Side note: repeating posts

Apologies to those of you who are seeing posts twice, or are trying to open posts from my RSS feed and not finding them. There appears to be a problem with my site in which some posts just don’t get saved correctly. I’ll try to look into it.

Ed Harcourt: Strangers

Ed Harcourt wants to be tough but he can’t help it—his heart is right out there on his sleeve. His new album, Strangers, is just now getting its US release after several months of worldwide availability (see an earlier Blogcritics review by one of our Italiian correspondents), and it’s the evidence that our Ed is a softie—it’s an album full of shimmering gentle love songs with an occasional hard rocking ringer thrown in.

That’s not to say that he doesn’t have a sharp edge to his tongue. He gets off some good one-liners to the tenderest of his melodies, “This One’s For You,” including the fine “I’d wear you on my arm like a brand new scar.” (Try that one as a pick up line sometimes.) Sometimes it works, as in “This One’s for You”; sometimes the images get a little thick, as in “Loneliness.”

Harcourt apparently isn’t totally comfortable with the intimacy he offers on songs like “Something to Live For.” The listener is ultimately kept at bay by gestures like the rocking “The Storm is Coming,” which is a fine song but seems out of place here, and the bitter “Only Happy When You’re High,” a US-release only bonus track. Maybe Harcourt’s getting the rocking out of his system on other projects like his new band Wild Boar will lead to a less hedged performance on his next album. I’ll be listening.

This post originally appeared on BlogCritics.

Egosurfing MSN style

Dave goes ego-surfing in new territory: the fresh-out-of-beta MSN Search. I’m the first Tim Jarrett in MSN Search, but not the first Tim—by a long shot. In fact, I first show up on the second page of results for Tim.

Interestingly, I turned up a new Internet doppelgänger on MSN Search. This other Tim Jarrett does web design, web development, and computer repair, is about eight years younger than me, and based in Michigan. Sadly, he was smarter than me and snagged a domain name that has a bit of portability.

That makes two Internet alter egos for me. My Googlegänger is a physics grad student at Oxford, and is from a very different branch of the family (judging from his photo). Weird that there are three “Tim Jarretts” in my generation, whereas I’m unaware of any in my family tree going back to the 18th century before that (not counting my second cousin Tim).

Incidentally, you can also go ego-surfing on Technorati’s tag pages. Occasionally you can hit a point where your posts are front and center, as I did today on the Mac and America tag pages. I think I still show up on the latter. I do like that, with a tag that broad, you get a full spectrum of posts, including a few from my Boston conservative gadfly commenter.