Month: August 2006

dinosaur jr. gear stolen

~ jamie ~ 2 Comments

in what has to be one of the uncoolest moves i’ve read about in quite a while, someone has stolen all of dinosaur jr.’s equipment from a trailer parked in long island city, new york.

i read about it on digg.

get the word out–here’s the list of equipment:

Attached and listed below is a list of gear that was stolen out of the
Dinosaur Jr trailer last night (Tuesday 8.29.06) outside of their hotel
in Long Island City, NY. We would appreciate spreading the word and
passing this list around in hopes of recovering their gear. Please
notify and alert your local guitar shops, pawn shops, music and web
stores etc. to keep an eye out for this gear. Feel free to send this
list to any and all band, tour and production managers, guitar freaks,
touring personnel, venues, musicians and or thieves that you think
could help us.

If anyone has any information about this gear, please call Brian
Schwartz at the number below or on his cell at 303.956.9671 or Bart
Dahl at 212.777.0922 or on his cell at 720.331.1836. Thanks and Best,
Brian

Guitars:

1959 Fender Jazzmaster SN# 38927.
-decal coming off. cracked headstock at top near low E peg. color
black with purple/bluish sparkle coming through. adonized pick guard
gold metal. tuneomatic bridge gold, tuning pegs gold.

1961-3 Fender Jazzmaster SN# 62012.
-purple sparkle, black pickup covers. headstock repaired, a whole new
piece of wood was glued on for the top part of the headstock under the
tuners and up a 1/2” , along the whole top of the headstock. gold
tuneomatic bridge, gold tuners

1964-5 Fender Jazzmaster SN# L21581.
-orange, white pearl pickguard, stickers we’re all over it, original
tuners.

Fender Purple Jazzmaster new SN# R074329.
-purple sparkle with matching headstock gold adonized guard tuneomatic
bridge.

Rory Gallagher Stratocaster new SN# R25507.
-has a big gold grover tuning peg on low E

Rickenbacker 197? Fireglo Bass SN# 4001.
-checker-board binding.

B.C. Rich Warlock Bass SN# 4242413

Custom pedal board with custom audio electronics RS-10 foot controller,
Teese RNC2 wah pedal, boss stage tuner, mute box, and cables.

Cymbals:
[1] Paiste 20″ 2002 medium
[1] Paiste 20″ giant beat
[1] Paiste 20″ 2002 crash
[2] Paiste 19″ 2002 crash
[2] Paiste 15″ 2002 sound edge top hi-hats
[1] 15″ 2002 sound edge bottom hi-hats

On Black backpack with Sony headphones, tools, etc.

i saw dinosaur jr. back in the day (all right, way way back in the day) when i djed at einstein’s. amazing live band. no one deserves this, least of all an amazing guitar god like j mascis.

cranky about my crankiness

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i have been cranky, to be truthful, for days now.

and i’m getting really cranky about it.

thankfully, i have friday off. my last summer friday of the year. it’s a wonderful new york tradition. do they have them where you are? all summer (memorial day to labor day) we get a total of seven fridays off.

i’d never heard of them until i got to new york. sure do love them.

and they are probably the only thing saving me from lunacy right now. work is a pita. not the bread. it’s an acronym. figure it out.

it’s really bad when you are so cranky that just the mere thought of how cranky you are makes you even crankier. and i lost sleep over work issues last night, which is a big no-no for me, and that made me, you guessed it, cranky.

i need to stop, and take a deep breath, and take stock, and take a chill pill, and take five, and take my time, and take it easy, and take it as it comes.

except that i’m kind of enjoying my cranky mood. don’t tell me to cheer up.

new restaurant

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it’s kirk’s birthday. happy birthday, baby!

we’re going to try a new restaurant: 809 restaurant. it’s a churrascaria in the hood, just a few blocks away on dyckman.

yes, that’s the name of a real street.

i’ll report back–kirk’s just getting home.

update: dinner was fantastic.  it’s not really a churrascaria–more of an upscale dominican restaurant.  i had an appetizer with a trio of tostones filled with various flavors of crab and seafood–excellent.  kirk’s appetizer was perfectly cooked shrimp on a bed of coconut risotto, and it was outstanding as well.

the entree was an enormous meat platter for two–skirt steak, filet, pork, chicken and sausage all grilled to perfection. far too much for four people to eat, let alone two.  we have leftovers for days.  and we split a huge pitcher of sangria–delicious and at $18 the deal of the century.

with two desserts the bill was under $100, which considering the level of food and the atmosphere (very cool interior design) was quite reasonable.  a starter glass of sangria each and an after dinner drink was on the house.

we’ll definitely be back.

pulling the trigger

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as you can see, if you visit often, i went ahead and switched to wordpress from greymatter.

hence the new look…let me know what you think.

it’s obviously a work in progress, and there’s still a lot of content at the old site that i need to move over. there’s a lot of content, though, that to be honest i probably won’t bother with. javascript games, the end of the internet, webrings, and some other stuff will be available at the old site (there’s a link to “old site” in the sidebar) but not the new one. at least for the time being. i’d imagine at some point it will just all go, and the link to the old site will be deleted.

there’s a lot of cleanup to do, so be patient. overall, it’s a good move–there’s just so much more functionality in the new site, and once everything is done, it’ll be easier for me and better for you.

have fun. explore. give me feedback.

hedging my bets

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i’ve loved greymatter (the blog software that i use to create the pages on this site) for quite some time. and i’ve extolled its virtues, and been a cheerleader, and stuck by it.

but i’m also a tinkerer, and i’m also a bit paranoid. the main developers of greymatter have abandoned the project, and i’m afraid that the software isn’t going to keep up with the times. there are people who have picked up the pieces and are trying to move on, and i’m helping them in my own very small way when i can, but still.

i need a backup.

so i’ve installed wordpress on my blog, and i’ve imported the old greymatter entries, and it’s up and running. you can check it out, if you like.

i dithered a lot about whether or not to make this move. and then, when researching alternatives, i ran across posts by old greymatter forum people in the wordpress support forums. lots of familiar names. and they all seemed to have switched successfully to wordpress from greymatter.

the blog part of the software is airtight and installation was a breeze, as was the importation of all the old blog entries. it’s basically a carbon copy of this site–all the blog stuff is there and works perfectly, but nearly all of the jamie-specific pages aren’t there yet. and the ones that are there will have some broken links.

it’s a long term project, and i may never switch over completely.

but it’s nice to know i can if i choose to.

mosquito trucks, ddt clouds, and me

~ jamie ~ 9 Comments

southern people of a certain age will identify with this, for sure.

when i was a kid, living in a fairly swampy area of north florida, mosquito control was a big deal. in the county i grew up in (citrus), it was probably the main reason to have a government at all, other than keeping the jail open.

mosquito control consisted of a truck that prowled all the county streets and roads on a regular basis. the truck had a tank and a compressor or something, and it spewed a voluminous white fog that would spread through the neighborhood and ostensibly kill all of the mosquitoes. you could hear it coming from quite a distance, so you had fair warning of when it was headed your way.

and the kids in the neighborhood (me included) would hear the truck, and run out into the yard to await its arrival. when it came, we’d run behind the truck for blocks, playing tag and running in the dense fog, running and breathing deeply and heavily until we were bone tired and quit from exhaustion.

geez, louise. had we lost our minds?

or, more accurately, i suppose, have we now lost our minds?

and where were our parents during all this? did not one of them have the sense to tell us not to play in the fog?

wow.

so i was telling this story to kirk this morning, and i got to thinking about it. so i did what anyone would do.

i googled.

and by googling i found out that the thick fog in the late ’60s was ddt, and that louisiana still has to tell people not to run behind the truck, and that errol morris shows the mosquito truck in his movie called vernon, florida.

and i also found out that by googling mosquito truck ddt you can read about an entire generation of people who ran behind the mosquito truck like i did.

i hope that kids today are smarter than we were. i think they are.

and i think that, unlike us, they may stay that way. i think i killed a lot of brain cells over the years, running behind that truck. not to mention what all else might still happen in the future.

ddt. ddt. wow.

kirk’s new masai warrior shoes

~ jamie ~ 3 Comments

so kirk got new shoes.

this in itself is not exactly news. people buy shoes all the time.

what’s news is the shoes he got, which are these extra special shoes that make you walk like a masai warrior.

mbt shoes.

m=masai, b=barefoot, t=technology. and apparently the masai walk differently, because they walk on soft surfaces and land on their arches and push off differently, instead of coming down hard on your heels and pushing off with your toes.

the latter style of walking, if the hype is to be believed, gives you back pain and problems that the masai never have.

so the soles of these shoes are bulgy in the middle, and have no heel or toe to speak of. this is supposed to force you to duplicate the walk of the masai warrior, and eliminate your back and hip and knee and leg and thigh and calf problems.

i have to say that they look somewhat odd, but the concept makes some sense to me. i’m letting kirk be the guinea pig for this one. i can’t decide if this is all just marketing crud (walk like a warrior! people have been walking wrong for centuries! learn the secrets of walking that the multinational corporations are trying to hide from you! be the first to join the revolution!) or if there’s something to it. if it works, i might have to get myself some too.

after we pay the visa bill for kirk’s pair, that is. these things ain’t cheap.

i’ll keep an open mind.

really.

site revisions and greymatter news

~ jamie ~ 2 Comments

i spent a good chunk of time in the past couple of days doing some long overdue site maintenance. a lot of it was behind the scenes–adding google analytics tracking info so i can see how the site is used, finally revising some last remaining odd pages to give them valid xhtml, and tweaking the css (the preferences file that gives the pages their uniform look).

you know, technical boring stuff that interests me for some odd reason.

some of the changes are more apparent to all of you, the browsing public. the navigation links on the side have been revamped, regrouped and streamlined. some pages have been combined (the games page and the sounds page, for instance). and i’ve increased the line height of the blog entries’ text to make them more legible. hopefully you’ll more easily see stuff that you never noticed in the previous disorganized mess of a website.

one final technical note–this site uses the open-source software greymatter. it was the progenitor of nearly all blogging software, and its flexibility is still, in my opinion, unmatched. if my blog looks somewhat unlike the standard blog you come across, it’s because greymatter is coded so that you can tweak the appearance of your site to your heart’s content, if you know a little about what you are doing. most other blogging software forces you into certain appearance parameters, and you get all these blogs that generally look pretty similar.

that’s why i was a bit dismayed to learn that the support forums at greymatterforums.com had been taken off the web. apparently the site managers felt that it was “time for greymatter to die” and yanked the treasure trove of helpful posts off the web without warning or full explanation.

perhaps they are right. i used the wealth of info in the forums to greatly modify this site for rss feeds, for spam blocking in comments, for visual issues, and many other things. but certainly those of us who already have their sites set up and feature-complete have little use for the forums, except to occasionally help new users when we could. i’m not sure, though, that new users should be encouraged to use greymatter, especially with all the alternatives out there.

alternatives that are moving forward with active development. at the end, there were not more than 5 or 6 well-informed forum users who posted even infrequently. it’s probably a bit deceptive to make new users think that they are going to get decent support with aging software via a somewhat stagnant forum, and it’s definitely unfair to expect a very few power-users to support an entire community.

i’m happy with greymatter, even though it’s last generation software that in all likelihood is not going to have further development. i like it, it works, and barring some unforeseen events, it’s here to stay on my site. and there’s a new support forum starting, albeit without the historical posts, so maybe there is a bit of a future for the old girl. i’ll stop by occasionally and see how it’s going.

probably, though, it’s r.i.p., greymatter. it’s better to burn out than to fade away.

and thanks, noah, for giving birth to it.

update: shut my mouth. the new forum site is pretty active already, and there’s a core of people proceeding apace on a new version of greymatter. shows you how much my punditry is worth.

snakes on a plane, baby

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i’ll be brief.

i had the most fun i’ve ever had in a movie theater, watching this movie just now. and that includes over a hundred viewings of the rocky horror picture show. it’s the most perfect summer movie imaginable–the tone and the script are dead on target.

it’s the quintessential example of a movie as entertainment. as such, there’s not a reason in the world why it shouldn’t get a best picture oscar nod.

i’m serious. it’s that good. go see it. get rowdy, yell at the screen, go bonkers, have a blast.

update: so much for hype. number one, but with a paltry $15 million at the box office. oh well. maybe it will have legs.

i was hoping for more, and so was our stock price.

liza, and snakes on a plane, and kiki and herb

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saw liza minnelli performing at coney island last night…incredible show.

it was a free concert, but the organizers had set up seats in the center of the field in front of the stage, and were selling them for $10 which went to charity. so for $10 i got a nice comfortable seat about twenty feet from the stage, in the center.

i did get there a bit early, to get a seat that good. by showtime, the place was a madhouse. i’m not good at estimating crowd size, but it had to be in the tens of thousands. and liza was great–very natural, unplanned, and spontaneous (for liza, anyway). she sang “cabaret” and “new york new york” at the end, of course, but preceded that with an atypical selection of interesting and well-chosen material, all of which brought the house down. standing wild cheering ovations after each song, and sometimes halfway through the songs.

and she was onstage for a good hour and a half. i think. maybe more–i didn’t have a watch.

it’s the second year she’s done this at coney island, and the last thing she said as she left the stage was “see you next year.”

i am so there. kirk stayed home and worked on the show he’s directing. his loss. he’ll be there next year. i’ll make him go.

and tonight, “snakes on a plane”, baby. i fandangoed tickets for 5:00. can’t wait to see those motherfucking snakes on that motherfucking plane. go on with your badass self, samuel l.

and sunday, a return trip for kiki and herb on broadway. we found another ticket deal.

i have a feeling we’ll probably go a third time before it’s all over. they are that good.

god, i love living in new york.

finding my voice

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

this is the most disorganized schizo blog on the planet.

well, maybe that’s overstating things a bit. i’ve seen a few myspace pages, and they have more than lapped me on the track of incoherence. but most people who do this sort of thing semi-seriously have a theme, and a point of view, and they talk about things consistently and cohesively.

and they play the blog game as well. that is, they find other like blogs and comment on them, and link back to them, and then that person does the same, and everyone logrolls (the nice way to put it) or circle jerks (the non-euphemistic way to put it) themselves to lots of comments and feedback and trackbacks and such.

i just don’t do that, because, to be frank, this is more of a personal diary than a blog for you to read. if you find it interesting, more power to you. read away. but i really find this more of a way for me to be able to look back over time and see what concerned me, or what i found interesting.

when i started the blog part of queerspace.com, in october of 2004, every other blog entry i wrote was political. heat of the moment, with the election and all, i suppose.

now i could care less. or couldn’t care less. i forget which is correct. couldn’t is certainly more logical.

and i’ve been feeling a bit guilty over the past little bit, because a lot of my blog entries have been little more than collections of links that i saw online somewhere, and linked to and commented on a bit. that’s really lazy.

but it accurately reflects my level of involvement at the time, so that’s useful for me.

useful for you? maybe. maybe not.

like i said, read it if you want to. evidently at least a few dozen people do.

which puts you, i suppose, in exclusive company of a sort.

today’s silly links? reviews for kiki and herb, which were nearly uniformly positive glowing raves. ben brantley at the ny times, whose opinion probably matters the most, had the biggest rave of them all.

ny times review of kiki and herb alive on broadway (free registration required)

ny daily news review of kiki and herb alive on broadway

ny post review of kiki and herb alive on broadway

i’m definitely going back, assuming i can get tickets. these reviews, in combination with the extremely limited run, might make well-priced seats scarce.

getting caught up

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i’m back at it. camping was fantastic. i’d forgotten how much i liked it. and kirk can build a good fire, so we had all our food cooked on the open wood flame. yum, yum.

i didn’t forget to go to kiki and herb this time, and the show was, as always, phenomenal. don’t miss it. it was the last show before opening night tonight, and they were up for it. i’m going to go back again, assuming i can get a ticket deal of some kind.

the fake steve jobs blog, which i’ve written about several times, is back in operation. check it out–hysterically funny writing.

and, although kansans are once again supporting evolution in schools, it appears that the united states is ranked next to last among countries of the world in acceptance of this scientific theory. the chart depicting the results is truly depressing. only 40% of americans accept evolution as true, with 60% stating either that it is false, or that they are not sure. at least we are smarter than the turks in this regard.

the continuing adventures of the fake steve jobs

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

for whatever reason, my favorite new blog (which i’ve written about before), is down and out.

the fake steve jobs assures us that he will return, but in the meantime if you missed out on the fun, you can look at the google cache of the old site.

the fake steve says about all this:

Dudes, I had no idea this blog was getting read so widely. I’m being held in captivity during the WWDC — scary story of rendition etc., which will be my firt new post. Anyway, I will relaunch soon, not sure where yet. Will keep you friggin informed. Like, with a post here or whatever. And FYI this is NOT an Apple publicity stunt. You really don’t think they have that much sense of humor, do you?
Cheers–
Fake Steve.

of course, he gets even more publicity now, because everyone puts on their tinfoil hats and starts spouting conspiracy theories involving apple legal.

whatever. come back soon, fake steve jobs.

and on a side note, i’ll be camping in the deep dark woods for the rest of the week–ricketts glen, in pennsylvania. and will therefore not be blogging until next monday at least.

i know you are crushed.

kansans regain common sense

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opponents of evolution have lost their majority on the kansas state board of education.

well, thank god. who, no doubt, also believes in evolution, because she let it evolve after she set the big bang in motion, or whatever. so now schoolchildren in kansas will hopefully at least have a clue about what the scientific method entails.

and the subhead of this post is “but kentuckians lose theirs”. their common sense, that is.

it’s in kentucky, you know. the new creation museum. where you can see exhibits depicting dinosaurs co-existing with adam and eve, and other anachronistic anomalies.

thanks to this article and the efforts of this museum, i now know that all fossils on earth are a result of the great flood described in genesis.

who knew? screw that carbon dating stuff, right?

art, and more art

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

i’m seeing the wedding singer, broadway musical version, tonight. as their homepage shouts at me, “i love the ’80s!!! so i’ll adore this show!!!!!” i’m sure.

the tickets were free. who knows. i might be surprised. kevin cahoon, my favorite hedwig, is in it, so at least i can enjoy watching him, i hope.

but, having seen a bit of it on the tonys award show, i’m not hopeful. but it’s something to do.

and, given the 100 degree heat in new york today, we thought we’d see a movie beforehand, to kill time and beat the heat. so we’re seeing clerks ii at 5:00.

now that i’m excited about. i love kevin smith. chasing amy is one of my all-time favorite movies. and jay and silent bob are the best.

snoochie boochies! i can hardly wait.

more quick takes

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fidel castro just might be on his last legs. too bad we have such nitwits in the executive branch of government, who if castro exits stage left will no doubt botch a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. bush, of course, is feeling fine. thanks, karma.

floyd landis, we hardly knew ye. according to the ny times, the testosterone in landis’s blood sample is not natural, but synthetic. game over? looks like it. always get natural testosterone, injected naturally. i swear by it–it works wonders for me.

mel gibson swears he is not a bigot, even though he also swears that jews are the source of all wars in the world today. is gibson a bigot? is the pope catholic? appropriate questions, those.

thanks everyone. i’ll be here all night. don’t forget to tip your waitress.