You know you're on the Atkins diet when you begin regarding orange-flavored Metamucil as just "grainy Tang."
It seems time for another small war story. This one's pretty minor. About ten years ago, I worked at Sunrise Computers with Joe Way. Sunrise had a small fleet of vehicles for store use. One of them was a big old red Ford van. I used to haul computers back and forth from Camp Hill to Chambersburg to set up training classes every month. It was a real pain. The van's steering had a huge amount of play, so I was always oversteering to correct the side to side drifting.
It did have a pretty strong engine, though. One day I finished unloading the computers and felt pretty bored. I had to move the van from the front of the store to its parking place, a simple twenty foot maneuver in most cases. But not with me. With Joe in the van's passenger seat and me behind the wheel, I had an incredibly stupid idea. "Hey, watch this," I said. I revved the engine up to 5,000 rpm or so while keeping the van in park. Then I pulled the gearshift straight into Drive. The tires screeched and peeled out, and I shot forward--directly into the path of a car that was whipping around the side of the building.
I slammed on the brakes. He slammed on the brakes. Our vehicles screeched to a halt about 1.5 feet from each other. Joe's face turned white. The guy stared at me for a few moments while the van rocked to a halt, and then slowly and carefully drove around us. I slowly pulled the van into its parking spot. Everyone came out of the store to see what had happened (to say it had been loud was kind of an understatement). Joe looked at me and said (I'm paraphrasing here) "Are you freaking nuts?!? Don't EVER do that again!"
I don't think he wet himself. But I can't verify that. ;-)
Here's a great site dedicated to the old 1930's Fleischer Popeye cartoons. It even has a number of them for download.
I've seen a number of the old Superman Fleischer cartoons. Kevin has them. The animation is great--no one since has used the full technique used for them (I think some Disney films of the same era did).
The TV Party website has the actual Mighty Heroes opening in REALVideo. Hmmmmm. Diaper Man--cool or not cool?
Far be it from me to post links for only the 35-40 crowd. For you 25-30 year olds, click here.
Click here for find Quisp and Quake (Quaker re-released Quisp in 1999--my wife actually bought a box of Quisp for me and Kevin a few months ago, but I gave it to the kids to eat).
Click here to find Astro Boy, Prince Planet, Kimba the White Lion, Space Giants, King Kong, Tom of T.H.U.M.B., and more.
McSweeney's has a great two part parody on the Fellowship of the Ring from the revisionist historian point of view. It's hilarious. I've read Howard Zinn before and I've certainly heard of Noam Chomsky--it reads just like their kind of work (not that I'm against revisionist history). You can find part one here and part two here.
Kevin was over and we were having too much fun. Who knew almost 30 years ago that we'd be hanging out on my back porch, smoking Hoyo de Montereys, watching 2001: A Space Odyssey on a laptop computer with a color screen almost the size of my parents first color television, and just having good conversation.
And no, I don't smoke cigars often, although I do like to smoke a cigar on my grandfather's birthday each year to honor his memory. Although if I were honoring him more strictly, I'd be smoking Phillie stogies every August 3rd...
So the story in Red Lion School District next door in York County went national yesterday. It's a terrible thing--people at our school knew the principal killed in the shooting.
It's interesting to note, however, that the incident at Mechanicsburg Area School District next door in Cumberland County didn't seem to get up there on the national media scene.
So in one story, a kid shoots and kills a principal. In the other, a kid throws firebombs at the school and tries to throw gasoline on an administrator, but fails to kill anyone. Is part of the problem with our society the fact that the one story gets all the attention because the kid managed to complete his plans? Is it all just about the drama?
That's sad.
At least Mancuso's Law of Media Accuracy was disproven with the Mechanicsburg story. My wife works at the school that was "firebombed" and verified that WGAL presented all the details exactly the way things happened (Mancuso's Law of Media Accuracy:"I've been on the scene several times during news events. In none of these situations--not one--has the media reported things accurately.").
Donald McCarty, the CEO of American Airlines, resigned amid controversy over his hidden management pension plan that was funded even after significant union concesssions. After asking and getting critical concessions from the unions, the management pension stuff surfaced. So he apologized about 50 times in a press conference (well, actually 3 or 4 times) but had to take the bullet.
I'm interested in this story because, well, is the guy a complete moron? Politically, did he really believe that he could talk his way out of this? You pull great concessions from your workers by telling them how tough things are and that "We all have to tighten our belts," and a day later show them that you lied through your teeth? He justified the darkest nightmares of his workers--that their leaders are the enemy and couldn't give a crap about them. It wasn't just politically incorrect, it was blatant political suicide. It was inevitable from the outset that he would have to fall on his sword--it was the only salvageable way out of the situation for the company. If it survives at all, after a one billion dollar loss.
You know you're on Atkins when you eat some Worcestershire sauce on a steak and actually think "this Worcestershire stuff tastes kinda sweet--I wonder how much sugar is in it?"
This just in from the "freaky stuff is all over the Internet" department, a marriage of Beatles and Metallica songs can be found here. I'm not quite sure what to make of this, but the songs are available in MP3 format (at least until the site goes down or the lawyers sue every drop of blood out of these people).
If you're into this kind of thing, that is.
The first DVD is out on August 26, 2003, and the extended edition (to me, the real one) is due out on November 18, 2003. the details are here.
The extended release may have up to 48 minutes of new footage.
Way cool.
By the way, the prime mover and shaker behind Chandler is Mitch Kapor, the guy who started Lotus and designed Lotus 123.
I'm trying to wrap my mind around the idea of this new uber personal information manager, Chandler. This piece of software is in its nascent stages. It's a super office manager--it's like having a super secretary as a piece of software. Say you have a project you're working on. Chandler will help you organize a project file that ties together everything to do with the project: emails, calendar dates, to dos, address book contacts, pictures, audio (MP3s), video, notes, spreadsheets, web pages, and more. It seems that virtually anything you have on your computer that has to do with your project can be tied together in Chandler.
But there's more. It doesn't just tie things together. It will help you create these things too. It helps you share them too.
If it does all this stuff, it really becomes a computer platform like Windows or Mac OS, or in this case a "sub-platform" inside Windows, Mac OS, or Linux.
I'm really curious about how this thing will turn out. I'm also curious how they'll pull all of this off for three operating systems within 10 years.
So I see the weirdest thing as I'm shopping at Giant, and I figure "why not?" I buy it for the kids. It's a new Jimmy Neutron food product. The kids want these every time I suggest them, but they're never able to actually eat them. As my wife said, "These are possibly the most disgusting things I've ever seen." The product? OreIda Jimmy Neutron chocolate french fries. I swear I am not making this up. Look here for the "Funky Fries" if you don't believe me.
Mmmmmmm...Choclified french fries. Even Homer would have trouble getting behind that.
To me, this is parenthood.
Two weeks ago at Giant, they have no Sesame Street vitamins, so the kids beg for Jimmy Neutron vitamins. They look good nutritionally, so that's what I get.
Over the next week I get the kids to try the Jimmy Neutron vitamins on five separate occasions. They hate them. They won't take them. Six bucks down the drain.
Last week, I mention to my wife that the kids won't take the new vitamins. Denise doesn't like to take her own vitamins (she considers them pills and she hates all pills--really hates them), so I think she will empathize with the kids. She doesn't. I've already since bought the kids Sesame Street vitamins, so Denise decides to take the Jimmy Neutron vitamins herself.
Denise has now been taking Jimmy Neutron vitamins for over a week. She says she'll finish the bottle. The kids really don't know what to make of it. I think it's hysterical. Apparently, the only thing my wife hates more than pills is wasting money.
You know you're in Atkins diet Induction mode when strips of bacon start looking to you like tiny little steaks...
I've updated the logo at the top, thanks to Brad Rhine for the concept and tips with Adobe GoLive [Later--I actually meant Adobe ImageReady, but Brad got to the comments section before I could correct this, as usual]. It'll change more, but it's a start.
Easter was good--the kids had a great time at Uncle Keith and Aunt Cheryl's. The funniest part of the day for me was church service. I go to a Methodist church now, but I was brought up Catholic. I'm slowly getting used to the Methodist faith, but it's painfully apparent to me how Catholic I've been. Heck, when I moved out here west of Philly, I couldn't figure out for the longest time where all the Catholic churches went (I'd thought it was the overwhelmingly dominant religion nationwide). At service, I constantly have to stop myself from answering things that seem vaguely familiar in a Catholic way. For instance, I keep biting my tongue at times to keep from saying "and also with you." I keep saying the Apostle's Creed slightly wrong. I wanted to sing the Hosannas today instead of speaking them. Friends are astounded that I don't know the most basic hymns here. Stuff like that. It's actually made me miss Mass a bit from time to time.
But today they did Communion. And I felt like I was "back home" again. I knew things by heart I gave the responses without having to follow along. People actually went up to the front of the church for Communion (they drank from the little cups still and went up row by row, but it was still familiar). But then at the end they launched into an "Our Father" that completely threw me, a short version with "trials" and other foreign stuff, and I was back into unfamiliar territory. I like the church, I like the community, I believe in the faith. I like the option of going to the traditional or contemporary service, too (the most contemporary thing about my old Catholic church was a guitar playing "Day by Day" at Mass). It's just humorous to me that Methodists can't seem to choose a single "Our Father" or a single Apostle's Creed (and it's funny how they have to footnote the word "catholic" and explain that it means "universal"). I guess part of me will always feel like a broken Catholic. I'll get used to it as time goes by, though. Now if only I can stop calling the two pastors "priests."
This one is one of the cornerstones of my personal philosophy (especially in dealing with people). I made it up ten years ago. Aristotle said "Man is the rational animal." I say "Man is the rationalizing animal."
This is why I can't read a book nowadays. If it's good, I have trouble putting it down. And I'm not as fast as I used to be. I just finished the Saturday Night Live book-- 600 pages in 24 hours is good, but not as fast as I used to be (just can't drop everything and read a book with kids, although Denise would tell you that's just what I did). :-)
40 is creeping up on me...
I sent a message to a number of people about this website. So I got an error message and tried to send it four times before I found the address that caused the problem. I may have ended up sending the message to several people four times over, but my email client doesn't let me know this at all. So I may have spammed someone, but maybe not.
Isn't technology wonderful?
My conversation today in Alyssa's room:
Alyssa: (throws dirty clothes on the floor and goes to the dresser to get new clothes)
Me: "Pick up those clothes and put them in the hamper. There's no need to make your room a pig sty."
Alyssa: "My room's not a pig sty."
Me: "It's getting there. Look at this mess."
Alyssa: (pointing to bookcase) "Well, maybe if my brother didn't mess up all my books my room would be cleaner."
Me: "Well, maybe if his sister would worry more about cleaning her room than blaming him, she'd be done by now."
Alyssa: "Well, maybe his sister should do whatever she wants."
She's five. What will the teenage years be like?
Not to be obtuse, but I'm reading a book on the inside story of Saturday Night Live and I noticed a name partway into the story. I never knew that Howard Shore, who has graced The Lord Of The Rings movies with such breathtaking soundtracks, was also the music director for Saturday Night Live for the first five years of the show's run.
This is really good news. Burt Rutan and Scaled Composites announced a new spacecraft almost ready for testing. This thing will be carried up by a specially designed plane and then launched to reach space.
The government space programs seem to be stagnating. It's great to see private firms get into the mix. I've seen a few announcements in the last few years for privately run space programs; I've wondered if any of them were partially funded by Robert Heinlein's estate. He's been a prime mover and shaker in the space program--you'd be surprised how many people in spaceflight he's inspired and influenced. Regardless, I'm glad to see someone making progress on spaceflight. Arthur C. Clarke said that we were 50 years ahead of our time with Apollo, but even if that were true, our time is still coming for a greater presence in the solar neighborhood.
You can find the Rutan spacecraft story here.
Robert Atkins died today in New York. Rumors will probably start that he died of his diet, but he actually slipped on ice outside his clinic two weeks ago. He hit his head and never recovered.
I can honestly say that I've never felt as good as when I'm on the Atkins diet. Contrary to popular belief, I eat more salad and vegetables on the low carb diet in two weeks than I eat on a normal diet in six months. You never know what's going to happen to you tomorrow, though. I hope I'll have at least as long a life as Atkins did, accidents notwithstanding.
Yep, Brad was right. The Moody Blues is the group who put out Octave. Their most famous album was probably Days of Future Passed (because of the song "Nights in White Satin"), but I think their best album was In Search of the Lost Chord.
By the way, The Moody Blues is one of Drew's favorite bands, although his favorite song at the moment is "The American Pie Song." Alyssa likes Sheryl Crow and the "Car Wash song" (yes, that "Car Wash").
Here's another trivia question, maybe easy, maybe not. Which Beatles song was titled "Scrambled Eggs" when it was being written?
And another, because I feel bad about not including (late) '80s music: which band had a great hit called "Break Out" (their only hit ever)?
Brad Rhine introduced a new application today: Frequency. Frequency is a clean and simple app that lets you easily post writing to an online weblog site on the Internet. I tested the beta version and was impressed by its fluidity and directness. I will probably move over to it in time. I would definitely recommend it to a computer non-power user. They could update a website daily by just writing a few words and clicking one button. Hey, maybe Brad could use that for a tagline: "Frequency is one-button Internet publishing."
This one may be a bit less obscure: which longtime rock band released their eighth album with the name Octave in 1978?
No one guessed, but that's likely because the band Steel Breeze was too obscure to note. I've heard of the band, but I've never heard their hit song "You Don't Want Me Anymore."
And the lyric from the Pink Floyd song? It's from "Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts 1-5)" ("Blown on the steel breeze").
I changed the item body text. I didn't like the serif I tried, so I changed it back to sans-serif, but a little smaller. It look small in Safari, not so small in Camino, not so small in IE. The top bar and side bar are next. Maybe over the weekend...
You know, I like HGTV as much as the next guy, but why do the makeovers in Design on a Dime always cost $1,000.00? That's not really a dime to me--are there new economic rules I'm not aware of?
The "Tokyo Drew" post a few weeks ago engendered a few comments, one of which was my sister Lisa's comment about the time the drapes were nearly ruined when we were children. Food was involved, children were involved, drapes were caught in the crossfire, and my parents made us write 500 times that we wouldn't throw food, or play with food, or whatever each of our parts of the transgression was. I was of course completely blameless in what I remember as the "Spaghetti Incident," but Lisa has a more precise memory of this traumatic event:
"Looking back, you are right about who did the throwing. It was not spaghetti, but instead a wretched stew of some sort that was likely a kitchen experiment gone wrong.
Lesson #1: A cook must be prepared to admit he/she has bungled... it is not acceptable to smile "convincingly" and serve it anyway... the mouth under the age of
10 can not be fooled.
Lesson #2: After serving such a "meal" do not leave said children under 10 unsupervised to eat alone while you check on your wallpapering project upstairs.
Lesson #3: The eldest Brother may not require the youngest brother to consume an additional portion of the "stew" or a serving spoon full may be thrown in his direction. [Editor's Note: Lisa must certainly be remembering this part incorrectly--as you recall, I am of course blameless. --eldest brother Dave]
Lesson #4: "Stew" stains custom-made Italian draperies.
Lesson #5: After a food fight, check for damage before taking off... you can run, but you can't hide.
Now that you've made me look back... I don't remember having a role in the event yet was also required to complete the writing assignment. Sigh, I must be off to polish my halo now. :)"
Hmmmm. As I recall, I was the only one who had to write 500 times since I had just learned cursive and could actually finish the assignment. I don't think Lisa or Joey could write much, since they were in 1st or 2nd grade at the time. I was ripped, man. But I don't carry a grudge. Oh no. Not at all.
She's right about the 10 year old mouths, too. Drew tells the day care folks that "Daddy's diet food tastes like dog food." Tell us how you really feel, Drew--don't hold back. :-)
Oh, and the drapes? The went to the dry cleaners and came back unstained. They lived to grace the windows for several more years and moved with us to our next house at 14 South Swarthmore Ave. in Ridley Park.
I've been digging into my web templates and stylesheets to alter the look of my site. I'm not sure how it will end up, but it may look radically different. Feedback is welcome (at this point, you may not even notice what I've changed so far).
I was listening to Pink Floyd and a good trivia question occurred to me. Can you tell me which band named themselves after a line in a Pink Floyd song? I'll give you a hint--it's a line in the album Wish You Were Here.
When I used to work at Denny's as a server and manager (and just about every other job code), we used to have several tricks of the trade that various servers or cooks liked to practive. Here's a Denny's "secret" for you: if a customer wanted their sausage well done, some cooks would drop the sausages into the deep fryer. In addition to cooking the sausages extremely thoroughly, it would make them crispy on the outside.
I'd post more today, but my laptop ran out of power playing games for the kids, since I had three kids to watch who actually were angels, but they used this laptop without a power adapter, because I lent it to Brad and forgot to take the one from work home, but then I went to work at ten after Denise got home so I could plug in and make a post, but now it's 11:34pm and I'm tired, and I went to sleep after midnight every day this week so I'm more tired, and tomorrow I have a big day with the kids and the Easter hunt at day care but probably not the day at Strasburg with Joe and Laura because things conflict despite my great efforts and I hope they'll forgive me and we'll get together soon.
It was actually a pretty good week, though. I made lots of progress.
(Welcome to the mind of Dave, on which six threads of thought can be running at any given time)
I forgot to mention yesterday, but I moved the comments system for the page over to Squawkbox, so you'll notice the new look if you make any comments. This does mean, though, that the old comments are all gone. That's a shame, because they were great comments, but I had to move over--my license to the old comment system ends soon.
The pictures of Saddam Hussein's statue being torn down were broadcast everywhere yesterday, including the Arab world. I heard a very salient interview on NPR at that time with an Arab commentator. The questions: what was the Arab reaction to the TV images of Iraqi joy? What did the Arab news media say about all this?
The commentator said that the Arab reaction was confusion. The Arab commentary said one thing (America interferes), but the images spoke more clearly than anything else to the Iraqi liberation.
I think that the Arab world cannot help but dislike the United States, but they must also feel deep down some shame and frustration. They must be thinking "How did it get this bad in the country of our brothers that the infidels became Iraq's saviors?" I think it's vital at this point that The US show respect for the true country of Iraq: the liberated people we saw yesterday.
On a somewhat related note, this is tremendously embarrassing for the French, Germans, and Russians (mostly for the French, but I can't explain why--it's just a gut feeling). They're in the position of looking like either dunces or cowards as far as this conflict goes: they were either ignorant of the true Iraqi situation or worse yet, ignored it. Yes, I know they could have had true antiwar reasons for their stance, but somehow I don't think so. France at least had its fingers in the Iraqi pie. We may never know the true whys and wherefores behind this conflict, but it's good to see this signal from the Iraqi people that some good may come of this.
For the second time in a week, this weblog has moved. The first time was invisible to you (unless you tried to connect to it while it was shuffling over to the new hosting company). This second time, you'll have to come to my new domain name, Split Focus website (http://www.splitfocus.org).
I should write more tonight, but it would be nice to get to sleep, too. I have two good war stories to tell next time around: a big one (Joan Jett) and a smaller one (Joe Way). See you then!
Since it was so easy to move our Mammoth Concepts website, it seemed to be a good time to move the Digital Perspective website onto its own server. The name "Digital Perspective" doesn't really roll off the tongue as a web address, though, so I chose a name that rolls off the tongue (slightly) better: Split Focus. In a day or two, you can find me at the new Split Focus website (http://www.splitfocus.org).
Besides, if you think about it, "split focus" is a theme that fits me perfectly.
I missed last night's weblog through no desire of my own. My laptop decided to take a vacation on me and crashed with a blinking question mark on restart.
Luckily, it was my Mac laptop that died, not my PC. Since it was my Mac that hosed itself, I was able to hook it up to another Mac in Target Disk Mode using the Firewire port (IEEE 1394 to you PC types). On the other Mac, I could then see the laptop's hard drive. Disk First Aid and Norton both choked on the drive, though--they couldn't fix it.
Since I could see the drive I figured that I could at least copy my info off. The drive was physically OK; it was the directory structure that was corrupted. But where could I find a 60 GB hard drive to back up my data too? I didn't have one.
I did, however, have a brand new Macintosh XServe, a Unix server with 360 GB of space. Within three minutes I had my laptop connected to the XServe and I was using the Disc Copy program to back up.
Several hours later, I came back to the office and started the restore. I blew away the bad hard drive, reformatted it, and used Carbon Copy Cloner to put everything back on my laptop. A few updates later, I had my laptop back (and I'm writing this post on it now).
An interesting point: I had access to a big hard drive to back up my stuff, but the rest of the tools are freely available for Macs. If I had this happen to my PC, I'd be up the creek without a paddle. There's no way I'd be back up with a fully functional machine and a clean install within a day. And I can tell you from experience that my Macs have much fewer problems than my PCs. I like both, and I use both, but if I had to choose one, I think my choice would be pretty clear.
The other day I mentioned the Beaver Avenue Beggars, a band I used to listen to up in State College. I failed to mention, however, one of the best and most popular music groups that Penn State has ever produced--Cartoon. They've been broken up for almost twenty years and yet they still get back together to play, mostly at Penn State's Arts Festival in July. I'm partial to them because I like acoustic rock, but apparently a lot of other people are partial to them as well.
I remember visiting Elaine Zaleski (now Elaine McCarty) at Penn State in 1983 and going into a record store where she bought an album called Native State by Cartoon. I didn't listen to the album, but the group stuck in my mind. Six years later, I had the chance to listen to a Cartoon reunion concert at the Arts Festival, and I loved it. I bought a great two-album Cartoon cassette that I literally wore out a few years later. When CD burners came on the scene, I thought about trying to transfer the tape to CD, but I never had all the right pieces to digitize the songs.
Later, though, the Internet saved the day. A Google search for the heck of it one day turned up this Cartoon website. Better yet, the website had CDs for sale of the songs I wanted. I bought both CDs and had my Cartoon fix again. Now I see on the website that they have a third CD for sale. It's on my list to get in the next few weeks.
Cartoon rocks.
I took Drew up to Fox's Market in Middletown earlier tonight, and we drove back along the river (it's the back way from Middletown to my house, down Route 441). As we drove by the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant I pointed it out to Drew. He'd seen it before, but he's so little he forgets. This time, thought, he asked a lot of questions about it. I tried to answer them as best I could. Do you know that the whole near-accident was compounded by human error? Back in 1979, the computers sensed a problem and began to cool things down immediately. A human operator misread the alert and shut off the cooling. That's what caused the plant to move to near-meltdown phase. The phone lines in the area were so jammed that no one could get in touch with the control room to tell them to turn the cooling system back on. Finally, they broke through and the operators set everything back properly again. Within a day, the area was out of danger.
I didn't tell Drew all this, but he seemed to be happy with the answers I gave him. I had to explain why two of the towers smoked and two didn't (they never restarted the bad reactor--it will be fully dismantled eventually). The funny thing was looking at the houses on the left as we passed the towers on the right. People live literally across the street from TMI. And life goes on.
My house is about six miles from TMI. My school district (my workplace) borders TMI. We have comprehensive plans for an event at TMI that are continually refined. We've discussed them in the last few months, and while I don't feel I can speak about our contingencies, I can say that the leadership of the school district has really planned for almost any eventuality, including instant and complete evacuation of the district. We live and work a stone's throw from the infamous TMI, and we plan for the possible nightmare scenarios, and then we go back to our daily routine. It's a bit strange, but most days we don't even think about it. The possibility is remote, and a situation will probably never happen again, and we've made whatever precautions we can, and we all have lives to lead, and frankly life in Etown is pretty good.
And life goes on.
I've resisted writing the war stories down because they'll take so long to write, and there are so many of them--but they demand to be told. Here's a quick one to seed the garden.
In fall of 1984, my parents were in the process of moving from Philly to Canton, Ohio. They had plans to fly to Canton on a particular weekend, and my brother Joe approached me about having a party at the house while they were gone. I thought about it, but I just didn't think it was a great idea. I told Joe "OK--if you had a party here, you'd have to be quiet. I mean really quiet. No one can know even in the neighborhood that you're having a party."
Joe actually decided he could handle that, and told me it was no problem, and went off to make preparations. Me, I worried. A lot.
The night of the party, I worked my shift at Denny's (I was a waiter then) and after doing my sidework, drove home. As I pulled into the driveway, the house was dark and silent. I guessed that things didn't work out for the party, or Joe had had second thoughts. I unlocked the front door and walked in. And tripped over something on the floor.
As my eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness, I heard whisperings and mumblings in the dark. "Who is it?" "Shhhh!" "What's going on?" "Hey, it's OK--it's Dave." I began to make out shapes on the floor. On the couch. On the stairs. In fact, just about everywhere. Joe had been true to his word, and I was witness to the most laid back, quietest "party" I've ever seen. The next thing I knew, a dark form worked its way up to me, and said in my brother's whispering voice "Hey Dave! Whaddya think? I kept it quiet just like we talked about!"
To this day it still weirds me out--in a funny, amazing kind of way. I mean, they even parked three blocks away to avoid detection. Talk about dedication to a cause...
The Internet is great for looking up information on just about anything, including old rock bands you used to see. Denise and I used to listen to a great band in State College called the Beaver Avenue Beggars. They played at the Phyrst for a while on Friday nights in the 1989-1991 timeframe, and we used to go up the Penn State on the weekends and catch them when we got into town.
I wondered where they were now, or if they even had a CD that I could get, so I did a Google search and found this webpage online. No CDs, but at least it had some detail about the band. This page detailed an earlier incarnation of the band, Trinity1296 (I think the 1296 represented the number of strings on their guitars, 12 and 6--I don't know what the 9 was for). They later hooked up with Randy Hughes from Cartoon and called themselves Trinitoonity, but my favorite incarnation of their sound was the Beaver Avenue Beggars.
I really hosed the new server tonight for a bit (at least for this weblog directory--not for the main site). I was fooling around with subdomains and access to the weblog was blocked off. I had to go into the .htaccess file to bring the site back.
But hey, that's how you learn.
Well, it looks like we've successfully moved our domain over to our new hosting company, Citadelhost. I think the DNS changes have propagated across the Internet, so www.mammothconcepts.com points to the new hosting server now instead of the old one. I republished this weblog to the new server--Radio choked a few times generating a year's worth of weblog, but it made it eventually. Welcome to our new home!
A mixed metaphor I use sometimes just for fun:
Well, the foot's really in the other mouth now, isn't it?
The ride to day care this morning was accompanied by the full seven minute singalong rendition of the popular Beatles hit Hey Drew, replete with my 3 year old's giggles (I think Drew fully believes it's Hey Drew--I've "fooled" him completely).
Alyssa, however, spent the drive with her hands over her ears, scowling because Daddy wouldn't let her spend the extra 45 minutes she apparently needed to find the "other jacket" (of questionable existence, if you ask me). She's "very angry" at Daddy (and Daddy laughing because she's so cute didn't help, either).
I'm sure I'll pay for all this in twenty years when the kids are in therapy reliving all my evils as a parent...
Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is not actually one of my top albums, although it's good (Abbey Road would actually be my top Beatles album, with a few others rounding out my top choices). It is, however, a landmark album that no one under 40 today can really appreciate. The Beatles entered a 60's world that saw the single as the norm in the recording industry. They had a major part in changing the music field so that albums became the norm by the '70s. The Beatles made an earthshaking move with the Pepper concept album in 1967, and nothing was ever really the same again. They initiated a huge paradigm shift in the production of the concept album, the studio album, and music techniques in general. Pepper made it clear that they couldn't tour again--there was no way that they could duplicate these new sounds in a live arena. There was a whole world of difference between the Revolver album in '66 and Pepper a year later.
To paraphrase a story I once read, "in 1967 at Christmastime we put Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on the turntable and listened, amazed by the new world the Beatles opened up for us."
This history makes things even more interesting now that new music services like Apple's rumored 99 cent song downloads have appeared. Evidence appears strong that these kinds of services herald a shift back to singles after more than thirty years of album-centric music publishing.
There's a cool site here with all kinds of information about the Beatles' songs. I know a lot about the Beatles, but a lot of this stuff was new to me.
So on Saturday we went to Tokyo Diner in Lancaster, a Beni Hana kind of place where they cook the food in front of you on a huge grill. Alyssa and Drew were spellbound the first time we went there, and this second time was no exception. Drew watched wide-eyed as the chef spun an egg around on his spatula and flipped it into his hat. Then Drew froze and got big-time scared when the chef set the grill on fire and a big mushroom of flame ballooned up to the ceiling.
The best part, though, is when the chef flipped pieces of shrimp into our mouths. Drew opened his mouth as instructed, but the chef couldn't get the flip right. Then he turned the spatula around and fired the shrimp overhand into Drew's mouth like a rocket. I only wish I had a camera to capture Drew's expression. First we saw the shrimp blast into Drew's mouth. Then Drew's eyes bugged out--we thought for a moment that he was going to choke! Then we thought he was going to spit it out, but he just had no idea what to do. Then we told him to eat it. He looked at us and began to chew slowly and suspiciously. I don't know if he'll ever trust us again, but the look on his face was priceless.