Wheat for sheep?

The Sound of Settling – Death Cab for Cutie
Settle Down Zelda – Mendoza Line

By far the biggest drain on my time in the last couple weeks has been an almost obsessive playing of Settlers of Catan, a board game my housemate brought up from Boston. The premise is simple: you develop settlements and cities on the intersections of hexagons, each of which is devoted to a particular resource (trees, ore, grain, etc.), and has an associated number. You roll dice and whoever has the resource that corresponds to the number rolled gets it, which they can use to purchase new developments. The reason the game is so addictive is that the board is different every single game – each time you lay down the tiles and numbers randomly. It creates a bewilderingly complex set of possibilities each time.

If you’re at all into board games, I highly recommend this one. It probably isn’t my absolute favorite game (most likely that is Age of Renaissance, or Diplomacy if you count that), but it has some serious replay-value and scores over the other ones in that a single game only takes an hour (two, at the most) instead of eating up a whole day (or weekend). Unless, of course, you immediately start another game…

While I’m posting “The Sound of Settling” let me just say that the further I get away from Transatlanticism, the more I think it’s a really fantastic album. I was initially put off a little bit by the way it signaled the end, once and for all, of the lo-fi, indie band I had fallen in love with, but as time has gone on, I’ve reconsidered. It isn’t a complete break from We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes and Something About Airplanes; it’s just a bigger stage and some grander themes. I’ve gone through the same transformation on Plans, to a lesser extent. I was initially very underwhelmed by that one and while it’s still probably my least favorite Death Cab album, I’ve come to love it in its own way. But seriously, “The Sound of Settling” is about as good of a 2-minute indie-pop song as you could ever want. Those “bah-bahs”s, some typically simple but great Ben Gibbard lyrics, and guitars so warm you could roast marshmallows on them…

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