Kablammo!

I am informed by The Onion A.V. Club that this month saw the publication of the 300^th and final issue of Cerebus. Soon, the 16^th and final phonebook will be released.

Fuck, that means I have to buy 14 more phonebooks now.

In other news, I’m fairly happy with the way this picture came out:

Song of the Moment: «Fuck Dub (Parts 1 & 2)» — Tosca

The professor for my 5:00 class today didn’t show up. This was the third or fourth time he’s been really late (30+ minutes) this semester, and today the class just didn’t feel like waiting around for him to show up. Maybe the traffic was particularly bad on the LIE today, but once the 45-minute rule goes into effect, can’t nobody repeal it.

It would have behooved the class to stick around, seeing as we have an exam next week, and it would have particulary behooved my project group to stick around, so we could show the professor that we have in fact done a nonzero amount of work on our project, but fuck that. It’s time for me to actively waste the next couple of hours to make up for having this hour wasted for me.

Song of the Moment: «Vitamins» — Supernova

The whole drink-beer-with-people-twice-and-three-times-my-age part of the weekend went pretty damn well. The drive to Maryland (and then Virginia) was as smooth as the Coronas (and then Stellas) I had there, and the delightfully agreeable weather made things even better all around. I even got a tekkel (it’s about time, too).

The only thing that’s kind of a shame is that we didn’t make it to the OCS graduation thing, but such is life.

At least there was some good basketball to be had this weekend, with a promise of even more to come during the next.

Song of the Moment: «Puttin’ on the Ritz» — Taco

It’s been so long since I had a day that was even remotely productive, I forgot how good they felt. I got approval for the summer courses I want to take, worked for a few hours on the ol’ senior project, made some arrangements for the ol’ HVAC project, did some laundry, and learned how to play «Listen to the Music», all things that I’d been putting off for varying lengths of time.

Will I be in Virginia on Friday? Only time will tell.

Song of the Moment: «Butterfly» — Weezer

It looks like Arne doesn’t know what words mean. He is convinced that I was accusing him of not having heard Comfort Eagle, despite the fact that I felt I made it fairly clear that I’d heard it before while I was accusing him of falling into the same trap I did in the previous entry.

He mentions that most of the album is unremarkable, as evidenced by the fact that he can’t remember more than one song from it. This same unremarkableness, and its accompanying homogeneity, is what leapt out at me and stuck in my mind. Cake used to be remarkable for just how remarkable they were. Unfortunately, I’m now officially sick of this topic of conversation. Rather, I will be as soon as I’m through typing the following:

Weezer’s Weezer [Green], despite tragically failing to live up to the precedent set by, for example, Pinkerton, is by no stretch of the imagination anywhere near as mediocre as Comfort Eagle. Its failures are awfuler, but its successes — particularly the duo of “Crab” and “Knock-Down Drag-Out” — are definitely on a par with the best of other Weezer work.

Whatever.

Song of the Moment: «Knock-Down Drag-Out» — Weezer

Looks like Arne’s falling into the same trap I did: coming across a mention of Comfort Eagle somewhere, getting a copy of it, and listening to it, sure that Cake must still be awesome.

My heart breaks for him.

Song of the Moment: «Mr. Mastodon Farm» — Cakeикони

I tried once before to like Cake’s Comfort Eagle, and I just tried again, but it still just strikes me as a soulless, repetitious, pale imitation of the essence that made Fashion Nugget and Prolonging the Magic such absolute gems. Even the lyrics, which were always delightful in their absurdity, now seem absolutely cloying. Rhyming “typewriter” with “prizefighter”? Maybe it would have worked if — wait, no, it still wouldn’t have.

A few of the songs — “Commissioning a Symphony in C” and “Long Line of Cars” in particular — remind me why I liked Cake’s previous work so much. This whole album, therefore, acts like nothing so much as an effective advertisement for its predecessors — the unremarkable songs that constitute most of it make me desperately want to hear Cake songs I like so I can get back to liking the band, while the good songs and their slight imperfections make me even more nostalgic for Cake done right.

Song of the Moment: «Let Me Go» — Cake

As you can no doubt tell, I’ve worked on the layout and style a bit, so now this page is rendering like some kind of half-assed amalgam of its old look and the default Movable Type template. It’ll do for the moment.

Well, it turns out I got the lowest grade in the class on the Space Dynamics midterm, but then again so did a third of the class. Hooray for stupid, stupid mistakes.

Song of the Moment: «Commie Drives a Nova» — Ike Reilly

Greetings, and welcome to the new face of Kablammo. I just spent hours learning regular expression syntax, manipulating text files, migrating archives, reconfiguring DNS settings, and installing blogging software just so that you, my dear readers, can have a better Kablammic experience.

I hope you appreciate the effort. The new server and better hosting should be a boon to everyone and to everything, and the fact that I’m no longer reliant on Blogger for anything should simplify matters on my end. Whee!

That means that, of all the various things I wanted to accomplish over this spring break, I’ve accomplished one. Hey, that’s better than my usual performance. I still have to do a bunch of stuff like changing the stylesheets and templates from their default settings, putting my links back in place, maybe changing the default titles provided for all my old posts, &c, but it’s cool for the moment.

Song of the Moment: «Altar of Sacrifice» — Slayer

This is the face of my spring break:

• Icicles
• and more icicles

The drunken Irish singer for the drunken Irish band at the Baggot Inn last night won my respect early with the line “half of one, six dozen of the other” and with the way he threw lyrics from Alice Cooper’s «Eighteen» onto the end of another song. Either of those could merely have been drunken mistakes, but were genius if they were intentional. Unfortunately he blew the best line in «Honky Tonk Woman» while they were covering it, but at least he had good stories involving a drunken Richard Harris. And I got a free ‘Bareknuckle Stout’ t-shirt.

Song of the Moment: «Transformer Man» — Neil Young