Earlier in the week I had made tentative plans to hang out with Adam at his house on Saturday, but I hadn't heard back from him. When I got up I called him, and sure enough, things were on. After a shower and a quick bite, I grabbed a handful of dvds and set out toward Adam's.

I was excited, not just because I hadn't seen Adam in a while, but also because he has a HUGE widescreen television -- something like 55" or so. Now, I'm not a typical boy: I don't like sports, cars, steak, etc. I do, however, rather enjoy a big tv and a big stereo. One day, perhaps, I may even get one, but until then, I'll live vicariously through others.

Since I wasn't sure whether Adam's wife Tricia and their two kids would be around, so I tried to choose dvds that would be agreeable, if not entirely family-friendly. I definitely wanted to see how a couple dvds in particular looked and sounded on his system.

Once I arrived, I realized that Tricia was leaving with the kids for a couple hours, so I needn't have chosen so particularly. No problem, though -- I still had some good ones.

First up was the KMFDM WWIII: Tour 2003 dvd, mainly because I'm actually in it for about ten seconds. The show itself sounds good, but it's regular stereo, not surround, so nothing spectacular.

Next up was the Peter Gabriel Growing Up Live dvd. This one I knew would be special, and so did Adam as soon as the menu came up -- the menu screens themselves were all in DTS. Adam's not a big Peter Gabriel fan, so I didn't intend to make him sit through all two hours of the show, but I did want to hit a couple songs in particular, especially the title track, "Growing Up". In short: amazing. The surround accentuates the songs without sounding contrived, and the visuals, which were great on my tiny, piece-of-shit tv, were beautiful, making me again regret missing that tour (though I'm not sure how much of the stage show from this Rome concert was traipsed around the US when he came through).

My two live dvds made him want to throw in his live Slayer disc. Not the Still Reigning disc, which I'm actually keen to watch, but their previous live dvd, War at the Warfield. It's not bad, but I wasn't really in the mood for Slayer (unlike Adam, who's in the mood for Slayer if he's awake, and occasionally at other times as well), so we didn't watch more than two or three songs. Plus, Kerry King's guitar tone was atrocious. Seriously. WTF?

Now was time for films. My youngest brother (coincidentally named Adam) had purchased Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as a Christmas gift for me, and I'd just received it the day before. That, coupled with the fact that my friend Adam had not seen it (nor even heard of it, due to his Tivo prepensity for skipping commercials), made for a perfect excuse to watch it.

Of course it's a great film; Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry are both great in their own rights, but when together are unbelievable. How is it on Adam's system? Incredible. The surround moments are great, and it's looks just fabulous. I think Adam will buy it now, if that's any indication. (He actually wanted to watch the first half again immediately, once he knew the ending.)

Midway though Eternal Sunshine, we took a moment to eat some pizza, as Tricia had just gotten back. Good times, pizza. Actually, it was weird, too, as I'd not met Paul, Adam & Tricia's youngest, before today. I'm not sure how old he is, but I know he can't crawl yet, but is about to; you figure it out. But it was weird, since the last time I at over there, a girl (Ellie, their oldest) was in the high chair, and now a boy was. Ellie was taking a nap, so it was kind of like deja vu.

After the pizza, Adam and I went back down to the basement to finish the movie. I was intending to leave after it, but I wanted to put in Zardoz and let him watch the first ten minutes or so. What happened of course, was we ended up watching the whole damn thing. It's shot in 2.35, whick I hadn't really noticed before. It's a really good-looking film, with nice color schemes throughout. Filming in rural Ireland doesn't hurt any, either. ;)

Of course, even though I really like it, I wouldn't say it's the best film ever; then again, it is far better than it gets credit for. But I'll discuss that some other time.

After Zardoz, I went home. Gabe, January Fairy, and Baby Kitty had all gone to a movie (Constantine) and then to IHOP, but were on their way home, so i couldn't join them. I chatted with the Toast in China (no relation to All the Tea in China), then crashed.

incidentally, check out this image of Zed (Connery's character in Zardoz) I just found:

sweet, isn't it?

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Friday night I went with my friend Laura to see Chalk at Crush.

Spencer (and I think Lesniak) was spinning cds before and between acts. It was a nice mix of po-type stuff, even extending to the Carpenters. Nothing like one might expect from hearing his Burning Star Core stuff.

I chatted with Lou from Hogscraper, who's friends with Laura. He's a cool dude, and is way knowledgeable on music. I also chatted with Jim (of Chalk) about DJ Empirical possibly guesting with his solo Prantershifter set on 03/07, when he opens up for Trevor Dunn. (I'm excited for that show, as there are loads of cool experimental acts playing that night, both in the Ballroom and the Parlour of the SGH.)

The first band was The Cathedrals, Cincinnati's version of the cookie-cutter emo-hipster stuff that's oh-so-popular these days. At times they sounded like a cross between U2 and the Rapture, and often basslines seemed directly lifted from U2 songs. Feh. The kids seemed to like it, though.

After some more dj-ing, Chalk played their set. As usual, they were loud and heavy, and even though they had a bit of an off set (a keyboard was finicky, causing them to cut it short), it was still awesome. Other bands take note: technical difficulties don't have to ruin your set.

The last set of the evening was a dj set from Joshua Treble. He played a dance set, with some rather noisy and weird tracks thrown in to keep everyone on their toes. I mean, he played Hawnay Troof, for chrissakes! Awesome.

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Well, to really read the instructions of the weird anime flash game, Nanaca Crash, you have to read Japanese, but it's not hard to figure out.



And it's oddly mesmerizing. I must stop now!

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Let's say you're a frustrated right-winger who's struck out at love one too many times.

Well, luckily for you, there's Hannidate! Here's an example (I've bolded my favorite parts):

Name: Gary
Location: OH
Age: 32

I live close to Dayton, Ohio. I am a 32 single white male. I am a smoker. I weigh in at 170 and stand at 5'-11" Dayton has a lot of liberal women which I am tired of dating. Help me find a republican woman. Below is what kind of describes myself in a nutshell I am a mature, responsible, stable, independent adult. I live on my own. I have a job. I enjoy going to movies, walks in the park, camping, NASCAR, cuddling and intellectual conversations. I am a funny person and enjoy making people laugh. I am a smoker. I can be sweet and thoughtful. I am weight proportionate to height. Some find me hot, some not. You decide. I have good morals and values and I am of a conservative nature. I like the outdoors and nice weather. I would like to see the USA in my truck and camper and would like someone who would enjoy doing that too. I make good decisions or try to. In my spare time I enjoy working on the restoration of my truck. I have all my teeth and brush them. I have been told that I am a nice guy; you will have to decide for yourself. I am not looking for “just friends”. If I was, I would go to my buddy’s house and hang out there and drink beer. What I am looking for: I am looking for these types of qualities in a woman. A mature, responsible, stable, independent adult. This person must have a strong heart, mind and soul. This person must have a level head on their shoulders and can make good decisions. Must be a good communicator. I enjoy conversation. A person with good morals and values. Someone who has goals and dreams in life. Someone with a good job, no fast food workers, pizza deliver drivers, cashiers. I am not into high maintenance women. Someone who is simple, but has class. Someone who is of a conservative nature, especially fiscally conservative. Someone with good credit and low debt. I am not paying off someone’s charge card debt where they bought some fly lookin rims and stereo for pimpin out her ex-boyfriends ride. Someone who isn’t a control freak. Good personal hygiene and has all their teeth and no rotten black teeth. I see this way too much and I find it a turn off. Must live on their own and must keep their place clean. I don’t care for drama queens or people with hidden agendas. If you do, I will find them. I do not wish to meet people who have mental or depression problems. Must have decent transportation. I am not a mechanic nor am I buying this person a car. I am not funding someone’s education either. I would prefer this person to have a college degree. I would prefer someone who is a smoker, since I am on too. That way I don’t have to be asked to quit or I taste like an ashtray. Then too who really knows what an ashtray tastes like. I don’t know too many people who lick ashtrays…lol. Must be weight proportionate to height. Someone who is not a nagging person, but who is a happy upbeat person and likes to laugh. Someone who is sweet with a warm heart. Someone who is energetic and not lazy. Someone who likes to go out and do things. I’m not into women who get into sports. I don’t care for sports except NASCAR.

how in the WORLD has this guy not found a girl? The world is CRAZY!

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so, my friend Pan, who runs Sensory Research up in Michigan, was nice enough to send me a dvd of the A&E Biography on Zappa. I had watched my tape of it recently and wanted to buy it, but apparently A&E have decided Zappa's not cool enough (or whatever) to release the episode for sale. (I guess it could be a music rights issue, too -- but whatever.) once i had the dvd in my hands i was itching to watch it, even though i've had that episode on tape for years. naturally, though, i ended up staying late at work, delaying my watching it ever so slightly. :)

once home, i called gabe, who came over. we ordered a pizza and threw on the dvd, on which Pan had included an old (60s?) documentary on electronic music, which was pretty sweet. many potential samples.... ;) after that, of course, we watched the zappa bio, which does a pretty good job, though the sections Peter Graves read came off sounding like a high school paper. e.g.: "Dweezil and Ahmet formed their own band, Z, which performs original music with many of the Zappa trademarks." ugh. oh well.

after that, on to the Golden Lions for the karaoke with gabe. januaryfairy met us there later, as did my friend laura, and some of the regular conspirators (janet and sharon). not very packed, but i somehow only ended up doing two songs, even so.

then off home, where i chatted with McChinaToast for a moment before crashing.

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My Collections is an online gallery of one man's collections.

and it's creepy. every picture is creepier than the last.

wow.

[note: edited to remove his image, as it stopped working.]

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i got this from Popbitch, my weekly gossip/rumor email. yes, i get those.
:D

>> Fear and Golfing <<
Farewell to Raoul Duke

Just prior to his death Hunter S Thompson invented a new sport, Shotgun Golf, with Bill Murray. His description:

"The game consists of one golfer, one shooter and a field judge. The purpose of the game is to shoot your opponent's high-flying golf ball out of the air with a finely-tuned 12-gauge shotgun, thus preventing him (your opponent) from lofting a 9-iron approach shot onto a distant 'green'. Points are scored by blasting your opponent's shiny new Titleist out of the air and causing his shot to fail miserably. After that, you trade places and equipment, and move on to round two."

Go out this weekend and play it in tribute.

Read HST's last ever column:
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?id=1992213

indeed.

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i had no sooner gotten home from work when i got a call from sara asking whether i wouldn't mind eating with her while she took a break from her schoolwork. one quick(ish) stop at sitwell's for a mocka (mine) and a ginger oolong tea (hers), i was over at her apartment, and i put on kaiju big battel. sara hadn't seen it yet, and... well... i just friggin love it. check out their site -- it's guys doing pro-wrestling in japanese-style monster costumes. awesome.

after we ate (and watched a bit of zoolander), i went back to my place. gabe's plans had fallen through, so he bright over his netflix copy of the special edition of alien resurrection. as with alien III, i hadn't seen it yet, and so the special edition was perfect for me. overall, i liked the film a lot, though i thought winona ryder was a bit out of place. milla would have been a better choice, but then she's always a better choice. :)

but yeah, it was good. which means that i actually like all four non-predator alien movies. weird. i guess i'd heard they sucked. i don't know.

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i got home from work and noticed a message from adam collins, with whom i hadn't spoken in a while. i chatted with him until sara called, then sara and i went across the revier to Newport for food and a movie.

we ate at dewey's, where i inadvertantly impressed the waitress by thanking her for the things she did. ("you're awesome!" she told me.) i guess thanks are uncommon in that profession.

after the meal, we stopped over at barnes & noble, where i picked up the latest issue of photoshop user magazine (to see whether it's any good -- i think it will be), and a new zappa biography that came out last year. now, i've read so much about zappa that i should by now know everything, but it seems i always learn new things about him, so i just don't stop. zappa's my elvis, after all. (yes, i stole that quote from groening. it's apropos, though.)

from there to the film. when sara gets stressed out with school or life in general (or both), she usually grabs me to go see a stupid film (often horror), or just one we don't care at all about. (most recently: white noise. whoof.) this time, since there weren't any truly dumb-loooking ones out there, we caught million dollar baby, a film that's getting major hype lately, and is hailed as a masterpiece.

my opinion: good, but not great. i think, though, that it was just that it didn't appeal to me personally. i think that there was nothing in particular wrong with the film; in fact, there were so many things right that i'm forced to chalk it up to a taste issue.

one of the reasons i was skeptical was that it just looked like a glorified katrate kid-type movie, which it sort of was until a certain point deep into the movie, where things took a big left turn. i won't spoil it, and to discuss it at all would do so. rent it when it comes out, if you like: it's definitely worth that. it's not the best movie i've seen all week (that would be dogville), and it's not the best movie i've seen in the theater all week (that would be bad education).

but yeah, i liked it.

after that, i took sara home, and went home myself, where i called laura and discussed dogville with her for quite a while. then to sleep.

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So, after the whole spare tire thing yesterday, I had hoped to be able to wait a couple days before heading to Michel Tires Plus (where I have all of my car work done) to get a new one.

Nope.

On my way to work, when I hit about 50 mph, the car began to vibrate like crazy. I stayed at around that speed all the way to Michel Tires and dropped it off. Usually they have someone available to give me a ride to work, which is a couple more miles up the road, but not this morning. I ended up calling our consultant Amy for the ride, as I knew she would be able to spare the time and wouldn't mind.

I pretty much knew the answer before they even called me back: the spare (which, of course, I'd never before had call to use) was shot. The result: two new tires for the rear of the hearse, with the good rear tire now becoming a spare. Total: $123 or so. Ugh. So much for not spending any more money on the goddam thing.

After I got home from work I watched the copy of Dogville I'd picked up the day before. I'd seen the first half with Laura a couple months earlier, but on that occasion I'd had to leave to play the Walker Project cd release show. So, I started where I left off, where, as Laura had related later, "everything went crazy". My opinion: Dogville is incredible, and definitely one of the best of 2004. I found out later that Ebert disagreed, but that's ok. I'll forgive him. ;)

After that, an uneventful (and somewhat boring) trip to the Lions, then back home to bed.

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so , reading arron's backlog of blog entries has made me feel guilty, so here's one for me today. (not that anythign interesting happened...)

i woke up feeling better this morning. i've been mildly sick the last couple days, though i say mildly in comparison with everyone else i see who is sick, as they're totally miserable & missing work, whereas i'm mostly just uncomfortable. the lungs are plegmy, but i'm on my way out of it now, so it's ok.

i took a shower and then went outside to deal with the flat tire. on friday, i had gotten in my car to leave work, and drove maybe 50 yards before figuring oput that the weirdness was a flat tire. i was still in the work parking lot, so i pulled into a spot and went to work changing the tire. in the end, it took me about 45 minutes, because the jack was being weird at one point and not raising up all the way. it turned out that there was some glass shards stuck in the grooves. weird.

so anyway, that was friday evening; yeasterday evening i had gone out to the car to discover that the spare had gone flat. sweet. i didnt bother with it yesterday, but today i had to. i hesitate to use fix-a-flat, but it seemed my only solution. it raised the tire pressure enough so i wouldnt be driving on the rim, which enabled me to drive to the gas station to fill the tire the rest of the way.

i pulled into the lot to discover some jackass in a pickup truck using the air hose. i call him a jackass not because he's using the air (which was inconvenient) but because he was parked at an odd angle that took up two spots and required me to park three spots from the hose. that in turn meant moving once he was finished, and more driving on the flat tire. grr.

after a minute of waiting, i saw he was pulling away. before i could put the car in gear, though, i also noticed that some chick had pulled in next to him at the same stupid angle he'd been parked at. jay-zus. she airs up her front-passenger tire, gets in her car, and pulls forward. i back up, so that she can pull though, and she stops her car. that's right, ladies and gentlemen: she is now parked parallel to the curb, blocking all four spots and leaving me without even a place to pull back in. genius.

eventually, she finishes, and i air up my tire. i drove it around a bit so that the sealant could do its job.

after that minor debacle, i got some coffee at sitwell's, though no espresso because they were ONCE AGAIN repairing the machine. suck. shake it was next, where i picked up Clerks X and Dogville. A couple records, too, but nothing of note.

Back here, then, to watch the longer, original version of Clerks and chat woth the Toast in China. We're very excited to unleash Montana & McDeviltoast on the public. Good times.

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I'd seen this before, but not for a while...



Dead Hooker Solutions



from the site:

Have you every been at a bachelor party and all your friends have been too drunk to dispose of the hooker you just killed?



Are you tired of storing dead hookers under your parents house?



Do you have dead hookers buried all other the county?



Or do you just need that dead hooker removed from that empty lot next door?



We can help!

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Well, the downside of gay marriage is that it's still marriage.

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you must check out this archive of eastern block tv commercials.



seriously. pay particular attention to

the Pinguin ice cream commercial







and the chicken meat commercial





wow.

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Bollywood for the Skeptical speaks for itself:

Bollywood for the Skeptical
Be like Madvillain, Dan the Automator, Avalanches and Kate Winslet's character in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind! Get more like that sweet tune from the beginning of Ghost World! Listen to this mix! It will make you twice as cool as you are now.

sweet. they even have mp3s!

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Now playing: Into the Pandemonium, by Celtic Frost







I'm brushing up on my metal, and i realized that i'd never heard this very influential record. So far it's not amazing, but at least i'll have the knowledge, you know?



--montana--

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Project C-90 catalogs cassette tapes. weird.

click on the brands at the left.

here are the ones i used to use when i was a teenager:



i think i still have some of those...

[note: i guess linking the image in didn't work...]

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This short film, Rocky's Back, is the height of guerilla filmmaking. Sweet.



Good enough to endure the song, though if you turn the sound off on your computer, i won't tell.

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apparently, ipod use is rampant at Microsoft.



Wired News: Hide Your IPod, Here Comes Bill



heh. funny.

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Buy Blue



from the site:

You may have voted blue, but every day you unknowingly help dump millions of dollars into the conservative war chest. By purchasing products and services from companies that donate heavily to conservatives, we have been compromising our own interests as liberals and progressives.



BuyBlue.org is a concerted effort to lift the veil of corporate patronage, so consumers can make informed buying decisions that coincide with their principles.

cool.

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...Gary Whelan



A little something for my boy Fudgie to shoot for (no pun intended) when he gets tired of Galaga.

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so yeah, i got a couple Ali G dvds for christmas, including his film, Ali G Indahouse. I didn't expect it to be spectacular or anything, but actually, it turned out to be surprisingly good. sure, it's a cookie-cutter plot (underdog fights to save the community center), but i was amazed at how many of the jokes (apart from the excessive dick & weed jokes) were actually NOT formulaic crap. take note America: the UK even makes better crap films than you do.

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yes. it's odd; even though i'm not the super guitar nerd i used to be, i still really enjoy certain artists/albums, and one of thse artists is steve vai. today i wondered what he was up to, and Lo! a new album is coming out and a tour coming through cincinnati. sweet. now i just need to make sure the Quahogs Entertainment Group has no events on 04/09 so there's no conflict.



i heard some clips from his new record, too, and it sounds good. i dunno; i might even buy it. ;)

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