All week I kept getting these MSN Messenger requests from people I don’t know, so I emailed them asking who they are and how they know me. This was one reply:
“oh im on jessica dycks and taylor bents and allie jones’s hockey team. ur also none as “yellow shirt kid ” ur the boy that my hole team knows about”
Good to know.
Anyone offended by discussions of a gastrointestinal nature may want to skip this entry.
As I approach the 30 year mark on this planet, some physiological changes have made themselves known. I have grey hairs. I hunt them down and kill them, not a big deal. My joints pop more often, so I’m taking glucosamine. The biggest problem, though, and one over which I have no control, is the abdominal noise. The churning after a meal is far noisier than the grumbling beforehand. I can’t stand it. It doesn’t seem to matter what I eat, although a taco salad from Hardee’s was apparently a big mistake today. Does anyone else have this problem, and do you have any recommendations to alleviate it? Do I need a colonic or something?
Driving across the river bridge this morning I saw a man walking north in the soutbound lane of the interstate. For those who don’t know, the dowtown river bridge is three lanes on both sides with no room for pedestrians to walk. I noticed the man was carrying a gas can. I then passed by his stalled car just beyond the halfway point of the bridge. For the next two miles I saw the bumper-to-bumper madness, a product of his motionless vehicle in the right hand lane.
That guy knows the blues. To run out of gas on the interstate, on a bridge with no shoulder, and to have to get out of the car, go get gas and come back…that’s about the deepest troubles a motorist can have. At least with an accident, you have it and it’s over. This guy has to continually be in danger just to get some gas. Never again will I complain about having a bad morning.
Suncoast, the DVD store in Park Plaza Mall, is closing its doors. This means I will have no other compelling reason to go to the mall beyond Chick-fil-A. This seems to be a pattern in entertainment media – they can’t seem to survive in malls anymore. Retail music stores have all but disappeared from malls, at least in Arkansas. Camelot Music, Musicland, Sam Goody…I’ve seen them all close between here and Missouri. There’s still a Sam Goody in McCain Mall, but I would wager that it will close within the next few years.
Of course the culprits are Amazon.com and Best Buy. I guess it’s just the natural evolution of the business, but I’ll miss the concept of a specialty DVD store. The only other place I can go to get obscure movies is Barnes & Noble, the place that never sells below retail.
Anyway. Going out of business sale at Suncoast. So far, it’s 20% off anything in the store, which in most cases puts the prices close to the Amazon.com rates (but still mostly higher than, say, DeepDiscountDVD.com).
My friend and hero Ross Rice has just released his long-long-awaited second album, Dwight. For heaven’s sake, buy it. He’s awesome. The link has samples of the tunes, as does the website I maintain, and the myspace page. I’m particularly excited about this album because it marks my first mention in an album’s liner notes! And I’m in there twice! It’s such a little music nerd fetish…my name is right next to John Fields[1]!
So between jamming with a former Yes keyboardist last week, and now this, I’ve sufficiently jazzed the little music geek inside me for several months. Although last night would have made a neat trifecta, as I played a gig for Ducks Unlimited at the Doubletree Hotel, and there were rumors that governor Mike Huckabee might want to play bass with us. So I brought my Rickenbacker just in case. Sadly no Huck by start time. I almost bumped into him at the dinner, though.
1.) Collaborator with Andy Sturmer from Jellyfish, among many, many others.
…where apparently they kidnap American guitar players and force them to battle in cage-match riff-offs. I found this video at YouTube.com, which is slowly taking over the world as a video answer to Flickr. People upload videos and share them online for free. The content is an amalgam of home movies and TV clips. I did a search on some of my favorite guitar players and found this clip of Paul Gilbert and Marty Friedman from a Japanese TV show. Even if you’re not a guitar player, I think this video is illuminating as a cross-cultural experience. First the guys compete in a name-that-Kiss-riff competition (which Marty wins, although if the game were Beatles tunes, Paul would totally have killed him), then another one based on letters of the alphabet. There are also clips from random videos (UFO and Ramones, anyone?) and a completely surreal The Price is Right-esque advertisement for Paul’s PGM301 guitar. Watching it I couldn’t help but feel as though there is a parallel universe where guitar shredding never died. Kurt Cobain never made it to Japan.
Compounding the weirdness is the fact that Marty and Paul speak fluent Japanese throughout the show.
If you like the convenience of iTunes, but want even more for your money ($1.50 for a complete album on average), and you don’t really care about artists getting paid, I recommend AllOfMP3.com, a Russian music service that has tenuous claims to legitimate legality via Russian copyright law. For more info, ask Wikipedia.
Personally the only reason I pay for downloading music is to clear my conscience of charges of thievery from artists I love. Here I’m not so confident in the accurate tracking of royalties. There’s only the thinnest veil of legitimacy here. Still it remains, for me at least, a convenient and semi-legal way to find and download mp3’s (lossless files available as well) by album. As an added bonus, Russia gets many of the CDs that the US doesn’t, so it’s good for digging up weird Hungarian Zappa bootlegs or live Tommy Bolin shows or Massive Attack singles. Watch out for their alphabetization – sometimes it’s first name first. And there are a lot of artists listed under “The…”
The Onion made a nice contribution to my interior discourse on the nature of love (click here for part I and part II) with this week’s article “I Love the Idea of My Wife.” Although the piece is comic, comedy is often one of the best sources of truth, so there are some good ideas to consider. This was my favorite bit:
“Frankly, I’d be lost without her. But I guess I’d feel that way about pretty much anybody who was from the same age group, economic tier, and level of education, and who I happened to marry 20-odd years ago, back when it was time to acquire a wife.”
I guess another title for the article would be “In Love with a Socio-Economic Construct.” I think that scenario is probably true for the majority of all marriages. I don’t think it’s anything to feel weird about; I think most people are largely interchangeable. Like LEGOs®, we’re all differently shaped pieces that fit together in particular ways. I know I could probably happily marry any number of girls I know. Of course they’d all be from similar demographic backgrounds, because we all have our own preferences – similar age group, economic tier, and education just mean that our mates will be more likely to understand us – you could keep going all the way back into species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, and kingdom [1] if you want. The dangerous thing the author does is compare his wife to a garden implement and a financial investment. There are plenty of people out there like that, I’m sure.
While I’ll be the first to admit that people are interchangeable, I’ll add that some of us are much more oddly shaped than others, and so will not fit together with just anyone. So therein lies the challenge: finding the best match.
1.) Yes I’m just showing off my retention of 9th grade science. Although in Arkansas some people do get more adventurous in their mating preferences…probably as far up as phylum.