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August 30, 2003

Wait a second... new Poll of the Week? That's right. Al Franken-inspired, a bit. His books should be required reading, not least the new one.

August 30, 2003

   So, what did I get? Let's see:
    *Wireless mouse and keyboard. The mouse isn't optical, but eh. The niceness of this will be less apparent before I get back to school, but it's already pretty nice that I don't have cords getting in the way everywhere. There are also a lot of neat hotkeys at the top of the keyboard.
    *A new digital camera. Bitchin'. There were several problems with my old camera: in addition to being really old (I think I got it as a high school graduation present from my grandparents), it had minimal features, mediocre picture quality, it munched batteries, and it was just huge and so annoying to carry anywhere. The new one is tiny, has huge picture quality, a lot of memory, rechargeable batteries (though these apparently take 24 hours to charge or something) - it's money.
    *Led Zeppelin 3-CD set live in California; pretty sweet. Can you believe Jimmy Page was only ninth on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 greatest guitarists ever? (That Hendrix, Clapton, and Page were not three of the top five - though the former two were two of the top four - is scandalous, as is the fact that freaking Jack White was #17 while Eddie Van Halen is #70 and Angus Young is #96. Sorry, White Stripes fans, that's ludicrous.)
    *Chicago DVD from Marian.
    *Guster's "Goldfly" CD from Shannon, along with Crunchie bars (oh yeah, she knows me) and a "golf voodoo kit," with a little guy and two pins.
    *Books and underwear. Yes, my mom was responsible for this.

Pretty good - the key, of course, is that I got the two main things I wanted. We also went to dinner at Cheesecake Factory and made the mistake of ordering appetizers. I couldn't finish the huge pile of mashed potatoes that came with my steak, which was disappointing because I freaking love mashed potatoes. We did manage to get cheesecake (dulce de leche caramel, ooh) and finish it among the three of us. I also ordered a drink (the amazingly fruity "Lemon Sunburst," which was like 50% lemon zest), but of course I was not carded. What's even the point?

At any rate, I'm 21. Who's ready for Trivia Night?

August 29, 2003

Merry Flaxmas to all. Updates later.

August 23, 2003

   I seriously have no idea where the last eight days went. As an update, I've been dealing with these random injuries. First, last Thursday, my right knee started hurting; this week I added the left elbow, and having to put so much weight on the other limbs has caused them to hurt a bit too, though not as much and less consistently. I've got a doctor's appointment on Monday morning. Bleh.
    One interesting thing about Washington. Most of you have probably spent at least some time in a major city like New York or Chicago, and you know that people will cross against the light all the time. Of course, that's common practice when nothing's coming, but sometimes they'll do it even when there are cars, particularly in New York.
    Washington, though, is different. In Washington, people will actually wait for the light to go against them and then suddenly dart into traffic. The light will be green, they're not going; suddenly as it goes red they remember they need to cross and run out as I'm trying to drive in the other direction. Apparently living here for a while makes you either colorblind or stupid. Maybe it's just as well I've only got three weeks left.
    Man, only three weeks left. Oh, six days till Flaxmas.

August 15, 2003

   Hmm, it seems I haven't posted anything in a while. Well, I drove home to New Jersey today. Not a bad four-hour drive; didn't even have to stop. Started things off with a Minute Maid "Grape Medley" soda at the gas station in Bethesda - Minute Maid's been doing these "fruit sodas" recently, and they haven't all worked exactly (the Valencia Orange isn't quite there somehow), but this was really delicious. It's everything you want out of a grape soda. Or at least everything I want out of a grape soda.
    The Beltway was a bit crowded, but after that it was no problem. I listened to six CDs (all four Gusters, plus Cream and Blink).
    At one exit in Maryland, they had a sign listing all of the gas stations at that exit. Amoco, Exxon, you know the drill. But below those (and with nothing saying "food" or anything), they had 7-11. Do some 7-11s really sell gasoline, or was it listed under "gas" because of those taquitos they have?

August 10, 2003

New movie review: Seabiscuit.

August 7, 2003

I managed to get onto the right bridge this time, but as it turned out, I would have been better off fucking it up again. Some utility workers apparently decided Washington wasn't hard enough to drive in and closed off half of Georgetown. I wish that were just an exaggeration. Between M Street being covered in cones for 10 blocks and getting fucked up by several "we're just going to terminate abruptly a block later" streets, it took me 35 minutes from leaving Shannon's to actually get back onto Wisconsin (which is like four blocks from Key Bridge, but god forbid they let me turn left there), and an hour door to door when it should take no more than 45 minutes. Man, I hate driving in this city. The real irony is it would really not take that much longer on the Metro, and I'd have a shorter walk to the building than I do from the parking lot.

August 6, 2003

   In case you didn't see my away message earlier, this cartoon is one Drew and/or Rich will really enjoy. Based on how often I've seen Drew online recently, he's more likely to see this than my away message anyhow.
    Marc suggests I am "overdoing it" with the Guster, perhaps because it keeps appearing in my away message or perhaps because I found it amusing that Chong quoted lyrics out of nowhere and so put that in my profile. I would suggest Marc "go fuck himself," because I feel perfectly justified going on a Guster kick. In fact, I'm listening to my Guster playlist right now. So there.
    I was informed by random RT netizen that the video for Amsterdam is seeing heavy rotation on MTV2, and sure enough, I needed to wait only an hour to see it. Now, during freshman year, I would have seen any given MTV2 video, particularly Danger and Ms. Jackson, three or four times in any given hour, but they seem to be diversifying a bit. (For those without my patience, the video - I don't know if it's in its entirety or not - is at the Guster site and also Launch.com.)
    As to the video itself, it is pretty obvious that Guster is only just getting its real break. It seems to have been shot largely, if not entirely, on digital video (which was perhaps then transferred to film, à la The Fast Runner or something), and on location. Like an epic film, it unfolds in three acts:
    Act I: Adam, on a boat, and Ryan, on a bike (shot mostly using the unforgivable handlebars-cam), head towards some destination, evidently in Amsterdam.
    Act II: The band, including drummer Brian, arrive at some location and play along with the song for a bit, thus fulfilling the "band standup scenes" requirement of the video.
    Act III: Random city scenes, which includes the band being chased away in a tiny car by a big inflatable man reminiscent of Little Red's dad or something.
    So, yeah. I mean, it wasn't bad. I wasn't expecting some big-budget extravaganza. But I think the video for Fa Fa was cooler. I also think Brian kinda got the first act shaft, considering he wrote the song's lyrics (he wrote a third of the album; oddly enough, or maybe not, guitarist Adam wrote none - Ryan writes most of the band's songs, lyrically anyway).
    I'm interested to see if they release other singles. I would probably have picked Homecoming King or Ramona over Amsterdam as a first single. But I would probably also have picked Come Downstairs and Say Hello, which is over five minutes long, so now you know why I'm not an A&R guy at Reprise.
    After the Guster video, MTV2 spent an hour (well, that's what the TV guide said; I turned it off about a minute in) plugging the Dashboard Confessional DVD, which I guess comes with his new CD (evidently I should have watched a little longer if I wanted information like that). I like Dashboard's stuff on the whole, but when it comes to live recordings there's no point. You can't even fucking hear Chris over the audience yelling out the words. (If you don't believe me, look at Amazon's review of the Unplugged CD/DVD set, usually a far more chaste affair than the average live show.) I don't mind some singing when I'm at a show - I'm guilty of it myself frequently - but if you're singing so loud that the artist can't be heard, something is wrong. If I were him I'd save my voice for the studio by just letting the audience karaoke on every song, since it makes no discernible difference.

August 4, 2003

   I should have linked last week to my Op-Ed on that gay high school in New York City. Consider that the "new material," because today's Daily Dose was such crap that I'm too ashamed to link to it. Okay, you twisted my arm. I'm sure it sounds fine, but let me explain why it sucks:
    * One of the bigger stories, the gay Episcopal bishop candidate getting voted on, changed at the last second as - gosh, just as a matter of chance, I'm sure - allegations emerged against V. Gene Robinson, the New Hampshire priest who was up for bishop. He had cleared the first three hurdles - his diocese chose him, the Episcopal Committee on Consent of Bishops approved him, and yesterday the House of Deputies approved him. Then, bam, eleventh-hour allegations, as the conservative factions of the Episcopal Church threatened schism. Hmm.
    * I called a whole bunch of people to talk about Liberia, and everyone was either not there or busy. I start off by calling Africa Action - sounds plausible, right? - and they said "we're sending all our inquires to so-and-so at this other place." That probably explain why that person was not there. In the end, I skipped the sound on Liberia, took a Joe Lieberman clip from Cuong and Minji's sound that just happened to work with the Al Qaeda story, and then took a several-day-old Joe Biden clip that worked tangentially with the Iraq story. Sound-wise, it's just awful. The upside, because I guess there has to be one: I got a sort of "in" with the media person at Foreign Policy in Focus, which will be nice when not everyone is calling them.

August 3, 2003

   Good lord, it's August. July did take a pretty long time to pass (it feels like so long ago I had that horrible staph infection, and hey, it was a month ago), but not only is it August, it's August 3rd. Yoicks. Only 26 more shopping days till Flaxmas.
    Yesterday Shannon and I braved the elements (it was really, really humid - imagine someone takes a long, hot shower and then you enter the bathroom) to go to Arlington National Cemetery. It's really big. It would have to be; according to the pamphlet, there are, on average, 120 burials there a week. We saw the eternal flame at the grave of JFK, as well as RFK's grave. We saw the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and memorials to the Maine (they had the mast and anchor there) and the Challenger. It would be a much more humbling experience were it not for all the tourists in Bermuda shorts.
    Then we went to the mall at Pentagon City. It's a pretty big mall. The stuff around the mall looks, as Shannon pointed out, just like Evanston. There's a World Market, a Wolfgang Puck, a Noodles and Company, an ice cream place right next to the Noodles and Company... and a Borders across the street. I picked up Keep It Together at the Borders (only 10.99!). (They had a special edition package of it which was cool, but I'm not paying literally twice as much for a collector's booklet.) It's pretty good but it doesn't sound that much like the Guster I'm used to. I'll have to keep listening.
    Then we went over to Chris N.'s place (all of Shannon's friends are ending up in DC for whatever reason), where he and Shannon did some cooking while I helped by sitting there and not messing anything up (in my defense, I got a little burn at Arlington and so developed a bad exposure headache, which I tend to get if I spend any amount of time in the sun - whee). It was a nice dinner and then we watched Blood Simple, the Coen Brothers' first feature. Obviously not their best movie, and jarringly straight for a Coen feature, but I thought it was pretty good.

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This page last updated: Sunday, August 31, 2003 06:25:29 AM