Do you surmise it's wise to have laser beams emitting from your eyes?

[mmcirvin]

After listening to Join Us a bit more:

The funky horn breaks from TMBG's "The Lady And The Tiger" have been earworming me all day long.

There's been this pattern over the past several years, in which the band is clearly capable of the same degree of astonishing strangeness that they maintained in their early albums, but they'd mostly show it in places other than the albums. The magic would be there in the live shows and podcasts, and in the rarities collections, supplementary EPs and bonus discs (even John Flansburgh says The Spine Surfs Alone was better than The Spine), and in the themed side projects like Venue Songs. But on the post-2000 adult rock albums, as great as they often were, it always seemed like they were holding back the geeky freakery just a little, like they were trying not to be a novelty act and there was a bid for rock respectability in play. On the kids' albums they loosened up more.

With Join Us they just said the hell with it and put it all in the album, and as a result I think it may be their best album since Flood. Maybe after making some money on children's music they don't have anything to prove.

"Three Might Be Duende" needs to have fanart.

Comments

[eb-oesch.livejournal.com]

An off-topic short^H^H^H^H^H (I don't seem to do short well) response to a question you asked a while back:

Let's suppose it would save an average of 300 miles of food transportation if fewer people lived in cities. How much fuel savings would be involved? If the food is transported by heavy truck, I estimate the savings at about 0.015 gallons of diesel fuel per person per day. (There's also the issue of how in the country one tends to be farther away from everything but food, but one need not address that point because it would be overkill.)

Assume one person consumes four pounds of food, including packaging weight, per day. (This is assuming people consume more water than bottled drinks.) So that 300 miles extra equals 1200 pound-miles, or 0.6 short ton-miles. Heavy trucks get roughly 40 ton-miles per gallon of diesel equivalent and trains get about 400 ton-miles per gallon. (Source: US Transportation Energy Book via the Wikipedia article on Fuel Efficiency in Transportation.) At that rate and with $3/gallon diesel, you're looking at $0.045 per day per person extra on fuel if transported by truck, or $0.0045 per day per person if transported by train without loss of efficiency compared to usual train freight (a bit of a questionable assumption, since trains are mostly used to transport large masses of durable goods between hubs, but if that bothers you, then assume the fuel cost is 4 times as much; it's still a tiny number.)

Aside: sea freight's advantage over rail freight, where it does have an advantage, is not in fuel efficiency but in other factors. According to an Australian government publication, fuel is just 3% of rail freight costs and 11% of sea freight costs in Australia (and up to one-third of road freight costs), so as things are now, conserving fuel is not a primary concern.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That seems to square with my intuitions about this stuff.

I think Carlos Yu's take on it is basically correct: he pointed out a while ago that most of the fretting seems to come from people whose intuitions are shaped by the efficiency of hauling stuff around in the trunks of passenger cars.

[eb-oesch.livejournal.com]

Right. Car transport, UPS, and price-gouging for luggage by airlines -- ordinary consumers see that anytime they personally want anything transported, it's expensive. They may blame fuel prices, but that's a tiny part of it, and with economies of scale the whole total can be quite low. As of the early 2000s, coal companies paid an average of $20 plus $0.015 per ton-mile to the railways in the US.