I'll post anything anyone asks

Some things live up to the hype

A sample ranking of the best concerts I've ever seen:

1) James Brown, House of Blues, Atlanta Summer Olympics. Went in through the VIP back door, convinced bartenders to serve me beer (I was 19), peed next to Scottie Pippen, and danced with a future TV sportscaster. Plus it was the Godfather of Soul.

2) U2, Verizon Center, October 2005. I'm not even sure if it was a great U2 show, but they're the definitive band of my generation.

3) Arcade Fire (and LCD Soundsystem), Bank of America Pavilion, September 2007. Kind of a crappy venue, but LCD Soundsystem proved that electronic bands can play mean live shows, and then Arcade Fire lived up to all the hype. Slightly fewer people on stage than Wu-Tang, but those that are there tend to be more involved in the show and less likely to be too stoned to sing. Seriously: go see Arcade Fire. They are worth the money and effort.

What really annoys me is that this cost me a round of golf

I joke with people that they can plan for rain whenever I've made a tee time. When I woke up this morning I thought my prophecy would once again come true: it was cloudy and cold and ominous. But then the clouds started to clear, and while it remained cold it turned into a promising afternoon. So I was excited as I drove a couple of blocks to pick up my friend Cory.

I was considerably less excited when I got about halfway through the intersection of 1st Ave and Broad St. Basically, this happened:



Yeah. I got in an accident. And as a result I didn't get to play golf today, which may or may not have caused all of the clouds to burn away and temps to rise into the mid 60s. I spent most of my afternoon on the phone with my insurance company (actually not the worst experience in the world). I was surprised how many people asked whether anyone was hurt in the accident. I laughed it off and said no, and wondered why no one asked whether or not I missed a tee time. How rude.

Anyways, this is what my fender is supposed to look like:



And this is what my fender actually looks like:




Yarg. Now I have to decide between golf and football tomorrow. Booooo!

This is why I was at work late tonight

I'll laugh at a lot of things. I smiled when my boss turned her laptop around and showed this clip to everyone at a meeting late this afternoon. But everyone else pretty much lost their sh*t. Rather than finishing the meeting so we could go home everyone loaded up YouTube so they could watch this again. And again. And then they watched the various derivatives. For 20 minutes. Even people who were participating in the meeting via phone got into the action. It was brutal. By the time we got down to bidness it was 5:30. Not that I had anything to do.

(Sadly, I didn't. I just hate missing the last express bus to my neighborhood.)

(Oh, and this is clearly a better video than the original.)

A band you should listen to

My friend Brian does silly things like spending all his time and money starting a record label rather than playing golf. Some people just have different priorities.

That said, much like Christopher Walken in the More Cowbell sketch, Brian puts on his pants one leg at a time AND he puts out hit records. Please go check out The Diggs. Buy their EP or their first CD. Or, if you want to be ahead of the times, check out this song from their soon-to-be-released album:

http://www.sugarspunrecords.com/promo/Careen.mp3


(My thanks to Brian to letting me listen to this early. For those of you in the New York, these guys play all over the city. Definitely worth checking out.)

Rye bread subtypes

Can someone explain to me the difference between all the kinds of rye bread out there? I love rye bread, and I think I prefer seeded as opposed to unseeded. In the past couple of weeks I've purchased Jewish rye, Russian rye, and Caraway rye. As far as I can tell I may have purchased the same loaf of bread three straight times. What's up with that?

Listen to my dad on the InterTubes

I'm sure most of you are already huge NPR fans and thus have already heard this, but in case you haven't, let me present my semi-famous father being interviewed on NPR's "On the Media."



(Also, feel free to go to the On the Media website and mock the commenter who claims that USAT fraudulently increases its circulation numbers.)

(Also, the downside of not driving to work is that I rarely listen to NPR any more, so I didn't catch this live. Surprisingly.)

The outdoors

Well, my mom seems to have taken my last two blog posts to mean that I do nothing by drink beer and eat french fries. Clearly she doesn't know how much I would like to be eating fries... but my lack of a deep fryer means that I usually end up eating chips and salsa. And occasionally yogurt and grapes.

In reality, I do a lot of other stuff. Like go hiking. My friend Chris sent me out to a trail along the Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie, about 30 minutes outside of Seattle. Gorgeous hike, although it nearly killed my car (4 wheel drive does not equal ground clearance).

Anyhoo, here are the shots from the hike.

http://www.flickr.com/gp/72188899@N00/6v1NHw

Maybe this is why Franko got a cat

My friend Jon got a cat back in March. Somehow this was a replacement for the friendship of Huan and me since we both moved away from DC. We've long debated why he felt the need to replace us with a cat.

I think I know why.

Having someone around is a great excuse not to eat. I lost about 15 pounds after moving to Seattle. A lot of it was the stress and emotion of the move. Some of it was not knowing anyone, and thus having no excuse to go out drinking. But some of it was having someone else in my apartment who would (passively) make me feel guilty about sneaking late night snacks or eating a 2nd portion of my dinner meal.

Now that I've started to meet people who like going out, I find myself in bars a lot more frequently than in the Spring. And with Huan living it up in the China I don't have anyone to shame me into not eating. The combination (along with a stretch of work that kept me out of the gym and eating takeout food) has encouraged a couple of the lost pounds to find their way back to my belly. Which makes me wonder: Should I get a cat to shame me into not eating?

And then I snap back to reality and realize that cats are lame. I'd rather be fat.

Hard days work

I wish I had some pictures to share, because it would make telling this story a whole lot easier. That's not entirely true... there isn't much of a story here. I spent today experiencing a real college football game, which not only includes an actual game but 2+ hours of pre-game tailgating, another couple hours of post-game tailgating, and finally wrapping up with a traffic-filled bus/car ride home.

Being a Duke alum I never really experienced real college football. Sure, we played Florida State and other actual football teams, but I think we won 9 games during my four years. The whole Duke football experience was so lame that students didn't even bother to drink at their dorms before walking 1/4 mile to the stadium, where tickets were free. It was awful. There is no debating that Duke has the worst Division 1 football program in America.* Basketball made up for it at the time, but now that I'm out of college I feel I missed something that most of my friends didn't.

So when I buddy from work offered up a ticket to the UW/Ohio State game I snapped it up. We were able to find a tailgate, albeit with Ohio State fans. Brats, sausages, grilled onions, bean salad, enough brownies to kill a horse... it was a veritable feast. Oh, and there may have been some beer. I love that the police can't/won't do anything about people walking around with keg cups, but they take extreme offense if you are standing around with an actual beer can. Is that what our public safety officers have been relegated to? Making me put it in a cup?

Anyhoo, the only thing more fun than a pre-game tailgate is a post-game tailgate, especially when the tailgate host's team won. UW gave OSU a fight for 30 minutes, but they didn't have enough in the tank to pull it out. I barely had enough in the tank to finish out the tailgate and make it home. Some of us leave it all on the field. And some of us leave it all in the parking lot.

* Holy S***! Duke WINS! First win against a real team in 3 years! Woo-hoo!

No me tuteas

Tutear was easily my favorite verb in Spanish in high school. Babelfish can't translate it, but roughly it means "to use the familiar 2nd person pronoun", which in Spanish is a pretty big deal. (The formal 2nd person uses the same conjugation as the 3rd person.) This word has popped back into my mind recently as I crawl through a book for short stories by Elliot Perlman called The Reasons I Won't Be Coming.

I first came across Perlman when I read his novel Seven Types of Ambiguity a couple of ago. If I hadn't also read Lolita I would definitely have rated it the best book I read that year. You can click on the links and get better summaries and reviews than what I can provide, but the gist of Seven Types is that it is told through a rotating series of narrators at varying points in time. Some of the narrators tell the story in the 1st person, some in the 3rd, and a few tell the story in the 2nd person. It is very well done.

Reasons is not that well done. Specifically, it should be the poster-child example of why writing in the 2nd person generally sucks. Imagine writing a letter to someone... it would include a lot of phrases like "You remember when..." and "When you did that thing it made me feel good that you were there..." etc etc etc. That's 2nd person writing. (Or, for sports fans, Hubie Brown pretty much calls the NBA and NBA draft in the 2nd person). Unless the author can give the reader a reason to empathize with the "you" (or, in the case of a letter, you are the "you") they are pretty much wasting their time. I keep thinking "is the narrator talking to me? No? Then who am I supposed to be?"

It's all very confusing. Which is why no writer worth his or her salt writes that way. Which is why I like that the Spanish make you ask for permission to use the familiar 2nd person.

(BTW, go buy Seven Types. It's very good.)

3861

That's how many miles my car had on it when I got the oil changed on Saturday afternoon. This isn't a particularly notable story except for what it means I don't do a lot of these days: drive.

Just how little? Let's dig into the stats a little bit:

• I've owned the car for ~280 days
  
• The car had 1700 miles when it was loaded on the trailer to be shipped to Seattle
• Overall I've averaged 13.8 miles/day
  
• While in DC I averaged 28.3 miles/day
  
• While in Seattle I've been averaging just 9.8 miles/day
• A 10,000 mile/year lease is 27.4 miles/day
  

Which means I own a very nice depreciating asset, albeit slightly slower than average. Which kind of sucks.

This is what I'm talking about

Liquid Swords

A Wu-Tang concert is music's version of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. How so?

1. If you can identify how many Wu-Tang members there are, you can't identify which ones are actually on stage at any point in time. Conversely, if you can tell how many people are on stage at any point in time, you can't tell which ones are Wu-Tang members.
2. It is impossible to say whether the music Wu-Tang plays during the concert is any good or not. Conversely, if they are playing good music then it is impossible to say whether it is coming from Wu-Tang or an individual member.
   

This might seem nonsensical, but have you been to a Wu-Tang show? I tried counting the number of people on stage tonight about six or seven times. I got numbers ranging from 7 to 13. My best guess is that there were 9 people with microphones who participated regularly, two hype men, and one DJ. But the confidence intervals around each of those numbers is just huge... there may have only been 5 Clan members present. Or maybe they've added a few. The point is that the Wu-Tang is unknowable.

So, is unknowable any good? Who knows. A few of the songs they played during the set were fantastic, but in reality those were just solo performances by Method Man, RZA, or Ghostface with some backing by the rest of the Clan. When they were all participating in a song it was terribly hard to follow what was going on. I can see why their studio albums are great... RZA can orchestrate the competing voices when he has them running through a mixer, but on stage he's just herding cats. The concert was hard to distinguish from the sound check at times.

All that said, I think they've recognized that their influence on the rap scene far outstrips the material they've contributed to the genre, and so they play to their fame: the W hand sign, the love of weed, the whole Asian fetish thing. They haven't really released a relevant album in 5+ years, yet they headlined the last night of a three day music festival in one of the whitest cities in America. They certainly throw out hardcore lyrics, but they don't sound very convincing... they pretty clearly did the rock festivals this summer to pimp a new album that may (or may not) be released this fall. Masta Killa spent five minutes begging people to buy his album and to buy something being released by ODBs family. Or by ODB. Again, the Wu-Tang's business is only knowable by the Wu-Tang.

The other striking thing about the concert was the crowd. I remember some guys from my freshman dorm driving to Raleigh to see Wu-Tang. The concert started with someone (presumably a Wu-Tang Clan member) telling all the white people to move to the back (they did), and most of the audiences pulled out real guns for Wu's 21 gun salute. That same band didn't play tonight. The audience looked like they hadn't moved since Joss Stone opened the day at noon. There were some fat spliffs on the field, but it was mostly white kids bouncing to songs written about the same time they were born. They didn't seem to mind that they were listening to a mediocre show put on by one of the great rap groups of all time. Or was it a great show by one of the mediocre rap groups of all time?

That's the beauty of the Wu-Tang. We can never know anything with certainty.

How many Wu-Tang members can you see?

Gratuitous night shot of Seattle