I tell you what, having some days off from work has been a much-needed respite. I can't remember the last time I've had several consecutive quiet, peaceful days in a row. Even Thanksgiving itself was about as low-key a holiday as I've ever had and I really needed it. It was just myself, mom and dad. We had dinner. The post turkey pan looked somewhat like a coronor's photograph:



Nasty, huh? It was delicious, though. Anyway, after dinner, we went and saw Elf, the new Will Ferrell movie. It was pretty damn hilarious and traditional Ferrell. I couldn't help but think during the film, though, that this guy is capable of so much more. I hope he really pushes himself through to the next level now. He's done 2 or 3 good, goofy comedy films and I really believe he could be the real deal in a drama. Think back to Tom Hanks, who built his resume in the early '80s in a similar fashion by performing in television shows like Bosom Buddies and movies like "Bachelor Party" (one the more underappreciated comedies of the '80s). Ferrell seems to be taking a similar path. Much like Hanks' "Big," Ferrell's next role as a newscaster in "Anchorman" seems to be a little more serious, although I'm sure we'll see some of the uniform comedy we've come to expect, but from everything I've read about "Anchorman" so far, there will be a slightly more serious undertone - a good move for Ferell, in my eyes. He's too good to ride a one-trick pony.

Anyway, the rest of my holiday was spent relaxing, watching television and laughing heartily at my parents dogs, a couple of marginally psychotic Wiemeraner's. I made a couple of attempts to photograph them this weekend and came up with this one - as I raised the camera the dog approached me quickly, undoubtedly to try and either a) sniff the unfamiliar silver camera that was in my hand or b) eat the silver camera in my hand.



So yeah, it was a great holiday. The best part about it is that I still have an entire weekend to go! Back to doing some TV research.........almost there.

Song now playing: Shirley Ellis - "The Clapping Song"

My vote goes to The Palace Brothers.

Over the last few days, I've had a few 1980s commercial jingles running through my head, for one reason or another:

- "Brown eggs are local eggs, and local eggs are fresh!"
- Riunite on Ice, Riunite so nice.....
- Hey! It's a donut! No! It's a Mr. Donut donut!

On my Launchcast player right now is the Beau Brummels. It's pretty cool that I never chose the Beau Brummels to play on my LaunchCast player, but yet here it is, because based on the other music I've rated, they've determined that I would enjoy the Beau Brummels. They're right. I've always enjoyed them. Rock music SAT question: The Beau Brummels are to the The Beatles as Paul Siebel is to Bob Dylan. Which brings to mind an interesting story about the Beau Brummels - the only reason why gave themselves that band name was so that they could be filed in the record racks right next to The Beatles. That is still the case today. Go into any record store worth its salt and you'll still find Beau Brummels CD's right there next to The Beatles.

Song now playing: The Beau Brummels - "When It Comes To Your Love"

Today I will share with you some information about my logs. Heh heh heh. I said "logs." Not those logs, I mean my traffic logs. For instance, check this out, for whatever reason this site was selected as a search result for the following searches:

- wallpaper glue
- barry manilow oh mandy chords
- photo of stupid man
- michelle branch san francisco
- boxing should be outlawed
- thundering skies of disgraceland
- warren commission pictures
- maynard fine arts theatre

....and my personal favorite: "pictures with grapes in ass"

How is it even possible that my site could come up as a search result for most of these queries? "Thundering skies of disgraceland?" How is that people think they'll get the answer they need on my site? How is it that search engines detect that my site has the information these people are looking for? Makes me laugh. The only one that makes any sense at all would be "Maynard Fine Arts Theatre" since that's where I live. Good stuff.

Speaking of search engines, is the backlash starting? Hard to imagine, really, isn't it? Then again, it would have been hard to imagine any backlash towards Microsoft in, say, 1986.

Song now playing: Bruce Springsteen - "Darlington County" (live)

I would give anything to be able to live on this road

If you ever need to know what time it is, just bookmark this and keep using it. The interesting thing here is that it exactly mirrors my Windows clock (you know, that one at the bottom right of your screen if you're a Windows user. Pretty cool!

According to this test I took recently, I am 26% gay. My results indicate that I am 13% less gay than the average male. I have no idea what this means, I simply saw the test while browsing my friend Tony's website the other day, so I took it. For the record, he was 29% gay. Take the test - it's slightly ridiculous, but fun. Post your results in the comments section if you'd like.

The fourth season of The Sopranos on DVD has finally been released and I've been watching them, as usual, with great regularity and admiration. This particular season has been unlike the three previous seasons - there's more subtlely and more hushed undertones. It seems the writers and directors are trying to say more by saying less. There's more periods of.....quiet. I'm probably about halfway through the season now and very much looking forward to where it all ends up.

Finally, after many many long years, my television is on the long, steep descent downward. Text on the screen is getting hard to read and it appears as if one the color guns is about to go. It's still watchable, but not for long. This means I have begun what can only be anticipated as a long period of research, reading and learning how the different kinds of televisions work (DLP, Plasma, LCD, Tube, etc) and in-store demos. I really get into this stuff. When making a large purchase, I just love doing the research and arriving at what I feel is the very best possible decision. I've been known to be frugal, and I probably am, but I think nothing of the amount of money I am spending, provided it's for a quality product. Of course, I have a budget in mind, though, I wouldn't drop $5 or $10K on a TV. That's just silly. Anyway, this is gonna be fun. The first thing I have learned is that Plasma & LCD TV's almost always have less to offer in picture quality than the standard tube TV. That was a bit surprising. I certain;y won't buy one of those projection TV's, either - I can't stand the fact that if you move 1 foot to the left or to the right, the TV goes gray/dark and you can't really see it. You have to be sitting directly in front of it. That ain't cool.

Saw The Thorns last night at The Paradise in Boston - those guys are truly a great live band.

Song now playing: The Beatles - "Glass Onion"

I have yet to watch any single episode of the TV show
"24," yet everyone tells me I would love it. Why haven't I seen it? I don't know. The chance of me watching it at any time are pretty slim. This article didn't help 24's cause, either. I'm really starting to get into Alias. I can't even imagine I'd like 24 more than Alias. Wait a second - if there's 24 episodes of the show "24," do 8 of the episodes just show Keifer Sutherland sleeping?

Does anyone remember "Dear Alex & Andy?" It was one of those little short-cartoons that ran just before commercials (like those Conjunction Junction shorts) and it was a kids advice type thing. Kids would write in and ask silly little advice questions and Alex & Andy would consult them. So they'd be helping the kid, but they'd also be sending a message to the kids of America to teach them a lesson, too. So noble. The problem is that I cannot seem to find anything about it online, which is odd. You can find everything online, can't you? I'd be real curious to see any pictures or even some examples of the questions that were asked and the answers given. Extra credit to anyone who can find me something about that....

Song now playing: CSNY - "Helplessly Hoping"

Happy Monday. That post on Friday was my first ever stab at fiction on this weblog. For the most part, I'll probably avoid too much fictional posting as I'd like to keep this almost exclusively journalistic, but it popped into my head and sometimes when things pop into my head, it just starts to flow. I'd really love to hear your opinion about it - negative or positive. Really. I can handle constructive criticism. I can also handle, quite nicely, a compliment. Comment if you want.

I've realized that I find it pretty difficult to watch an entire professional sports game, no matter what the sport. I used to be able to watch an entire hockey game back in high school and during college, but NHL hockey is almost unwatchable these days, compared to ten years ago. No, this isn't me being all "back in my day" or anything. It's based on some simple facts - there are too many teams and the talent pool is spread too thin and the regular season matters very little.

But I'm not here to talk about hockey. I'm here to talk about my ever-dwindling attention span. I just cannot sit for three hours and watch a whole game. Come to think of it, I don't think I can sit for three hours and do anything. Last night, though, I was able to get through the two-hour CSI. Now that was good. What a great show that is. Afterwards I caught a special on the assassination of JFK - a topic I find very interesting.

Forty years later (!!!!!), despite all the research, the movies, the documentaries and the books, there is still no definitive answer, no clarity on the events of that day. This particular special, aired on CNN, didn't try to dredge up any whodunit stuff again, which I appreciated. The show interviewed reporters who were in Dallas that day, focusing on what they remember and how the events unfolded. It was truly compelling how some of this stuff made it to the airwaves. In one example, there was a crew from CBS who were upstairs in the Texas School Book Depository minutes after the shooting. They were filming the police handling the rifle and milling around the 6th floor window looking for clues. They finished filming, the cameraman took the film out of the camera, dropped the film six stories out the window and into the waiting hands of another crew member, who rushed to get it developed and aired. They aired the film as soon as they could - it hadn't even dried yet and at the end of the clip, because it hadn't dried, it began to shimmer a little bit. Incredible. Anyway, this being the 40th anniversary of the day our country commenced its downhill descent, I'm looking forward to seeing some of the other specials, particularly the ABC news special airing soon, which will staunchly defend the Warren Commission's findings that Oswald acted alone.

During one of the commercials on that CNN special, I flipped over to the Patriots game as it was ending. The Patriots won the game and the teams were all on the field shaking hands, praying, etc etc and the two coaches, Belichek and Parcells, met up at mid-field for the customary coaches handshake. Only this time, they took it a little further. Upon meeting at mid-field, the two old friends stopped for an instant, gazed into each other's eyes and locked themselves into a deep, passionate tongue-kiss.....I think we knew all along about these two.....



Song now playing: Steve Earle - "Taneytown"

His hesitation was understandable. In his own mind, there had been no event in his life thus far that would measure up to the moment he was about to endure. Endure might have been a bad word, actually. To "endure" meant, or at least implied, that it would be a negative experience, a painful struggle; he didn't know if this would be negative or positive yet. He only knew that it was, perhaps, one of the only moments in his life where he just might, as that puppet dog said on television all the time - poop on something, himself being the most logical candidate.

Oh sure, he had rehearsed plenty. He tried to memorize what he was going to say, like when he used to try to study for science tests during freshman year in high school. His mind now drifting off topic, he thought of those high school science tests. Oh, how he hated those. There was nothing more painful than having to lay on his bed the night before with the most uninteresting science book in the whole wide world and try to memorize, section by section, over and over again, scientific equations. Or to try and remember that fissionable nucleii are so unstable that they will fall apart if struck by a neutron. Memorization was such a funny thing. He couldn't remember any of the elements of the periodic table, but he remembered the shit about the fissionable nucleii? He laughed to himself. He thought about the one time in science class when he had faked a severe headache and was convincing enough that the sceince teacher, the miserable (and clearly gullible) Miss Veracruz, appeared so concerned that she had excused him from class to go to the nurse. That trip to the nurse would be memorable for another reason - his affliction of singing out loud and not knowing it. For on the way to the nurse's office that day, Led Zeppelin's "Rock & Roll" was cruising through his brain, attacking him like those lions attacked the hapless gazelles on those Animal Planet specials. He was in mid-verse, strutting down the hall, walking right by Mr. Temple's math class, almost shouting the "lonely lonely lonely lonely time" part of the song and not realizing he was singing out loud.

The twenty or so teenage heads in Temple's class all turned at once in near-perfect synchroncity, looked out into the hall and broke into spontanous, cackling laughter, as if someone had held up the "laugh" cue card on a TV set. He could still hear the laughter as he passed through the bright red, swinging double-doors twenty-five feet down the hall. He always wondered why they didn't just get some new god damn doors instead of painting over them every August? He spotted a small piece of peeling paint, stopped at the doors and pulled off a soft half-inch of the red paint, revealing the slightly different colored red underneath from the previous year. Hisotry, he thought. Now that's an amazing topic, promising himself to never, ever fake a headache in history class.

His mind snapped back to the present, remembering what he was about to do......

Song now playing: Uncle Tupelo - "Train"

President Bush is clearly starting to feel a very serious and very negative rumble in this country regarding the slow, needless trickle of death that have befallen U.S. servicemen in Iraq on a daily basis now. The U.S. launched an offensive today in Baghdad, but you know what? It doesn't matter. At least to me it doesn't. Hopefully, Bush has done enough irreparable damage to himself to get him the hell out of office next year. Alas, I'm not that dumb, either. I'm still 101% convinced that the U.S. already has possession of both Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden and both of them will be, uh, miraculously "found" in the next 3-6 months. It is, of course, the perfect time. My aforementioned negative rumble would settle down, at least temporarily, it would be a nice one-two punch with all the "good news" about the economy lately, which to me is pure spin, as the generation of jobs is what the American people want to see. All or most of my friends who've been laid off in the past year still ain't got jobs, so throw whatever numbers you want at me - we're still in a recession. The big kahuna, though, is that "finding" those two would probably get Bush elected again - that's the real reason they'll find them. Mark my words. I really believe it.......

Song now playing: Sloan - "400 Metres"

OK, OK, no, really. This is funny. No it's not. Yes it is. No it's not. Yes it is......

If you were to point your little mousey right here you might find yourself looking at some pictures from Saturday nights Bottle Rockets show here in Boston. Two things about taking pictures at rock shows - 1) there must always be a shot with the camera held at a goofy angle and 2) there must always be a blurry picture, taken on purpose, so it looks cool. Like I know what I'm doing.

I'm getting a cold.

Song now playing: Woody Guthrie - "Columbus Stockade"

I'm not sure why, sometimes, I get somewhat fascinated with self-portraits. But I do. You have to believe that I am not some narcissistic freak who can't stop looking at myself. I am not. I promise you that. Anyone who knows me even remotely well enough knows that I am not vain nor Am I narcissistic. The people who really know me, in fact, probably wish I had a little more confidence and self-esteem. All that said, this picture fascinates me and I don't know why. It looks staged, and to certain degree it is, I guess - I mean, I brought the camera, set it up, and set up the self-timer. But my mind races from so many topics, minute to minute, second to second, every day, so capturing one expression like this, I don't know. It freezes a moment in my mind.....Ah, whatever. Taken in New York City last week......



One my favorite live bands in the whole wide world hit Boston this weekend. The Bottle Rockets played here at a place called Harper's Ferry, a place normally reserved for jam bands and blues cover bands. I had some skepticism about a band this good playing there, seeing as though the show wasn't too well publicized and that their new album is a bit of a departure for them. These were issues that got worked out, oh, about two minutes into the show. As usual, they blew the roof off the joint, playing some of their songs from the past that I didn't think I'd ever hear again. A great night for music......here's one picture of lead singer Brian Henneman with his new showpiece, a purple-glittered guitar. I'll post a full slide show later this week:



Finally, I saw the movie Mystic River this weekend - certainly one of the best movies I've seen this year, other than the last 5 to 10 minutes, which were completely unnessecary and just plain putrid. There was no need to end it like that. I really would like to get into why I thought the last few minutes were so bad, but I'm sure a few of you haven't seen it yet, so I'll refrain. I'll just say this: don't let it get in the way of seeing the film - it's really a good one, with a tremendous performance from Sean Penn and an almost equally strong showing from Kevin Bacon. Bacon's character was less emotional in the film, but no less powerful than Penn's roller coaster ride of a character. One more thing - if they could give supporting actor Oscars to multiple people, the Savage brothers win hands down.

Song now playing: Bread - "Guitar Man"

Upon returning from New York City yesterday, a place I do love to visit, I couldn't help but feel a bit depressed. I had a meeting at, of all places, the hotel lounge in the New York Hilton on 53rd Street and I overheard a conversation there that, while probably common, really put a lot of things into perspective for me.

There's two guys in the lounge, sitting about eight feet from me and they're going back and forth on how many people they need to lay off from their company while they eat food and drink beer. Right there in front of me. I was looking straight at them and they knew it, yet they continued to talk within easy earshot, no apparant concern whatsoever as to who heard them.

Now, from a business perspective, this seems incredibly unprofessional and dumb - they have no idea who I am - I could very well be their number one competitor, now privy to some pretty valuable info. Or I could very well be one of the people they're laying off. Why wouldn't they be doing this in a hotel room, a conference room or somewhere private where people don't have to hear this? Who knows? All I know is that they're laughing, writing, drinking, with little outward concern about what they're doing. I was upset. Not upset because they were doing it in front of me, really. I was more upset because the fate of so many people rested in the hands of two half-joking guys who didn't even care if other people heard them. I know too many good people and close friends who've lost thier jobs in the last two weeks alone, so to see this really just makes me feel so down on Corporate America (TM). As if I needed more to be down on Corporate America about.

The topper, though, occured when a call came in to one of them and he just starts talking about how he's "not the sure the numbers are going to work out right," that he may have to consider more layoffs, etc etc. People's fates are determined by a bunch of ones and zeroes - of course we know that. We realize it. I can almost agree with it. To witness it, though, in it's festering and rotten process, was a lot to have to bear at that time. For me, it made New York crappy. For a city with so many people, so much life, so much to offer, I don't think I'd ever felt so alone riding in the cab on the way back to the airport.

Song now playing: American Music Club - "Fearless" (what a beautiful song)

As I'm in New York City right now, I won't have many detailed updates until I get home and have some time, but I did see this link and I just had to post it right away - it's some pictures of the "worst album covers," according to some random person. My favorite one is the very last one at the bottom. Of course, I should not fail to mention that Julie, on her sixteenth birthday, is probably not having the day she envisioned. Just look at the link. Hilarious.