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I didn’t see the Kelly Bell Band as planned last Friday, but instead headed out to Tom Drinker’s Pub and even stopped by the utterly pathetic Coyote Ugly. At Drinker’s some guy thought I looked like stupid Russel from Six Feet Under who was played by Ben Foster. Russel of course was famous this season for sleeping with his male teacher and having hair greasier than a McDonalds dish rag. Speaking of McDonalds, I’m fascinated with the new McGriddle. If you haven’t heard of the McGriddle, it’s an egg McMuffin with the muffin swapped out for two syrup injected pancakes. I think there is a good chance no human invented the McGriddle as it is possibly the most unnatural thing you could eat. My guess is that a sophisticated artificial intelligence designed to develop new and exciting McDonalds’ menu items came up with two ideas: The McPoop and the McGriddle, and the rest is history.

I went down to Ocean City, NJ on Sunday and the weather was just awesome. Is it me or did the beach down there completely shrink?

I saw 28 Days Later on Saturday night. DAMN! This movie was awesome. The premise of a guy waking up from a coma to find an empty world is pretty cool and other than Finding Nemo, there aren’t many decent movies in the theater right now so check it out.

If you’ve never seen the Kelly Bell Band come to Grape Street tonight and check them out. They call their style “phat blues” and always sound great live. You should come just to see Matt Carol’s 8 string bass.

I thought someone I knew saw G-Love on Wednesday night at Grape Street with his side project, Lottery. It turns out some random guy was searching for info on Jeremy Hollis and decided to submit the news. I like it! Jeremy Hollis deserves all the praise he gets and I keep telling myself I’ll make it to his next show. It would be nice if the guy had a website. Oh wait, he does. I guess you could call that a website.

i went to the grape street pub in manayunk not knowing what to expect. we knew that g-love was gona be there. so we got there early knowing the place was going to be packed. about 7:30 he showed up for sound check. their was only about 9 people in the whole place. he played about two songs and i was blown away. after his sound check we had the chance to chat with him for a couple of minnutes. i sugest anyone who likes g-love to check him out at the feastival pear at penns landing aug. 10. and keep an eye out for his side project, lottery.

It was night #2 for me as the host of the Tree House open mic and it went great! I won’t pretend scheduling everyone to play went perfectly smooth and there wasn’t the occasional feedback explosion, but we had great musicians and good sound for most of the night.

This was the first week I used the Internet sign up form and I had a hard time joining the list from the web and the list of people who signed up in person. To get around this, next week I’ll be showing up a lot earlier (the music will start at 8:00PM next week) and the Internet list will be the start of the final list. I tried to accommodate everyone tonight, so if I asked you to play a certain time don’t take it personal.

Everyone rocked tonight. Here was the final list.

1. Ben Garvey – (he sucked) Played “Why Now Satan?” and “I Hope I Die on the Moon”
2. August Sky – This couple sounds great and will be playing the Tree House pretty soon.
3. Mark Penza – My cousin and he rocks for playing his alien abduction song he wrote years ago. He knows I like it.
4. Barry Dwier – He gets the record for the tallest open mic act I’ve ever seen. He was awesome, especially hiis cover of NIN’s “Hurt,” which he did the Johnny Cash way.
5. Chuck and Dan – Good bass and acoustic duo.
6. Maria – She keeps getting better and I hope she hangs out a lot like last summer. Rocking Ben Harper cover.
7. Matt Winn – My favorite martian guitarist. I’d say this was one of the best performances I’ve seen him do. He should be doing soundtracks for short films. Weird short films.
8. Keith Lewis – Sure the song wasn’t about Willie Tapps, but Keith, I secretly think you meant this Willie.
9. Willie Tapps w/Danielle – Danielle sounded great on the flute and Willie gave his usual awesome performance.
10. Aaron – Played a Ryan Adams cover on my guitar. If it had been Brian Adams, it probably would have burst into flames or possibly caused Aaron’s fingers to bleed.
11. Roz King – My favorite part was the little snake charming Indian scale he played between songs.
12. John Shaughnessy – Anybody who covers local bands gets praise from me. I’ll have to start working on a cover of some local artists.

Thanks to everyone for coming out. Remember, next week starts at 8:00PM!

Sorry to any unregistered users who tried to sign up for the open mic. It probably didn’t work for you until recently. Everything should be fine now.

Things will get started at 8:30PM. Signup in person after 7:30PM or signup now online. I broke a string already on my two week old strings, but I should be in good shape for tonight. See you there.

I’ll have to check out both versions now. Taken right from Beck’s Journal:

I also saw pink doing her new song, which is in fact my old song. I wrote and recorded it with william orbit a few years back. its called feelgood time. it sat around languishing like a few dozen other tracks of mine are currently. somehow pink heard it and wanted to cover it for the charlie’s angels movie. I was doing a solo tour of europe when I was asked. I thought about it for a few days then gave the ok (I’ve had other songs covered by johnny cash, weird al and tom petty). I like the idea of songs having life beyond what I do. I have much respect for the songwriter tradition. bacharach, hoagy carmichael, frank loesser, hank williams. if a song is good enough it’ll translate to all sorts of voices and styles.

I finally heard it a week later when I got home and was suprised to find that pink had sung over my actual recording of the song and resang the vocal arrangements I did! they took out some of my crazy guitar shizz and made the song a little more radio friendly. I was dissapointed cos I wanted my version to get out there in some capacity. but now it would just sound like I was doing karaoke to pink. so I let it go, but still have plenty more in the kitty. my version, which I am partial to (though pink sings the chorus better than I did), is floating around somewhere. hopefully you’ll be hearing it in one version or another at beaches, community pools and motor parks across the nation this summer. feelgood time indeed.

As the title suggests…

Bees
I can’t help but think of Tommy Boy.

Scary Clowns
Don’t click if you’re afraid of clowns.

Cowbell Fever
In my top ten Saturday Night Live sketches is certainly the Christopher Walken/Blue Oyster Cult skit where Walken demands more cowbell. It inspired some music geeks to list every cowbell song ever recorded.

I’m not sure how but we had two nice days in a row. I even went running again (3rd time in 7 days). Right now I have to take a break from my latest programming project, because it’s making me nauseous.

Oh, and by the way. This is the 200th post.

Every programming book starts with a “Hello World!” example. It’s the most basic program you can write in any language and I use it or its many variations (“Goodbye Cruel World!”) to make sure my development environment is set up properly. This site houses Hello World! examples for dozens of programming languages including C++, Perl, Visual Basic and tons I’ve never even heard of.

My favorite is the Hello World! for Microsoft Visual C++, which checks in at almost 400 lines of code!

I fulfilled my promise of putting up a way for people to sign up for the Tree House’s Wednesday open mic online.

Sign up here for this week’s open mic.

If you’re logged in and saved a website address in your profile, the signup sheet will link your name to your website. Another cool feature is that you can go by whatever name you want on the list, even if you’re a logged in. There is also a space to let me know what requirements you need to play. Do you need a chair? Two mics? Singing lessons? It’s easier if I know ahead of time. You can also use the space to proclaim your greatness/humbleness/nervousness/excitedness/lochness/etc.

I really liked Finding Nemo. I’m not sure how Pixar put out 5 quality films in a row. You can’t help but be impressed, especially compared to the complete and utter crap from Disney’s traditional animation studio.

I didn’t really like Shrek, and wasn’t crazy about Ice Age (and not because Blue Sky turned me down on a job interview), but somehow Pixar manages to write good stories, refrain from milking sequels (only one so far), and make their movies look even better each time around. I thought Monster’s Inc. looked incredible, but visually, Nemo beats the snot out of anything done before.