( METAL MELTDOWN )

Ah, yes; cheap used ($1!) compilation from Down in the Valley, purchased around 1991. I think I'll toss it, because whatever songs I'd still actually wanna hear* I have elsewhere.

*probably the Anthrax, Dio, and Judas Priest songs, for the record.

Guys, the new Spinal Tap album is quite literally a piece of art, meant to be cherished for ages.* Check out www.spinaltap.com for instructions on how a seemingly normal Digipack-style CD case transforms into an action-packed scene of the legendary band on stage.

The album contains a few new tracks as well as some new interpretations of the classics we know and love (e.g., a funk version of "Sex Farm" and a reggae version of "(Listen To) The Flower People"). As I've mentioned previously, the Jazz Odyssey (in three parts) is included, and it does NOT disappoint.

The highlight for me is probably still "Stonehenge,"** which I feel encapsulates everything about Spinal Tap into a few minutes of sheer hilarity; also, it's a heavy metal parody that manages to laugh at the genre while, well, okay it's basically just laughing at the genre. But srsly, once you learn the words you can't help but sing along, no matter how ridiculous; one could argue this puts the band right up there with the work of Ronnie James Dio. "Holy Diver," anyone? WTF was that all about?!

Highly recommended. \m/

*actually, once I tire of the package and the album I'll likely just fold the thing back up and it'll live on my shelf 'till the end of time...

**the Stonehenge bit in This Is Spinal Tap was somewhat based on actual events. Back in the day, Black Sabbath had a giant Stonehenge prop built, but it proved too cumbersome to transport so it was only used for one or two shows.

Yesterday was pretty much a perfect Saturday! lonely_doll made us yummy breakfast and then we headed over to theophania_79's Perfect Summer Day Party. Oh wait; I walked around Lake Calhoun listening to Primus while lonely_doll was getting a haircut first; sometimes I forget how much I <3 Primus. I think one of the top 10 concerts I've ever been to was when they performed Sailing the Seas of Cheese in its entirety at the State Theater.

ANYWAY, Tiff's party was super fun and it was the perfect day! There were some pretty entertaining dudes there in this other party, but I didn't post about 'em soon enough so I can't come up with any amusing anecdotes. Drinking Red Stripe out in the hot sun made us kind of sleepy, so we came home and took a nap around 5 p.m. or so.

We got up and headed to the Uptown for dinner; guys, the owner sold the lot right next door (which used to be their outdoor patio/parking lot) so you can't sit outside anymore. SAD. There's gonna be some chain store smacked right up against one of Uptown's most-loved establishments, which is stupid.

In the interest of supporting local music we skipped Green Day (although that woulda been cool) and headed to the Cabooze for Cold Colours CD release party. We missed the first band but got there in time to see the last few songs in Urn's set. They were pretty cool; I'm gonna have to check them out again. Cwn Annwn ended their set with Iron Maiden's "The Wicker Man," which was awesome. Cold Colours was really good, too; I got the new CD and this hilarious shirt that's a spoof of an old Journey shirt. :-)

Today we have to bring the little dears over to the vet, and while they're there we're gonna head over to Park Tavern for Eye Openers. Then we have to go grocery shopping and hopefully clean the apartment a little when we get home.

I think I slept better last night than I have in quite some time; I actually crashed on the couch (sofa?) from around 5:30 to 6:30 p.m., got up and had super tasty leftovers for dinner, and then fell asleep again around 10:15 p.m. or so. As far as I can remember, I only woke up to use the bathroom once, but that's most likely due to drinking beer too close to bedtime. Regardless of all the sleep I still feel pretty groggy...

If you want to know why I'm trying to give up coffee, just look up all the possible side-effects of caffeine and apply a good handful of 'em. Sometimes it seems like getting old just means you end up with more and more unwanted side-effects and less and less what you were actually looking for. :-/

There's a hot chocolate button on the coffee machine; pretty tasty! Mostly I'm just trying to drink plenty of water throughout the day.

There's a Google ad stuck to an Onion feed on my friend's page that says:

"You are not your name, your job, or the clothes you wear. Scientology."

It's like, the people that would get this reference are (I would hope) the LAST people that would fall for this shit. Although I do have to say, their web site is getting pretty impressive.

Guys I almost forgot -- I got this shirt at CONvergence:

MY GOD. IT'S FULL OF STARS.

It's awesome because it combines two of my favorite things in this world into one handy T-shirt, kids. Also, I was playing the Rainbow Road track on Mario Kart Wii tonight and it reminded me of something; we did a lot of driving back and forth on 35W (which they've been working on for years, and which currently resembles a set from Terminator Salvation) this weekend and at one point we were like, "Who needs Valleyfair or Mario Kart when you have 35W?!"

Just finished Tom Perrotta's The Abstinence Teacher; I thought it was really good. I love the tone of his books--there's always an element of humor but it's always very dark and much of his work could be read as more tragic than comedic. There's always stuff I can easily identify with, and this book was no exception; I was involved with a church youth group when I was a teenager that in hindsight was more than a little wacky. Parts of The Wishbones and Joe College also cracked me up by being almost like looking into a mirror. His characters all seem kind of sympathetic, too--none of these people are really bad people; they're just all dealing with the circumstances they've found themselves in.

I kind of feel like starting a sci-fi series or something, since CONvergence is still floating around in my head. However, I've also got the new Palahniuk book, which looks intriguing. I wasn't too crazy about Snuff but the premise of Pygmy seems pretty interesting.

It felt weird to be back at work today; I felt a little dazed and confused for a while but eventually it started coming back to me. By the time I was at the gym after work I started feeling normal--it's weird how I cling to these routines so strongly that it actually ends up being a little disconcerting when it all changes for a while. The younger jwright_71673 would probably be at odds with this aspect of 35-year-old jwright_71673.

Well I have to say, that was a pretty awesome weekend.

Next year I'm going to have more of a plan, though; we managed to make it to the Sci-Fi in Academia panel, which was really interesting, but we missed some of the others we wanted to go to. Since it was my first time, it was fun just wandering around looking at stuff the whole time.

I bought a Q*Bert board game! Back in the day, they had this whole collection of board games based on popular video games like Zaxxon, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, etc... They tended to be terribly stupid, but I used to <3 them anyway. The Pac-Man one was pretty elaborate; they used marbles for dots, and your Pac-Man guy could actually "eat" them by pressing down on them and making the thing's mouth move or whatever.

OMG IT'S MONDAY YOU GUYS. :-/

DUDE I HAD A TOTAL FREAK-OUT. o_O

However, I got to play Intellivision.

gabba gabba hey. :-[

There's a guy at the convention wearing a shirt that says AMERICAN TO THE CORE and what's great is it's stretched over his massive beer belly and tucked into a pair of acid-washed jeans.

Khaaaaan!!* >:-O

Whew! Just got back from a nice short "I'm on holiday" workout in the Sofitel's luxurious exercise room (srsly, the stuff in there is in WAY better shape than the stuff at my gym). Now I'm enjoying a nice "I'm on holiday" can of beer in our luxurious room.

Yesterday we got kind of a late start due to heavy drinking the previous night, and went out for some soup and breakfast cocktails around 11:30 a.m. We did a little shopping at the convention (you guys, lonely_doll looks SO HOT in her new corset) and also checked out the art show. They've got some amazing stuff! We're gonna head back over there on Sunday and pick out something to commemorate our first ever Con together.

Then we headed over to the Taste of MN for the free Judas Priest concert, which was really good! In celebration of the 30th anniversary of British Steel, they played the album in its entirety. Also, other than "Prophecy" from Nostradamus and maybe one or two others, every song in their set was at least 30 years old. It was a good time, although navigating St. Paul can be a little disconcerting at times...

We're bummed that we missed the Lebowski party! Sadly, it was after midnight by the time we got back and we were both falling asleep. Today we should be at Con pretty much all day, other than a trip home to feed the cats and give the little dears their pills.

*this never gets old...

Guys! My sweetie sang "The KKK Took My Baby Away" tonight and she was super rad!! I totally have to start a band with her; probably not the band we made up which she LJ'd about a while ago, but a proper band. :-P

We went to the opening ceremony, and then we spent a while in the hotel bar. I ran into Pietro in the men's room; like, we were both just taking care of business and happened to glance at each other and went O HAI.

Tomorrow morning there's a Hello Kitty movie followed by Voltron which I'd totally love to see; hopefully we can make it back over there by 8 a.m.

Oh and also? I had the "Breakfast Club Special" at the House of Toast -- Cap'n Crunch and Pixy Stix on toast. It was sort of horrifying and awesome all at once.

G'night!!

P.S. Hey talekyn -- that's so awesome that you're gonna be in town! Just let us know if there's anything you'd like to see; for starters, the new Dreamhaven location is right in our neighborhood.

I'm at the car dealer getting my oil changed and using the complementary Intarwebz. Also, an excerpt from the February 2009 Highlights for Children:

"Who cares about elections?" says Goofus.

Gallant thinks about what's best for the school.

Hah! This reminds me both of the movie/book Election and of the one episode of Beavis and Butt-Head where Beavis is reading Highlights and goes, "Goofus is cool."

My iPod just went from Virgin Black's "Lacrimosa (I Am Blind With Weeping)" to "Hip To Be Square" by Huey Lewis and the News.

I gave up trying to steer with the Wii Wheel and plugged in a wireless GameCube controller last night, and performed much better. I kind of found myself wishing they'd used the exact same controller scheme as Mario Kart Double Dash; the buttons you use to throw stuff and skid around corners and whatnot are a little different. I suppose it's kind of lame of me to not use the Wii Wheel (which actually works remarkably well), but whatevs.

I had the same reaction to this Mario Kart as I did to the GameCube one; I wasn't that impressed until I'd started unlocking harder courses. Also, it's cool how you can ride bikes as well as karts! If my friends Brian and Crystal ever come visit Minnesota again I'll have to have them over for Mario Kart; we were all pretty equally matched at Double Dash, which makes for pretty intense races.

I should probably track down Mario Kart: Super Circuit for the GBA, and download Mario Kart 64 to the Wii...

Almost time to go to Con!! I has a doctor's appointment this afternoon, and I'm gonna sneak my car in super early tomorrow so they can change the oil and check the brakes, and then I'm free 'till Monday.

There's a track on Kylie's Boombox: The Remix Album 2000-2008 that mixes "Can't Get You Out Of My Head" with "Blue Monday" and it's called "Can't Get Blue Monday Out Of My Head." It's pretty decent, but I found myself a little underwhelmed. I think it's a case of a concept being so brilliant that there's no way the actual execution could possibly live up to expectations. Kind of like making a new series of movies about how Anakin Skywalker ended up as Darth Vader. :-P

What's funny is whenever "Britain's legendary Spinal Tap" reunites Guitar World conducts an exclusive interview with the "band." For example:

NIGEL TUFNEL If you're playing in C you've got a major triad, which is C, E and G. If you flat the third then you've got a minor. Big deal, right? That's not that interesting. But there are these places in between, which I call "caves." You know what a cave is, right? Have you been in a cave ever?

GUITAR WORLD I have once, as a child.

TUFNEL Okay, well, that's not what I really want to know, specifically, about your being in a cave. I just meant if you knew that I call in-between notes "caves." You've got C and D, sharps and flats. In between those are little hidden places that I call "caves," where you hear an overtone. It's not so much naming what scale but what caves you're using. You've got B and you've got B flat. Aha! But in between the B and the B flat is something else, but it's not quite the same, and it creates an illusion that you're somewhere else, and it's subliminal. You can hear the echo of the B and the B flat, but it's not quite the same, and it creates the illusion that you're somewhere else--namely in a cave--sometimes. In that particular solo I went caver. I call it "I'm goin' caver on ya." That's what I say.

What's funny is way back in the late 80s I remember reading this interview with guitar virtuoso Steve Vai where he's talking about "microtones," which I guess are notes in between the notes. It pops up in blues all the time; for example, you play a B flat on the 3rd fret of the G string and do a quarter bend towards B, and you've got a note that resides between the two. Anyway, Vai went on to talk about this whole elaborate system of scales he's worked out using notes that reside in between notes; let's face it, this guy is a little strange, you know? There's always this amazing sense of awareness with the Spinal Tap humor; like, it's funny that "Nigel" is goofing (or possibly "riffing") on the whole eccentric guitar genius stereotype.

My friend Jason was digging through some boxes and found some old magazines I must've let him borrow a long time ago. One is the August 1984 issue of Faces Rocks, which features stories about The Pretenders, Queen, Van Halen (pre-Van Hagar!), The Scorpions, Mötley Crüe, Nena, and Weird Al. The other is the June/July 1984 issue of Video Rock Stars, apparently brought to us by the Teen Beat crew. This one's got Van Halen (they were huge at this point in history), Michael Jackson, Duran Duran, Culture Club, Cyndi Lauper, and The Police. There's a "Giant Color Duran Duran Fold-Out" included, which I should probably hang up in my cube at work. Finally, a copy of Musician magazine from 1989 dedicated to the important metal acts of the day, and the Van Halen issue of Rock N' Roll Comics. Awesome! This stuff is priceless.

Yesterday's Flight of the Valkyries show was amazing; every single band was great! I left with three full-length CDs, and a demo CD from a newer band.

lonely_doll informs me that dinner is nearly ready; hooray!!

Guys! I'm still receiving analog TV on an old set with no converter box:

CH 43: Home Shopping Network
CH 19: The Don't Have An Abortion Channel (srsly, that seems to be the whole point)
CH 13: one of the Spanish channels; right now they're doing a tribute to Michael Jackson
CH 04: a channel that seems to be designed for people who may have missed the boat and are wondering why all of a sudden their TV no longer works; right now they're explaining how since the dawn of the TV era analog signals have been beamed into your house and picked up with an antenna (signature quote: "This is an important step towards the future.")

My friend Tarik and I used to call each other whenever MTV was playing the Thriller video. Like, "Dude, Thriller's on!!" and then we'd hang up and run to the TV to watch it.