Distance is up, static is down

* The scared of Santa photo gallery. [via screenhead]

* Keith Moon's personal contact list is for sale on eBay.

"The index box, which is divided alphabetically contains a number of pink and white cards with personal and professional contact addresses written on them in Moon's hand and also in the hand of another, probably Moon's wife of the time Kim Moon.

"The cards detail the contact numbers and in some cases the addresses of celebrity friends including, David Bowie, Lionel Bart, Donovan, Elton John, Billy Fury, Frankie Howerd, Maurice Gibb and Lulu, Mick Jagger, George Lazenby and of course fellow band members, Pete Townsend [a Dust Congress reader notes that the correct spelling for Pete's last name is Townshend], Roger Daltrey (spelt Daltry), John and Alison Entwistle and the band's manager, Kit Lambert, (on this card Moon has written after Lambert's name 'the sheepish lion, God bless him')."

* The Mountain Goat's John Darnielle on top ten lists. excerpt:

"My relationship with year-end wrapups is thorny at best. I love reading them; I've loved reading them since I was nine or ten years old. Back then, I took it on faith that these lists were as weighty as they seemed to think they were; around December, I'd begin to think hard - not to say 'worry,' or even 'fret' - about which records would make the list, and which wouldn't, and whether the critics who'd made the lists were certain that they'd given ample consideration to (for example) Lynyrd Skynyrd's Street Survivors or Heatwave's Too Hot to Handle.

"That wonderful albums might be left off the list, or that shitty ones might worm their way onto it and possibly even place in the top five: was the universe really so disinterested in justice? Wouldn’t such miscarriages inflame the passions of the deeply concerned masses, and wouldn’t their rage eventually result in the death of rock music or some comparably great catastrophe? Would I have endure yet another year in which none of these L.A. Times schmucks would attest to the excellence of Heart, or Toto, or of German Toto-clones Lake?"
...
"And so it turns out, according to me, that year-end lists are the music-obsessive’s intensely personal version of those Christmas letters you sometimes get from an over-busy aunt in Massachusetts: the ones that sum up what-all happened in the family this year, all the deaths and marriages and births and divorces. One hopes they make for entertaining reading; they sometimes do; but as lists, they are meaningless. This may seem an obvious point. I’d hope that it would. But outside of personal blogs, I’ll bet there’ll be more lists that poise, peacock-like, above their subjects, pretending to be in possession of a secret machine that enables them to state the exact qualitative discrepancy that makes Antics a better or worse record than The Pretty Toney Album. It seems a fool’s errand, and that’s why you won’t be getting any lists here. I recommend Jess Harvell’s list, since Jess is always on the lookout for the broader picture, and I recommend Ethan’s list, since the one album I bought on its recommendation – Rapalot Presents The Day After Hell Broke Loose – is completely fucking awesome. But more than these, I recommend that we shy away from year-end lists when we can. Let’s leave such things for lesser arts, like film."