That damn cat is so very lucky she’s the cutest four legged fur ball on the planet.
Yesterday I came home to a big hair ball on the living room floor. Today is the first kid day this week and both of them found hair balls on their beds. We are going to run out of sheets!
Enough is enough, Patches!
This is an experiment. The audio (assuming it links) is Rush playing at Radio City Music Hall on September 18, 1983. One of the shows in the run that so impressed me and has forever left me wanting to see them at Radio City.
Of course, soundcloud in its infinite wisdom decided to not upload tracks two and three, meaning we go straight from the intro music to Freewill, skipping The Spirit of Radio and Tom Sawyer. Figures, huh? Now this soundcloud account is maxed out (for the free service) so I can’t add them back in. Hey, live with it.
Technically the NHL is still locked out. The legal documents are still being drawn up. The owners expect to ratify the deal tomorrow at the Board of Governors meeting. The players will have an electronic vote over the interwebs to see if they approve of the new deal. The talk now is of training camps opening on Sunday, and the season starting on January 19th. It should be noted that the 19th is one day after Gary Bettman’s deadline to cancel the season. Oh well.
So the lockout has not officially ended, but it effectively has ended. But when we look back at this years from now, what will be the moment we look at as the moment the lock out ended?
It will be the moment when the Toronto Maple Leafs fired General Manager Brian Burke.
This is the dick move of all dick moves. They waited through the off season after the Leafs failed to make the post season for something like the seventh straight season. They waited through four months of lockout. Then, suddenly, just a few days before training camp opened on the insultingly shortened season they gave him the axe.
There are rumors going around that he got canned over Roberto Luongo. There was talk of a trade in the works and the speculation is that Burke did not want to pull the trigger, but Leafs ownership did. I’m of two minds on Luongo. First, as a Bruins fan, I love to see him lose. He choked like a chump in the cup finals against the Bruins and it was glorious to see. How dare you tell Tim Thomas how to play the puck! Tim Thomas might be a right wing nut job, but he already had a Vezina in his closet and was a shoe in for a second. Forget the fact that after your little bit of friendly advice he went on to win a Stanley Cup (at your expense) and a Conn Smythe (again, at your expense). What a jack ass!
Of course I am also a lifelong fan of the Lowell Lock Monsters and Luongo was, for a brief time, one of us. I tend to go easy on him for old times sake.
But given the way he has tended to lose his sanity during the playoffs, and how he still remains saddled with the can’t-win-the-big-game label (unfairly thanks partly to the first three rounds of his Cup run, but mostly due to that shiny gold medal he won in the Olympics), there is no way any serious GM would have pulled the trigger on any trade, unless The Iron Lung (that’s what we called him in Lowell… well, that’s what my brother, sister, sister’s ex, and I called him) were some sort of inexpensive throw in. Nope. Not going to take that deal, friends. Luongo has to win a Stanley Cup before I would consider dealing for him. Let the Canucks deal with him.
Regardless of the why or the how the Leafs fired Brian Burke, the fact is that suddenly those few of us who still follow the NHL are talking about something besides the lockout. Today is the day that we actually start moving on.
I will be damned if I give this asshole of a league a dime this year, but I suddenly am not bitching about the labor dispute and the work stoppage. I suddenly am wondering if Chris Bourque can make his dad’s old team. I’m suddenly wondering if Tyler Seguin can score 50 goals in 48 games.
Go Bruins!
Would you like to live on Mars?
In a totally related yet seemingly unrelated question, Would you like to spend the rest of your life as a reality TV star?
If the answer to both questions is yes, then have I got a link you need to read! Click on this space.com article and prepare to be dazzled.
So you have to be mentally and physically healthy, smart, and over 18 years old in order to apply to be a Martian colonist.
Allow me to quote one thing from the article:
“Gone are the days when bravery and the number of hours flying a supersonic jet were the top criteria,” Norbert Kraft, Mars One’s chief medical director and a former NASA researcher, said in a statement.
I think Norbert might have misspoke a little here. I think bravery might still be a necessity for anyone planning to move to an uninhabitable planet for the rest of their lives. I think that if you are planning to do that for a living, forever, you should probably have a solid set of balls (literally or figuratively). Just saying.
I think the funding plan for this is absolutely hilarious. Just think of the 24/7 (actually, how long is a day on Mars, and how would we define a week there?) television coverage of the people living in the artificial habitat. How long would it last before they start scripting the daily events. How long until they send a space craft full of eligible, sexy, single women along with a great big bucket of red roses so that they can air The Bachelor: Mars once a week? Think of the ratings!
I may sound cynical about this project, but I have to say… if I were 18 and could speak Dutch? I would totally go for it.
We’re coming for you, Marvin the Martian. I don’t know when we’re going to get there, but we are going to get there.
Today is January 8, 2013. Three weeks and four days from now will be February 1, 2013, and you all know what that means…
Robbie starts blitzing you all with bad homemade music. It’s still far enough away that both rpmchallenge.com and fawn.org are not even up yet. That doesn’t mean I’m not already thinking about them.
As always, I hope to come up with a lyrical concept to tie all of the songs together, but usually all I get is songs about how my cat is really a super villain out for world domination. No one has ever accused me of being the next Bob Dylan. Maybe in terms of my singing, but never my lyric writing.
I’m looking forward to this once again. If I write one song that doesn’t suck then I will have out done every other February writing project attempt in my past.
Rock on!
This on was 1000000000000 times funnier in my head.
Have you watched the show, The Big Bang Theory?
They stole a set design from my wife and my bedroom! I kid you not! The bedspread in Bernadette’s bedroom is exactly the same as the one we sleep under every single night!
This is the original, on our bed. I took this half an hour ago.
One of the reasons this isn’t as funny as I thought it would be is because Google Images let me down. There is a first for everything, I guess.
Here are two pics from the show that kind of demonstrate the stolen bedspread.
See? They stole it from us!
Okay, worst post ever. I am so sorry.
This is what happens when you have an iPhone with a camera app that lets you take long exposures, and you get stuck at a long stop light in Concord, MA.
This worked better on the iPhone 4.
Let the rumors begin.
Word on the street yesterday was that Rush is about to release the dates of the second leg of the Clockwork Angels North American tour. It’s supposed to take place in March and April, just prior to the band going to Europe in May. There are no definite dates yet. There was a leaked itinerary that was pretty clearly fake. It featured three separate stops at one venue. That seemed very unlikely and it removed any possible credibility from the “leak”.
Still, the rumors suggest that there will be another stop at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. I remember back in 1983, reading in some lame rock magazine (Circus? Maybe?) that Rush had booked six nights at Radio City. Back then, that sounded like the most amazing example of success. To book six consecutive nights in one of the most famous of all US venues. It was hard to believe. The 13 year old me decided that someday, he would see Rush at Radio City.
I am still waiting for a chance. I have seen them in Manhattan twice. Both times at Madison Square Garden. As unbelievably awesome as those experiences were, they still weren’t Radio City.
I have been inside Radio City Music Hall once. My wife and I took the tour on one of our visits to the city. Hopefully the next time we’re there it will be to see the Holy Triumvirate of Prog Rock.
I’m such a nerd. Like there was any doubt that a guy who blogs like 3-5 times a day would be anything other than an uber nerd.
A couple of months ago I turned to Twitter with a question. I always turn to Twitter with nerd questions, and I never get any answers or advice or anything outside of occasionally being followed by spam porn accounts, but I digress.
I asked Twitter if anyone had any experience with using external camera lenses with their phones, specifically their iPhones. I was curious about The Photojojo Phone Lens Series, and the Olloclip iPhone camera lens. I was leaning toward Photojojo because it includes a zoom lens, where Olloclip does not.
As mentioned, the Twitterverse was totally silent in response to my questions so I had to decide for myself.
I just ordered the Photojojo set.
I told you I was an uber nerd!
Oh yeah, I also ordered the super deluxe blu-ray version of 2112.
I told you I was an uber nerd!
It’s official. The flu/cold/plague symptoms have now been with us for three full weeks. Hoo-freakin’-Ray!
After visiting the emergency room last week, Jen was not seeing any improvement so she went to see her primary care. He gave a better explanation of the situation and prescribed yet another new antibiotic (her fourth since this all started) and a steroid. Nice. My wife is going to smash the long ball, just like Barry Bonds!
I’m still congested. I still have a cough. Neither is as bad as it was three weeks ago, but they are all still sticking around. I had a bit of a tough night sleeping last night. The cough woke me up a couple of times. Last week I thought I was 90% well. Now I’ll put it at 70% well. My health is currently getting a C-.
We are having a post-holiday, holiday party with Larry and Mike and families this weekend. I am going to be well enough to go to that party, even if it kills me! My health needs to be at least at a C+. I can do it. Hear that, immune system? I have confidence that you can stop sucking just enough for me to spend an evening with my family and my friends all in the same place together. You can do it, immune system. You can do it!
Did you hear that hockey is coming back? (yes, that was a sudden change of subject) Baseball pitchers and catchers are less than two months away from reporting to spring training as well. The days of no sports to watch but football (yawn) and basketball (zzz zzz zzz) are coming to an end.I am still furious with the NHL. That is not going to go away. When it comes to holding a grudge about pro sports labor disputes, I am the king. I am still fuming over the 1981 baseball players strike. Because of that stupid thing, the stats on my 1982 Topps baseball cards did not include 162 games for that season. Dwight Evans only got to play something like 104 games. That sucked and I’m still pissed.
Anyway, I think one of the reasons why I am so much more upset about this lockout than the last one (don’t get me wrong, I was steaming with rage last time too) is that last time I had an AHL team to distract me. The Lowell Lock Monsters. Eric Staal. Chuck Kobasew (sp? sorry Chuck). Damn, what a great team we had that year. While everyone else was boiling over with rage about not having hockey, there were maybe one thousand or so people in the Greater Lowell area who had Monsters season tickets. No, it was not the same as having the NHL, but it did keep our hockey minds occupied for that black hole of a season.
I could have followed Worcester, or Providence this time, but I still have that old Lowell loyalty. Be it the Lock Monsters or the Devils that replaced them, I loved AHL hockey in Lowell. For the record, there was no way I would ever have followed Manchester. That would be like rooting for the Yankees in the Red Sox absence. It would never, ever happen. In fact, I talked to my gorgeous wife Jennifer about maybe going to a game in Manchester, but I made it clear I would be rooting for the visiting team.
Lock Monster hockey, it’s alive! (or at least it was back then when I needed it)
Inside the Red Head's Head 