Anyhow… we all lost three people within the last few days.

Courtesy sgoralnick's Flickr

Joe Ades was that guy who some have seen on the street corners of New York in various locations around the city selling vegetable peelers. I’ve seen Joe in many different places since I moved here in 1993, the Seaport, Union Square, Midtown and the World Trade Center. He was one of those people woven into our everyday lives who just add to the flavor (horrible vegetable pun) of this city.
Heres a post at Gothamist and Joe’s obit at the NY Times.

Hans Beck was the creator of Playmobil toys. When I was little, I never appreciated Playmobil, perhaps they were too expensive, perhaps not readily available. But since my son is of the age where he is playing with these type of things, I really appreciate the detail and simplicity of Playmobil toys and their incredible range.

Photo: Helle Nilsen

Lux Interior was the co-founder and leader of garage punk band The Cramps. I remember first hearing The Cramps about 1991 and thought the were really unlike anything I had heard before. I was into a lot of hardcore music like Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Bad Brains, Dead Kennedys, etc, but The Cramps were really something different and refreshing. Much like The Clash had major influences from Reggae,  The Cramps had major influences from 60’s surf music and rockabilly.Unfortunately I never got to see them live.

Thanks to Brian, I have recently acquired and amazing collection of Lux and Ivy mix CDs which contain an incredible mix of odd surf music gems and assorted other weirdness. Here is an great post on the series and another place to check it out yourself.

RIP to Joe, Hans and Lux.

I was originally going to name this post Random Death, but thought it sounded a bit too Black Metal.

This was taken with a low-end Nikon point and shoot that we got using some rewards points. Strangely the video is recorded as Quicktime .mov files and got some odd little artifacts during the conversion process to flash video.

Anyway, this to me is the best sound in the world:

Texas, ca. 1990 (Taken with Lomo Action Sampler)

Pisa, 2000

Pisa, 2000

Montana, 2003

Montana, 2003

Who Cares?

Let it rain and thunder,
Let a million firms go under.
I am not concerned with
Stocks and bonds that I’ve been burned with!

I love you and you love me
And that’s how it will always be
And nothing else can ever mean a thing

Who cares what the public chatters
Love’s the only thing that matters

Who cares if the sky cares to fall in the sea
Who cares what banks fail in Yonkers
Long as you’ve got a kiss that conquers?

Why should I care?
Life is one long jubilee,
So long as I care for you
And you care for me!

Who cares how history rates me
As long as your kiss intoxicates me?

Why should I care?
Life is one long jubilee,
So long as I care for you
And you care for me!

-George and Ira Gershwin

photos: g.e. masana

You can wear your fur
like the river on fire.
But you better be sure
if your makin’ God a liar.
I’m a rattlesnake, babe,
I’m like fuel on fire.
So if you’re gonna’ get made,
don’t be afraid of what you’ve learned.

On the day that I turned 23,
I was curled up underneath a dogwood tree.
When suddenly a girl
with skin the color of a pearl,
she wandered aimlessly,
but she didn’t seem to see.
She was listenin’ for the angels just like me.
So I stood and looked about.
I brushed the leaves off of my snout.
And then I heard my mother shouting through the trees.
You should have seen that girl go shaky at the knees.
So I took her by the arm
we settled down upon a farm.
And raised our children up as
gently as you pleased.

And now my fur has turned to skin.
And I’ve been quickly ushered in
to a world that I confess I do not know.
But I still dream of running careless through the snow.
An’ through the howlin’ winds that blow,
across the ancient distant flow,
it fill our bodies up like water till we know.

You can wear your fur
like the river on fire.
But you better be sure
if your makin’ God a liar.
I’m a rattlesnake, babe,
I’m like fuel on fire.
So if you’re gonna’ get made,
don’t be afraid of what you’ve learned.

Furr - Blitzen Trapper

Oh sweet sweet hockey. The Rangers are winding down their season with about a month to go and sit firmly in 6th place in the Eastern conference. The top 8 teams make it to the playoffs. The next few weeks will be pretty intense as we play all Eastern teams with the majority of our games against divisional rivals. The way hockey seedings work is if you are top in your division, no matter the points you have, you are ranked 1-3 with the other two divisions in your conference. So, the Carolina Hurricanes are ranked 3 in the East because they lead their division with 79 points while the Rangers are 6th with 81 points. The Rangers are third in their division, but are closing fast on Pittsburgh (85) and New Jersey (86) with no regulation losses since February 7th. The Hurricanes are likely to be the only team in their division who will make the playoffs, sad considering the talent on a team like the Washington Capitals. NHL Standings.

Also, this is an exciting idea, thanks to my brother for the link.

The Wire ended last night, and it was excellent. I highly recommend watching the whole series from the beginning. There are a LOT of characters and a lot of story lines going on at the same time. When we watch it over again, we will spread out the episodes, instead of playing catch up like we did with Heroes and Lost where we’d watch 8 episodes in a row (with time out for child maintenance of course). I think with some shows theres a reason why, besides the obvious, that there is a week buffer between episodes. Next up to watch on HBO, John Adams.

Nine Inch Nails has released a new set of music called Ghosts. Brian wrote about it here.

Saturday Night Live has bee pretty funny. The SNL digital shorts have been great. While the Ellen Page episode wasn’t that great overall, the short film “The Mirror” that they did was great.

Wilco was on SNL two weeks ago and were amazing. I’d love to see them live again, but they don’t seem to be making their way around here anytime soon. The two songs they did were Walken and Hate It Here. The drum fills in Hate It Here are excellent and the lyrics are deceptively simple. The band is so tight and they really look like they are having fun doing what they do.

Hate It Here

I try to stay busy
I do the dishes, I mow the lawn
I try to keep myself occupied
Even though I know you’re not coming home

I try to keep the house nice and neat
I make my bed I change the sheets
I even learned how to use the washing machine
But keeping things clean doesn’t change anything

What am I gonna do when I run out of shirts to fold?
What am I gonna do when I run out of lawn to mow?
What am I gonna do if you never come home?
Tell me, what am I gonna do?

I hate it
I hate it here
When you’re gone

I caught myself thinking
I caught myself thinking once again
Have to try to keep my mind out of this
Try not to pretend

I’ll check the phone
I’ll check the mail
I’ll check the phone again and I call your mom
She says you’re not there and I should take care

I hate it here
When you’re gone
I hate it
I hate it here
When you’re gone

I try to stay busy
I take out the trash, I sweep the floor
Try to keep myself occupied
Cause I know you don’t live here anymore

And finally.. at times it seems like I am overrun with clippings of things I pull from magazines, anyone have any good solutions to this? I’ve thought about scanning so they are searchable, etc… I’ve also thought about putting them through the shredder.

We went swimming in the building pool this Saturday and it was great. It’s just really relaxing and every time we go, we always say we need to go more often. Hopefully we will make that happen. The pool is 75 x 35 feet and enclosed and as Will says, no bugs can get in it.

PSP comics are a pretty cool idea and some of them look quite interesting. I’m still working my way through Watchmen, about 3/4 of the way done. It will be really interesting to see how they make the rich stories from the book come to life when they finally get going on the movie.

The Simpsons movie opens on July 27 which reminds me of one of my favorite scenes.

We went out to Mike and Kathy’s for lunch on Sunday and had a great time just hanging out eating, drinking beer, catching up, etc. We even got in some co-op Guitar Hero II action.

I have a renewed interest in R/C cars, though I think I’m a little bit more in love with the whole building procedure than the driving of them, probably because of the lack of space to drive them in. I went to storage and go out the two 1/18 scale cars I have. One of them is complete, with a BMW M3 body, the other is mostly done except for some of the electrics. I have to solder the motor leads and attach the speed control, attach the receiver and clean up the wiring with zip ties. Also I have to paint the body. I have a VW Beetle body shell that needs to be painted, maybe silver.

It’s strange, I think I’m drawn to things that I dont have space for because recently I have been checking out a few sites on Vespa restoration. I think this would be a great project, but only if I had a garage, some place to work on it, etc. Perhaps some day. I love the process though and could read about it for hours.

Recently we cancelled out NetFlix account. While we love the idea and convenience of being able to have a movie on hand all the time, its not too fun when you get psyched up to watch a movie (Match Point in this case), put it in and watch for about 45 minutes then it craps out on you. I took out the disc, cleaned it well, put it back in and still had the same issue. Then I broke the disc in frustration, I think I kind of frightened myself at that point and sent the disc back to NetFlix as damaged. When called about the issue, after waiting on the phone for 15 minutes, they had no problem letting us go as customers. We realize that discs get scratched, but they had nothing to say to us besides “OK, I can cancel your account”. It’s amazing they would rather lose a GIVEN $9.99 a month for a potentially very long time then do something for us. So, therefore, we joined a neighborhood DVD rental place with a good selection of movies ($4 per rental) and with the very few movies we watch in a month, this seems like a good plan. I did remember to print out my NetFlix queue though.

Beer update: Part of the beer has been bottled. When the yeast has run its course by eating all of the fermentable sugars in a beer, additional sugar has to be added to aid in carbonation. I had a case of clean bottles and after adding priming sugar to the still beer, bottled up a whole case. When I was almost done bottling, I realized that I had more beer than bottles. I bottled on June 24th and have let the rest of the primed beer sit for a few weeks now while I had a chance to gather more bottles (drink beer, rinse and save the bottles), this week I plan to re-prime and bottle the rest. The reason I needed to let it sit was to make sure that the priming sugar was all eaten up in the remaining beer. If too much priming sugar is added, exploding bottles could happen, and I don’t really want warm flat beer with shards of glass exploding in our apartment. Maybe if we had a house though, see above…