Wednesday, July 11, 2007

hold the afterthought


it seems as i get older the more i seem to forget simple things that should have been cemented in childhood. while preparing my turkey burger tonight, i stood at odds with the question of does mayonnaise mix well with mustard?

as commonplace and mundane as it seems, i contemplated this for about a minute and a half. another thing i've noticed as i get older is my tendency to hold tight to "sure thing" choices and always cast the unknown into the dark where it lies, baited, waiting to attack my steadfast sensibility.


i thought back to when fuddruckers was a weekly family outing, and i hovered over the nacho-esque cheese bowl waiting to overcompensate my burger with hot melty goodness, secretly masking the taste of mustard and any other assorted condiments virtually tasteless.

thinking back even further, sadly, my only real association with mustard to this day comes in the form of a statement that my childhood friend's father said to us one day while eating burgers: eat mustard, it makes your d__k grow. while i never believed that to begin with back then, to this day i can't help but crack a smile every time i think of a grown man weaving that phrase into gold.

though i wish his pops had been a tad more insightful, as to explain to us which foods went best with said choice or more importantly how his statement actually made any significantly proof worthy sense. i could imagine him now, forming his thesis, making his arguments, closing with that same line of magical aspirations.

so then, with the choice in place sight, in my own unbelievably boorish way, i chose to take the plunge off the cliff and try something i hadn't tried in quite a long time: i gently spread mayo on one side of my double toasted country potato bun, and mustard on the other.

add to that mild cheddar and some leftover mushrooms and onions.

and let me tell you, it was fantastic.

Monday, July 9, 2007

Live Earth: new band to watch, Nunatak

Not sure how many of you watched the Live Earth concert on saturday (put on by Al Gore). It's the first concert he's thrown to promote awareness about the environment. All in all, the performers he brought in (Smashing pumpkins, The Police, Kanye West, Keith Urban featuring Alicia Keys?) to perform were okay, but one band stood out, so much so, that i was driven to look them up just because of their performance. It turns out that they're part of a group of scientists doing research in Antartica, and moonlight as the house band! Now i'm not saying they are the greatest new and big band buzzing around town, but i think they are decent enough to be mentioned! Anyway enjoy the video! No website or m-space page at the moment, but let's hope for either in the near future.



From Wikipedia:

British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera Research Station’s house band. The five person indie rock band is part of a science team investigating climate change and evolutionary biology on the Antarctic Peninsula[1]. On 7 July 2007 as part of Live Earth, Nunatak will play to a sell out crowd of 17 (the entire population of the BAS research station Rothera[2]) and will make up the Seventh Continent contingent of the Live Earth concert.

Lead singer Matt Balmer, 22, said of the event that the band "expected to spend our Antarctic winter here at Rothera quietly getting on with our work and maybe performing at the occasional Saturday night party. We could never have imagined taking part in a global concert." [3]

The band's name is derived from the Greenlandic word for a mountain top protruding from a glacier. Originally the band had named itself after a disease previously common to Punta Arenas roughly translated to "Ratchet Death" but felt that the pronunciation of that name was less than politically correct.

Friday, July 6, 2007

wherever the night takes you



i read about this earlier today on Pitchfork. by the few sounds of the songs on myspace i'd have to agree that this might indeed be the return of richard d james aka aphex twin. but who knows.

i'm often bored when left to my own recognisance, so i usually do one of two things. mill about on the television switching from a set number of channels, wandering back and forth from vh1 to food network to usa to mtv to lifetime (yes lifetime) to bravo to bet to comedy network and then the cycle begins again, sometimes varying it only by order of appearance.

i do the same thing online. i don't know if it's my semi-o.c.d. at work or just my complete and utter boredom for the current moment that makes me compulsively switch from email to imdb to peerflix to myspace all in a matter of a minute. and i go back to each as if anything significant will change within a minute's time. the sad thing is most of these never do. it then becomes apparent i am just doing this to waste time.

after hours of this i then contemplate how much time i've wasted and then think of something construcitve i could have been doing. yet at the moment when i had this opportunity, i was too tired or lazy to do anything about it.

the death of ambition.



i've been listening to the new arcade fire album almost consistently each day, if not just for the song 'No Cars Go.' It might just be the most emotionally driven song for me this year right beside 'Mapped by What Surrounded Them' from The Twilight Sad's album.



Go get these albums NOW!

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

Ban the Man!



So the other night i had nothing to do and my sister jaime and the illustrious raymend were in tow to go out and get a drink and a bite. they invited me to join them for as much and i plainly accepted the invitation.


we decided to go to acapulco for their margarita mondays bit, as it was in the $$ range and well, it's just damn good.

i hadn't been there for about a month or so and to our suprise there was a new catch to the monday festivities: a sign politely indicating their inquisitely odd new guidelines for attending said affair...including the exlcusion of sportswear (see: jerseys), sandles and hats.

what is this...a nightclub? a 5 star restaurant? no, it's f*cking acapulco!

we went in to confirm this as we stood in disbelief to these newly delivered rules. the girl at the front counter was pleasant enough and offered to confirm that we weren't indeed being fooled. 30 seconds later she suggested that 'we could try' to get in, but we opted out.

now i love margarita mondays, but the truth of it all was i seemed to always have a problem with the douche bag checking IDs there, so this was a welcome blow to persuade our permanant withdrawal from the place altogether. i hate going to a place where people look at your IDs for so long you feel like you've aged another year just standing there.

moral of the story: just say no to Acapulco's in San Marcos, CA. I'm officially banning it.