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Only 5 days until Jeanne and I officially get hitched, so I won’t be hosting the open mic for two weeks. Roz King will be filling in for me while I spend some time in San Francisco. I plan to host two more open mics after I get back (8/11 & 8/18) and that’s where I part ways with the Tree House open mic. I’ve had a good run there and hosted about 60 weeks worth of open mics, but it’s time to move on. No word on whether Tina and Randy will keep the open mic going with a new host, but I’ll let you know as soon as I find out.

I’d step down from the open mic at this point whether I was getting married or not, so don’t think that has alot to do with it. It was a good experience for me and hopefully most of you.

Right now I’d also like to mention a few new websites by local artists:

The Forest Greens! – Good site. Lots of pictures, although they load really slow.
Cynthia Bennett – Needs more content, but she just put it up.
Jeff Ritchie of Greensleeve – An music hosting site for Jeff, so it has some cool new songs although in some crappy proprietary sound format. Update: Two songs are available in MP3.
Xxoxia – Phil Golub’s new band

I added the random photo box to your right, although I think I want to switch it to a “latest photo” box instead. That will give me some incentive to post new photos.

Some random stuff:
Cool stickfigure animation
Great weird cartoon
The record industry isn’t dying because of downloads. It’s because of DVDs
9/11 Commission Report
Buggy, but cool flash Castlevania game
If they bring knives, we’ll bring straw dispensers

Come out tonight to the Tree House open mic. It runs from 8:00PM – 11:00PM. You can sign up in advance here or just come to hang out, listen to music and drink coffee.

The list is already pretty full. Tonight you’ll see the following performers:

Shannon Rae Cole and Joe Caliva
The Forest Greens!
Cynthi a & Blade
Jason Vertucio
The Freewheelers
Willie Tapps
Sarah Allen
Steve Flocco
George Hillman
John Shaughnessy
BJ Ness
johnny miles
Jerzy Jung

Last week was an interesting night. We had our first ever accordion performance.

1. Ben Garvey – I played The Genius of it All, All My Dreams are in Cartoon, and Daydream Believer by the Monkees.

2. The Forest Greens! – Rocked the joint. Jeanne and her neices really enjoyed Ellen’s dancing, too. The crowd was going crazy for the Greens.

3. Brimstone Alley – Played a song about an ordinary hero. They also played In Your Eyes and contrary to rumor, I didn’t cut the guitar out. Something happened and we couldn’t hear the guitar player, but I had nothing to do with it. When Roz guest hosts he has a “No In Your Eyes or Me & Bobby McGee” rule, which is strictly enforced.

4. Sarah Allen – Played that great Jeff Buckley song that AJ Visgil also covers. I can’t remember the name of it.

5. Bob Michel – Bob played the 2nd saddest song he knows.

6. Johnny Miles – His 2nd song had a cool, bluesy vibe. When I see him next time I’m going to get a CD right away because he always walks out before I remember.

7. The Freewheelers – I felt bad about cutting their set to 2 songs. I thought I told them ahead of time, but it’s possible that I didn’t. Sorry guys!

8. Joe – I didn’t feel bad about cutting Joe off, because I know I told him 2 songs. He started his 3rd while I was in the bathroom and tried to cram

9. Jay Shanken – Played a few good acoustic songs

10. Steve Kwiatho – First accordion player ever and he was awesome!

11. Jason Vertucio – Jay did a pretty good cover of John Lennon’s Imagine. Neil Young did a great cover of that song on TV for a 9/11 benefit a while back.

12. Matt Winn – Update! I forgot to include Matt, who also played.

I use Mozilla Thunderbird as my email client and it’s a terrific piece of software. The junk mail filters help me sift through tons of unwanted mail, but marking messages as junk takes too long if you have a rule set up to automatically move those messages to the junk folder. It takes a half a second to move the message and that time adds up when you have 50+ messages that need to be moved. One solution I’ve found is to go down the list of messages and select each one I think is junk (hold down Ctrl to select more than one message) and then hit “j.” This marks them all at once and saves me a lot of time.

Someone tried to rob the Sun bank in Collingswood yesterday, but he got tired of waiting for the teller. That sounds like every bank experience I’ve ever had. I’m pretty sure the Sun is right between the Tree House and Wawa on Haddon Ave. The Sun is just east of Wawa on Haddon Ave.

Authorities are looking for a man who they say tried to rob the Sun National Bank in the 600 block of Haddon Avenue on Thursday morning and ran away empty-handed.

The man walked into the bank about 11:15 a.m. and handed a teller a demand note and a yellow plastic bag he had brought into the bank, police said. Instead of giving the man money from her drawer, the female teller walked to the bank manager’s desk and handed him the note, police said.

The would-be robber then turned and walked out of the bank empty-handed. He ran away in an unknown direction, police said.

The suspect is described as white, about 6 feet tall, weighing between 160 and 170 pounds, with a thin build. He has brown hair and was clean shaven and is believed to be about 40 years old. He was wearing a baseball cap, sunglasses and a gray-colored T-shirt turned inside out.

Police searched the area after the robbery but were unable to find any suspects.

# Anyone with information about the attempted robbery is asked to call Collingswood Police at (856) 854-1313 or Camden County Investigator Patricia Taulane, at (856) 580 5854.

I watched “I Love 1992″ on VH1 last night and it’s much different than “I Love the 70s” and “I Love the 80s.” A lot of the cultural references from the older decades were about toys and cartoons, whereas the 90s are remembered more for Fabio, Billy Ray Cyrus, and Joey Buttafuoco. Of course, that’s because the Mo Rocha, Michael Ian Black, and Hal Sparks didn’t play with toys or watch cartoons in the 90s. Except for Ren and Stimpy, but who wouldn’t?

Reliving the year made me realized that it hardly qualifies for even being in the 90s. 1992 was more like Nineteen Eighty Twelve.

You know you want to come out tonight to the Tree House open mic. It runs from 8:00PM – 11:00PM. You can sign up in advance here or just come to hang out and listen to music. They have great food, so why not stop in for dinner?

In June of 2003 I finished a book called Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe by Richard J Gott. My favorite chapter of the book talked about how you can predict how long things will last using the Copernican Principle, which is basically “We are not special.” If you assume that your point of observation is not a special one, then according to Gott you can determine how long something else will last within a certain range of time. He cites examples like the Berlin Wall and the space program. You take a point of observation (now), assume it probably isn’t special. Special in this case is defined as a point in the subject’s lifespan that is not at the very end or the very begining.

My idea was to take the opposite of this and choose 50 celebrities, assume my point of observation wasn’t special for 98% of them. Statistically, since I picked 50 celebrities my point of observation should have been special for one of them. The experiment only has 2 months left and so far no one on the list has died.

The only ones left on the list are
Sigourney Weaver – 07/15/04
Kathy Bates – 07/25/04
Christopher Walken – 09/02/04
John Cleese – 09/27/04

If they pass away before their dates, then my experiment was a success.

Note: I don’t want to see any of these people go.

My politics don’t always bleed into this site, but I’ll just put this out there. Congress is about to vote on a Constituional amendment called the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would deny homosexuals the right to marry. Constituional amendments are extremely hard to roll back once they are in place, so if you believe in the right of consenting adults to get married, head here.