The ICP-lite band ( I dunno ICP well enough to know if they were a cover band, or just a tribute-in-style band) passed out pillows at one point for the mosh pit to play with. If you watch the next few shots in sequence, you can see the kid in red hit someone who doesn’t react entirely happily. Too bad I didn’t realize what I was capturing at the time, to follow through.
Pillow Fight in the Pit
August 23rd, 2010T-Mobile suckage
August 21st, 2010Something has gone wrong with the t-mobile tower that serves my house, and I’m wavering between getting 3-bars of service that don’t actually work, and straight up “no service” error messages. Of course you can’t get any sort of customer support out of t-mobile without a phone; they claim to have a chat support system, but it doesn’t actually work, and they don’t offer any support by email. Too bad I finally kicked my land line to the curb. At least the cable modem still works.
24 hours too slow
August 18th, 2010Nothing like finding a release stopping bug 24 hours after you burnt the final CD’s to send to manufacturing.
ARGH.
“You’ve got a way with crazy people”
August 17th, 2010This guy is in the bar last night, being obnoxious to this couple that just wants to have a private conversation.
When the bartender shoos him away from them, he comes over to me next, wants to play a game of pool. I figure, if it keeps the peace, how bad can one game of pool be?
He’s at the grab and hug stage of drunken rambling, going on and on about how he came to Seattle ’cause he doesn’t want to work anymore, and they won’t give him his SSI, so he’s gonna steal a car and drive it off a bridge.
Wait, what? Oh crap. So much for just a simple game of pool. I try to be helpfully sympathetic; I point out that if he isn’t taking his meds, but he tells his doctors he is, and he’s not getting any better, of course they are going to try upping the dosage, and that if he doesn’t want to take them, he doesn’t have to, so just tell the doc.
He’s a decent pool player, when he can stop wobbling long enough to get a shot off. It looks like he’s had a lot of practice playing wasted. The game takes forever, because whenever it’s his shot, he’s too busy talking more crazy at me, or wandering off around the bar looking for something in his pockets. He can’t keep track of which set of balls is his, and insists on using Bigs and Smalls as his naming convention, instead of Solids and Stripes. Which leads to me realizing that the larger numbers are indeed the Stripes, and the smaller numbers are indeed the Solids. But that’s not what he means, he makes it pretty clear he thinks the balls are actually different sizes.
After 3 games, I’m ready to sit down and enjoy a little silence somewhere away from him, so kindly thank him for the game, and disengage as best I can. It helps that the bartender won’t serve him another beer, which distracts him. “I can still walk, c’mon!” As if that’s the limit.
After he’s left, the bartender buys me a drink, thanks me for defusing the guy, and says the title line.
Housing GRAR
August 16th, 2010I get home today to find a 10-day quit-or-comply notice on my door.
WTF?
It turns out they somehow ‘forgot’ my cat deposit/etc, and now want another pet deposit, plus they want to start charging $10/month for pet-rent. I went down, and the lady flips through the paperwork several times, before she finally finds a deposit in my name that says “$400 total, $200S, $200P”. I also point out that my lease is not up for renewal, so they can’t start charging extra until it is. While I’m waiting for her to look up these basic facts, another 2 tenants in the same position of having paid their deposits years ago, and now getting nastygrams, show up to complain as well.
Without something in writing from these people appologizing for their terrible record keeping, I’m not inclined to trust that they won’t still be trying to evict me in 10 days. Time to call the Tenants Union of Washington State, I think.
And starting the painful process of sorting through 4 years of piled up “too important to throw away” papers that I didn’t get sorted properly when they first came in. D’oh. If lawyers end up involved, they’ll want those papers, I’m sure.
UPDATE: Found the original lease, which indeed has the check box marked for pet deposit paid. When I go down to show her where to look on her copy, there are 2 other people waiting to do the same basic thing, and a 4th shows up before she gets back. She accepts are proof with good grace and tries to explain that the corporate office is in texas, and is unresponsive, and that we should expect things to get worse, and to have lots of empty apartments in the near future. oh joy.
Le Faux at Julia’s on Broadway
August 14th, 2010If you get there, and the seats right by the stage are still open…know that you’ll be craning your neck a lot, and missing whatever they put on the video screen. But you get a really close view of the action that you can see.
Their Cher was really impressive. They all were pretty good, really. When they do the picture-with-the-whole-cast thing at the end of the show, you realize how many people they put on stage through the evening. The guy who does the hanging cloth acrobatic stuff must work out like crazy, he makes climbing up that stuff look so easy. They do a lot of comedy talking bits, working with the crowd, including at least one bit that included a plant in the audience, I think. Or else they just improvised around him really well.
I was entertained.
Reshooting the Past
August 13th, 2010I’m watching Y&R today, and I realize, the ‘flashback’ I’m watching has to be new. When Hope died originally, the actor was the other Adam. I’ve always wondered what they did for a flashback, if the actor had changed. It seems like it would only work for recent flashbacks. You can’t reshoot Victor at 35 without way more effects budget than I suspect they have.
UPDATE: Oh wow. They reshot scenes with new Heather as well. It’s going to be a whole episode of reshoots, methinks….
There Are Ways…
August 13th, 2010There are less selfish ways to commit suicide, than driving your bicycle head first into on coming traffic. When you’re willing to do said stupidity because the rest of your entire life isn’t worth the 30 seconds it would have taken for the crossing lights to come on, it makes you look like someone who isn’t very satisfied with how her life turned out.
I’m just saying.
Needs More ‘oke
August 13th, 2010Why don’t smaller artists release their stuff in Karaoke form?
It seems like a significant source of word-of-mouth advertising, if a fan of yours can take a karaoke disc of your songs with them to any karaoke night they perform at.
For that matter, why don’t big artists release more of their stuff in Karaoke form? Is it really that hard to make a second edit without the primary vocals?
Oh for the days when you could just turn your stereo all the way to one side and get a sing-a-long version that was built into the regular version.
UPDATE: Out of curiosity, I emailed Michelle Shocked’s contact page, to see what they had to say about the lack of Michelle-oke. She asked me for a top 10 list…that sounds hopeful =)
There ARE stupid questions
August 12th, 2010At a company that went through two rounds of lay-offs recently, it’s a fucking stupid question to expose yourself as ignorant of basic math skills, consumed with greed, and completely without human compassion for your former fellow workers.
At any company, it’s basic fucking stupidity to suggest that sales people will suddenly stop wanting to make their massive bonus commissions, just to screw you over.
And you are both major jerks for even coming close to suggesting that any of us share your self-centered and loathsome views, much less trying to claim authoritatively that we all do.
You wanna ask your stupid question, fine, ask away, but stop claiming you speak for other people, and for god’s sake, ask the question without repeating yourself 10 times. Can you at least waste my time efficiently?