never knows best...

dry as toast

Titan Go King's is a 3 girl pop-punk band. They probably average about 4'5" between the three of them, and the are a riot to see live. Seriously. Although almost all of their lyrics are in Japanese, this was still one of the most entertaining shows of the week. The music is solid, and the between song banter is priceless! At one point, the lead singer held up and sign and said, "You love me? I love McDonald's! Yeah! Yeah! I love hamburger!" Seriously, no shit. I bought their new CD, and love it.

From Flattire

That's a description from their SXSW show, but they had similar antics for the Japan Girls Nite show, which made them similarly great. I definitely need to steal Forever Idol from Carlos if it is on the CD that he got.

All in all, a pretty good show.

First the bad, oppresively humid and hot inside the club, I forgot my earplugs so my ears have been ringing for the past 2 days, and I got horribly lost in SF for about 40 minutes (thanks to my passengers for not complaining about it and living with the fact I turned onto the left side of a 2 way street).

The good, more than a couple good bands. Missed a lot of the Emeralds (thanks a lot Nick for getting lost), but hearing them say "my favorite cranberry juice" was good enough. Noodles was not as great as I hoped, I guess having one of their members leave really did make them a less intersting act to watch. Petty Booka put on a nice live show, but I still doubt that their CDs are worth listening to (it's one of the 2 CDs I listened to while sorting CDs for KALX during my short volunteer stint there). And of course Titan Go King's were definitely the best of act of the night, with their zany songs like Yoneda, where they yell Yoneda over and over again in rage against the Mr. Yoneda who ran over one of the members. And, they finished up with Forever Idol, which was not zany but was great.

So where does that leave The Pillows? They meet my expectations, did not exceed them, I guess that's what happens when you only have time for 6 songs and you don't play Bran New Lovesong (my personal favorite of theirs). Also, I think I would have been more enthusiastic if I saw them 2 or 3 years ago, when I was much more so into their music. At least for me, the FLCL halo effect has faded a bit.

I am Nick, and this is my heart... Nine months and more.

Snuck out to see Mono in concert last night at Lobot Gallery in Oakland while being on call. Thankfully no pages. My contingency plan if I did was to drive over to teh Emeryville Barnes and Noble or Starbucks or something and try to get set up on the internet there.

As always with new areas, I got pretty lost trying to get there. I should really learn and write down better directions with more indicators of nearby cross streets. But, stopping off at a gas station was close enough to useful enough, so I still got there.

And I didn't even really care about late, seeing as how it is a good thing I got there pretty late at ~10 PM (doors opened at 8:30 according to the site) cause I still had to stand through more than an hour of crappy music before getting to crowd up and watch Mono perform.

I literally got to be like 5' away from the band. I was in the second row of people, standing mostly behind a guy on a stool, so I got a good view. In general I hate people that crowd up to the front and block other people's view, especially if they are tall, but I made an exception for last night, and selfishly crowded up close (besides I'm not really that tall and I stand in place, no swaying or moving around for me). Performance was great as last time, it was nice to be able to see up close the passion I believe they put into their music.

The only problems with the venue as compared to Bottom of the Hill was that people didn't seem to really care that the band was playing, fine for crap like Tarantel, but I want near silence for Mono, and that they overlook California's many, many no public smoking laws. It's the first time since being in Charlotte that my clothes and I reeked of smoke. Lobot Gallery is a pretty sad excuse for an art gallery too, $2 Pabst Blue Ribbon and 6 or so different exhibits, but it works well enough as a music venue.

But yes, Mono great as usual, and definitely worth it. I got a couple free posters out of it too, so I'm a happy camper. Might go to Lobot again (if there ever is anything interesting there again) just cause it's in Oakland (yay! no toll) and because they let you get to be so close.

And I am learning, hopefully no more tinnitus (or more severe tinnitus) for me when I go armed with my ear plugs.

So the plan for the weekend (time and issues permitting): Saturday night Asobi Seksu at Hotel Utah; Sunday night The Pillows + et al at Club Z. 3 nights of Japanese stuff... not exactly sure how that turned out.

Like 2/3's of the randomly interesting stuff I think of in a given day, Slashdot jogged my memory about stuff like Bill Nye the Science Guy and Beakman's World (I did forget that guy in the rat suit). The quality TV of my youth. Those two shows, in combination with cooking shows (I still miss The Frugal Gourmet), probably provided almost as much useful information as Junior High. Square One also gets some points for stuff like the googolplex (of course Google makes it so I don't remember how to spell it) and perfect parabolas.

Among the more unusual offerings is "Moon Garden," a bowl of soft tofu "custard" artfully planted with bright vegetables: tiny mushrooms, kabocha squash, snow peas, asparagus, and ginkgo nuts.
...
Even more rustically appealing is a bowl of taka-sui, gyoza in clay pot.

From SF Guardian review of Cha-Ya

I get the feeling she had almost the same meal as what Amy and I got. Of course, I imagine she knew better than to add the salad to the miso, which I'm not really sure why I did. But I did. At least we also ordered even better miso soup, unlike the other didn't somehow prompt me to feel like I shoud add salad to it.

I think I'm finally getting the full Berkeley (and surrounding East Bay) eating experience now. Of course having money and somebody to go with

Sin City trailer looks good. Almost makes me want to read the comics.

Yay internet! Just in time for me to be on-call over spring break, not that immediately mind, but I mind through Amy and through The Pillows' concert being all in the same period. But still, to celebrate this (and the fact that I found the infrared port on this notebook) a picture.

Another reason why I read Slashdot fairly daily: I get to hear about the Wing Commander: Privateer remake being complete. Now that there is a remake of that and a remake of Star Control 2, all the computer games that I cared about when I was young have been reborn with slightly better graphics and runnability on modern day computers. Good stuff.

"Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who's in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It's like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven't seen in a long time. It's just a natural feeling."

In another point in the book, he goes through the best way to kill someone with a bayonnet, and sounds very familiar to me. Just like killing someone with a sword (from what I remember from Snow Crash or kendo you are supposed to just tap your opponent's head hard and lift up to prevent the sword from getting stuck), it takes some technique: stab and twist (sounds like it would be hard to pull out though). Thinking about it some more it sounds like something that I could have picked up from any number of places. What I imagine is some hero dude training hapless peasants in the art of bayonetting enemies.

Sorry the previous paragraph kinda takes away from the sentiment of the original quote, but it feels like something I wanted to note.

What do I miss more: internet or cell phone or TV? Sadly I think I'm going to have to go with the internet. TV is the most ingrained of all time wasting tools, with Internet as a close rival, and cell phone is the most fun of all time wasting tools, with Internet as a close rival, but taken as a whole, I have to go with the gut feeling that I miss the internet more. Even with my hours upon hours of surfing at work, it just isn't the same.

Also, while with a cell phone, I can amuse myself to no end by calling up Amy, that still involves bugging her to some extent and keeping her from her studies; but with internet I'm still somewhat reachable and I get to read a bunch of random stuff to keep me from being too bored. So while, the level of amusement is a lot lower with the internet, at least there's plenty of it and I don't have to worry about overextending my stay. Who has ever hurt the internet's feelings anyways?

So yeah, the life in the boonies has started out kinda unexpectedly, but it will probably get better in a week.

I had to sign up with evil and endangered AT&T, which according to both Amy's and Brian's cell phones seems to be A-OK for reception whereas my Verizon just craps out. I am actually kinda looking forward to it, I get, in my opinion, a swankier cell phone in the Sony Ericsson T637, so that will be fun. It will be the geekiest and most technologically advanced gadget-like thing I have, so I guess that more or less says something about my ability to spend money on trying to be geeky. I can only pour time into trying to be geeky, no money (Amazon is paying me $200 in rebates to take the T637 from them). So, that will be coming later this week. 6 months ago, I didn't even have a cell phone, soon I'm going to have 2.

Internet and tv will be coming up hopefully next week. So, soon enough all will be well, and the boonies will just seem like the suburbs.