X-Tra Rant

Just a quick link. Drinking Liberally: Indianapolis made this week’s Nuvo Newsweekly. It’s a good profile and includes information not only on DL but on Spencer’s Tavern and the ReplicAle beer event from a couple weeks ago. Good stuff.

So Liz & I were hanging out at Nicky Blaine’s, chillin’ and enjoying the live jazz/lounge music. Somehow we got on the idea to invent a new drink. I give you…
The Creepy Scoutmaster

• Cheap plastic bottle whiskey
• Just enough off-brand kool-aid to make the drink taste like cherry paint thinner

Serve in a chilled aluminum canteen.

We are so going to hell

So I decided to take a couple days off and head to Colts training camp. I wrote up some diaries at StampedeBlue about each practice which you can access all four easily from my post at CWAMB. It was a good time. Soul-meltingly hot, but fun. I may have lost 10 pounds or so in sweat alone. I needed a little mini-vacation like that.

Back to the grind now, unfortunately. Have some catching up to do and projects to work on. Nose, grindstone, etc.

well this is a short one, again crossposted from last.fm

8/3 - Lord of the Yum-Yum, The Born Again Floozies at Radio Radio

So I headed out last night with the idea to see the Born Again Floozies at Radio Radio in Indianapolis. they are great fun always good to see live.

Their opener was Lord Of The Yum-Yum, a guy I’d heard about before and was sort of intrigued by.

Now imagine a family taking a Family Truckster style road trip vacation from Connecticut to California. There’s Mom, Dad and Little Billy. Little Billy has ADD. But.. oh no! Mom forgot Little Billy’s Ritalin!! By the time the Family Truckster gets to Nebraska, Little Billy never shuts up and is singing random gibberish sing-songs and using the seat in front of him for a drum. Mom wants to kill Little Billy, Dad wishes he’d stayed home and kept banging his Secretary and Little Billy cluelessly keeps shouting gibberish and calling it his new songs.

THAT is Lord of the Yum-Yum.

That is also why for the first time I up and walked out of a concert. I just couldn’t stay any longer after the first few “songs”. Why he got such a good reaction from the crowd I reallllly don’t get.

I really wanted to see the Floozies, but the opener was really just so terrible to me and the crowd so big that a bit of a claustrophobic feeling + unlistenable gibberish = me getting the heck out of there.

Sorry Floozies

Yeah, so that night didn’t exactly turn out like I expected.

so once again I’ve been gathering tabbed links in my browser with the idea of posting about them but it hasn’t happened. So that means another Link Dump! You are excited, I can tell.

• Apparently crime really isn’t as bad as people perceive it. Maybe people will calm the fuck down about all this panic over a “crime asploshun!!” in Indianapolis that really isn’t. Although I doubt it. Because even though The Star carried this story, it won’t stop them from sensationalizing crime themselves and contributing to the problem.
• I think I got about 100 IQ points dumber reading about the Scientific Proof For The Existence Of God!!!111eleventomgbbq!!. Really, if you have any sort of logical reasoning skills at all it’s easy to decimate this thing into a million pieces. but I value my sanity FAR too much to actually read it again and do that in blog form. The best part is probably the uranium part. jeebus.
• A great find, CJ notes the appearance of Indianapolis in a new Marvel comic! Too bad they based the art on an old picture of the circle with the now non-existent Market Square Arena visible. Oops.
• God I hate the Pacers anymore. And not just because of horrible management decisions and blundered personnel. No, also because they still refuse to have any redheads on the dance team. Heathens!
• Schadenfreude, thy name is Ted Stevens Getting Raided By The FBI. I really hope they showed up in a BIG TRUCK! In honor of this amazing news, I went back and found the Ted Stevens internet speech techno remix.
• Nerds + Showbiz Pizza + The Rockafire Explosion + New Ms. Booty = AWESOME.
• This REALLLLY deserves its own post but damn if I have the time right now. So Thanks Mitch! Because you caved to the property tax whiners (of whom so many are people who have been paying far under what they should have been for years - I’m looking at you Meridian Kessler District) and put off the new tax evaluations Marion County is going to have a $52 million shortfall. Don’t worry, Indianapolis is only the economic engine for the state you pretend to represent completely (but in the end you just end up representing road construction companies and people who believe your fake accent). A big ol’ hearty middle finger to Mitchie Rich The Amazing Midget Governor.
• I’ve been posting more on CWAMB lately. I have a big post eventually planned for a what-if solution for the NBA: a 50-60 team league with three divisions and European-style relegation. Keep an eye out for it.
• Couldn’t agree more with this at Tapped. The way our politics work, the short sighted politician who only spends money in time of disaster instead of spending money when there is no disaster gets rewarded. The latter just gets yelled at for spending tax money and *gasp* maybe raising taxes. Heavens to Betsy, noooo!
• This is horrifying. Dear Oklahoma, I enjoyed my time there for a national high school student council convention in 1995, but you are now dead to me.
• Mega-Kudos to FCC Commissioner Michael Copps. You couldn’t be more right about the absolutely TERRIBLE broadband policy in this country. Making the link between this and the rampant media consolidation in the US is very nicely done.

I think that’s it? I hope?

Been meaning to write both of these for awhile but this week just got crazy busy. Both are crossposted from last.fm.

Fri 27 Jul – Bryan Scary and the Shredding Tears, THE HEDRONS, Tiger City

I’ve been meaning to post this review for a week now but just now getting the time to get around to it. Unforutantely that means it’ll be a little shorter and less specifics as I would have liked.

First band was Tigercity, with a style I never would have thought I would have liked. A poppy/funk/disco sorta sound. Barry Gibb called, he wants his voice back. But in all seriousness they were crazy fun and made me wish I could dance at all in a way that wouldn’t horrify and blind onlookers. Great fun and worth checking out for sure. I picked up their 6-track album Pretend Not To Love and have had alot of fun with it.

Next up was a band I had heard some about and was looking forward to seeing in person, THE HEDRONS from Scotland. Wow. Holy shit. As I told the lead singer Tippi after the show at the merch table “that was fucking SPECTACULAR.” Those girls rocked my socks off into next year. A great band of energetic punk rock, and not the more modern whiny faux-punk but real, honest to goodness badass punk rock songs. The stage presence of all the members was great, and Tippi knew just how to work the crowd, actually coming down into the crowd at Radio Radio with her mic during the last song of their set. Doesn’t hurt that they are all incredibly gorgeous and rocking the Scottish accents. You MUST see them if you have the chance.

And the final act for the night was a band I saw not too long ago and was glad that they were making a second swing through Indy - Bryan Scary and the Shredding Tears. They blew me away last time as the second to last act, and as the closer they did not disappoint. They played a number of songs from the new album they are working on (coming out in January hopefully, according to drummer Brian Bauer). Their music is so infectious and just plain FUN, and Scary’s interludes and stories he wraps around the songs in a live setting make seeing them live a great experience that enhances their music when you’ve heard only the album (The Shredding Tears). They played an encore and the crowd got them to play one more after that even.

Overall a spectacular show, ****. You should have been there.

That was Friday. Then hit another show on Sunday in Bloomington

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DailyLit is awesome. I just subscribed to “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions” by Edwin Abbott. (via Wil Wheaton)