Things go better with ^Co^ke...



The weekend was cool.

Friday I got off work a few hours early and took a walk around midtown. I kinda miss living in that area (I live about 1.5 miles from where anything within walking distance is these days). I miss walking three blocks to tonevendor, the Loft, Zelda's, The Distillery, Noah's, Metro Electronics, the corner store (now all my emergency beer runs are via the co-op), friend's houses, various coffee locations...pretty much everything in downtown that I like. So now when I want to take a walk around that area, I park my car at tonevendor, say "hi" to Dan and Heather (and whoever else is there) and begin my walk.

I found a used CD by this band at tonevendor. I guess the story behind them is that this guy, who was a famous children's song writer in the 50's had a son who wanted to revamp his fathers music for a 1970 urban children's show in Boston, and came across this crazy psychedelic jazz/funk band called Stark Reality. I never use this term, but I gotta say: it's sick as hell. Most of the songs consist of some dude playing the vibraphone through a fuzz box over deep grooves. Occasionally the singer busts in with children song lyrics: "The first seven letters of the alphabet... are all that you need to make music...ABCDEFG..." Great stuff. Whoever sold it to the record store was either hard up for crack money, or had it as a promo, having no clue what it was. I'm surprised Dan didn't take it home and keep it for himself.

Saturday there were just too many damn things going on. I was having a joint (as in combined) b-day party with Matt L. at his house in Oak Park. We told people to show up at 6, since there were a ton of shows going on that night, and if everybody showed up on time there would be enough time to have a party and go to the shows (including myself...who wanted to check out the Bright Ideas at The Fake Loft). Of course, no one showed up until 8 ish, I got wasted, and some of my friends who had no interest in checking out bands wanted to hang out all night...so that's what I did.

Sunday my friends Josh and Benji wanted to take me to Thunder Valley casino for some reason. I think they mainly wanted to eat a Fat Burger, play roulette and ogle at the cocktail waitresses. I wound up winning $0.35 on video poker (I stopped after winning a lot, losing a lot and breaking even). I can't justify blowing 50 dollars on shit like that.

Monday I had a nice day off. Helped my sister work on her website and just hung out.

Always and forever


I was going to write about some shows I saw this week, but right before I clicked "publish post" I accidentally closed my browser and all my hard work disappeared into thin air. Fuck it.

Instead I'm gonna post about some cool internet shiznit:

As you all know, I'm a bandwagoneer for technology (I can't help it. It's preprogrammed in my DNA). Here is a great thing I found online called Audioscrobbler

Audioscrobbler builds a profile of your musical taste using a plugin for your media player (Winamp, iTunes, XMMS etc..). Plugins send the name of every song you play to the Audioscrobbler server, which updates your musical profile with the new song. Every person with a plugin has their own page on this site which shows their listening statistics. The system automatically matches you to people with a similar music taste, and generates personalised recommendations.

get it and join my posse

I'm also trying this podcasting craze I've been hearing about. Essentially it's a broadcast encoded into digital form that you can listen to at your leisure (and updates automatically). So Far I have it set up to DL some of the programming I miss on air america while at work. Now I can listen to AL Franken on my drive home!

Old Thirty Bastard




Happy Belated Birthday to me!!!
Yesterday I turned the big 3 Oh...and so is everyone else (three of my friends already beat me to it already). I think it's great. Saying my age makes me sound old, but I don't feel it. I'm still keepin' it real.

Last night the family took me out to Chicago Fire Pizza out in Folsom, which makes Zachary's in Berkeley NULL and (void) in my opinion. Great stuffed pizza. My sister said it was the most very best pizza she's ever had in her entire life. For some reason we ordered 2, and now I almost have an entire pizza for lunch-leftovers for the rest of the week. I'm not sad about it at all.

I may have a cocktail party in my honor this weekend, but details are still in the works.

A Thousand Miles



Last week was pretty damn busy here at work, thus, no posting, but at least I wasn't bored senseless sitting at my desk for 8 hours (ok...i snuck out after 6 hours most days so I could go home and play with the puppy for my one hour window of afternoon sunshine).

The weekend was great. Friday Chris called me up around 9:30pm to tell me the Feeling where about to play, and normally, in my current state of mind of being a homebody these days, I would have just stayed home, but I managed to get myself out of the house and was glad I did. I got to the party moments before the Feeling began and they played brilliantly despite some minor technical difficulties with the bass (should have stuck with the powerpuff girl bass, dude!). They made up for the last time I saw them at the Distillery, where it seemed to be a "what band can play the loudest?" pissing contest. This time the volume was perfect, probably due to the fact that it was a house party and the boys didn't want it shut down due to noise complaints. The second band was friggin awesome. Faux 80's Eurotrash New Wave band (I never found out who they were...other than there were members from the Low Down in it). At first I thought it was just a gimmick that would wear off quickly, but they managed to pull me back into there set, just when I was starting to have my fill of fur coats, fake German accents, synths and neon body suits. During their set, the power went out a couple times, which didn't even faze them a bit...they just kept going and they were hella tight...hella. which was most impressive about them. I had enough after a while, so I cut out before the other band (The Jay and Joel Show) played... I love them and all, but it just seemed like the right moment to leave. Maybe they played some mind blowing set and I missed out. I'll never know.

Saturday day Niki and I took heylove walking in midtown for the first time (she just got all her shots) and she did pretty good, walking in spurts, then coming to abrupt stops. She did eventually catch on that the middle of the street was no place to stop and sniff.

My friend Matt had his dirty 30 b-day party that night (mine will be this saturday), and in honor of his hobby of collecting and fixing pinball machines, we had a pinball tournament, which turned out to sound better on paper than in reality. I love the game as much as the next person, but some of the contestants didn't have as much enthousiasm, and dropped out early. I came in second and won my money back, Rory kicked my butt, rolling the score over on one of the machines. It seemed to last forever, and when we were all done the party had dispersed a bit. We had cake and just sat around and talked. Timmy busted out the guitar and tried to convince me to sing along to some Led Zep songs. Timmy rules.

Sunday was "do-nothing-day", and I did nothing except watch "White Chicks" which was pretty damn funny...best scene in the movie was when Terry Crews (the dude who always plays the big scary guy in "black comedies") bust out with the Vanessa Carlton hit song. Almost too funny...I was in a state of shock and laughter at the same time.

***Follow Up***

This is the band I saw friday

Here is a great song by them

Some fake sushi I made for a potluck this weekend

ingredients:

• twinkies
  
• fruit roll-ups
  
• gummy bears
  
• sour apple candy
  
• orange sprinkles
  

I made a Quiz for you! Take my Quiz! and then Check out the Scoreboard!

BAD DOGGY



Nobody is as addicted to puppycam as much as Niki and I. We put it up so we would know what to expect when we got home. I think I want to stay in the office tonight. "Why?" you ask? Well if you've been watching the webcam, you have seen that heylove has been pretty bad lately, tearing up her potty-pad, welcoming me home with pee-stained stuffing and poop all over the place. *sigh*...(And to think, just the other day I was bragging to everybody about how great she is.)

I'm attributing this to neglect and all the pent up energy heylove has been building up, since lately it's been cold in the morning, and nobody wants to get up on time and play with the dog before work. I would just put her out back and let her run around, but our 86 year old neighbor still has her white picket fence up in her back yard, where the gap between the pickets are just large enough for heylove to run through (while chasing cats).

Last night I went to Home Depot and bought some wire fencing to put between ours and the neighbors fence. Hopefully it works!