Enjoying life's little Guilty Pleasures

MIDI files on the Web
In my listening habits, the MP3 revolution has overshadowed, but not buried, a distant digital-music cousin: the MIDI file. MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) documents, originally designed as the synthesizer equivalent of a piano roll, activate sampled musical instruments hidden in most Web browsers.

Earnest would-be Wendy Carloses and Tomitas use them to replicate their favorite songs — musical "fan-art," if you will. Resemblance to the originals depends on the arrangers' skill. Their efforts are often hampered by the sounds, a standardized collection of 128 "instruments," including pianos, drums, and guitars, many far from the target timbres, varying wildly by software.

Why listen to these mutations when the originals sit a few clicks away? Somehow these kludgy renderings of human artistry entertain me endlessly, falling in a region bounded by player pianos, Muzak, and karaoke accompaniments — an aural landscape where few willingly tread. These weird transmogrifications give my played-out favorites a new, Frankensteinish life, either amusing with their awkwardness or occasionally impressive if the interpreter manages to capture a subtle nuance. Most people would relegate these to ringtones. Me, I just can't get enough. Which, come to think of it, is right here.  -Tom X. Chao

SkyMall catalog

SkyMall

If necessity is the mother of invention, the SkyMall catalog is its bastard son. No one, for instance, needs an extra appliance solely to roast garlic. But trapped at 30,000 feet, suddenly even the most savvy consumer may wonder how they ever got along without a way to roast garlic — in only 27 minutes. I assume this is why the SkyMall catalog exists; there can’t really be a natural market for three different types of specialty hot dog cookers, right? On one page there’s a statue of a sumo wrestler for your garden, on the next, a digital wine cooler. The sheer ridiculousness of its products makes it the first thing I turn to when I board a plane. Some people gripe about air travel, but I can do without meal service or sufficient legroom. Just don’t take away the SkyMall. –Hannah Meehan Spector

Novelizations of comic-book movies

Onyx

It started as a joke: A friend dropped off a copy of “Daredevil” he had “found” on my desk one day. Not the movie or the comic book, mind you, but the novel based on the movie based on the comic book. One rainy spring day, I actually sat down and read the thing in all its contrived glory. Since then, I can’t seem to pass up the opportunity to dive into a novelized “Hulk” or “X-Men 2.” Understand, I am not a comic-book reader. With the exception of graphic novels like “The Watchmen,” I haven’t purchased a comic since the Reagan administration. I do love most comic-book movies, but only those with great plots in addition to great action scenes. (Sorry, “Fantastic Four.”) Though I’m positive my fascination with these meta-novels places me pretty low on the geek hierarchy, I can’t help myself. The writing is horrific, the plotlines more bizarre than the movies, and finishing one is inevitably accompanied by a feeling of absolute shame. Yet like a moth to a flame, or a radioactive spider to a glasses-clad geek, I’m inexplicably drawn in. -Jim Ray

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