Hey baby, it's the 5th of July

Anna summed up yesterday pretty well when she announced from the bathtub "Dad, this 4th of July was kind of a disappointment!"

The weather was the major contributing factor to the disappointment - I'm not sure it got up above 75 degrees and for the vast majority of the day and it rained. It rained during the parade which gave it a much different feel than parades of years past. And because the weather was so crappy, we pretty much holed up in the house for the rest of the day. Anna and I did manage to watch Short Circuit which I have not seen in probably 20 years. Man, that movie is very dated but it was still fun to watch, especially with a 7 year old.

And even though the rain had managed to stop for the annual fireworks display, even that failed to meet expectations. It's a tradition in our neighborhood to trek down the street and sit at the top of a hill and watch fireworks, rather than contributing to the vehicle and foot traffic down on the Iowa State Center campus which is much closer to where the fireworks are shot off. It also serves as a great place for the kids to run around like loons, playing with sparklers and other incendiary devices. Well, this year, unbeknownst to me, the fireworks were being shot off from a different location, which meant that they appeared much further away and a good 50% of the just barely cleared the tree line, if at all.

So it's the 5th of July today and the weather today is much more like what it should have been today. We took baby steps on teaching Anna how to ride her bike without training wheels and Heidi finished her latest manuscript which I have been reading closely this afternoon in a copy edit.

The other big news of the day was that less than 12 hours after Sky 1's broadcast of the Sticky & Sweet Tour, the audio has hit the internet and I managed to download the entire show. My worst fears were realized when, upon listening, I found that the show had indeed been autotuned within an inch of its life, stripping it almost completely of its live sound. I am kind of torn on the whole autotuning thing. On one hand, it has this horrible tendency to make the live versions of these songs sound almost identical to the album versions. Well, if I wanted to listen to the album versions, I'd listen to those. This is most noticeable on the Hard Candy tracks. But on the other hand, my biggest complaint about the audience recordings was the fact that they were completely unlistenable, due in no small part to Madonna being unable to hit the damn notes. So therein is the conundrum - she certainly doesn't want to release something that sounds horrible (which, let's be honest, she sometimes does in her live shows) but in using all the studio manipulation after the fact, it seems like cheating.

Oh well, ultimately it doesn't matter much. As I said before, I'm mostly glad that the tour is getting an official release, manipulated or not, unlike poor old Re-Invention Tour.

EDIT: Yuri has reminded me of my oft-repeated sentiment on Madonna's live vocals - and that is, anyone who goes to a Madonna concert expecting pitch-perfect vocals is going for all the wrong reasons. Or is at least hopelessly delusional.