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 week of august 4th, 2003 elliott smith "angel in the snow" from the yeti zine cd 
 
say hello ... brad at bradleysalmanac dot com |
Thursday, July 31, 2003 The First Boston Flash Mob : Ode to Bill That rumbling you hear is the stampeding of dozens of bloggers back to their computers to share details of this evening's first Boston Flash Mob. Ok, technically, it was in Cambridge. Harvard Square to be exact. The masses descended on their assigned locations, picked up their instructions, and headed over to a store called the Harvard Coop at around 7pm. If mob success is measured in sheer numbers of mobsters, it went well. If it's measured in subtlety, or how well people followed directions ... not so well. The media attention garnered in the past week was both good and bad... it blew much of the surprise, but it brought what I think ended up being a much wider variety of attendees, and a whole new aspect to the mob experience. I was glad to see a mother and daughter waiting at the Border Cafe to pick up their instructions. While the majority of the crowd was probably 20-30 something hipster-types, it certainly wasn't exclusively so. What the attention also brought was a whole lotta cops. Seriously. Count 'em...  Walking cops, bicycle cops, motorcycle cops, cops in cruisers, cops in unmarked cars, even an ambulance. And then there were the reporters. TV reporters, print reporters, cameramen. There were reporters talking to the police. There were reporters on TV talking about the police. There was even a helicopter in the sky waiting in vain for footage (not only were they an hour too early, but the thing was happening indoors. Oops.) Everyone was all worked up for this 'hot new fad', which may have been officially dead the moment it hit the Yahoo front page headlines a couple days ago.  But one Boston mob needed to be attempted, and so it was. As interesting as it was to have that many people crammed into the greeting card section of the Coop, it was more a noisy gawkathon than mysterious occurance. The crowd was supposed to remain "eerily quiet", and didn't even come close until someone shushed 'em near the end of the 8 minute greeting card search. People were also instructed to wait quietly a few minutes before pulling out the cameras. Apparently no one read that part, or thought they were exempt. Go figure. It was an out and out flash-fest. Sometimes it looked like the picture takers outnumbered the subjects. There will be no lack of documentation of this Mob.  The only thing the crowd did do 'right' was stick to the story. Every person that I overheard answer a reporter's question of "Why are you here?" responded the same... "Just looking for a card." "For who?" "For my friend Bill" "Where's Bill from?" "New York". I asked the confused sales clerk at the counter "What's the deal with all the people, anyway?" His explanation? "I dunno... some Channel 4 thing." "All I wanted to do was pick up a card." "Well, good luck with that," he said. Then, of course, somebody jumps in and starts tellin' the guy "Oh, actually, this is a new thing called a Flash Mob, where random people get together and... blah blah blah." Yeesh. The RIAA Radar : Boycotting Made Easier Fire up a search on Magnetbox's handy-dandy RIAA Radar to find out if the label that released the cd you're thinking of buying is a member of (and therefore supports) the now-irrelevant Recording Industry Association of America. An easy way to keep your cash from going towards misguided lawsuits and pointless ad campaigns. Send a message to the RIAA : Adapt or Disappear.  This album was found to have been released by a member of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) S.D.R.E. Minus One = The Fire Theft Do you share my Sunny Day Real Estate love? Dang, I loved that band, although not quite as much near their end as near their beginning. They put on some pretty intense live shows, although by the time the final tour hit, things got a bit too crazy, a little too crowded for my tastes. Well, three fourths of Sunny Day (all but guitarist Dan) are picking things back up as The Fire Theft. Received via email just now, via the old Sunny Day mailing list ... Hello, hello!New sound? Hmmm. More stripped down with just the one guitarist? Will we get the sweeping, almost proggy songs of the last S.D.R.E. record, or will they lean towards the catchier Diary-era rock songs? Maybe a bit o' both? Something completely different? Time to check out the demo mp3 at the Fire Theft site. Wednesday, July 30, 2003 A Digitial Dilemma : BuyMusic Stealing Music? Here's a story for ya. Seems the launch of the new PC-centric digital download spot BuyMusic.com is not only full of the dreaded "technical difficulties", but it's walking a dangerous legal tightrope as well. Given what former Amalgam band member Jody Whitesides has to say, it might be more than a tightrope... they might be walking themselves right off a cliff. Pimping your new online service as "helping the artists survive" in the face of illegal downloading and declining cd sales, while at the same time not getting permission from (or offering payment to) a potentially large number of lesser-known artists is not exactly the cleanest way to kick things off. Sure, maybe they're clueless. Maybe they thought the catalog they bought from the Orchard distribution weasels was legitimate. Not bothering to ask for documented proof of digital distribution rights, though? More than a slight oversight. If what Whitesides says is true, that his original contract with Orchard included no reference to digital rights, it'll be very interesting to see how this all plays out, to say the least. Me? I'll just wait for PC-compatible access to iTunes, which is still rumored to be happening by the end of the year. Even though my Archos Jukebox Recorder 20 (with the excellent RockBox open-source firmware, of course) is treating me just fine, once PC-iTunes hits... an iPod will be mine. Addendum : Speaking of iTunes, here's an interesting article at BusinessWeek.com on the battle between artists and iTunes downloaders when it comes to single tracks vs. full-album downloads. One of the Mysteries : Contagious Yawning Ok, there are three things I'd like to know... 1. Why is yawning contagious?I'm not quite curious enough to google those up, but apparantly some researchers at the State University of New York in Albany are on the contagious yawning case. A RedNova article published yesterday doesn't quite solve the mystery, but it certainly proves the existance of the phenomenon (as if we didn't know that), and also asserts that people who are more self-aware and empathetic are more likely to catch yawns from others. Hmmm. Time will tell if they can prove why it actually occurs, though. As for my other two questions, what's the deal there? Monday, July 28, 2003 The B.W.E.F : Above & Below Charlestown Yesterday afternoon the mutating group known as the Boston World Explorers Foundation got together to check out an abandoned stretch of highway over Sullivan Square in Charlestown. Possibly legal, sure, but quite safe given the complete lack of traffic and apparant structural integrity (well, for pedestrians at least). Even though auto access was impossible, we couldn't help but paranoidly glance behind us whenever we heard traffic on the streets below.  photo by dave belson The overpass was a bit shorter than we expected, so we extended the tour with an even more-probably-illegal walk through a closed chunk of route 99 that headed underground. Traffic was still flowing in the other direction, so we tried to act casual while sidestepping the pigeon carcasses. The tunnel ended up near the Mystic River drawbridge, so we headed to the riverside for a look at the ball fields, industrial sites, and docked gas tankers. Here are my photos from the walk, and fellow explorer Dave Belson has a few here on Ofoto. If you're interested in possibly joining the B.W.E.F. on the next irregular outing, sign up for the new Yahoo Group and you'll be in the message loop. There have already been trips to Castle Island and Beacon Hill, and you're more than welcome to have a say in where the group heads next. Miss Vermont vs. Tucker Max : Case Dismissed A couple months back I wrote a bit about unabashed rude-boy Tucker Max and his legal battles with former Miss Vermont Katy Johnson. The gist of the whole mess was that Tucker kissed (ok, more than kissed) and told, and Katy didn't like that he shared their story with the world. Given her online persona as the abstinant Queen of Nice at her totally over-the-top website (which is mysteriously non-existant this morning), it's apparant she had a self-imagined image to uphold, and that Tucker's account completely contradicted that. So she dropped a lawsuit and a temporary injuction down on him and his site. Simply put, she wanted to shut him the hell up, to at the very least have the courts force him to take down the details of their affair (which were, admittedly, painfully brutal). Her and her family called him 'depraved' and 'a complete liar', not just claiming he had no right to share the story, but denying that much of it even took place. Well, unsurprisingly, the case has been dismissed. Voluntarily and without prejudice. Mr. Max, who was unable to speak publicly about the lawsuit once it started, now shares every detail, including the original story of their sordid, dysfunctional tryst, all the legal documents, and even so-called proof that their affair took place. He may be a jerk, but it appears he may be an honest jerk. I'm certainly not defending Tucker and his mysogantastic website, but you've gotta give him a little bit of credit for sticking up for anyone's right to speak about their life, their own experiences, online, and for his willingness to offer up a look inside the whole process. You've gotta wonder what prompted Miss Johnson to yank the lawsuit (logic? nah.), and exactly what happened to her cheesariffic website. Has she gone into hiding? Quietly reinventing herself? Maybe working on a followup to her book ""True Beauty: A Sunny Face Means A Happy Heart"? Oh, we can only dream. update : her site's back. whew, the world was such a darker place without it. Almanac Mp3 of the Week : Huffy's "Quilted" Monday morning means another mp3. This time around I thought I'd offer up a rare treat from three guys once collectively known as Huffy. In Burlington, Vermont in 1995, Tim Lauben, Jeff Brown, and Nate Wells put out what was probably the best cassette-only release I've ever heard. "Sunny Drive Time" was six songs, catchy as all hell, which transformed Huffy from the lo-fi duo of Tim and Jeff to the full-on rock band they became when Nate joined up. I was pretty much blown away, and I still listen to the songs often. I hope they won't mind that I'm sharing one of 'em, Quilted, with you. Ringing Ear Records released a 7'' with two of the other SDT songs ("Anything Goes" / "Handlebars"), which you can actually still pick up even though the label isn't around anymore. A fourth song, Carry, can be downloaded from the My Life or Some Dream compilation page here on this site. For a whole lot more Huffy, Me Too! Records put out their posthumous No High Five cd, and you can also get the Ringing Ear 7'' there as well. Tim now plays in Brooklyn's The Red and The Black, Jeff's doing law-type stuff and is about to get hitched, and where the hell's Nate? I've kinda lost track. Friday, July 25, 2003 The Globe on the Boston Flash Mob : Jumping the Gun Ok, I understand that Ms. Talcott here is just trying to do her job, but is something really news if it hasn't even happened yet? From today's Boston Globe : Shock tacticsWay to go. Congratulations on sucking a little bit of the fun right out of it, you journalista, you. Sheesh. Well, at least we got a little Howard Dean mention out of it. Probably the first Globe article that includes Dean's name but isn't an thinly veiled Kerry campaign advertisement. Small steps. Thursday, July 24, 2003 Hookey on a Hot Day : North Shore Getaway Summer struck Boston with a vengeance a month or so ago, a long-awaited late-June assault of sunshine and perfect temps that made going to work nearly impossible. After a brutal winter and a gray, rainy spring, the sky seemingly opened up to us, and a difficult Wednesday morning decision had to be made. Head to the cube, or head to the shore? Ok, so the decision wasn't that difficult. A sanity day was in order, so I called in, we packed a couple beach bags, and headed northeast as fast as the mid-week traffic would allow. First stop, Devereaux Beach in Marblehead. Cheap parking, lotsa space, not too crowded. Just perfect. Well, it would have been nice if the water wasn't arctic-cold, but the feeling in my feet came back eventually, so no big deal. Oceanside strolls, snack-bar treats, people watching, beach reading... all good things. We had an especially good time playing "Spot the Patriotic-patterned swimsuits" (as you'll see in the photo pages I just posted.)  Sufficiently sunned, we headed over to Salem and hit the gloriously tacky tourist trap known as the Salem Willows Amusement Park, a one-sided strip of videogame goodness, clam shacks, and indoor kiddie rides. The hum of the Salem Willows Arcade was too much to resist, so we went straight in and found a little oasis of 80s-style gaming goodness. A row of classic coin-ops and a dozen old-school pinballers was hidden away in the back corner. My first thought : "If they have Cyclone, I am going to totally. freak. out." As I got closer, I heard it calling to me ... "Ride the Ferris Wheel!", it said. And so I did, while Amie did time with Galaxian. Let's just say that many quarters were spent, and many bonus plays were won. Time travel never came so cheaply, and a pair of photobooth smiles never came so easily ...  As if the day couldn't get any better, we headed to the Salem waterfront for dinner. After a quick visit to the witchcraft museum (and a fairly lame witchtrial presentation), we asked around and discovered there was a free water taxi out to a floating restaurant in the middle of the harbor. Well, how could we say no to that? We got on board, motored between the many moorings, and before we knew it we were ordering at a bar on a mini-barge. "One Corona," I said. "Eight dollars," was the reply. Ahhhhhh... now I knew why the water taxi was free... you're trapped out here in the hot sun with mucho-expensivo summertime beers. But wait, what's this? The Corona is twenty four ounces? Ok, that makes more sense. Big honkin' beers. I'm not sure why everything there was super-sized, but I'm certainly not complaining. Back to the shore, back to the car, and back to Boston. It was hard to head home, but the return trip was made all the better when we passed by this place ...  A perfect exclamation point on a perfect getaway. My sunburn may have faded, but the feeling and the photos remain. A brand new top ten day. A Shout-Out to Some Linking Loyalists I'll probably never stop being completely surprised, and entirely flattered, to find that someone has linked to the Almanac from their personal web space. So, in the spirit of sharing and reciprocation, I offer up my gratitude to ... Thanks, gentlemen. Appreciate it. A FlashMOB in the Pan The growing popularity of the FlashMOB is a catch-22. Part of the beauty of these pointless, perfect 10-minute public gatherings is how they confound the curious, completely confuse the clueless. Every article, every blog post (hell, maybe even this one), chips away at the mystique. That's the dilemma : In order to 'work' (whatever that's defined as), enough people have to know about it to show up... but enough people have to not know about it to build a mystery. This morning's article in Salon continues the inevitable outing, focusing on the ManhattanMOBs that have been happening for a couple months now. Before the inaugural Boston FlashMob even took place, a Globe reporter came sniffing around. Unfortunate, but unavoidable. Word is spreading fast, and it was bound to hit newsprint sooner than later. The FlashMob phenomenon has a very short shelf-life (what doesn't these days?), but I think we're still in a that tiny window of time where it feels new, the collective magic can still happen, the shared experience can still mean something. I'll see ya there. Tuesday, July 22, 2003 Watch What You Read... The Feds May Come Calling Like any relatively level-headed U.S. citizen, I've got my fair share of paranoia about our increasing loss of civil liberties in this new age of the so-called "Patriot Act". This paranoia turns to fear, then to shame, then straight on over to disgust when I read a story like this... Careful: The FB-Eye May Be WatchingRead more here. The 2004 election cannot come soon enough. (thanks for the heads up, kim) On Seeing Seabiscuit (spoiler-free) Saw a sneak screening of the new filmic horse-fest called Seabiscuit last night, and it was officially the first time I've ever been scanned with a metal detector and had my bag searched at a preview. It wasn't for firearms or brass knuckles (not exactly a rough crowd at this high-brow preview)... no, the search was for digital recording equipment. A by-product of bit-torrent and other internet-based file-sharing services, it seems. Only five days before the film's official release, but that's still enough time for someone to record it, encode it, and throw it up there for the masses. Faster, faster, faster. So, yeah, the film itself. For the most part, I like my movies with an edge, a little darker, a little different. Sure, there are a few fairly mainstream flicks in my faves list, but the ones that stick with me are the ones that take chances. For that reason, I have this urge to pick on Seabiscuit for the fairly manipulative, middle-of-the-road, overly-sentimental story that it tells. But I just can't bring myself to do it. It just has too many good things going for it, more than enough to push my inherent indie-snobishness down. First off, the acting. It's been awhile since I've seen a movie so perfectly cast, down to every single character. Chris Cooper and William H. Macy can do no wrong in my book, and they just shine in this sucker... Cooper as the stoic cowboy, Macy as the comic relief radio-announcer. Tobey McGuire, Jeff Bridges, and Elizabeth Banks... all excellent in their roles. Hell, we even get a nice Danny Strong sighting (Jonathan from Buffy). The biggest revelation, though, was a gentleman named Gary Stevens, a renowned real-life jockey who has a history of winning races, but not a bit of acting in his past. I had no idea he was a rider, no clue that he'd never acted before... he was so, so good in his role of famed jockey George Woolf. Usually, when real athletes are cast against a main character, they're kept to bit players and one-liners, but Stevens had a major part to play, and he did it perfectly. Another inspirational bit of casting was having author David McCullough (John Adams, Truman) narrate the introduction and interspersed historical pieces that give the film much of it's context, and help tie the story of Seabiscuit into the story of the U.S. in the wake of the depression. As for the plot ... well, let's just say I've very glad I didn't read the book. I'd imagine that knowing the winners of the climactic races would take quite a bit away from the drama, although they're so excitingly filmed that I could be wrong. If you've seen the previews, you know the basics... it's a story of underdogs, comebacks, second-chances. Not just for men and horses, but for a country. It delivers, although I thought that the message was more than a little ham-fisted. In particular, a couple of Jeff Bridges' speeches were a bit over the top, but that's not to say they were that out of place. If this movie is anything, it's not subtle. It knows what it wants to do, what it wants the audience to feel, and it goes for it. Leave your cynicism at the door for this one, folks. This movie is razor clean-cut... old-fashioned in every sense of the phrase. Hell, even Tobey's occasional cursin' sounded out of place. It's a safe, solid, hope-filled story, with no real villian, no irony... and it's surpasses mediocrity thanks to great actors in wide-open, beautifully-filmed settings. Like Oprah says, "America is just gonna love this movie!". Yeah, they probably will. Monday, July 21, 2003 Almanac Mp3 of the Week : Red House Painters "Wop-A-Din-Din" Full Band Version This week's mp3 is another song that can only be found on an out-of-print 7'' from a few years back. The Red House Painters released this full-band version of "Wop-A-Din-Din" on a single included with the excellent Devil in the Woods magazine, but for some reason chose to open their Old Ramon album with an acoustic recording instead. Me, I think this version is a whole lot better. It's the most heartfelt love song to a cat you'll probably ever hear... but don't let that stop you from downloading. Sunday, July 20, 2003 Photos : A Vermont Summer Visit We spent last weekend with family and friends up on Lake Champlain in Alburg, Vermont. Click here for the digital photographic evidence.  Friday, July 18, 2003 Perfect : Hipster Bingo Oh man. So many laughs to be had ...  It's fun for the whole family. I'm so bringing this to the next show I go to. Should I be bothered that I can look in a mirror and fill in three of the squares? Hmmm... (thanks again to shannon, and the original source of this thing.) Beware : Here Comes the BostonCityMOB Last month, I wrote a bit about the coordinated tech-social ambush known as the FlashMOB : An organized (yet by all outward appearances entirely random) gathering of those-in-the-know that serves no real purpose other than to confound onlookers and give a mob of strangers and friends a common goal, if only for a short period of time. The Manhattan MOBs were a sight to behold, and it looks like San Francisco just got in on the act. I'm fascinated by this whole thing, and really hoped the phenomenon would make it's way up to Boston. Well get ready, because the Boston FlashMob is here. Join us, will you? (thanks for the heads up, shannon) Wednesday, July 16, 2003 Revision Derision : Bush's Blatant Blundering According to the Washington Post, George Walker Bush, the appointed 43rd President of the United States, said the following on Monday, while speaking with reporters about the decision to go to war in Iraq : "We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in."Thing is, um, that's not what happened, George. The inspectors were already there, they were already doing their job. You simply got impatient and would not give them more time. Don't you remember that? It was kind of a big deal at the time. Those are facts. Is it more frightening that Bush is out-and-out lying about known history, or is it scarier to think that he's just that stupid... that he doesn't know from one moment to the next what's going to fly out of his mouth? Or maybe it's more frightening that there's not enough outrage about this. Joe Conason gets it, though. From his journal on Salon.com : "What possessed the president to make an assertion that everyone on the planet knows to be untrue? And who is going to take the responsibility for this one?"Howard Dean's Blog for America calls attention to the lie as well... but the question is, is anybody listening? We can only hope that this is another pointed nail in this administration's cash-lined and oil-shined coffin. Monday, July 14, 2003 Almanac Mp3 of the Week : Helium's "Hole in the Ground" This week's mp3 is the song that started my crush on Mary Timony, and probably still my favorite Helium recording ever. "Hole in the Ground" comes from a perfect piece of vinyl, released in 1993 on Bill Peregoy's seminal Pop Narcotic label, and backed with the also-great song "Lucy". As far as I know, this song has never been released on cd, which is a damn shame. It's pure gold. Back from Vermont... Tuesday, July 08, 2003 Sight, Sound, Smoke, & Shrapnel : Too Close to the July 4th, 2003 Boston Fireworks To thousands of camped-out Boston July 4th revellers, enjoying the fireworks on the Charles River is all about location, location, location. Who can get the closest to the riverbank, who can get to the front of the Hatch Shell stage for the Boston Pops concert. Show up early, jockey for position, get that blanket down, mark your territory. Well, thanks to our generous friends Hollis & Steve, we ended up on a boat in the middle of the Charles, front and center to the big old fireworks barge. Closer to the spectacle than almost a million people. No exaggeration ... we were in the bow of the frontmost boat, right up against the "safety" buoys, and we loved every surreal second of it. Even getting pelted with spent firework casings. Yes, we were bombarded by falling bits of charred cardboard... from dime-sized flakes to big honkin' shards...  We thought we'd be out of the wind current, but it didn't stop us from getting our fair share of the debris. Hollis even got one right in the cheek, and she was kinda proud of it. Her very own battle scar. Actually, we stopped laughing when the rescue boats had to take a nearby spectator away to the hospital. Scary stuff if you're not prepared... the incoming shrapnel explains why some of us are wearing sunglasses in the pictures. It's all fun and fireworks until someone gets it... etc... Despite the dodging of projectiles, waiting hours until 10:30pm (have they ever started so late before?), and having to endure some painful Lee Ann Rimes songs, the lightshow was so worth it. Fourth of July fireworks can't possibly get much better than this...
Monday, July 07, 2003 New on the 'Nac : Mp3 of the Week I've been meaning to start doing this for awhile, and apparantly the time has now arrived ... Every Monday I'll be posting a new Mp3 in the left hand column of the site. I'll probably be skirting (ignoring?) legality here, but I'm certainly not going to be offering up anything that's easily commercially available... I'll be sticking to live songs, out of print and random rare finds, things along those lines. If the man comes down on me, I won't hesitate to pull stuff down when asked, but hopefully I'm small-time enough to fly under the r(i)a(a)dar. I'm working on encoding my entire collection of indie seven inch vinyl, so that's probably where a lot of the stuff will come from. It's also pretty easy for me to record live songs from TV broadcasts, so I'll be doing that, too... ... which is exactly where the first track, Sondre Lerche's "You Know So Well", comes from. I grabbed it from an amazing performance he did on Carson Daly a couple weeks back. The crowd was obviously blown away by him, as was I. I caught him at TTs last month, and he just floored me. Just a young Norwegien guy, his guitar, and his stellar, pitch-perfect voice. Damn, but he's talented. Take a listen. Mikey Dee Linick 1962-2003
Pure Joy : Midway Announces "Arcade Treasures" A mighty wave of teen-videogame-geek nostalgia just knocked me over as I read this article at Gamespot... Midway Announces Arcade TreasuresAs Captain Murphy would say: "Holy. Crap." Marble Madness? Did someone say Marble Madness?! and Gauntlet?! um, uh... and freakin' SINISTAR?! Gah! Must ... resist ... total ... teenage ... regression... Friday, July 04, 2003 Wonders Never Cease (aka T3 vs. Reloaded) If you had told me, before this season's battle of the big-budget sci-fi fests started, that I was going to enjoy Terminator 3 waaaay more than the Matrix Reloaded... I woulda said you'd been partaking of too much of the crack rock. Well, whaddya know... it's true. Terminator 3 rocked my socks right off, and was completely devoid of any cringe-worthy bits (um, rave scene anyone?) that Reloaded was sprinkled with. I like my destruction large-scale, and T3 had tons of it. The insane chase scene, and even the Terminator fights, had weight to them. Substance. Impact. Didn't feel like a videogame. Didn't exist just to impress me with some CGI-skillz. The Matrix gave me a lot of "wow. cool." moments, but T3 gave me a whole bunch of "Gah!" and "Holy shit!" moments. Huge difference. The cast was better, their performances were solid ... Nick Stahl was perfect, Claire Danes didn't annoy me at all, and even Arnold did a better job of acting wooden than Keanu did. (Oh, wait, Keanu's not supposed to be a robot. Nevermind.) Ahnuld's one-liners walked the fine line between amusement and self-parody, and actually worked for me. And geez, shirtless Schwartz is like 56 years old and he's still totally cut. Seriously. He's a musclebound freak o' nature. The plot was simple, the end was satisfying... I never got bored. The expository scenes weren't out of left-field, they weren't forced, and didn't feel like a setup for the next level of a Matrixy videogame. Sure, if you think about time-travel too much, the plot unravels... but the same holds true for the first two Terminator films. Speaking of which, I'd probably rank T3 above T2, although neither beats the first one.... a sci-fi classic that blew my 15 year old mind. When they announced Terminator 3, I was like "eh. whatever.", and didn't even care if I saw it in the theater... it was actually Amie who insisted we see it opening weekend. (exact quote: "If we can see Lord of the Rings at 11 o'clock in the morning on opening day, then we can see T3 the first weekend.") Well, when they announce T4, no more apathy from this guy. Wonders do, in fact, never cease. Wednesday, July 02, 2003 The Case of the Mysterious Links In the past couple of days I've gotten some serious traffic through links buried in the forums of punk comic Nothing Nice to Say and from the message boards at Underground Hip Hop. Now, having an Almanac link somewhere in the boards of NNtS I can understand (they do, after all, have a Nrrd Crap section), but the Underground Hip Hop forum? I'm at a complete loss to explain that one. Tuesday, July 01, 2003 That Old Summer Feeling ... Here it comes again... same time, one year later. As soon as we hit the solstice, the summer blogging slack-off starts. I'm trying to fight it, but forces are conspiring to keep me from posting as much as I'd like to. It's that recurring catch-22... living life a little larger gives me more events to reflect on, more stories to share, more reviews to write... and yet, the very act of living all those things gives me less and less time to blog about 'em. Combine that with busier workdays, and no after-work computer urges, and well, the words begin to backlog. I'd love to tell you about the day I played hookey from my job, and we spent a near-perfect day up on the north shore. I'd be happy to share tons of photos from that trip, or maybe some shots of the excellent Cinerama and American Analog Set shows at TTs last week. I'd love to talk about how good I thought 28 Days Later was, and how you might want to check it out if you're hankerin' for a good, solid scare. Above everything going on, I need to take time to say farewell to my two friends, Micki and Jason. I'm sort of in denial about their departure to L.A. today... just kind of pretending it's not really happening and that we'll be hangin' again this weekend, seeing a movie, sitting around the livingroom, maybe going out to dinner, or fixin' Jason's computer. I've never made such close friends so quickly, and the impact of their absence is gonna be pretty tough to take. I wish 'em the best, and if anything is ever going to get Amie on back a plane, it's the thought of seeing 'em again in a few months...  So, safe travels, you guys. Get on out there and wow the west coast. "Hey, Don't Call... You Never Can Call." Now that the initial registration flood has receeded a bit, the brand-spankin' new National Do Not Call Registry website is fully accessible and ready to receive yo numbah. The servers were just plain overwhelmed (unsurprisingly so) for the first few days, and any attempt to surf there had me pulled down by the undertow. Well, no longer. The sign-up process is remarkably easy. Enter your number, enter your email addy, click a link in the confirmation email, and away you go. If you register before the end of August, then telemarketers can't call you after the 1st of October. If you wait until after that, it's three months from your sign-up date. Not bad at all. The site even has a complaint form if you're wrongly violated. Finally, the targets strike back. There's no small sense of satisfaction in that final mouse click. Telemarketers have single-handedly turned me into a call-screener. I never was before the ever-increasing wave of sneak attacks ... I'd just answer for any old number that came up on the caller ID. Now, if it's "unavailable", "private caller", or a number I don't recognize... I back away slowly and go on about my bizness. It's gotten so bad that sometimes I don't even look at the ID box... I've been tuning out the ring and figuring if it's important, they'll leave a message. Thing is, my folks use a calling card, and it always comes up "unavailable", so I'm missing out on the occasional parent-funded family updates. Sure, turn me into a paranoid call-screener, but don't go getting between me and my 'rents, ya lousy phone-whores! I'm very curious to see if this actually works, and if cold-call telemarketers even pay attention. According to the NDNCR site, "you may still receive calls from political organizations, charities, telephone surveyors or companies with which you have an existing business relationship," so perhaps the flood will just turn into a steady stream. Hey, I'll take it. So long as the Watertown Tab stops calling me. How many times am I going to have to say ... "I live in Allston, you fools!" |
Such sad, sad news this morning.
