smacky and bucky

• So a panda farts in China and our stock market falls 400 points in an afternoon. Have I got that right?
• Holy crap the final episode of the season with Doctor Who #9 kicks ass. On the special effects level, on the emotional level, on the quotable line level. Wow. I'm so glad he found his way to Heroes here in the States.
• I found a full show by Cracker, recorded on April 18, 1991. That year (in the fall) I probably saw Cracker at least three times. Going to school in northern Virginia, the band stopped at our college every time they passed through between DC and their home base in Richmond.
• Yes, Lauren, I was in college in 1991, a freshman. Please don't tell me how old you were then. Six? Five? Two?
• Damn, this is an odd one: I just read about a band. A bunch of white guys who met in college in North Carolina. They traveled to West Africa three times, including a long stay in Mali to play with local musicians. Now they make West African music that sounds really good. The best part is the band's name: Toubab Krewe. ("Toubab" is the Djula (A West African local language) word for "whitey." Little kids chanted it me on the streets as I rode by on my bicycle in Africa. Really drives the point home that you're a foreigner!) You can hear their music on their site, www.toubabkrewe.com.
• Do any geeks out there know if Torchwood is coming to America any time? Or do you know where I can watch the episodes? I had heard the show's name but didn't realize it was the continuing adventures of Captain Jack, and now I really want to see it.

Oh man, is there anything the internet can't give you? Thanks to "trader-friendly" bands like the Grateful Dead, Phish, Keller Williams (and so on), excellent recordings of full shows exist. And thanks to the internet, you don't need to find people with shows, mail them blank cassettes, wait a few weeks and get shows in the mail (and figure in cost of cassettes and postage both ways). Not that I ever did that. I just know that's how it was done in the dark, pre-internet days. People would mail requests for certain shows to the back of Relix magazine, for example. Their requests would appear on the same page with Deadheads in prison looking for penpals.

Now you just find a website (and I've found a bunch), find the show you want, click on the zip file, wait a few minutes (thank you, high speed wireless!), open the file, and drag the songs into iTunes. It's mind-boggling that the entire process takes maybe 10 minutes. Ten minutes to have a complete concert, an audio record from 1972 (35 years ago)!

And it works the other way too. Not only does it preserve history, it disseminates information immediately. I found a concert by Keller Williams that took place three days ago. Someone recorded and uploaded the show that quickly.

Relaxing weekend. Watched three episodes of Doctor Who, got a haircut, played some poker. Sunday we drove home in the snow. The temp was just above freezing, so it was good driving weather: The snow stuck to grass and trees while the roads remained clear. That didn't stop some people from wanting to drive 40 MPH down the highway, causing more of a hazard than the weather ever could.

Dr. Who intros through the years

I don't normally watch My Name is Earl, but I caught it last night. Best line of the show:

Woman says to guy: "We'll wait until the restaurant closes and you can do me on the pinball machine, like in that porno Jodie Foster did."

That would be a reference to The Accused, in which Jodie Foster was gang-raped on a pinball machine. Referring to it as a porno, and wanted to reenact it... priceless.

Once a month, a group of women (girls, chicks, ladies, broads, whatever) in our neighborhood get together for what I believe they used to call "stitch-n-bitch" until some asshole in NY copyrighted the term and had a lawyer send cease and desist letters to groups using the name in their Yahoo groups. [I may have gotten some facts in the previous sentence incorrect, so don't go adding it to Wikipedia as fact.] The point is, I don't know what they call themselves now, if anything. The group is connected by mass emails, knitting, and eating and drinking.

Tonight it is my wife's turn to host this event. She's excited and I'm happy she's making friends with the neighbors.

I'll be hiding in the back bedroom with pizza, beer, and a new episode of Lost.

Home sick on Friday. Sick over holiday weekend. Still sick today, but at work.

Some statistics:

Temperature Thursday evening: 102
Temperature Friday morning: 98.2
Times I blew my nose over last four days: ~10,000
Naps taken in last four days: 5
Movies watched: 2 (Flyboys and Cube 2: Hypercube, which I caught on SciFi channel)
Episodes of Doctor Who watched: 2 (saved on Tivo from BBC America)
Books started: 2 (Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill and The Thrill of It All by some dude)
Medications taken: 4 (before finally settling on the two most effective)

Sunday evening we caught the train up to New York City, walking the two blocks from Penn Station to our hotel. Monday morning we got up early and walked two blocks to Madison Square Garden. The reason? The 2007 West Minster Kennel Club Dog Show. Wall to wall dogs, wall to wall people looking at dogs. I had fun, and Laura loved it (this was a trip for her, really, but it was still fun, so no complaints. And hey! You can buy a beer at Madison Square Garden for any event. Enjoying a beer while watching seven rings of dogs being judged is a surreal event).

Monday evening we met up with one of her sisters and her sister's husband. We took them to dinner at Josie's East. We had to find a place that offered vegan choices (no meat, no dairy). Luckily, the restaurant also had a lot of other tasty choices, so I was able to get the ginger grilled calamari with pineapple and red pepper salsa, followed by "grilled aquanor salmon, hand-farmed & organically-fed roasted sweet potato mash, grilled asparagus & mango-roasted pepper salsa." Then back to Madison Square Garden for first night judging of breeds.

Today was another day in the big city, followed by a train ride south, watching the snow change to ice along the way. We got back into town round 3:00, but the ride home was not destined to be relaxing. It turned out that the federal government closed up at 2:00 and sent everyone home at once, meaning rush hour was (1) three hours early and (2) not staggered. Thousands of people clogged the streets heading home. After and hour and a half, we finally bailed the main roads and stopped at a good Mexican restaurant for an early dinner. A margarita later, and the tenseness of the drive washed away. After dinner the roads were much more manageable and we made it home without incident. We're secretly hoping the weather will stay ugly enough to cancel work tomorrow, but we had a nice little vacation.

I liked this week's return of Lost, with a few minor exceptions. I don't feel up to a full analysis, so I'll just point you to Lost... And Gone Forever, where this guy has posted a long, extremely detailed recap, with screen grabs from the episode's freakier moments.

What else has happened this week? I'm finishing a book that shouldn't take this long to finish. No excuse for it, except I get tempted by reruns of Scrubs, a show I've ignored for six seasons. Now all the episodes are new to me, and funny.

Speaking of being behind the curve of popularity, I picked up Maxinquaye by Tricky the other day. Released in 1995, I'm only now discovering it. A few of the tracks I already knew, thanks to a mix tape someone sent me when I was in Africa. I played the tape endlessly for a year, but I lost the insert with the song titles and artists' names, so I just knew them as "that song that goes da-dada-da" and so on. I suppose "trip-hop," as it's described, is now passe, but it's still an amazing CD. It sounds like the music that would play in the taxi in Paris, as you ride home with a mysterious good looking stranger you met at the club, someone who may become a lover or an enemy. Ohh, how poetic for a Friday morning!


We're staying in town again this weekend. Going out to dinner with one of the wife's sisters and sister's husband tonight. Saturday is looking open though. Any ideas?

Labels: Lost, trip-hop

Well, it's Wednesday, so time for quick recap of the weekend. Had a fun, relaxing time. Saturday I got up early and went to get my car inspected. Then I swung by to pick up the wife and head to IKEA. She wanted a new dresser (we left the beat-up old one in the house we sold in December). She picked one out and I spent part of Saturday afternoon putting it together. Saturday evening we went to visit friends. Since we're so often out of town on the weekends, it's rare we get to meet up with friends. It was a lot of fun. I finished assembling the dresser on Sunday. Watched about 75% of the Superbowl, got bored, and turned the channel.

Woke up this morning to about an inch of snow on the ground. The most we've had all winter! Sigh. What a letdown. Brushed off our cars and came in to work at my regular time.

Lost is finally back tonight, kicking off 16 uninterrupted weeks of new episodes. I hope it doesn't suck. I've been avoiding spoilers since November. It will be interesting to see if the Lost writers have been paying attention to the success of Heroes, and how the writers of that show tell a story. Especially the part about not having to have something happen only in the last five minutes of the episode!

Labels: Lost, snow, weekend

News Round-up!

You know how after every big sporting event, the winning team immedately dons caps and shirts proclaiming them the national champions? These are obviously made in advance, and they obviously need to make caps and hats for both teams, because they don't know who will win. Well, what happens to the hats and caps of the team that loses? Here's proof that I did see this when I was in Africa:

T-shirts depicting Bears as champs head to Africa

****************

So the woman that piloted the space shuttle to the international space station last July has been charged with attempted kidnapping, attempted vehicle burglary with battery, destruction of evidence and battery, and is being held without bail.

She drove from Houston, Texas to Orlando, Florida wearing diapers so she could pee in the car (She's a petite woman, so I assume a large diaper would fit her). She confronted a woman at the Orlando airport (apparently the rival of the affections of a fellow astronaut) and tried to pepper spray her. When police caught her, she was wearing a wig and a trenchcoat. She had a bag containing a BB gun, a steel mallet, a 4-inch folding knife, rubber tubing, $600, and garbage bags. Sounds like she was going to eliminate the other woman.

This is proof that, regardless of who you are or what you've accomplished, love can make you stupid.

Labels: Africa, astronaut, news

I'll post a weekend round-up soon, but this deserves its own post. One of the pages I check every morning is The Comics Curmudgeon. Mocking the daily comic strips is a wonderful way to start the day. Over the course of a week, thousands of comments are left on the posts, and each week the site's owner Josh picks the "Comment of the Week" and about a dozen runner-ups.

I made Comment of the Week! For the next seven days, my comment will sit in the place of honor in the upper left corner of the site.

The comic I was mocking was this:

Mary Worth has gone to Vietnam to rush to the aid of her sick "boyfriend." And of course the hospital staff is too dumb to understand modern medicine.

I said: Mary Worth: "This calls for a second opinion, but where can I find a white doctor at this hour?"

Thank you, thank you!

Labels: honor, Mary Worth, Success

I'm taking a half-day today to have lunch and catch a movie with my wife this afternoon. We need a little time to do something that doesn't have anything to do with running errands and doing chores. Just a date day.

I'm being pulled kicking and screaming in to the new blogger system. I'm not sure what the differences are. We'll see.

Staying in town this weekend. Actually meeting friends (another couple) tomorrow, so we're continuing to be more sociable. Dig us!

Labels: date, friend, technology

We were out having an early dinner last night, and Laura asked what the date was.

"January 31," I replied.

"You deserve a treat for not smoking for a month," she said.

It had been a month. I hadn't been thinking about smoking very often anymore.

"What do you have in mind?" I asked, raising my eyebrows rakishly.

"You'll see," she responded.




Mind out of the gutter, folks. We went to the Apple store. She decided I needed a new laptop. I've been using her hand-me-down model for years and years, an old Dell PC that didn't have enough memory to hold my iPod music, making it necessary to plug in an external drive to use iTunes. That, plus the fact that it weighed a lot compared to models of today, and the big fact that, even fully charged, the battery only lasted just over an hour, and yeah, I suppose I could use a new laptop. It just seemed like a big ticket purchase I could delay indefinitely though, since the one I had did in fact work, so I never thought about it. But my wife did think about it, and decided she was tired seeing me adapting her outdated hand-me-down to make it do things.

I am now the owner of a sleek little MacBook! It has a zillion features my last laptop lacked. It plays DVDs with more clarity than the older television we own. We watched parts of Kill Bill, part II on it, which turned out to be a great choice to display what the MacBook can do, since the movie starts in vivid B&W and moves to color, with a slow pan of the desert leading to the showdown in the trailer.

The laptop comes with a remote. With the remote, you can play a DVD, scroll though photos, or use iTunes as a jukebox, going to one specific song you want to hear, all the songs by a single artist, or random shuffle of your entire library.

Speaking of library, I transferred my music library from the external drive to the new laptop. It has a ton of memory compared to the old computer, so will easily hold all my music. I had to reformat the iPod, but somehow ended up with three more songs on it than it had before. Strange.

Anyway, I'm freaking spoiled, and though I think I'll have to take one of their free Apple classes to learn everything the computer can do (for example, it has a built in webcam for chatting) I'm looking forward to playing with it. This is the first Mac I've ever owned. A whole new world for me.