Bam! Pow!

by | Aug 18, 2008 | Random, Sports

Bullets!

  • I woke up on Saturday morning around 5:45am, as usual, to get the kids up and about. As I groggily opened my eyes, I saw an odd formation to the right of my dresser. It was a strange shape and I thought “ok, you’re half asleep, so it’s probably something obvious.” Then it moved! Now I’m like “oh shit!” The first thing I thought was that it was a bat. Because when it moved, everything moved in tandem and it went from wide to thin pretty quickly. Now I’m freaking out a little, because if there’s a bat, I’m not gonna be the guy running around the house with a broom and a box. Hell NO. Remember, all this is happeing in the space of about 30 seconds. So I get up, half-expecting the bat to come at me and peck my eyes out. But as I approach, I realize what an ass I am. It’s a leaf, part of a whole little project that our twin nephews put together for the boys. Sigh. One of the leaves was simply hanging off the edge of the bureau (by fishline).
  • Crazy event this weekend. We went to a pool party thrown by some local Maynard friends on Saturday. It was hard to socialize the way we want to since a) our guys are 1 and the rest of the kids are mostly self-sufficient and around 5 years old. This means most of the kids can swim – and ours just walk around and want to jump in the water. Anyway, I’m sitting there and lost in the craziness of a pool party, I notice another kid jump in. No big deal, looks like he’s done it a million times. 30 seconds later, a woman screams and jumps in the pool, without taking her shirts and shoes off. The dad was already in the pool, so he shot over. Seems the kid that I watched jump in couldn’t swim yet. Holy shit! The kid was freaked out when the parents got a hold of him. I don’t know if it was instinctual or not, but the kid knew to kick and flail to keep himself up. Thank goodness. Really scary stuff.
  • Speaking of pools, Michael Phelps’s display of awesome at the Olympics was something to behold. But swimming is like the NHL. People don’t really watch it except once every few years and I don’t care how many golds you win, swimming goes back into the closet for 4 years now that it’s over. On another Olympics note, it was awesome to see people our age doing great things at the Games. How about a 38 year old Romanian woman winning the marathon by almost a country mile! Or that 41 year old American swimmer? Really cool.
  • Oh, we had our annual “tax-free” weekend in Massachusetts these past couple of days. Basically anything you buy up to $2500 is tax free. It was suppoesdly a decent success. My contribution to the state economy: 24 wall anchors for screws and a fill-up of my propane tank for the grill. Total: $18. I saved one cent!

ID, Please

by | Aug 10, 2008 | Music, News, Sports

Seriously, who believes these Chinese gymnasts are 16 years old or older? Steph and I are channel flipping tonight and we stop at the Olympics because, well, 60 Minutes is over and there’s literally nothing to watch. I mean it – we went through just about the whole online guide. Nothing of interest. More on that in a second. The gymnasts from China look like they are 7. I’m not even kidding. Steph and I were pretending that we were the color-commentators and saying things like “and here’s Lio Zinzan, she’s 18 (minus 10)” and “here’s Siano Yuanyuan, she just entered pre-school last year.” Honest to god, can they find fake 16 year old that are least 50 pounds and taller than 2 feet, 4 inches?

I’m beginning to wonder if having cable TV is worth it. Seriously. We watch very little TV nowadays. I guess when fall comes and Lost, The Office and 30 Rock are back on, it may make it worth it, but I’m thinking maybe my money could be better spent elsewhere. We’ve also been thinking about removing the TV from the family room and setting it all up in the basement. Imagine that – no TV in the living room. That would be the first time in my life and you know what, it’s not sounding too outrageous right now. Having to go down into our basement (it’s finished) for TV isn’t ideal, but with the amount we’re watching, it’s acceptable.

I’ve been digging on Blitzen Trapper lately. They’re a group of lads from the Pacific Northwest who are fairly hard to classify, although somebody on Wikipedia called them “an experimental folk band,” which I take exception to. I don’t like experimental folk bands. I poked around on the web for a better explanation and I guess I found one on Pitchfork, from a review of their last album:

While I’m loathe to make a Pavement reference (lo-fi recordings! Slackers with guitars!!!), ‘Wild Mountain Nation’ comes closer to catching the carefree fuck-off sprawl of [Pavement’s] ‘Wowee Zowee’ than any record in recent memory. Here the band sail through any number of genres and styles without giving off a whiff of effort, their apparent West coast breeziness covering for the judicious amount of detail crammed into nearly every song.

Yummy. Here’s a taste for you, a song called “Wild Mountain Nation”
[audio:mountain.mp3]