Category: Uncategorized

Argh…I feel all woozy. I’ve been taking malaria pills for the last 10 weeks (I went to a malarial part of China on vacation a couple of months ago, and you have to keep taking the drugs long after you get back). Larium, the drug, has one nasty side effect: extreme sun sensitivity. So playing football this morning out in the sun for three hours made me feel like I’d been out baking for a whole day.
(The only plus: I got an actual tan in China, for the first time in my life.)
The worse thing: I took a shower after football, then hopped in bed for a nap, which has made my hair look as Flock-of-Seagulls-esque as the bassist for The Faint (see below). We’ll see if that can be contained before tonight’s festivities.
(By the way, while searching for a photo of The Faint’s bassist in full Seagulls regalia, I found this exciting piece of news: Goats Faint When Frightened. “According to the American Tennessee Fainting Goat Association [real link, really], the goats were orginally used to protect sheep. If the sheep was threatened, the goat would fall over providing the predator with a meal as a distraction.” For too long, the story of the Tennessee Fainting Goat has gone untold in our culture.)

I regret to inform you that this week’s Saturday football game did not turn out as well as last week’s — one lonely catch, no TDs. The fix was in, I tell you.

Anyone in the Dallas area should catch the 7 p.m. rebroadcast tonight of This American Life on KERA. It’s a great episode on life in wartime: excerpts from letters sent home to girlfriends from the front lines of World War II, some very touching interviews with Native Americans about the Current Situation, and other great stuff. They do amazing work there — I’d thought I was done crying for a while, but they ripped a few more tears out of me. (It’ll also be available for listening on TAL’s web site early next week.)

Spotted at dfwblogs‘s moreover feed:

Someday, I hope my vacation schedule is important enough to be the most important breaking news across the Metroplex.

Saw my new favorite billboard on Harry Hines, driving back at 1 a.m. last night: a big photo of Ricki Lake, with the caption, “So Real. So Ricki. So UPN.”
I mean, we’re all for reality, no? And I can even see how Ricki Lake might have a substantial fan base out there that would make “So Ricki” seem like a compliment, not an insult. But “So UPN”? Since when is that anything other than the lowest dig conceivable? How did “So UPN” become the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval in somebody’s mind?

Went with my friend Dena to Denton last night to see The Faint, which — I’ll go out on a limb and say it — I believe to be the finest band in all of Omaha. (Actually, considering I’m seeing Built to Spill on Sunday, that means I’ll be taking in Boise and Omaha’s finest in one week’s time. That’s coordination, my friend.)
Anyway, they were amazing. In a way, they sound like a cool K-Tel 80s compilation: the singer sounds like a cross between Dave Gahan and the guy from Gene Loves Jezebel, the bass player has that modified Flock of Seagulls haircut, and they play one song that sounds exactly like Soft Cell circa 1982. But they’ve got a nicely menacing edge, and their drummer is a mad man, so they get a little punk/industrial energy to go with all the New Waviness. (The only problem was the intense heat, which was remarkable considering it was actually quite cool outside. At one point, the band complained their keyboards had been pushed out of tune from “this fucking heat,” prompting a 10-minute delay.)
They played at Rubber Gloves, which gets a lot of interesting indie acts, but whose crowd is generally pretty dance-phobic in the standard indie kid way — lots of staring meaningfully at the floor, perhaps with an occasional head bob. But The Faint had even the most supercool kids shakin’ some ass on the dance floor. Before their final song, the lead singer reasoned “I know you’re all sweating out there, so you might as well dance.” I think that’s my new life slogan.

Last night was terrific fun — even if all that Maredsous 8 had more than the intended effect. Among the people I met there, in alphabetical order by middle name: Lyn, Trent, Cheri, the other Josh, Karen, Erica, Mark, Jeremy, Jessica, Billy, Matt, Charles, Denise, Dave, Andy, Anna Beth, and of course Leia the Czarina herself.
My favorite part of the evening was definitely the campfire singalong around 9:30 — to hear so many voices belting out “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore” at once was deeply touching.

John McCain’s moving eulogy for Mark Bingham, one of the passengers who stormed the cockpit on United Flight 93.

Ripped from The Morning News: the winning entry in this year’s Air Guitar World Championships.

To any Mac users out there: If you use System 9.2.1, please email me or comment on this message. I installed the Apple firmware update for G4s today, and my audio no longer works. It appears, from discussions around the web, that this is a fairly common problem for System 9.1 users with this (irreversible!) firmware update, and it’s only solvable by installing a small part of the 9.2.1 software. Unfortunately, that small part is only available online as part of the whole 82MB download, and I’d like to some day get married and have children, not spend the rest of my life tethered to a 56K modem. So please, help out if you can.
Oh, yeah: To any Mac users out there: If you’re NOT using System 9.2.1, avoid the firmware update Apple released today.
Update: The impossibly nice folks at xlr8yourmac have hooked me up. They rock. Please consider naming your first-born child something like John Xlr8yourmac Smith.