INKSTAND

I was looking for a hoodie, but since all of The Gaps hoodies are hideous this jacket caught my eye. I had a really great denim jacket that I left at a friend’s house when moving to Seattle. This one looked cool and the price was right so I tried it on and decided to buy it. The worst part about it is that the front pockets, where you put your hands, are all the way back at the side seam, so I have to reach back to put my hands in there. The best part about it is that there are three inner pockets! I love inner pockets, so I was thrilled to discover this. After I bought it, of course. So, depending on how long it lasts, yeah, I’d say it was worth the $30 or whatever I paid for it.

I went to this show to celebrate my birthday. While I really loved their first album and favorably reviewed their last one, for some reason I wasn’t expecting much. I think it was because I wasn’t impressed with the few songs I heard by the opening bands, Patience Please and Lillydale, as well as some lukewarm feelings toward other Elf Power songs and/or albums. I also thought that if I set low expectations, I would be pleasantly suprised (hey, I’m a pessimist). My plan worked, as all three bands sounded great, just proving that live music is still where it’s at.
Elf Power played songs from throughout their catalogue, including Temporary Arm and Let the Serpent Sleep. Naturally they played songs off the new album, but not Old Familiar Scene, which I thought would be a crowd pleaser. They even graced with an encore, playing a song that Jake identified as being by T-Rex.
There is a certain distinguishable guitar sound Elf Power has that I have become familiar with. Not being a musician or anything I’m not familiar enough with it to tell exactly what it is, but hearing it live was like visiting an old friend. There were times that I just let the music take me over and I even danced a little, partly out of spite for the popular concept of not dancing at rock shows, and partly because latley booze+good music makes me dance. And yes, I look stupid.
Next time Elf Power is in town I am definitley going to see them. I only hope they play some of my favorite songs, All You Experiments, about aliens, and High Atop the Silver Brances, about swimming and flying.

The first thing I noticed about this movie, other than the the oddly juxtaposed opening credits, was that it had all the melodrama of a kid’s cartoon. The kids are given a few elements of “edge”, like hanging out in a abandoned house, yet are still essentially good and righteous. The men who run the track and who don’t want the main kid to win some qualification race don’t really do anything too evil, but they act like they do all the time. I don’t think this movie did that because it was geared towards children, but because its filmakers were that bad. I think what convinced me that it isn’t geared toward kids is that there was some mild anit-authority violence and profanity. The little sister of the main kid says “shit” a lot.

One fallacy I see in this movie’s logic is how keenly the biker kids are tuned into the community. Their newspaper route has made them heroes of the town, delivering the USA Today in weird, crazy, and time-senstive ways such as in a dog’s mouth, to a fire engine, and to a woman who times him. It is rare in movies, and rarer in real life, that you see characters who know their neighbors with such Archiecomician familiarity.

There was a scene before the last final race that introduced all the racers and who their sponsors were, promoting the racers and, in doing so, thier sponsors. During this final race, other than rewinding a couple of times to see the crowd reaction shots, I mostly zoned out and thought about sex.

MY favorite crowd shot was one of a dude who worked with main kid and didn’t like him. We only know this becasue he says it a bunch of times. Here he is distracting a woman with the fact that he works with this kid in order to steal her pop corn:

This blog has been reviewing a random assortment of things since February 2006. The majority have been about beer and/or alcohol, but as of this writing that category is tied with movies. There are often attempts at humor, but whether or not these attempts are humorous, or even jokes, is usually open to interpretation. At times the author strays from his main objective and uses the review format as a forum to express things that have happened in his life. Content of this sort tends to fluxuate and has been minimized as of late, with concentration lying on actual reviewing.
The reviews themselves are rarley helpful. Descriptions of what is being reviewed are limited to the points the author wants to make about them. They are often for products that are not new or movies that have been seen and/or reviewed by countless others.
This site, as a whole, is in fact the best site on the internet and word about it should spread like wildfire until the author gets his own television program.

For some reason the first thing I did when I woke up (ok ONE of the first things I did) for the last two days was clean my bathtub. In addition to not wanting to see the scum anymore, it might have been because I wanted to break my usual monotonous workday routine of rolling out of bed, trying to clear my head of the beer-cloud, and stumbling off to work. At least I did something productive instead of, say, heroin.

I knew that the build-up was going to be too much for any one product, but I can’t help but be pulled in by the claims on the label. I tried Tilex first, which says “Dissolves bathroom grime with thick foam!” Dissolves? That’s perfect, it does all the work for me! And it sounds like something that would be accomplished by a thick foam. But alas it was no match for the layers upon layers of dirt and grime. Sure it pulled some of it up but not much, and it left streaks of dirt where the foam hadn’t run down the side of the tub. The bottle also says that there’s no need for scrubbing, so I’ll be damned if I’m going to.

I needed something else, so yesterday I picked up SoftScrub. The bottle said to rub gently, but of course I had to rub roughly. Despite the inclusion of actual elbow grease the product still did a great job. The grey gunk was visibly leaving the surface of the bathtub. The sad part about it was the area that I had to cover. The scum was crawling all the way up the shower walls. Once I got tired of that I did the sink, too.

Now my tub is relativley clean. It worked a lot better than when I tried to clean the tub in my old place. I plan on maintaining the cleaness, and if I do it again in a couple of days it may be even cleaner, so I’ll only have to use the foam stuff like once a week or something. I want my tub to be clean because sometimes I think “I might like to take a bath,” then I look in the tub and think “No, no I wouldn’t.”

The copy on the box reads: “Cookies so soft…they taste like they’re right from the oven.” There are several things wrong with both this claim and that copy. First of all, I don’t know why there is an ellipsis in there. If words were ommited they certainly wouldn’t want to inform the public of that, and there seems to be no need for a pause at that point in the sentence. Also, there is actually a period at the end on the box. I WOULD say, “Hey it’s advertising, you need an exclamation point!” However, I suppose the implied pause by the aforementioned ellipsis reduces the need for excitment.

So, away from the grammar and on to the cookies. Yes, they are soft, I’ll give them that but I’ll be damned if that makes me think they are “right from the oven.” I have three reasons. First of all, they are not soft enough. When you grab a cookie right from the oven it breaks in half because it’s still stuck to the cookie sheet. Secondly, They are not warm. They are room temperature at best. And lastly, there is something about these cookies that I have always thought. It must be the preservatives in them, but I always said they taste like rat poison. Of course I don’t know what rat poison tastes like, but that’s the first thing that popped into my head. I think I was in high school when I first thought that. That chemically, packaged, gross taste is in every bite. Sometimes I see these cookies and want that grossness, and that’s why I still buy them. But only because it’s a lot easier to find small packages of these than Chewy Chips Ahoy.

Yum. Yum, yum, yum, yum, yum. Have you ever had a Choco Taco? Sure you have. If not, I’m telling you to right now. If you dont know, it’s an ice cream concoction with a taco shell-shaped cone, vanilla ice cream with chocolate fudge in it, topped with chocolate and peanuts. The fried ice cream version is new.
The ice cream is cinnamon caramel flavored with honey caramel and topped with chocolate and little cinnamon crunchy things. It is delicious. So very delicious.

Let me say first off that the only reason I attended this show was because my boyfriend is in the chorus. That’s not to say I have any aversion to it in any way, it’s just that I probably wouldn’t have known it was happening otherwise, and even if I did I almost never go out and do things. He gets me out of the house, just another reason why he’s great. But hey, I’m not reviewing him, so…
Overall, the show was fabulous beyond my expectations and I had a lot of fun attending. The songs were, obviously, comprised of all songs from the 1980’s, most of them in medleys. There were dancers, some from the choir, performing in front of the choir as well as a smaller group called Captain Smartypants. Here’s the set:

Opening medley - Mr. Robato/I’m So Excited/Celebration/I’m Coming Out/Let’s Hear It for the Boy/Ready for the 80’s
The gym medley - Physical/Muscles/I Know What Boys Like/Don’t You Want Me/Another One Bites the Dust
Gentlemen callers medley - Who Can It Be Now/Smooth Operator/You Should Hear How She Talk About You/Call Me
Sweet Dreams
Cars medley - Drive/Cars/Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car/Freeway of Love/Pink Cadillac
True Colors (a capella)
Science medley - Weird Science/She Blinded Me with Science
Rock Me, Amadeus
Video medley - Mickey/Maniac/Whip It/Heaven Is a Place on Earth/Addicted to Love/Thriller
Movie medley - Xanadu/Flashdance/We Don’t Need Another Hero/It Might Be You/Let the River Run/Up Where We Belong/Wind Beneath My Wings/Arthur’s Theme/Making Love/Fame/Ghostbusters
Girls medley - Material Girl/Uptown Girl/Rich Girl/Rosanna/Billie Jean/Bette Davis Eyes/To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before/Venus/Simply Irresistible/Girls Just Want to Have Fun
Anthem (from Chess)
Closing medley - Shout/Karma Chameleon/Walk Like an Egyptian/I Wanna Dance with Somebody/Hungry Like the Wolf/Never Gonna Give You Up/Ready for the 80’s (reprise)
(Encore)
It’s Raining Men

I missed Mr Roboto because I was late, like I am for everything.
My favorite part, overall, was the harmony in the “Call Me” rendition. I think It was a four part harmony and it sounded really good! Full, clear and dynamic. Another great part was the Video Medley, during which the dancers gave it their all recreating videos for the songs. I particularly enjoyed “Heaven is a Place on Earth”, and the “Thriller” dance was fun, but I think the popular favorite was “Maniac” from Flashdance. The guy who did the Jennifer Beals dance was spot on and they used this sparkly glitter stuff in place of the water that was very visually impressive. I wish I had some pictures for you, but you’ll have to settle for streaming video. Click here to see the preview video.
The show also had a sign-language interpreter. I kept watching him thinking “There’s no way he’s saying everything!” A co-worker also went to the show and his girlfriend knows sign language. She said taht since it IS impossible to sign every single word, he was mostly conveying the feeling for what was being said, and doing it well. I believe it, he seemed to put a lot of emotion in to his actions.
Captain Smartypants stuck in my mind with their mash-up of “Wierd Science” and “She Blinded Me with Science.” I always liked the Oingo Boingo song, but not the Thomas Dolby one. Their fusion of the two, however, pleased my ear holes.
I do have a few small criticisms, though. Most of the dancing was done during the first half of the show, before the intermission. It would have been nice to see it a little more spread out in the last section. I dont’ have any recomendations as to HOW they could but, hey, I’m not a choreographer.
Also, I wish the “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” part was longer. They only used a small section of that song. Boo Hoo.
So, yes, I had a great time. I was entertained. And I hear that the last few concerts by the choir weren’t nearly as fun as this one. Since this is the first one I’ve attended I’m glad it was a good one.

Oh yeah, it’s over now so you can’t see it!

Maybe it’s not Vincent. While Ethan escaped, someone took all the blackmailer’s pictures down, but Vincent was meeting Chad at a motel at that time. So very important, I know.