It was bad enough when Arsenal knocked Chelsea out of the FA Cup this year. It was worse when they effectively ended our league championship bid by beating us at Stamford Bridge the following week. And now, to complete the teeth-kicking treble, we've drawn the Arse in the quarterfinals of the Champions League. Another two matches against the bastards ... i don't think i'll survive. Best foot forward Ted, c'mon ... if when we beat them, that will be some sweet payback.

V and i met up with Lance at Bottom of the Hill last night to catch Pretty Girls Make Graves, with openers Mahjongg and repeat PGMG supporters The Fuse!. Once again online show schedules screwed me, as we intentionally arrived at 9:30 to miss most of Mahjongg, and instead found they hadn't even gone on yet. They were interesting, for all the wrong reasons. Their first three or four songs suggested they were going for a Rapture, Radio 4 kind of indie dance rock sort of sound. However, they weren't particularly engaging, and moreover they were not cohesive. At all. During one song, i realized that no two of the five band members were in time or in tune. That's pretty impressive, considering all the possible combinations. The Fuse came on next, thankfully not spending an hour to set up this time. And again, they kicked some serious ass. There wasn't as much open aggression with the audience as last time, perhaps because of the raised stage at Bottom. Still an ear-shredding, knock-you-over set. PGMG came on around 11:15. I was fairly disappointed with their last performance at the Cafe Du Nord, but they sounded much better this time round. They've tightened up the live versions of the songs from their latest album The New Romance, which were the weak element of their last gig in SF. There were five or six guys in the crowd that went apes@$t for the whole set. One crowd surfed, fell down, crowd surfed, fell down, then crowd surfed some more. A few girls just behind us got several good kicks in the head. All i could think of was if he surfed over me, i was going to do a number on his testicles as he went by. My one complaint about the band is that the singer appears to think "The Getaway", one of the standouts from their first album, is too dated for them to play now. She was visibly agitated when the rest of the group began playing it during the encore, in response to repeated requests from the audience. A band with two albums cannot start claiming their "older" material is no longer suitable.

Afterwards V and i headed over to Poopscene. I was coerced into attending in order to score some passes to Monday's 100 person studio session by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, courtesy of Live 105 music director and Popscene founder Aaron Axelson. I even ended up dancing a bit, to Yaz's "Situation" and "Everything Counts" by Depeche Mode. I think it's been three years since i last did that. Usually going to Popscene means camping out at the bar. Aaron kindly added us to the YYY guest list, so we headed home to let the dog in. This morning however my neighbor informed me Cobi was barking continually late last night, probably thinking we were asleep and had forgotten to let her in. He was very nice about it, but it leaves us with a dilemma: leave the dog outside and piss off the neighbors, or keep her in the house and have her pee and bleed everywhere. Veronica may have found a solution ... doggie jams.

Tomorrow Veronica works while i head to Corte Madera for my aunt's surprise 60th birthday party. I don't think i've been to their house for 15 years. Then V and i get to do some serious scrubbing, washing, and tidying in an attempt to get our house back to some semblance of cleanliness.