First things first: Happy New Year!

Kerbey Lane, a small chain of hip cafes in Austin, put up a nifty offer on the sign of its South Lamar location a couple months ago. I’m only now getting around to scanning the picture. Yes, it does say, “10% OFF WITH A MULLET.” Ahh, gotta love Austin.

My New Years Eve was very chill. Instead of going downtown and wrestling with the crowds and shelling out lots of cash, I took it easy with some friends at one of their parents' ranch north of Austin that has a neat little house with plenty of guest beds, so Amanda (and her parents) were nice enough to invite some friends out to par-tay. We stayed up till three chatting, drinking, and snacking. One of the girls' younger brothers did a fantastic Raptor imitation and bravely took an injury for his act. I even got to drive the Official Ranch 1970-Something Jeep for a minute even though my standard transmission skills are rough. If the Jeep didn’t have a roof, I do believe we would have gone flying onto the road at every shift. I did do a good job parking it though, so perhaps that will serve as a redeeming factor (hah).

In music news, Amanda gave me a copy of a mix CD that includes a song by a UT student (I’ll leave out his name for privacy purposes). The song was a piano number and it was amazing. The vocals and melody totally struck me. I even liked the sound of the piano – it had a certain ‘aged’ quality. And I think Tarflet said it best when she described his voice as haunting. It reminded me of Jeff Buckley. I sent him an email asking if he plays shows. I hope he does.

Ross introduced me to a cool band called Minus The Bear. Guitars are clean, melodies are catchy, and bass lines groove. “Making Plans for Nigel” by XTC popped into my head. Steve Fisk, a well known Seattle producer (Nirvana, Soundgarden, Soul Coughing, Beat Happening), turned the dials for their debut full-length and I just ordered it and their EP from Suicide Squeeze records. I’m very excited to hear all of their stuff. Stay tuned for a review…

I uploaded the Barcelona and Cordoba pictures (links also in 'pictures' section on the right). Enjoy =) Up next are Madrid and Sevilla.

Troops, battalions, entire armies of germs swarm in the air in cubicle-land. Endless open-air boxes of busy, breathing, tactile people contribute to the airborne soup of unique germs carrying all kinds of various and sundry bacteria. One of them bore the name “sore throat” and landed in my cube. Bastard. I am thus a victim of cubicle-landitis, the general malaise that often accompanies working in cubicle-land-type environments. To top things off, I’m still getting over the remnants of a sinus infection. What gives? There’s a golf ball stuck in my throat and each of my inner ears is maintaining it’s own preferred level of pressure.

On page 206 of Come As You Are:

(‘Macleod’ is Alex Macleod, Nirvana’s tour manager.)

Dave, who is not a “morning person,” began rooming with Mecleod [in hotels while on tour]. But as the tour went on, Macloed acted more and more annoyed at Dave. Finally, Dave couldn’t stand it anymore and confronted him.
“What’s your problem? What’s wrong?” Dave asked.
“Fuck you!” Macleod shot back.
Apparently, whenever Macleod would try to wake Dave up in the morning, Dave would yell in his sleep, “FUCK YOU! LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE! THIS IS BULLSHIT!” then settle peacefully back into his pillow. Later, he’d go down to breakfast and wonder why Macleod was scowling at him.

I posted the Madrid pictures (link also on right under "pictures"). Sevilla has twice as many and I’m too lazy to sift through them right now, so looks like those will get done later this week.

The antibiotics I got are finally beginning to regulate on that lingering sinus infection. Things are looking up.

I’m really thinking about turning my laptop into a port-a-studio. I figure it’s more cost effective and convenient than buying a digital 4-track because I’ll be able to burn to cd straight from the laptop instead of having to buy an adapter or something. Any advice from you home-recorders out there? I’m only looking to record guitar and bass.

David (dah-veed) Garza is playing four free consecutive Monday-night open-mic shows at the Cactus Café in Austin. I went to the first one last night and caught the 9:30 show (the first was at 7:00). Having only seen David once at a festival, I was very excited to see him in a club as small as the Cactus, which only sits about 50 people and stands 50 more. It’s about as ‘intimate’ a venue as possible without being the sidewalk.

I didn’t know what to expect. I had heard the early show was all piano. For all I knew, the late show could be all acoustic or all rock. Luckily, they went for a combination of both. When I saw the full band set-up packed onto the mini-stage I knew we were in for a rock out. For the first 40 or so minutes they played rock song after rock song, bathing the sitting and standing crowd in David’s signature rock grooviness.

That night happened to be David’s brother Raul’s birthday. After the rock out ended, David retired to a chair (after sheepishly asking to borrow one) and his Martin acoustic. He sang Happy Birthday and dragged Raul onto the stage to sing a Tom Petty cover. From there on out he took requests from the audience. I imagine some of the requestors were friends because he’d make them tell some story about the song. One requestor complained that one of songs was “too mellow.” The audience protested and backed David up. She got booed. Another requestor asked for a song that no one else knew. David, shocked at the request, explained that they only played the song live once in 1993. He played the song anyway and when he got to the second verse, he remembered why they never recorded it. He never wrote a second verse.

Throughout the acoustic portion of the set, David pulled various friends onstage to sing or accompany him on guitar. It was really cool to see him in his element, away from the big stage and lights. I’ve already made plans to see next Monday’s show. If you live in or around Austin, you should definitely come out.

And as David reiterated several times, the show is free so we can't complain. And by the way, "please tip your band." Whataburger is open late.

Polka is exactly like hip-hop, only Polish.

1. It’s feared and maligned by people who aren’t part of the same disenfranchised culture.
2. It’s been absorbed and tweaked by other cultures with similar disenfranchisement.
3. It’s been co-opted and watered down by the corporations to sell products and control the youth population.

Polka is exactly like hip-hop, only Polish.

That is all for today.

So my team at work is having a ‘party’ this afternoon at our project manager’s house. We just got through a major release and he offered his house, kegerator, and BBQ grill for our enjoyment. Granted, I’ve gone drinking with him and some of the other guys on the team before, but this time, everyone, including spouses, will be in attendance. There are also some really conservative people on my team (i.e., don’t “understand” the reasons for drinking alcohol and think it’s a sin).

Any tips on how I should handle myself? I could get totally smashed and make a complete fool of myself, thus breaking the ice. We could play power hour until no one can stand up. Or I could calmly sip my beers, have my BBQ fajitas, chat with the spouses, and be on my merry way.

I think a combination of the two will likely take place.

I have a record player and some random Nirvana 45s. At the time I bought the 45s, I didn’t have the plastic adapter needed to play them, so I just shelved the records for when I got the adapter.

It’s been about four years and I still have not gotten the adapter. About 90% of that time has been wasted forgetting that I even had the 45s. So now I’m finally getting off my ass and looking for an adapter, and it turns out these things are extinct. I called Radio Shack, who referred me to Hermes Music, a local guitar/audio store, who referred me Bjorn’s, a local high-end audio equipment store, who referred me to Electronics Services, an unheard-of local electronics services store. Electronics Services is open 9-5:30 during the week and 9-12 on Saturday.

This basically means that I will never be able to get the adapter. In this day and age, it feels good to support your local music/electronics shop instead of automatically going to the internet, but you know what, the local music/electronics shop has some crappy hours.

Results from the office party last night: the most embarrassment I brought upon myself came in the form of a sad game of darts. I couldn’t hit anything with a number on it. On the bright side, the BBQ was good, the beer was plentiful, and I hit on, or got hit on, by the boss’ girlfriend. Sweet.

helpinghandmonkeys.org. no joke. link via mightygirl.

Saw David Garza again last night. He and the "rock n roll band" were a lot more aggressive than last week; much more punk-y than I thought they could be. It was a whole new side of David.

me: I had a healthy salad for lunch today. skorloff: I had a healthy massive bacon cheeseburger with barbecue sauce and fries. jonathan: I had a salad also... with a bun and fries. Oh yeah, the salad had buffalo-wing style chicken too. I am trying to eat healthy myself. skorloff: You can’t eat yourself healthy Jon. me: semantics, semantics. jonathan: No but I can myself healthy Jon.

It’s done. I killed my desktop. A friend at work needed a copy of Win2000 and I offered to burn him one. I’ve had a bootleg Win2000 cd for years and it has never failed me. I thought I should probably test the cd first to make sure it still worked. My desktop has gotten clogged with various annoying third party apps and I figured a fresh install would help. It didn’t.

At the initial install screen it asked for a .ini file and urged me to insert a cd entitled “Windows2000 Professional.” It was in. I said “OK” a million times but the file was MIA. So I tried to cancel out of the Setup process and set the first boot device to IDE-0 (that’s the C: hard drive for you normal people not familiar with geekspeak). It rebooted fine but as soon as it hit Windows, it asked for the file. Damn.

Any suggestions? I suppose I could surf the net for the specific .ini file, but who knows what other files vanished from the cd. And I’m sick of that computer anyway. Good riddance. But it did have a cool blueberry-colored case (a-la iMac).

I started reading Joseph Conrad’s from Under Western Eyes last week and am thoroughly enjoying it, which is odd because I started reading it years ago for a class but quit after 50 pages. It put me to sleep. But after spending most of the semester reading Dostoyevsky and Nabokov, anything that wasn’t a twisted and shocking psychological thriller came off as ho-hum. I wanted scandal. I wanted crazies. I wanted my vocabulary to be challenged by a psycho killer. fa fa fa.

Under Western Eyes takes the classic Russian novel’s backdrop of political rebellion and puts it in a college student’s dorm room. Murder, rumors, Princes, and drunkenness permeate the story. Traces of Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment are visible in the main character and his subversive, murderous compatriot. I still can’t decide which one Conrad intended as ‘his Raskolnikov,’ but both of them seem to suffer from their own delusions.

In other irrelevant news, I reorganized the links on the right to make it easier to find stuff.

I had a cinnamon-raisin bagel for breakfast today for the first time in six years. This may seem infinitely pointless to most people, but to me, this is a monumental step. For almost every Saturday and Sunday morning of my childhood, my family gathered at the breakfast table for bagels, cream cheese, and scrambled eggs. And for almost every one of those mornings, my parents served cinnamon-raisin bagels. There was no variety. For umpteen years I only tasted one bagel flavor. My taste buds soon became numb to the taste of both cinnamon and raisins.

When I was all growed up and ready for college, I decided it was time for me to strike out into the plethora of bagel flavors on the market. Blueberry soon became the reigning champ but never dominated the scene. Basil tomato, honey oat, banana nut, and asiago cheese also had their say. But cinnamon-raisin never surfaced. I kept it buried beneath years of repressed bagel frustration. So it goes.

Now, here I am, six years later, ready to give cinnamon-raisin another try. So I bought a 5-pack at the store, and, lo and behold, it still tastes like cardboard. But at least now I know for sure that cinnamon-raisin is not for me.

PS: dooce also posted about bagels. but her story is kinda different.

I’m moving into a 2-2 with a friend on Friday and I’ve hardly packed anything. The new apartment is only a half-mile away, so I suppose I could throw stuff in my car and make a million trips. But that’s disorganized and totally grates with my personality. I need to pack things in modular units that are easy to carry and stack in the corner and never unpack. My life is very modular and yours probably is too. Furniture dismantles in logical chunks. Kitchen items naturally group themselves into categories: metal, plastic, the chemicals under the sink. Clothes demand piecewise attack: delicates like suits and recently dry-cleaned shirts must be hung; everything else gets thrown in a box.

Modularity greets us wherever we go. It’s in our political system. It’s in our religions. It’s in music.

I had better stop rambling and start packing.

Hasselhoff claims he had hand in Berlin Wall falling

"After my appearance I hacked away at pieces of the wall that had the black, red and yellow colours of the German flag on it. I kept the big piece for myself and gave the smaller pieces to colleagues at Baywatch."

thanks to jonathan for the link.

also: rack-o-hoes.

also – plans are in motion for particleman to visit Portland, Oregon. Beer will be consumed. Thai food will be inhaled. Geeks will lose glasses at rock shows. World problems will be solved. The Northwest will never recover.