7/30/2006

ReeeeeeeCAP

Friday
Cassidy and I saw Miami Vice on opening night on the biggest screen in town. My favorite part was seeing all the 50 year old dudes in floral shirts wanting to relive the glory days of Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas. Well, I was there for Gong Li and guns, everybody, I'm not going to lie.

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Then we cruised to the landing for a while before they kicked everybody out of my favorite bar. That crowd was fun, they were going to the East side to party more even though we'd had enough at about 230 am.

Saturday
Got a suit, and thus became a man. Nursed a hangover, and ate BBQ with Cassidy's fam. I even watched "This Old House" with her dad. Then went to Soulard for a couple birthday parties. It became apparent that a few people in the party, over the phone, and people who didn't return calls were uncomfortable outside a certain radius beyond their homes in West County. Quite a change from the night before when people had driven an hour into the city to party and had stayed out all night. We ended up at Lucas Park Grille, a trendy place I'd never been. It was the type of place you can almost drown in the "Where'd you go to high school?" questions.

Sunday
Played God of War on the Playstation, where my character managed to kill some massive Loch Ness monster thing. He then climbed into the thing's mouth to get a key off a drowning (in the thing's stomach) man. Then he got wasted and in a menage a trois, all in good ole ancient rome.

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Then I watched baseball and an indy car rain delay ("Helio might get deported") and went to the Cahokia Old-Tyme Music Fete. In a twist, I passed the Eastside, including all the strip clubs and the Oz to get to the festival. My boss socked it to the power company and played an excellent version of "House of the Rising Sun" with his band, Taum Sauk. Capped the weekend off by going to the parents to watch Entourage and the movie Junebug and relax with Cassidy.

7/28/2006

Roots w/ Talib Kweli & Pharcyde July 27, 2006 @ The Pageant in St Louis

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So I went to see the Roots, Talib Kweli and the Pharcyde last night at the Pageant with my man Eugene, or "Fudge" as he's sometimes known. I guess the odds were stacked against the guys from the get-go because the Roots claim they are socially conscious rappers and yet the tour was sponsored by a cigarette brand. Talib Kweli seemed to have a similar dilemma. I'd read in Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop that record companies had branded him as a "conscious rapper" in presenting to the same fans as the Roots. But at the same time he didn't like this label, he felt as if he had universal appeal. And the Pharcyde, well I knew a couple of their songs but without Fatlip and his diaper + trenchcoat combo I figured they'd be a little bland.

But the Pharcyde weren't bland, they had the crowd going, I don't know why I haven't really listened to their music lately. The venue seemed perfectly set up, too. I'm embarassed to say I hadn't been to the Pageant before. It reminded me of the old Missouri Theater (now Roberts Orpheum), only larger. In between acts, some hype man came out, looking like he should be the small forward for UCLA and saying things like "I'm 25 and I still dance like THIS" and wiggled his legs. Everybody was laughing their asses off at that point. Then they brought out some girls who looked like they had been grabbed at the mall earlier in the day to do a little fly girls dance number. But the thing that got the crowd into it was a breakdancing demo from some little scrawny white dude.

Then the Roots came out and Jesus, they were a dissapointment for their set. I think it had to do with Black Thought's huge-ass Jacob the Jewler watch and the Surgeon General warnings and the product placement in the bassist's mouth. But I noticed the crowd kept getting more into the band everytime the rapping stopped. Then I realized all the Roots songs I like have different singers. Think about it. Their biggest hits are the songs with Erykah Badu and Cody Chestnutt. Anyway, I went to drink the pain away and next thing I knew 'lib was on the stage with a Cards hat.

Now the crowd was really into it, maybe because of the Cards lid but my guess is just that they fed of his energy. I had a good time too, even though I only knew a couple of his songs, one he did with Kanye, ("Get em High"), and "Get By." Then the Roots came back out for a bunch of songs with him, and then for some reason the Roots stuck around for about an hour for the most bizarre encore I've witnessed. They played White Stripes ("Black Betty"), Michael Jackson ("Smooth Criminal"), MOP ("Ante Up"), and a bunch of other songs I'm forgetting. For some reason I thought they played Fleetwood Mac's Dreams but I think I imagined that one through the smoke in the pit. Anyway, the encore blew me away and capped the show off nicely.

Oh and as a little sidenote, on the way out a couple angry looking dudes were just chilling in a parked car and one started jabbering at me. It took me a few to realize that he was just complimenting me on my new, free (thanks, CI) No Mas shirt. I told him to hit up the site and grab one from Turntable Labs.

Another note, if somebody let me know how to break this entry down I'd appreciate it. I know, I'm a computer programmer and I can't handle HTML, I'm like an armless cop.

7/27/2006

The Neph

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Sometimes you've just got it. Take this kid for example. He rocks the seersucker and bowtie like it's on the cover of GQ, and puts his own personal twist with the baby bottle. To top it off, he macks on my girl and he even has delivered a few Zidane-like headbutts on me. Play on, player. Just give me a cut when you're the capo.

P.S. Nice picture by Cassidy

7/26/2006

Super Soakers n Hockey Masks

Have you heard of Street Wars? Apparently it's a game where you try to "assassinate" your target (given to you in a manila envelope) using a water gun. Sounds like the "Jason" game they used to play at Mizzou where they'd go out into the woods and a few of the kids would get plastic knives and hockey masks. Then, once you found somebody hiding, they became the Jason next by taking the mask and knife. Also, this Street Wars thing reminds me of how my buddy claimed that he'd become an assassin when he went to Denmark as a foreign exchange student. That or a Danish League Pro Basketball player. Neither panned out. So I'll sign him up when the thing comes to the Midwest.

7/25/2006

Back in 94

Big day for Brazil. First, word from the Sun in the UK is that Ronaldinho's lackluster play was a result of late night rendez-vus with a French model, not to mention playing FIFA 2006 WC on the PS2. Let me tell you, playing video games and chilling with the fairer sex til 5 am does drop your day time game a little. That's why I was in Fluid Mechanics 3 times. But have no fear, Brazil fans, DUNGA is going to be the new boss of your squad! That's right. The guy whose name I once saw on a young Brazilian girl's forehead in permanent marker* in 94, when Dunga fed Bebeto, that little baby rocker.

Ah 94, what a Cup that was. I remember seeing the US tie Switzerland in the Silverdome, meeting some Swiss dude who wore a leather jacket in 90 degree heat named Jacques. OJ was fleeing the cops on TV, and Blue Jays pitcher Juan Guzman was trying to shed groupies in our hotel lobby. Guzman was slick, he claimed his mother was with him. He still got torched the next night at Tiger Stadium though, so the moral of this post is women.... can't win with 'em can't win without 'em. Just ask Jimmycakes Edmonds.


*Creepy, kinda like that part in Cecil B Demented when the dude is such a rabid fan of a star that he carves her name into his head with a knife.

Duck Duuuuck Duck!

I think the next story I write is going to involve a husband and wife playing a game of duck, duck, goose with their child. The problem is that the child is a robot, and he's having a little problem grasping the concept of the game, so he just keeps saying duck duck duck duck. The dad is just really really happy that he has a robotic son- he likes the gadgets. And the mom is just not having this type of inadequacy. Or maybe the dad can't handle broken gadgets and he's always opening the son up, and the mom is just a little too more on the compassionate side. In whatever case, it sounds like an episode of "Small Wonder." In a related note, I should be getting a rejection letter on my first story from McSweeney's in a few weeks. I'm puttin it on the fridge too!

Landlocked!

So a week from Thursday I'll be partying on the beach in La Jolla. It sounds unreal, in part because I haven't been to California before, and in part because my visits to blue bodies of water are few and far in between. Legoland is out, in part because it just looks like Six Flags or Disneyworld with a different branding scheme. LA, we probably won't have time for it with the wedding, but maybe next summer. Even Street Scene we'll have to scratch off, as much as it pains me missing Snoop Dogg in concert. But at this point I wouldn't mind just relaxing on the beach for a couple days, trying to ride the surf flat, and just having some laughs. I remember in college I tore a picture from a magazine out, it was just a pic of a beach. I put it on my dorm door. It was my happy place, and centered me every time I walked into that room. Until somebody drew a stickman with a Sharpie and left a message as simple as "Hi" a few weeks later. Damn, I love the ocean.

7/21/2006

Queens? More like Kings...

So how many St Louisans equal one New Yorker to the national press? Give Up? Here's the test, have a tragedy befall the people in both cities, then see where the stories are given equal play. As luck would have it, NYC is out of some electricity. Yahoo! News reporting!

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St Louis, too is out. Yahoo! News reporting! (Their outlook is just a little lower, and less grave.)

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Seeing as 500K houses are out of electricity here, I'd say the conversion is about 5 St Louisans to 1 New Yorker. Why is that? I don't know, maybe it has to do with the amount of time spent doing something OTHER than talking about the Cardinals. 80 percent of a St Louisan's time is Pujols-related, I'd guess. Like telling the joke "What do gay men and Cardinals' fans have in common?" over and over again.

-Props to fark.com where I saw the NYC/Stl link

*****EDIT: A few days later I saw a story on StL's blackout on the national evening news. NYC was back up to speed by then- apparently it just took a little ineptitude on the part of the power company to get us on top! Thanks AmerenUE, I knew you had a "masterplan" all along.

I'm from Ellisville!

I know, I know, I said this wouldn't turn into a million YouTube clips. But since it's Friday, and everybody should be happy, I figured I'd post a couple music videos that make me happy. The first is by a band with 29 people called I'm from Barcelona. It reminds me of the annual summer follies or whatever they were called, back in grade school, where we'd pile on to risers, and memorize our positions. I was always back corner. Every time.



The second is by Muse. For some reason I thought this band was whiny, why didn't anybody tell me they're like some cool new version of Queen! And a video like a spaghetti western mixed with Laser Tag? Maybe the internet isn't so bad after all...

Good, uh... Evening

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I took Russian for a semester back in high school. I took it at the community college, at night. I think out of 8 kids in my class, 6 were on heavy drugs. 1 got into a car accident halfway through the semester and came back... different. That just left me, and I did enough to get by, which wasn't much. Since we didn't have a teacher. Yeah, it was a satellite class, which meant we all sat in front of these UN style microphones and were on camera for our teacher on the other side of town to see. Suffice to say, there were plenty of smoke breaks, weird backrubs, a broken fax machine for our homework and even a story about a rave and the Teletubbies that I can't get out of my head. Which brings me to the point that I never really learned all that much Russian except the saying for good evening. Which usually impresses people enough. Anyway, check out this for some Russian fun. Just don't expect me to be able to translate it.

7/20/2006

Viacom at the Top, Find Me with a Magnifying Glass

So I had this idea once that I'd make a sort of corporate map on my wall, a large poster showing the links between every company in America with all the big ones at the top. The big ones, being, as far as I can tell, Viacom, Time Warner, GE, Disney, etc. Then you'd see the hierarchy, and for instance, when Michael Bolton is hawking his CD on Extra! as a guest host,* you'd be able to trace a vertical line and see the business at work. I'm not going to complain that much about the fact that a business friendly SEC is going to allow mergers like CEOs are at a makeout party. But I mean, come on, Viacom has Comedy Central and MTV, not to mention BET, Nickelodeon, SpikeTV, Dreamworks and Paramount and every damn billboard I see (just look underneath the ad, in the center, you'll see the logo). Now the Onion? Isn't fake news sacred? Well get ready, because the fake news is about ready to get a little faker.

*Yeah, ok I watched Extra! last night, so sue me.

What We Need are Little Coke Bottle Glasses...

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So I had a blast at Grant's Farm when Cassidy and I went last month. Seriously, you can't beat taking a train around some zebras and goats, then walking by camels and a huge turtle (my power animal, if I had to pick one) until you get some free booze in an old German-style town square. Something stuck with me this last time, though. They have a nice colony of little goats, and you feed them out of little bottles of milk if you can part with a dollar or two. Cassidy and I of course dropped our nickels and posed for the photo-ops. But the thing was, I noticed that the goats seemed a little more sluggish than normal. Their eyes were a little glassier than I remembered from my last visit a few years back. To get their attention, you had to wave your bottle in front of their face, at which point they'd plow into each other. In other words, they seemed like a pack of blind dumbasses. Anyway, I started thinking, what type of genetic variation is there over at that place? If they started back in 1954 with say, 10 goats, 2 or 3 of whom had a recessive trait for blindness, and if there's no "survival of the fittest" going on, then it seems possible that the blind trait could last. Males reproduce at 4, females at 2, so the generations since 1954 are impossible to count. I'm wondering how open Grant's Farm would be if I asked about this whole matter. But one thing is for sure... even blind goats can pick out the hottest girl around!

Someone Needs to Protect the Chickens from the Aliens!

So YouTube is pretty cool... the last time I did this online journal it wasn't so easy to find short clips and videos and drop them into words like this. But anyway, what I'm posting is a short movie about aliens and chickens called "Aluminum Fowl," and, well, just watch it if you have 13 mins to spare.



And don't worry, I'm not going to post 10 obsolete by tomorrow clips. So relax.

Hey, Junkie!

So I was waiting out last night's storms in Wildwood, MO in a basement and the local weatherman kept bustin into local programming for some damage-porn. Like "Hey look at this sheet metal on the road," or "We've got some overturned tractor trailers on 270," as if he's a carnival barker telling us about a smoking monkey. Then they did the drill where they zoom in on each individual neighborhood, like some place called OLYMPIC VILLIAGE, MO. Suffice to say, they show lots of little storms and storm paths that didn't really concern 99.99% of the viewing area. So what do people watching do at this point? Take their eyes off the screen. And you know what I noticed? The Doppler Radar doesn't have ads, it's one of the few spaces nowadays like that. I hate the pervasiveness of advertisement as much as Naomi Klein, so don't get it twisted. I just found it bizarre they hadn't sold off the real estate yet. Think about it, they tried to put Spider-Man on the baseball diamond, a spot more sacred to Americans than a church. About the only thing I'm in favor for is that genius "Million Dollar Homepage."

On another note, I'm starting this thing to combat boredom, There won't be any cohesive element to my posts whatsoever. To prove my point, here's an interesting article about how people perceive animated figures differently, in relation to "A Scanner Darkly."

The title of the page refers to the fact that I don't take any of this too seriously, I'm just trying to start a little conversation, and that usually the internet isn't more than just an endless, faceless skid row. Finding a typical, intelligent conversation on the internet is difficult at best. And I promise I'll keep the damage-porn and advertising to a minimum.