Completely random thoughts. The woman in front of me in this office listens to this atrocious oldies radio station, which is always on whether she’s in the office or not. It wouldn’t be so horrible, what with the soulless songs, too-incessant boogying, and endlessly lovelorn lyrics, but being an oldies station the repetition of a regular radio week’s playlist is compounded – it’s the same songs, forever and ever. Anyway. One thing I’ve noticed is that more recent songs, I mean on the new music stations, are completely filled with either direct samples from these oldies or are ripping off oodles of their melodies and riffs. The only two examples I can think of off the top of my head are the song from the first Men in Black movie, and Madonna’s “Music,” though I don’t know the names of the originals they’re copying from, and not copying in an ironic hipster fashion. I don’t wonder whether that’s obvious to people with more of a mind for music than me, but as this was the result of arduous aural labor, I leave it as is.

Also, in catching the end of the first Kill Bill the other night, I was reminded of a thought I had way back when, when I first saw the movie. In it, Lucy Liu’s character curtsy’s in a very stylized way in lieu of bowing (ah ha! had to sneak a pun in there) before her duel with Uma Thurman. I guess I thought it would interesting if female martial artists did that in real life, not like a real curtsy per se, but that stylized knees to the side kind, in that to me it seems like that could be a real expression of feminine identity in a context that sometimes has some undercurrents of denigration towards that sex. Or maybe I’m just completely stepping on feminist toes. But hey, if they’re martial artists, they can come argue their counterpoint as they may, and just bow first, I suppose.