Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Archives for August 2011

#MusicMonday: “The Fight” – Sia

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Last Monday I caught Sia at The Trocadero in Philly, and I haven’t listened to anything but her since then.

If the name sounds familiar but you can’t place the music, here’s a hint: Sia was X-Tina’s side-woman on The Voice, and her “Breathe Me” scored the final episode of Six Feet Under

CK readers already knew that Sia’s eclectic neo-70s dance pop LP We Are Born was near the top of my 2010 albums list, and YouTube watchers will know her music videos are all hallucinatory classics, but she also wound up being one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen.

Sia isn’t a note-perfect singer, and she doesn’t move around the stage very much. What she is is a stunning interpreter, and a present, engaging performer who makes you feel like you are sharing a memory with her, rather than just attending a performance. Her dance tracks shook my booty, and her powerful ballads were all breathtakingly riveting.

Here’s a video of her performing We Are Born‘s opening track, “The Fight,” live @ London Roundhouse.

Recommended Listening: “Clap Your Hands,” “You’ve Changed,” “The Girl You Lost to Cocaine,” “Breathe Me,” “Soon We’ll Be Found“

Crushing On: WordPress Editorial Calendar plugin

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If CK frequently seems like bursts of organized, topical posts followed by droughts of randomness and silence … well, that’s because it is.

Not that it’s meant to be that. As CK has transitioned from a personal blog to a blog about my music, Philly, and other specific topics, I finally settled on the perfect mix of posts for the current incarnation. I even made myself an Editorial Calendar – basically, a forward-looking schedule of what content is in which stage of readiness for the weeks ahead. EdCal’s are traditionally a tool of newspapers and magazines, but in recent years they’ve become an important resource for bloggers.

The WordPress Editorial Calendar Plugin is a drag-and-drop calendar that lives in your "Posts" screen. It's also my communications-nerd dream come true.

Then I hit a barrier: how would I keep the editorial calendar updated?

It was a barrier I couldn’t overcome with blogging as a part-time exercise, fighting for time against my three musical incarnations and dealing with the new house. Paper EdCals were a chore and got lost. A Google Spreadsheet was great for planning, but I just kept planning and never wrote. Penciling drafts into WordPress was meaningless without some structure, and I wound up with endless lingering drafts since I couldn’t see an overview the lineup of an entire week or month.

I thought, maybe WordPress has an EdCal plugin! It seemed like the sort of plugin motivated bloggers would create. Alas, I searched and searched, to no avail.

I keep re-drafting my own EdCals, but they never lasted more than a few weeks as they were interrupted by actual work and my musicianship. Despite a myriad of ideas for CK, I just didn’t have the spare time to wrangle them, write them, schedule them, and post them.

Then, in an actual work meeting about WordPress during actual work hours, Mel & I were glibly showing off our personal blog plugins to the social team at the office. I showed some of my favorites (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin being primary among them), and the she whipped out WordPress Editorial Calendar.

Screenshot of the quick-draft screen in action, from the WordPress Editorial Calendar Plugin page.

WHAT IN THE WHAT NOW!?

(I may have actually screamed that in the middle of the meeting with our Director. Luckily, he is already well aware of my insanity.)

Yes, about 13 months ago someone came up with a fully-functioning EdCal plugin for WP. Set up a schedule of posts, start a draft right on the calendar, and drag and drop them to your heart’s content. When a post is ready, just move it over to “Publish” status via a dropdown – or, edit it the way you’d normally edit.

Ta-Da – instant blog organization.

Needless to say, the next time I logged into CK I immediately installed the plugin. I’ve been working with it all weekend, and for the first time ever I have a month of planned posts. That doesn’t mean I wrote them all today – it just means I finally have a living schedule of what I hope to talk about and when I hope to say it.

I’m positively aglow about it. I hope you dig my first week of EdCal content, starting tomorrow morning!

Crushing On: Rita’s Water Ice

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Philly is a city full of water ice. As a child in the 80s every block of South Philly seemed to have some mom’n’pop store with a cooler of the poor-man’s gelato at the front.

I remember when Rita’s launched its first few chain locations into Philly proper from their base in the burbs. People were understandably skeptical, since to that point water ice was a strictly homegrown phenomenon, with Pop’s being the major local “brand” with a handful of locations.

I instantly loved Rita’s. Every other water place in town had a white, super-sweet vanilla flavor. Rita’s vanilla was brown, slushy, and had the cloying, nearly-liquory taste of vanilla extract. If I was in the mood for vanilla, I’d demand a trip to Rita’s.

After an entire years sans water ice, yesterday after a dinner date I convinced E that there really was a Rita’s nearby and we needed to find it. Lo and behold, not two blocks into our drive we struck gold.

Gold, and their amazing Juicy Pear flavor.

I’ll always love Philly’s homegrown water ice shops, but as chained franchises go you could do a lot worse than Rita’s.

I’ve got a beautiful feelin’ nothing is goin’ my way.

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I think Mel should tweet the punchlines to all of my posts before I write them.

I’m not sure I can make this story any funnier than that tweet, other than to point out that there is clearly some sort of voodoo curse on our car.

Here goes…

Early in my process of learning to drive I decided it might be a good idea to save our local service center’s number to my phone. You know, in case I got stuck in a situation where knowing the price of, say, a new car door would impact my decision-making.

Being a denizen of the mobile age, I punched “Ardmore Toyota” into my phone’s Google search, added the number to my contacts, and went on with my life. Thankfully, I didn’t have any occasions to call them while I had my learner’s permit, aside from inquiring about getting an iPod dock installed.

A few weeks ago I called to get the price of my replacement car keys. Oddly, all of the hold messages were spoken in a southern drawl. Why would a dealership in Philly advertise with a southern accent, I wondered. It seemed a little counter-intuitive, given the well-to-do, perfectly-coifed mainline clientele they serve.

My question was answered this week when I ordered my keys. Everyone I spoke with had a southern accent! Clearly our local Toyota dealership was a family-owned business, and the family was transplanted from The South. Why not have hold messages with accents – their accent is part of their brand! They assured me that getting a Saturday appointment would be no problem, even if I called on Friday.

Wow, I thought, our dealer is awesome. They made their regional heritage part of their brand identity, they had plenty of Saturday appointments available, and they were all so darn friendly even though I speak about four times as fast as they do.

On Friday I dutifully called to make my Saturday appointment. At the time my cell was buried under a pile of proofreading, so I Googled the number and used my desk phone to call.

Ardmore the county seat of Carter County, Oklahoma, United States, and is generally considered the hub of the 10-county region known as Arbuckle Country or Lake and Trail Country. It is located 90 miles equidistant from Oklahoma City and Dallas/Fort Worth. Ardmore was named after the affluent Philadelphia suburb and historic Pennsylvania Main Line stop Ardmore, PA.

Weirdly, the dealer had no record of my order. And, even stranger,  no one I spoke with had a southern accent.

While on hold while they looked up my order confirmation again I glanced back at my computer screen and saw that there are two Ardmore Toyotas. One in the Philly suburbs, and one IN ARDMORE, OKLAHOMA.

I gingerly hung up the receiver and called over the wall to Mel.

Me: You know how I ordered those car keys on Tuesday?

Mel: To replace the ones you lost in the middle of a field in broad daylight, possibly stolen by some sort of highly intelligent vole?

Me: Yes, those. I think I may have ordered them from Oklahoma.

Mel: You mean, they had them in stock in Oklahoma and are shipping them to you?

Me: No. Like, now I have to drive to Oklahoma to pick them up.

Thus the above tweet.

To Ardmore of Oklahoma’s eternal credit, they do outstanding PPC mobile search targeting, and they were very good-natured about shipping my keys to Philadelphia.