Drips

I think that shower floors should be carpeted to avoid the noise of the dripping that happens when you forget to turn off the water completely.

Update on Sunday, April 28, 2013 at 11:23PM by Jaymes Buckman

Bonus Question!

Best shower? Meteor.

Preparation

Saturday's show was pretty great. We got to see some awesome bands, play some new songs, and enjoy a generally awesome afternoon. I think that it also marked the first show for which we were excessively prepared.

Hot Apollo has a long history of pulling things together at the last moment. In the week before our first actual show, we lost two bassists and a drummer. The bassist we got actually had to learn all of the songs on the night before the gig. With all of that, we still managed to play a good set. We've had a lot of experiences like that, and we've made some strides towards adequate preparation since. This weekend was an unusual one, though.

The set time we were given was slightly longer than what we usually get, and we didn't have time to pull together people for a full electric set. That left us with the task of adapting some extra songs into acoustic versions. Various life circumstances and a fracture in the guitarist's leg meant that most of this had to be done on the day before the show. We're no strangers to this kind of thing, though. We arranged a solid set, and an awesome new song even got written when I accidentally played a recording of some humming I'd made before bed in the preceding week. Things were set.

Unfortunately, things on the day of the show got slightly chaotic, and we were forced to cut our time down. I think that we managed to play two thirds of what we had in the end. They were two awesome thirds, though, and that incident of excessive preparation was a surprising new experience for us. 

Update on Sunday, April 21, 2013 at 08:06PM by Jaymes Buckman

Bonus Question!

Best swamp punk? Alan Moore.

Still Groovy After All These Years

I just got back from seeing "Evil Dead". I went with a friend who differs from me in his unwillingness to see every random movie that comes out, but this was one of those occasions on which he decided to take a chance and do it for the sake of it. For what it's worth, I wasn't that sure about seeing it tonight either, but I'd heard good things, and my standing affection for "Army of Darkness" gave me a sense of obligation. 

I remember getting that tape from one of my father's assistants for Christmas when I was 10. Was I 10? Probably. It seems slightly stranger in retrospect, but that guy's primary job seemed to be taking care of my brother and me. The whole situation is somewhat reminiscent of the sort of internship one would see in a situation comedy. Still, the guy was pretty awesome, and some sort of amiable connection must have been established through sheer familiarity, for that gift really hit the mark. I hadn't heard of the franchise before, and I was initially bemused to receive the final installment of a trilogy I'd never seen. He explained that the movie's greater emphasis on crazy fun made it the one for me, and I agreed that that made sense. I don't know whether I've actually seen the middle film yet, but my eventual encounter with the first one definitely reinforced the guy's argument. A fairly straight horror movie pales beside a fantastical time travel romp in my eyes, and that would have been especially true at that age. That was probably around the time of my first viewing of "Young Frankenstein", which initially left me in a state of confusion over the movie's placement in the comedy aisle of the video store. I watched it again shortly afterwards and started to build up a greater affection for it, but I doubt that I'll ever be able to say the same for Ash's first outing. In any case, I watched "Army of Darkness" on the first day of Christmas vacation, and the thing still sits on some nebulous list of my favourite movies.

This new film is obviously a different beast, but it does what it does well. My friend and I didn't leave the cinema with any sort of transcendent joy, but we had a good time. There is one lingering thing, though.

How is a decrepit cabin a relaxing environment for a recovering drug addict? Mother of balls. Cabins are generally pretty boring unless you already enjoy the sorts of activities they enable, and I would guess that most heroin fanatics aren't really the types who ascribe any great importance to the joys of fresh air. I doubt that anyone has a great story about going on a kayaking expedition with Lou Reed. I suppose that the included diagram claims the possibility of a slight overlap between addicts and cabin enthusiasts, but it's probably filled by adherents of the Coleridge lifestyle that mostly just involves sitting alone and suppressing sanity with a bunch of opium. And Coleridge's place certainly couldn't have been as isolated as the one in this film. For one thing, it would have needed to be in walking distance of that guy who interrupted "Kubla Khan" with some great offer on water heaters or something.

People go to cottages to get away from distractions. Care for a quick bit of news about distractions? They're pretty important in fighting obsession. For some reason, I have a very vivid memory of going to see "Clerks 2" with a group of friends. When Jay walked up to the camera and sighed that boredom was the first step on the road to relapse, the suicidal alcoholic who sat beside me proudly whispered, "It's true."

If the poor girl hadn't been interrupted by damned zombies, she might have had a worse time. I don't think that you're really supposed to sit alone in an empty room when you're trying to fight off addiction. At least turn on "Ellen" or something. Damn. 

Obviously, bad decisions are fairly necessary to enforce the plot of most horror movies, but there's often a bit of justification. The people in them have no way of preparing for the types of new and depraved situations in which they find themselves, and it therefore makes sense for them to be unable to formulate decent plans. They're not trained for it. But it's harder to condone the mistreatment of a friend in that manner. It's the same level of horror movie stupidity with less logic. In this case, it's especially weird because they specifically mentioned the abject failure that resulted from a previous attempt to do the same thing in that exact manner. 

Whatever. I preferred "Oz".

Update on Sunday, April 14, 2013 at 11:40PM by Jaymes Buckman

Bonus Question!

Best cabin in the woods? "The Cabin in the Woods".

Again (For the Worst Time)

The inside of my microwave.

I have accidentally started fires in my microwave before, but I think that I was less worthy of blame on this occasion than I was on all the smaller occasions. 

I had a couple of bags of popcorn in my room, and I decided to throw one in the microwave. Good times? What I forgot, however, was the fact that the popcorn store had recently started using a new type of bag that could be closed with clasps. Metal clasps. Metal clasps that don't look like metal.

At all.

That's the clasp I pulled out from one of the bags. Do you see any indication of metal? It basically just looks like a wrapped straw from a fast food place to me.

But within it lurks danger!

That's a terrible picture, but I ripped a part of the paper off to display a portion of the offending metal.

While the bag was in the microwave, I took the opportunity to fill up a glass of water. Having done this, I turn around to glimpse the familiar flashes of a microwave fire. The mug of water in my hand did not thoroughly douse it. Two full splashes from the larger mug in which I customarily keep random coins were required to put the little blaze out, and in the time this took, my smoke detector went off. Incidentally, this was around 2:00 in the morning. Fortunately, no one complained.

I have a theory about that.

A few weeks ago, I was quietly playing on an acoustic guitar in the middle of the night. The guy who lives beside me came over to bang on my door and threaten to call the police. A week ago, the same guy wandered into the building at midnight with a woman who added her own voice to his raucous laughter. Since then, their constant giggles and comically loud sexual acts can be heard across the first floor of the building. Since then, I have received no noise complaints. Actually, I don't think that I received any before that guitar thing, but I'm guessing that my neighbour has learned that it's actually pretty hard to be completely silent in this kind of apartment and accepted the fact that you get what you pay for. You have your sex, and I'll play my guitar. Rock-and-roll is my bride. From the sounds of things, I should probably admit that he seemed to be better at the making of love than I was at the playing of guitar, but that's really beside the point.

Anyway, I jumped onto my chair and attempted to find some way to deactivate the alarm, but my clumsy hands took over the task from my technologically ignorant mind and inadvertently succeeded by knocking the device off the ceiling. After that, it was merely a matter of removing the water and ash from my microwave. Apart from the burn marks, it looks pretty great now.

The bag of popcorn was ruined, but I tossed the other one in the microwave after removing the clasp and taking those pictures. The night improved after that.

Update on Sunday, April 7, 2013 at 07:54PM by Jaymes Buckman

Bonus Question!

Am I the only one who reheats popcorn?

Jaymes Questions the Coldness of the Gun

Alright. I've been listening to this song pretty frequently over the last week. I think that the main attraction for me is the production. There's just a kind of shadowy mysticism in the sound that's helped along by the faintly innocent rawness of Kate's voice. Also, I may have a soft spot for bottle crashes that are used for percussion. It's probably one of the things that puts "The Lilac Hand of Menthol Dan" near the top of my list of early Tyrannosaurus Rex songs. 

I was already vaguely familiar with the general plot of the song before the onset of this week's obsession, but I've had the chance to pay some real attention to it in recent days. Basically, the woman believes that her husband thinks that she has become old and ugly over the course of their marriage. After he responds well to a letter she sends in the guise of a fake admirer, she turns the pseudonym, "Babooshka", into a disguise that's basically a version of herself that's made up to look like the younger, prettier model the husband supposedly wants. In this persona, the wife successfully seduces her husband and ruins the marriage by proving to herself that he has the potential to be unfaithful. 

But now I'm just confused about her reasons for being doubtful of her man's fidelity in the first place. Seduction by letters would be one thing. She can conjure up images of her faded beauty for her husband in her prose. She went further, though. Somehow, she was able to convince her husband that she was actually a gorgeous nubile vixen and maintain that disguise through the most intimate of all acts. I just don't understand how she managed to convince herself that she was so ugly in the first place.

Alright. That's a total lie. I totally understand how people can be insecure about flaws of dubious reality. It's not uncommon.

What I don't understand is why she thought that she was irreparably undesirable to her husband. She easily transforms herself into his dream woman by the end of the song! She doesn't even give that a second thought! She never sits and thinks, "Hm. How in hell am I going put these ragged old bones back into sexy fresh overdrive?" She just picks a pseudonym and goes to it. Was her name the only problem? I don't get it. It seems as though the only things that stood between her and a sexually satisfying marriage were a bit of makeup and a fancy outfit. 

I'm an avowed romantic, but even I accept that a lot of couples need to take extra measures to keep the boudoir loud as old age advances. A lot of couples even role-play with fake names and secret meeting places to simulate the forbidden excitement of an affair. If she'd turned the whole thing into a game and told her husband about it in the beginning, the story would have been a happy one, and she would have injected a new sense of vigour into her marriage. 

Instead she punished her husband for wanting a younger, prettier lover by being a younger, prettier lover. I just don't comprehend how that works, and I don't know how it ever became a problem. 

Incidentally, I did a tiny bit of research about the song once, and I learned that Kate Bush wasn't aware that "babushka" is a Russian term for an old woman when she wrote the piece. Apparently, the story's leading man wasn't either. 

Still, dude. Great song.

Update on Sunday, March 31, 2013 at 11:41PM by Jaymes Buckman

Bonus Question!

Best old Russian lady? Black Widow. Seriously, she must be 80 at least.