Midweek Cafe and Lounge, Vol. 112

Welcome back, music lovers. Remember this track by Toto?

That song would lead to this wonderful moment early in the second season of Community:

I’ll try to add a little bit of trivia about this song when time permits. In the meantime, cheers!

Author: Don Durito

Left of center and lover of photography, music, pop culture, and life. Favorite quote - "There are no innocents. There are, however, different degrees of responsibility" (Lisbeth Salander, from Stieg Larsson's original Millennium Trilogy).

37 thoughts on “Midweek Cafe and Lounge, Vol. 112”

  1. There is a blog called Africa is a Country that has some regular fun at this song’s expense. Another blogger picked up on that not long after the start of this decade and had a bit of fun as well. This blogger was trying to put together something for a musicologist friend’s wedding and came upon this epiphany:

    But after a few days of intense humming along to myself and attempting to trigger things in the recesses of musical memory, I had come up with relatively little. However, while I had only located a couple tracks that make reference to the rhythm, I had seemingly stumbled across an almost incredible possibility: that Toto’s “Africa,” which seemed like one of the least African songs I could imagine, might actually be based around an actual African rhythm. (And I use actual there twice because it’s a magic word, like Africa.)

    Make sure to read the whole post. It is a terrific story, and I am barely giving you a teaser. The track that emerged can be found here. It makes for a fun mashup and suggests that a pop song that I considered to be one of the least African songs to evoke the continent needed to be considered in a somewhat different light.

    1. I don’t recall ever mentioning it here before, but I am a big fan of marching bands and drum and bugle corps, so my contribution to the cover versions of this song will be by two drum corps.  Today, I am sharing Crossmen and Genesis from 2016.  Both corps are from Texas, although Crossmen used to be from Pennsylvania.

    2. Tomorrow is National Amaretto Day, so all of the drinks I will serve while this diary is on the rec list will contain amaretto.  I begin with How to make the Amaretto Sunrise – Tipsy Bartender.

      Your girl will love this drink…THE AMARETTO SUNRISE! This is one of the prettiest drinks we’ve made–it truly looks just like a magical sunset in a glass, with the hue changing from a yellow to orange to red in subtle layers. Plus, it tastes incredible! Amaretto, orange juice, and grenadine give it a nice fruity almond type of flavor that is sweet and smooth. This is one recipe to hang onto–with just three ingredients, it’s super easy to make, and yet beautiful and tasty!

      1. Today’s recipe video is How to make Homemade Amaretto – Tipsy Bartender.

        Try out this awesome recipe for…HOMEMADE AMARETTO! Amaretto is such a great liquor and so versatile. You can recreate the same exquisite almond taste as Disaronno with this recipe. This homemade amaretto is sweet and flavorful, and making it yourself is super fun and handy. It’s easy and the results are delicious, so whip up a batch and serve it to your partygoers, or just impress your girl or guy with a custom bottle of amaretto!

  4. Is there some way to have a gray background to this site? BooMan Tribune let me use my computer settings to do away with the extreme glare of white backgrounds.

  5. Posting in response to Mr. Longman’s request for observations about the new platform:

    • I notice that there’s no longer a preview option for comments. I know of at least one other site that doesn’t have a preview option, and people there make do. That being said, for what it’s worth, I’ve found the option useful particularly for testing links (it’s easy for me to get tangled in the code. I see there are HTML buttons here, but I suspect that would not really help my proofing much or reduce the kinds of errors I tend to make. We’ll see).
    • I see there’s a vote-up/vote-down option. This seems different from the ratings option at the old site. While I picked up from comments here and there to some extent what the rating conventions were and how the ratings functioned, I never was able to find any explication of them on the site. If the vote-up/vote-down is intended as something different from, say, YouTube’s, would an explanation somewhere on the site be warranted?
    • Again for what it’s worth, as I enter this text into the composition window, I find (unexpectedly) that the background gray is dark enough and the text/background contrast weak enough to make reading taxing; I’ve had to zoom in a few steps. That may be more a statement about my particular vision than anything else.

    Finally, a plea. I understand why webpages have splashy images. (It happens that I’m one of the six people on the planet who actually likes to encounter text without splashy images at the top of the page—quaint, I know.) If there have to be images, I’d implore that Individual-1 not be shown. And if Individual-1 must be shown, let the image be, for example, of the dumpy old fart on the golf course gracelessly trying to clamber up a slope and stretching his shorts in the rear near to bursting. After all, that’s where he spends most of his work days.

    I noticed, a few months into this nightmare, let’s say in early 2017, that images of Individual-1 in certain media started to change. They became “presidential,” dignified shots of the ridiculously coiffed figure, posed to disguise his obesity, against flattering backgrounds, often from below—in short, the normal photographic treatment of the officeholder. Media, that is, had begun the process of normalizing this presidency in its visual discourse. That process of normalization, in whatever modality it happens, is terribly pernicious. Please consider that images in media can contribute to it.

    And there’s a personal component. For Individual-1, as everyone knows, it’s all narcissism, all the time. Whenever I encounter an image of that figure, I’m reminded that I, along with the whole world, have been dragged—most of us unwillingly—into his narcissistic fantasy and it makes me want to pump bleach into the visual-memory centers of my brain.

  6. So far, I think the site looks great, but I have noticed a few small things that could be improved. I understand that this is all in beta right now, so maybe these are known, but here they are in case they aren’t.

    First, the comment count at the top of the article is off. The link on the front page says 5 (which only includes top level comments, I’m not sure if that is intentional or not) but the article heading says there are 0.

    Second, there’s a pretty uninformative error message on author profiles that (presumably) either aren’t public or haven’t been filled out. Maybe something like “Community member since 3/22/2010” or something would be better than “There was an error processing this directive”?

    Third, the profile tabs are a little confusing. Under Settings / General, I can edit my email address, but the next tab is Settings / Email and deals with email notifications. Maybe that second tab should be called Notifications? Or is that too confusing since there is also a main tab called Notifications?

    Fourth, I have ad-blocker plus turned on by default, and it seems to work really well on the site. Since you’re offering no ads as part of your premium tier membership, it might be a good idea to add some kind of pop-up asking people to disable their ad blocker? This can get into some touchy areas though. You definitely don’t want to restrict access entirely, but you might want to inform the user that there is an option where they can view ad-free content while also supporting the site. Here’s some info for your consideration.

    Fifth, the “Subscribe Now” popup seems to have a broken image link.

    Sixth, article ratings don’t seem to work. I can rate the Café, but my rating isn’t remembered when I leave the page and come back, and it says the article is rated a 0.0 (when obviously I gave it a 5.0!). I can rate as either a logged in user or an anonymous one, maybe that should only be available to logged in users?

    Seventh, and I didn’t notice this until I was working on this feedback comment, have you considered a WYSIWYG editor for comments? This would allow for things like inline pasting of images and provides a much better user experience. Potential hurdles to that approach are that you then have to store images somewhere, and depending on the editor you choose, you might have to pay something for it. I plan on purchasing a subscription to the site, and if one of your tiers offered a better comment editing experience I would absolutely pay for it, so I think there is an opportunity for monetization with this. For direction, I’ve used both Froala and TinyMCE in the past, they are both extremely customizable. But it’s been awhile so I’m not sure on their current pricing models.

    That’s it for now, hopefully I’ll have some more time to look later. I really do like the new look of the site so far and it’s a huge upgrade functionally.

    2. Apparently, you just paste the photo’s url in and it takes care of all the html. Not sure how it handles sizing, as I’m worried people will bust the margins.

  10. Found something else in my poking around:

    On the Froggy Botttom Cafe page, shouldn’t Froggy have three Gs? Or something. (The typo on the page matches the typo in the URL.)

    That page seems to be about painting with boran2, and it was posted last Saturday. Is this page (“Saturday, painting time with Boran2”) related to it?

    1. Not sure what you mean by froggy having 3 g’s. I certainly would not use more than 2.

      On Satudays, the cafe hosts boran2 and his painting diary. Maybe Sundays should have stand-up comedy, but I’m not going for poetry readings. Fridays are for photography.

      1. I was trying to be witty, succeeded only in being half-witty. Botttom has three Ts both in the header of the page and also in the URL. Is that deliberate, and am I being even less than half-witty?

        Yeah, I got that the cafe hosts the painting diary on Saturdays. I didn’t understand why the entry “Paintings” under “Popular Posts” linked to this page and not the diary itself [which seems to be here]—in the way that the entry for the Friday Foto Flog under “Popular Posts” links to the photog diary itself. (I’m guessing that “SPP” stands for “Saturday Painting” and then some?)

        (Is it a problem that the header calls the page Vol.715 and the URL calls it 714?)

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