This happened Wednesday night while we were huddled around the TV watching the season finales of Lost and Alias. We barely noticed. The log on the right is about a foot and a half in diameter; it's part of a tree next to our building that came crashing down around 9:30 or so. Fortunately, it only took out the power lines next door. I don't think they were quite as absorbed in their humpday night TV viewing.
I am officially a g33k.
Driving to work this morning, listening to the radio, a song ends and the DJ comes on. And as with all DJ's, he does his little morning banter thing over instrumental background music.
And my first thought was "Hey, that's the song the Mac plays after you've just upgraded your operating system."
Geek, geek, GEEK.
"Do I smell WET FOOD?!"
In my younger, more foolish days, I once left central Maine at 2pm, drove straight to New York City, caught a show that started at 9pm, ran until well past 2am, got back in the car and drove all the way back to Maine to teach four classes on a Wednesday morning.
So why is it that after staying up until 3am on prom night at the school - at home on our couch watching movies, no less, I'm sofa king tired today? I'm not even 30 yet and already my body is surrendering?
Scott Rolen. Jose Vidro. Jose Valentin. Ben Sheets. David Wells. Brandon Lyon. Jeremy Affeldt. Woody Williams. Chad Fox. Bengie Molina.
These players have two things in common - one of my fantasy league teams, and the disabled list. Oy.
My girls. Yes, they're really both that comfortable.
I'm currently on hold.
The background music is "Mahna Mahna".
I'm trying not to sing along in case someone suddenly picks up the phone.
It's very hard.
Well, the month isn't quite over yet, but I'll make up for that by going back to the end of April...
04/29/05: Ryan Adams/Rachael Yamagata, Hampton Beach, NH. Probably not a show I would have gone to by myself, but one of those expand-your-tastes shows instead. Kat was interested, I always like me a show at the Casino Ballroom, tickets were $20, and I figured I could use some stealthing practice before some rather important shows in June which shall go unmentioned. The show was entertaining; Ryan was apparently in a good mood (for him), goofed around on stage, made some horrible seafood-related puns, played a lot of new stuff in the first half and older stuff in the second half. I'd never heard anything of his except "New York, New York", which was practically unrecognizable the way he played it, and "When The Stars Go Blue", which was only marginally better in its original form than the Corrs' execrably insipid rendition. I wasn't a big fan of Rachael Yamagata's opening set but a second listen sounded much better than the first time. She sounds like a cross between Fiona Apple and Aslyn, and after I heard "Letter Read" on the radio a couple of weeks later, I think I appreciated her more.
Stealthing was an interesting experience; they now use wands at the Casino Ballroom, and since I had a largish hunk of metal nestled up against my reproductive area, I had to do a bit of a Jedi mind trick to get in, telling them it was my keys (taking them out and putting them back in) and my cellphone (taking it out and putting it back in). Sneaky, I know. Of course, once we got in, I realized I didn't have any blank tapes...but Nomah to the rescue. Nomah is Kat's Jukebox 3, an mp3 player that also has the capability of recording CD-quality to its internal hard drive. It got hungry and ate the first set of Ryan's show, but I managed to tape Rachael and set 2 of Ryan Adams on a contraption I'd never even really handled before that evening.
05/05/05: Guster, Boston College. Happy Cinco de Mayo! Guster played a free, but private, outdoor show at BC. No skulduggery or cloak-and-dagger involved in getting the equipment in - just some wind to avoid and my mic stand falling apart to deal with. Good thing I packed the Leatherman. Got it up and running just before Guster took the stage. They played an abbreviated set - about 70 minutes - but managed to pack in four tunes from their new album, which they had just finished recording. First impressions were not great but repeated listening, along with a second show later in the week, made them a bit more palatable. Mrs. Dave refers to them as "KFG" now (Kentucky Fried Guster) but there's really only one song (so far) that's bona fide country - "The Captain" - and they had gone so far as to warn us that it was. "G Major" starts off a little bit folky but quickly departs from that in favor of what appears to be political commentary ("the king who hides behind the pawns"), and good commentary at that. "I'm Through" was a bit rough; it seemed to be a key or two too high for Ryan to hit properly, and didn't leave much of an impression, and "You're My Satellite" is a bit sappy but very catchy musically, including one part that almost sounds like a theremin. I felt old the whole show.
05/11/05: Guster, Quincy, MA. Another free outdoor private show, this time for Providence College, at a place called Waterworks, in a schmancy neighborhood south of Boston that was at one point reportedly home to Tom Brady. Fortunately, we didn't have to drive all the way to Providence, because we wouldn't have made it...93 going through Boston is brutal anytime between 4pm and 7pm; it's about 25 miles from door to door and it took me about an hour and a half. Right on the water and rather breezy, so despite the "beach" setting, it was chilly. None of the students there were feeling any pain (thanks to the Budweiser Tent and Corona Cabana) and the show was much better than the previous one. Again, a short set - around 75 minutes - but despite there being a smaller crowd, they were more into the show, and despite there being no time for a sound check, the sound was more dialed in. Only two new tunes but they definitely sounded better. I still felt just about as old, though.
05/14/05: Ben Folds/Corn Mo, Avalon, Boston, MA. Before last summer all I'd heard of Ben Folds was a depressingly boring Ben Folds Five set at the Tufts Spring Fling in 1999, but then came last summer and four Ben Folds sets which converted me into a fan. The guy can play, and the guy can joke, and the guy can just put on a show. He doesn't, however, allow open taping. Well, he does, but according to the only official word from his management, mic stands can't be any taller than a particularly vertically-challenged member of his crew...so again, it was back to stealthing. Fortunately, the Avalon is more concerned about making sure people get out of their place by 10 so they can turn it into a Eurotrash BOOM-tss-BOOM-tss-BOOM-tss-BOOM-tss dance club (you know the type), so they don't really check for anything on your way in. I could have been carrying a rocket launcher strapped to my back and they would have waved me on, just saying "You'll have that out by 10, right?"
I walked in and found a taper friend of mine standing against the right stack, and after a quick trip to the bathroom to...unburden myself of the strategically hidden gear, we were wired up and ready to go. The opener, Corn Mo, opened with a solo Italian aria accompanying himself on accordion, and closed with a heavy-metal version of "Hava Nagilah Monster", whipping his long hair around like a combination of Dio and Meat Loaf. That last tune was loud but not *quite* painfully so...so I thought I was ok, figuring Ben wouldn't be as loud.
I was wrong.
Still funny, still entertaining, still plays the hell out of the piano, but oh my bleeding eardrums was he loud. Most of the night was played with a bassist and drummer - oddly, a similar instrumental lineup as Ben Folds Five - and they really went over the top. The five-song solo set an hour in was a welcome respite, including a meditative and emotional "Brick", but there were many highlights to the night, starting with an on-stage snafu, of all things. During "Jesusland", his vocal mic started some howling feedback; after the third time it happened, he just said "fuck this" and started improvising a gospel song, apologizing to God for making fun of religious folks. A half-hour later, they covered Dr. Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit" - there's just something hilariously surreal about a middle-aged white guy singing "Tight than a muthafucka with the gangsta beats/And we was ballin' on the muthafuckin' Compton streets". If he ever brings his plan to fruition to make a Broadway musical from "The Chronic", I may just have to buy a ticket.
The show ended with a lengthy rendition of "Not The Same", including Ben climbing up on his piano to conduct the crowd's vocal accompaniment. At one point he was getting one side to sing the same note over and over, while the other side sang a different part; the whole time he was motioning with both hands while thumping the piano with his knee. Then he hopped down to play the loudest, fastest, most combustible version of "One Angry Dwarf" he'd probably ever played, by the admission of his drummer after the show.
Links are now up to download the shows for those interested...
My life is now complete.
I just saw an old, beat-up maroon minivan...with spinning rims. Yes, Pimp My Grocery-Getter.
We have a small office space. From where I sit, nobody is more than three desks away from me. It's entirely possible to ask someone two desks away a question in a normal conversational tone, and to slightly raise my voice if I don't feel like getting up and it's a quick yes-or-no question. We also have telephones, which are completely functional.
We also have regular afternoon visits from Boss Lady's seven-year-old son Anklebiter. Anklebiter has been a regular on this blog for a few months now - you might remember him from such entries as Urchin madness and her from such entries as Two things. Now, I fully admit that I'm a lazy shit myself, but Boss Lady and Anklebiter are now working in tandem.
Boss Lady just asked Anklebiter to go get office manager (she of the bubble wrap fetish) and tell her to come see her.
"Hey, your phone's ringing."
"Huh?"
"Your phone. It just rang."
"Oh, that's just the text message ring."
"Oh."
"It's confirming that I just voted for Bo Bice."
"I don't even KNOW you anymore."
Another gimmicky entry, mostly to test out the new 3.16 installation of MovableType...sadly, we're beyond version pi...
I love the stored info in the address bar of my browser...I can just type a letter or two of the sites I visit most and it'll give them to me quickly. What's in your browser for A-E?
A: http://www.archive.org/audio/ - so much live music for free download, it'll make your eardrums bleed. I've got over 100 shows I taped up there.
B: http://www.boston.com - my home page. Pretty self-explanatory. A close second is the message board for bluestraveler.com, and the home page for bt.etree.org, a place I use for taper-friendly BitTorrents whose artists aren't on archive.org.
C: http://cc.com/artist_detail.html?artist_id=6920 - ClearChannel's concert listings for Blues Traveler. I don't check C pages that often, it looks like - there's a Circuit City rebate page I went to (bought a new 160GB hard drive) and the listings for the Casino Ballroom (saw Ryan Adams and Rachael Yamagata there a couple of weeks back).
D: http://db.etree.org's show maintenance page. I'm an admin there and I'm constantly working on fixing setlists and show records. A huge time waster but it's fun.
E: http://www.erinmckeown.com/tour.php - one of my new favorite artist's tour pages. She's got a new album coming out next month and I just found out she's playing Boston for her album release party, the day after it hits stores. I'm there...
Inconsideration? Inconsiderosity? Inconsideritude? Whatever.
The parking lot at the post office was crowded today, to the point where I was actually sitting in line in my car, in the street, waiting for other cars to move into parking spots as they emptied.
I finally get in, and see a Hummer parked in two spots. Well, not really in two spots. It's taking up 2/3 of a handicapped spot, ALL of the striped zone next to it, and 1/3 of ANOTHER parking spot.
I didn't see a handicapped plate or a tag on the mirror/dashboard, so not only did this jackass not belong there, but he'd driven a DAMN HUMMER TO THE POST OFFICE. It's not like our post office is in the middle of a swamp, or a war zone, or on top of a 20,000-foot peak, requiring a team of Sherpas and an oxygen tank to get to...it's a post office, not the hut of a hermit wise man.
I should have keyed the fucker.
"Ok, heads we go to Marino's, tails we go to Redbones."
[flip]
"Shit...this is a Sacagawea dollar...which one's heads?!"
"I like having Bogus greet us when we get home. It's just like having a doorman.
Except she's fuzzy.
And has four legs.
And absolutely no capacity whatsoever to open a door."
A little something to break the blought (that's "blog drought")...
Have you ever broken a bone?
Fortunately, no...but not for lack of trying. Although I never was one for bone-breaking sports - I never played organized football, hockey, rugby or Aussie-rules football - I did do the typical stuff that little boys do. Stuff that would make their mothers' hair curl AND stand on end (which is a hard feat to pull off).
I've got my share of scars, though - the biggest one is a six-stitcher on my forehead, which I got from bashing my head on our fireplace when I was three or four years old. It wasn't intentional, mind you, but it sure freaked my parents out to find their oldest son crying on the floor, face absolutely bathed in blood. Apparently the forehead has a large number of blood vessels in it and very little flesh to actually hold stitches, so things got messy very quickly. I have no recollection of the events but there are a number of pictures in my parents' photo collection of me with a big-ass bandage on my forehead. the thing was so big it looked like I was wearing a diaper wrapped around my noggin.
Other scars are from illness or surgery - I've got one on the left side of my chest from a particularly large chicken pox scab I just couldn't leave alone (the thing was the size of a cornflake) and another on my right biceps from having a mole removed on my arm (which, after careful analysis and biopsification, turned out to be...a mole, now removed from its host organism). And of course there's the three stitches I recently got in my hand, after it lost a fight with a broken soap dish.
I even managed to survive several spectacularly stupid ideas with nary a scratch - one in particular involved us building a bike ramp in our backyard out of scrap wood left over from the addition of a sun room onto the back of our house. Just about every boy our age in the neighborhood was in our backyard helping to put the thing together, and I'm quite sure my parents even glanced out the window once or twice to witness the Sears Tower of bike ramps materializing on their own side lawn. I vaguely remember us having watched "Rad" at some point that summer, which likely was our influence for wanting to become the next Cru Jones by way of Bob Vila. But miraculously, nobody got hurt in the whole episode...despite its gargantuan height, we never really got to do much more than ride straight at it, and then come straight down backwards. Not much of a trick. If we'd had judges, they'd have just abandoned their cards and thrown rotting vegetables at us.
But the nastiest injury I got - other than the sprained ankle resulting from my indecision about whether to slide into second base in a softball game a few years back - was probably the road rash incident that happened when I was biking home from my first job. I worked at the local library ($4.63 an hour, I still remember it) putting books back in the stacks. After work one day, I checked out a few books and tucked them under my arm for the ride home. The library happened to be at the top of a rather steep hill, while my house happened to be at the bottom of said incline...I'd put the steepness at about, oh, 80 degrees. Y'know, something more suitable for a goddamn parachute rather than the massacre waiting to happen that was my bike. Definitely not something you'd want to go down while steering with one hand.
So off I went, like I said, with my books tucked under my arm. Riding in the street. DOWN THE LEFT SIDE. At the bottom of the hill was a gap in the curb, maybe two feet wide, to allow runoff from the sidewalk into a storm drain. When riding with two hands, it was easy enough to steer right to the gap and hop up on the curb. About halfway down the hill, I realized that this had absolutely zero chance of ending well. I did manage to hit the gap, but the lack of stability on the handlebars caused my front wheel to turn sideways, T-boning the bike against the storm drain, and catapulting me up onto the sidewalk, a flurry of books, limbs and left-behind skin. Scraped the shit out of both hands, elbows and knees. I managed to pick up the books and limp home, but bringing the bike was out of the question - and of course that was the thing I was most concerned about when I finally burst through the front door, bleeding and wailing about my own idiotic misfortune. My mother went to pick up the bike - which was none the worse for wear despite my abuse - but not before tending to my battered joints and severely bruised ego.
