Kablammo!

Today was a Wednesday. My first Wednesday in the city since a few weeks ago, in fact. As such, the late dinner at the Alehouse felt quite appropriate. Abbreviated, but appropriate. Speaking of which, there’s some cranberry juice in my fridge that looks awfully lonely…

What else happened today? I finished making a mix CD, into whose creation I put far far far too much effort. I can only hope that the relevant parties appreciate that fact. I also started work on my newest domain-name-related project. You can, should you like, see some mildly interesting things at http://www.pildid.net/radiohead… Stuff like short, low-quality bootleg videos of Radiohead’s concert at Merriweather Post Pavilion.

I’m never again restringing a guitar ‘just because the strings are old’, as it’s simply not worth it. Wait till a string snaps, I say. I broke that rule yesterday, only to have a bridge pin fly out and disappear, leaving me sans low E string until today, when I had to go two music stores to even be able to buy an 80¢ replacement. To top it all off, the new high E string I put on yesterday decided to snap today, apparently purely out of spite, so I had to dig my old dirty one out of the trash in a fit of ghettoness.

Speaking of 80¢, I discovered today that I’ve been wasting my life making the cent sign. While trying to find the alt-number key combination for ‘ñ‘ I made my way past alt-155, which produces the same result as alt-2536987412536987 with an assload less keypressing. Such is life, I suppose.

Song of the Moment: «Señor Burns» — The Simpsons

There’s nothing quite like coming home to your apartment after being away for three weeks, and finding the decayed remains of a mouse in the middle of your kitchen floor. I’m kind of impressed with the mouse, considering that in its death throes it managed to move the mouse trap it was caught in a good three feet or so from under the sink to the middle of the floor. I’m also relieved that I happened to stay away from my apartment long enough for the mouse to transform from bloated-corpse-that-gives-off-putrid-stench mode to creepy-but-stench-free-pile-of-bones-fur-and-tail mode. I had to spray various cleaning fluids at the floor and do some scrubbing to get all the mouse parts to dissociate themselves from it, but that’s better than having to smell dead-mouse fumes would have been.

In other news, Verizon is really pissing me off right now. It’s not that the service has suddenly degraded or anything; it remains as shitty as it’s always been. No, what’s irritating me is the bill I just got from them. It’s not that the bill was unexpectedly large or anything; the amount of the bill was reasonable as such things go. No, what’s irritating me is the form of the bill; specifically, the form of the envelope that the bill came in. The envelope is upside-fucking-down. I can’t think of any way to explain it other than that.

I picked up the bill such that the writing on the front of the envelope was right-side-up, fully expecting that there would be a flap along the top side of the back that I could gleefully tear open to find out just how much money Verizon claimed I owed them. I flipped the envelope over, only to discover, to my horror, that the flap they expected me to tear was situated along the bottom of the envelope. So now, instead of behaving like books or envelopes, Verizon’s bills behave like coins. Fuckers.

Verizon also loses points for having the gall to print “The Post Office will not deliver mail without postage” on their reply envelopes, instead of something that lets me retain my dignity like “PLACE STAMP HERE”, the way Time Warner Cable does. I sure am glad Verizon informed me about what the post office does and does not deliver, or I might have assumed that postage was a thing of the past and that I could send things for free. Boy, would there have been egg on my face when I tried to mail a mix CD to my friend in Italy without paying postage! Thanks, Verizon, you’ve averted another catastrophe. Fuckers.

Speaking of postage for paying bills for Verizon, I’m also pissed off by the fact that Verizon expects me to pay a 37¢ postage fee for every bill I pay them, while they send me two or three pieces of worthless junk mail a month. I’d much rather have them spend the money they waste on mailing me that bullshit on something useful, like pre-paying the postage on the bill return envelopes. Fuckers.

Why do you hate Verizon today? Leave a comment.

Lucky you, you have more of this drivel to read. About time I updated, eh? In any case, you’re now privy to some observations I’ve made since my last update.

Here they are, in no particular order:

• Two pounds of london broil plus a shot of warm vodka equals bad news. Just take my word for it.
• Old people who are normally crotchety assholes can, in the right context, be fairly interesting and cool.
• Digital cameras rawk.
• It feels great to be able to feel like an idiot because of something I said instead of something I should have said, for once.
• The Kajaka Salk is some good people.
• Laager’s at its best when uninhabited.
• St. Pauli Girl makes a surprisingly decent non-alcoholic beer.
• Radiohead puts on an awesome live show.
•   
• You’re all jerks.
•   
• If you ever get the nagging feeling that you want to accomplish something, just take a nap or go watch TV and the feeling eventually goes away.
• Foster’s oil cans are the shizzle.
• PLD is best cured by not giving a shit.

And so it came to pass, on the first day of the month of August, in the year of our Lord 2003, that I’ll be away for a while, so this shitty blog shall return to its usual state of me not updating it, since pine forests aren’t known for their internet connectivity. Once I reëmerge from my wonderful self-inflicted prison of blissful, isolated misery, this shitty blog may or may not return to its recent state of me updating it surprisingly frequently. And then I go see Radiohead at the ‘Meriwether Post Pavilion’, whatever that is. Hopefully I’ll find that out in time.

In other news, go and read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Also, listen to the Moog Cookbook’s cover “Buddy Holly.” Warning: I wouldn’t recommend reading the former while listening to the latter, since I’m pretty sure it would make your face explode.

Song of the Moment: “The Sinister Minister” — Bela Fleck & the Flecktones

I’m the king of the world. Seriously. If I wake up dead tomorrow, it’ll be with a huge smile on my face, because I just figured out how to use the sustain pedal on a piano properly. Properly enough so that I don’t sound like a complete smacktard, in any case. I’m not going to win any prizes for my piano playing (except for, perhaps, the “Incomplete Smacktard” award, which I don’t believe actually exists) but at least now I can let each chord I play ring out while I desperately try to remember how to finger the next. Maybe one day I’ll actually learn how to involve my left hand in this somehow, but that seems patently unlikely. Fuck it, I can play “You and Whose Army” pretty damn decently right now, and that’s good enough for me.

I totally rock, just so you know.

Song of the Moment: “You and Whose Army” by Radiohead, as performed by yours truly on a Roland HP1700

So there I was, sitting in Peter Cooper Park earlier today, reading the Voice and eating the pair of guaco locos that constituted today’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner, when all of a sudden I got a snippet of a song stuck in my head. It seemed hauntingly familiar, and I knew I’d heard it recently. There I was, humming along to the disembodied tune, when it hit me: this was no ordinary song I was remembering, it was the ultra-rare flamenco version of Eric Clapton’s “Layla”. The reason it’s so rare is that it only exists in my memories, and in a dream I had last Saturday night.

The dream opened with Eric Clapton alone on a stage, wearing a blue mariachi costume. He was clearly Eric Clapton, but he’d put on a lot of weight and let his beard and hair get all unkempt, so he ended up looking an awful lot like Richard Stallman. Well, in any case, he was playing the intro riff to “Layla” on a 12-string acoustic. When he got through the intro, two Mexican guys, dressed just like Clapton, appeared on stage brandishing classical guitars. The two new guys played a bunch of fills and stuff while Eric Clapton somehow managed to simultaneously play the lead and rhythm-guitar parts. And “Layla” was made into a flamenco song, like the Gipsy Kings might play. And it was a hell of a catchy song. Now I only wish Eric Clapton would record this song, because I swear it works really well.

Song of the Moment: “Layla” — Eric Clapton & The Mariachi Bunch

OK, winamp‘s shuffle feature is notoriously nonrandom — some songs get played much more often than others. Spinal Tap’s “Back From the Dead” gets played much more frequently than their other songs, for example, and plenty of worthwhile songs never get the nod from those fickle shufflegnomes. I can deal with that, I suppose; I know where the ‘j‘ key is on my keyboard, and I can often pick a song I’d like to hear at the moment. No biggie.

But then winamp goes and does something like play “Grimly Fiendish” by the Damned 6 times in a week. With roughly 6900 songs in my playlist to pick from, you’d think it would mix it up a bit more. Not that “Grimly Fiendish” is a bad song, or anything, but this is very strange nonetheless.

Song of the Moment: “Grimly Fiendish” — The Damned

“There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time.”

God bless you, Kilgore Trout.

In other news, white Russians are as delicious as ever.

You Cat-in-the-Hat rapper, you Dr. Seuss Mother Goose, listen to what I’ve got to say. I’m the rex tremendae, and what I say goes. And what I say is as follows: Worlds colliding isn’t necessarily completely bad. Drinking buddies from, say confirmation camp can mix perfectly well with drinking buddies from, say, acoustics or solid mechanics classes. Also, the Blue Man Group are, as alleged, rather awesome. Stories involving Rex Morgan are confusing in that they deliberately involve Rex Morgan, of all people. As described earlier, being mentioned in a complete stranger’s blog is kind of cool. And now it’s happened again.

Before I leave you, let me just leave you with the following truth: the Box Tops were fucking awesome, those two songs that they had.

For. Nor. Or. Thor. Tor. War. Abhor. Señor. Cuspidor. Dinosaur. Ecuador. Guarantor. Labrador. Matador. Metaphor. Meteor. Minotaur. Picador. Salvador. Troubadour. Ichthyosaur. Toreador.

Boar. Boer. Bore. Chore. Core. Corps. Door. Floor. Fore. Frore. Four. Gore. Hoar. Lore. More. Oar. O’er. Ore. Pore. Pour. Roar. Score. Shore. Swore. Soar. Sore. Store. Swore. Tore. Whore. Wore. Yore.

Adore. Afore. Ashore. Before. Claymore. Deplore. Encore. Explore. Folklore. Footsore. Forbore. Forswore. Galore. Heartsore. Ignore. Implore. Restore. Albacore. Battledore. Baltimore. Commodore. Evermore. Furthermore. Hellebore. Heretofore. Nevermore. Pinafore. Sagamore. Semaphore. Singapore. Sophomore. Stevedore. Sycamore.

Underscore Gantrithor.ikoni