After battling a general sense of illness for Thursday afternoon and all day Friday, I headed off with Veronica Friday evening to see Ladytron at the Paradise Rock Club. It was spooky in a sense because only the day before the Rhode Island club fire had claimed 96 lives. I've mentioned before how I think Boston clubs are in general poorly laid out. Before the headliners took the stage, club management made an announcement advising everyone to take note of the nearest emergency exit. The show came off without a hitch, however. I'm not huge on seeing electronic bands live ... they'd better do something to make it interesting because watching people twiddle knobs is not interesting. Ladytron were guilty of the crime of knob twiddling. During one song, one of the male synth players appeared to be tapping the same, single key for the five minute duration of the song. No conversation. Minimal dancing, or even head bobbing. That being said, the show was enjoyable. Ladytron's songs catch your attention effectively enough, and the matching outfits are certainly cool, in a Clockwork Orange, "me and my three droogs" kind of way.

I forgot to mention that I saw The D4 a few weeks back at T.T. the Bear's Place in Cambridge. A heavy dose of garage rock from the kiwi quartet. They rocked the joint in no uncertain terms, leaving me with a persistent ringing in my ears as I got up early for journal club the next morning. These guys can definitely play, and just plain kick your ass on stage. I find their album 6Twenty a smidge boring however, not an uncommon problem for today's garage rock bands ... they just can't capture the live energy on record.

1. "avoid _______ like the plague"
2. "barney" (cockney rhyming slang for "trouble", thank you Ocean's Eleven)
3. "bob's yer uncle" (thank you Happy Mondays)

As if to kick us in the butt as we prepare to move back west, the skies opened up yesterday and dumped 27.5 inches of snow on us, a Boston record. I now own a snow shovel that I will probably never use again. Man, shoveling snow is hard work! Veronica is now making numerous references to a trip of ours to Tahoe a few years back. We arrived late at night and were pulling into the cabin driveway, partially blocked by a snowdrift. Being the experienced winter driver that I was (am), I tried to drive right through it, expecting it to explode into powder. Not quite. I bottomed the car out on it and had to have my dad come out to help dig us out.

Here's a pic of the state of our parking lot this morning. My red Honda is at the bottom right. Not too bad, considering some cars on the street were almost completely submerged in fallen snow and snowplow-made drifts.

We ended up spending Saturday and Sunday in Providence, hanging with Rob and Roo, as well as their friends Pete and Erika. Had some nice Kebab and Curry, played a lot of Cranium and Trivial Pursuit, and ... well, umm ... I broke my video game fast. Rob rented NBA 2K2 for GameCube, and I just couldn't say no to a little multiplayer basketball action. After that, we played some classic NES, including Gunsmoke, Double Dribble, and RC Pro Am. That inspired me to download an NES emulator, which has kept me busy while stuck inside avoiding snow. Hopefully my recent video abstinence has tempered my consumption of games.

Last but not least, we enjoyed Olive's company for the weekend. The big conversation point was her possible pregnancy, suggested by her recent weight gain and UNBELIEVABLY HUGE nipples. Rob and Roo weren't incredibly impressed with the shelter from which they picked her up, so they didn't put it past them that Olive either entered the place with puppies or was impregnated within. After a visit to the vet on Monday, the diagnosis however was false pregnancy. No puppies for us. Yet.

Down in Providence at the moment, at Rob and Roo's after spending the night. We all attended the Sleater-Kinney show at Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel. I wrote about their last show in Boston last October, mentioning how they weren't very tight and the show lacked a certain energy. Well, version 2 was no different. I understand that bands are always anxious to play new material and let older crowd favorites fade from their live sets, and that's fine. But Sleater-Kinney tackle this problem in a very strange manner. The set was maybe 75% from their latest album One Beat, but every once in a while they would break into an older song, mostly drawn from Dig Me Out. But while playing the older tunes, the band either seemed to just zone out completely, or they would play it at a faster tempo, almost as if trying to get it over with quickly. This was particularly true for "(You're No) Rock 'n' Roll Fun", which Corinne sang like "You're no rock 'n' roll fun, like a party that's over before it's begun, you're no mmph sshhmmph mmmsshhh phhhhmmm GIRL BAND! THE GIRL BAND!" The other characteristic example was "Get Up", the only song in the set from The Hot Rock, which they seem to avoid like the plague. This tune, which I've seen them play with such raw emotion and vigor previously, was sung like they were reading an IRS document. What happened to the girls in the year they took off after touring for All Hands On The Bad One?

"And we will shine a light of justice on them, and we will smote those evildoers out of their caves ..."

I can't handle CNN anymore. Between Dubya's incessant calls for war, unsettling information about possible new terrorist activities ("Oh, by the way, we're going to put these antiaircraft missiles around the capitol. Just in case, you know. Go about your usual business."), branding of the French and Germans as "ungrateful" for their reluctance to follow Bush's charge into Iraq, and news about how not only are the North Koreans most likely in possession of two nuclear devices, but they have a missile that could reach the west coast of the United States. The Onion's recent headlines have hit the nail squarely on the head: "N. Korea Wondering What It Has To Do To Attract U.S. Military Attention", "Saddam Enrages Bush With Full Compliance", "Plowshare Hastily Beaten Back Into Sword". I'm seriously disgusted with our government, moreso than i can ever recall having been before.

Nineteen days since I played video games. I can't even remember the controls to Splinter Cell anymore. Was X the button that put you in stealth mode? How did you fire those sticky shockers again?

Saw a sneak preview of Old School, starring Will Ferrell, Luke Wilson, and Vince Vaughn, last Saturday at Fenway. A good belly laugh kind of movie, in the style of Road Trip (not surprisingly, the same people made both). I'm doubtful that Will Ferrell could ever not be funny. On an entirely different note but strangely the same day, i tivoed Princess Mononoke, an anime film from 1997 about the battle between ancient forest gods and the humans inching ever closer. That was wonderful, both visually spectacular as well as topically relevant. Anime is a genre that i always mean to more fully explore, but never seem to get the chance.

I finished Fast Food Nation on the T the other day. On the whole i found the book very well written and thoroughly researched. It touches upon many different social consequences of the proliferation of fast food culture, from the exploitation of a cheap and easily replaceable work force to government regulation of meatpackers. Although i am a democrat, i did find that the author's left wing bias had too much of an effect on the book. I mean, i know for a fact that the fast food industry has made a number of positive contributions to our society, none of which are covered in this text. Nevertheless, the book's indictment of fast food corporate culture, from the restaurants to the meatpackers, potato conglomerates, and other suppliers, remains valid. Descriptions of the horrors of the meatpacking industry are difficult to dismiss, from bilking its workers out of compensation for their numerous and ghastly on-the-job injuries to squashing legislation proposing anything (improved microbe screening regulations, occupational safety, minimum quality requirements for food sold to the school lunch program) that might affect their bottom line. I'm pondering giving up ground beef altogether after reading FFN.

Tonight is Sleater-Kinney in Providence. Hopefully they've gotten their act together since their ho-hum performance at the Roxy in Boston last October.

My youngest sister Hilary has been pretty peeved with my dog-centric reporting of late, claiming that I've blacklisted her kitties from my site. So just to show I'm an equal opportunity big brother and pet reporter, here's a recent photo of her six toed cat Caramel. Apparently the cat bears more resemblance to my other sister Emily ... just can't seem to wake up.

Back to dog news, it seems Emily's second puppy, the Weimaraner, fell severely ill, so she was forced to give him up. Hopefully he'll pull through.

It's been nine days now since I last played a video game. I can't even remember what the last one I played was ... I think it was FIFA 2003, but it may have been the glorious Splinter Cell. But in keeping with my vow to reduce the influence they have over me, I've only fantasized about them in the last week. In short, I realized that if I was at home and wasn't eating or sleeping or watching television, I would flip on the Xbox/PlayStation 2/GameCube and play for an hour or four. At the end of a weekend that I would have begun with a lot of great ideas of things to accomplish, I would have done none of them. And there is so much other stuff I want to do ... work on this site, play guitar, read, ride my bike. Video games are fun, no doubt, but they don't exist to fill any unused moment of my life. So far, so good ... I made some nice improvements to the site last weekend (don't think so? leave a comment!), started reading Fast Food Nation, and made great progress in the two papers I'm writing at work, not to mention the preparations I'm making for my new job at Stanford. The Solid Snakes, Samus Arans, and Super Marios own me no longer.

(yeah, right)

Seems like television these days is a non-stop parade of publicity-craving retards ... ahem ... I mean, reality shows! Tonight was American Idol, which quite frankly I'm amazed is on for a second run. Apparently finalists from American Idol 1 Kelly and Justin have a movie coming out shortly, but I'm doubtful as to whether that will extend their fifteen minutes of fame much longer than an MTV Say What? judging gig or two. It's amusing how much flak resident jerk Simon Cowell takes from Paula "Can I enter this contest too?" Abdul and Randy "Who the hell am I, anyway?" ______. Umm, do they really think America would tune in to listen to the two of them offer cliched praise for the latest contestant's rendition of Melissa Etheridge?

Last night's Joe Millionaire was a hoot. Seriously. As far as mentally-challenged primetime stars go, Evan takes the cake. It took him until he had whittled twenty women down to three to realize "Hey! This is all a lie! I don't have fifty million dollars!" Fortunately a little chat with one of the show's producers got him back in the spirit of the contest. My suspicion is that after turning the cameras off, the producer slapped him around and threatened to air Evan's child pornography video on the 11 o'clock news. Evan is hardly the only source of entertainment in this program, however. These women ... good lord! One of the final three, Melissa, never misses an opportunity to talk behind a fellow contestant's back, can't make pasta, and when asked what she would do with fifty million dollars, replied "I would go to a third world country and do mercenary work" (Jesus Christ! She's a soldier of fortune!). Sarah has a similar disposition but has apparently learned the lesson "loose lips sink ships". I was pulling for the third finalist, Zora, to be eliminated. The worst of the bunch? Hardly! She's the one with her head screwed on straight, so I want her to be spared the humiliation of being told she's been lied to for a month. Zora has that "What the hell was I thinking? Please don't let me win!" thing going, à la Darva Conger.

But wait, there's more! VH1 has gotten in on the action with Star Dates. This show is fairly tame compared to the rest of the reality lineup, featuring former and semi-current celebrities going on two blind dates with ordinary folks. Actually, the Phyllis Diller episode was very cute. But this week featured Gary Coleman. Should be fun, right? The wisecracking, short-in-stature star of Diff'rent Strokes? Good god, this must be the most jaded man in show business. His first date basically ran to the house as soon as the car bringing the couple home turned onto her street. Well, he did take her to a train exposition. His second made a serious attempt to have fun with him, but Gary just complains constantly. Why he isn't on television anymore, how he's never had a relationship in his life (there's a puzzler), etc etc.

Now that I've used the holy triumvirate of exclamations (good lord, Jesus Christ, and good god), I will bring my rant to a close.

Joe Rogan: Okay guys. Ready for your next stunt? On this tray we've got twenty pounds of sushi. That's twenty pounds of raw tuna, fish eggs, rice, seaweed, and wasabi.
Dylan: Whoa, that's a lot of sushi!
Mike: At least it's not horse testicles. I've eaten tons of this stuff in sushi bars.
Jenna: Yeah, no sweat!
Joe Rogan: That's great guys, but you won't be eating any sushi today. At least not like you see it here. Over here we've got Tanaka, Yoshi, and Akira. They're Sumo champions from Japan, each weighing over 400 pounds. They each consumed one of these twenty pounds sushi platters about two hours ago, so it's had a little time to work it's way through their system. Each of you will lie on your back on this bench while one of the big boys squats over you and drops a load in your mouth. You will then have ten minutes to get it down. If you yak during the stunt, you are eliminated. If you refuse to perform this stunt, you are eliminated. We've randomly selected who gets to go first, and Jenna, you are lucky number one! Ready?
Dylan: You go girl!
Jenna (using the official Fear Factor puke bucket) : Uhhhh, hold on ...

I am positive NBC is looking for the one doctor in America who thinks this stunt is safe, then it's on the air.