The original Clankface—a name coined by Milo Miles for the Microsoft unseen force that policed Robert Christgau's Expert Witness blog for expletives and, for example, could not abide words that ended in -sh being followed by words that started with it- (spaces between letters don't fool Clank.) Also, it tampered with URLs by inserting invisible punctuation-mark to make them unfollowable—whether to keep us on the MSN reservation or to prevent spam, nobody knew. Indeed, often a post would be swallowed whole and proclaimed to be something resembling spam and prevented from being posted, not then and not ever if it hadn't been saved.
With the demise of EW and the other MSN blogs—by a Microsoft exec's executive decision to pivot its piddly puddle of spare change into marshaling content (Bing) rather than continuing to originate original content—Clankface has also gone missing, if not missed.
But not forgotten. DJ Clankface inherits the name and some of the attributes. He mindlessly patrols a large body of data and capriciously picks and chooses. I actually like to think his hand more guided by the ghost of Steve Jobs than the Great Courses-educated brain of Bill Gates. (But then, when I play music with iTune's classic visualizer I get that same cosmic sense of seeing Steve's soul abiding.)
I figured out that listening to all the music on my hard-drive for an hour a day would take 65.4 years to listen to everything. But since I'm inputting music at a much faster rate than that, it would actually take forever. Kind of like just paying a credit card bill's minimum each month, I guess. Not that I hope to live to be 130 years old.
In any event, I have recently enlisted Clankface to pick songs on my hard drive to randomly listen to in just such one-hour chunks. Since I'll never be able to listen to all of it anyway, this way at least all of it has some chance of being heard—and not just by me. I'm uploading these one-hour chunks, one a day, as continuous mixes to
Mixcloud. So far there have been 21 of them. A few songs I'm less than fond of, but so far I haven't exercised my curative discretion to remove any. If I hadn't already burned the mix to a CD maybe I would, but I need a CD to be able to import for all the songs to be joined together as a single track. There are surely better ways to do it, but I doubt they would be easier—and ease matters if I'm going to keep doing this.
Whether other people care to hear this stuff when there are so many other listening options, even just on Mixcloud, is doubtful. Maybe I'm unique in being able to tolerate such mad variety and even delight in the unexpected. And be able sit through a few lesser moments.
Here's #21 (for example):
