Busy with new job
No time for a good haiku
So this one will have to do
Happy Anniversary of the the day we "met" Michelle. Met is in scare quotes because it wasn't me she was interested in that night.
I'm starting a new job tomorrow, so this week was a vacation week between jobs, which we spent in Atlanta visiting family and friends.
I did learn that if you need to make a all-day drive, Super Bowl Sunday is a good day to do it. I-85 between Richmond VA and Atlanta was as empty as I've ever seen it. Even driving in a downpour almost all day we made good time as there was no traffic to cause a delay in the bad weather.
The story of those "love tester" machines you used to see in arcades or bars is interesting. They started as legitimate attempts to quantify love or sexual attraction, and were taken advantage of by scam artists for a quick buck. Some things never change in this country.
And I loved this story of John Jaso, a MLB player who retired about 5 years ago at age 32, even though he almost certainly would have received a 2 or 3 year contract worth at least another $10 million had he continued to play. This check-in 5 years later finds him living his best life traveling the world and sailing the Caribbean, with no regrets at all about quitting after earning "only" $17 million.
NPR's Tiny Desk Concert featured the Indigo Girls this week.
Finally, this weekend is The Great Backyard Bird Count. I did a count for our bird feeder this morning, and saw my first American Robin since the fall at the feeder. Also, the goldfinches are starting to get their yellow coloring back. Spring is coming!
Last night's experiment with non-alcoholic beers was Sam Adams NA IPA. It's advertised as a hazy IPA. It pours a medium dark straw color with a light and frothy head. The nose has notes of pine and citrus. It tastes like a New England IPA. If handed this beer in a pint glass I'd have no idea it was non-alcoholic. It's simply a good beer, regardless of the ABV.
I had a weekly email newsletter back before Substack was cool. I quit doing it years ago, and I don't even remember why. Anyway, inspired by Brian, I just decided 5 minutes ago to revive the weekly interesting links email as a weekly blog posts.
Side thought - I wonder when the last time was that I referenced another blog as inspiration for something, as opposed to a Tweet?
Interesting Articles
The Strangely Beautiful Experience of Google Reviews
Apparently some people use Google Reviews as a way to create a trip log for themselves.
The Case For Digital Minimalism
If you've been reading here for anytime at all you know that I am very sympathetic to this argument, impractical as it may be.
Now Entering the Golden Age of N/A Beer
The big question for me is are NA beers just a trend, or is this a fundamental shift in drinking habits?
Learning to Love Paper Books Again
I have dramatically increased my reliance on my local library over the last couple of years, and I typically go for the printed version over an e-book, unless the e-book is available much sooner. Pretty much the only e-books I buy are $2.99 specials I find via BookBub.
Music
I stumbled into Robert Jon and The Wreck last week. How did these guys put out six records without me noticing? Their mix of southern rock and R&B goes down as smooth as a shot of Tennessee whiskey. Check out Chicago, Oh Miss Carolina, Gold or their newest single, Come At Me for a taste.
This warm weather we've had all week has me really feeling the wanderlust. I'm ready to de-winterize the camper and get out into the woods. Realistically, I've probably got another two months. Ugh.
I was listening to a podcast today where two dudes my age were listing their top 10 concerts. I got inspired. In chronological order, because I gave up trying to rank them 1-10.
Night Ranger - Aug/Sept 1984 - Honolulu Civic Center
My first concert. It was right around the time Sister Christian was making them famous. The trip home was more memorable than the concert. It’s on this list because I think your first real concert gets grandfathered onto your top 10, unless it objectively sucked or something. I tried to find a set list on the Internet, but this show does not exist online.
We were in Honolulu on vacation and the show was at the Honolulu Civic Center. I took the city bus to the show from the hotel, which was a few miles away. When the show got out city buses were done for the night, I didn’t have enough cash for a taxi (or assumed I didn’t), and because I was 16 and had been drinking, wasn’t going to try to call my parents at the hotel. So I’m standing there, wondering how I’m going to get back to the hotel, and some guy pulls up and offers to sell me pot. I turned down the drugs, but offered him 5 bucks for a ride to the hotel. And that is how I got home. My parents were out partying and weren’t even at the hotel anyway when I got back. My mom might be hearing this story for the first time if she reads this ?
Motley Crue / Whitesnake - Sept 87 - Market Square Arena, Indianapolis
Peak Motley Crue and peak Whitesnake. I think this was my first concert with Michelle.
Monsters of Rock - Summer 88 - Van Halen / Scorpions / Dokken / Metallica / Kingdom Come - Market Square Arena
At the time, I was probably most excited about seeing Dokken. They sucked. They broke up (for the first time anyway) not long after this tour. You could tell Lynch and Dokken weren’t speaking by their performance. This show is most memorable for the Metallica set, which blew the roof off the place. Many years later I saw an interview with James Hetfield where he names this specific show as the day they knew they were blowing up huge.
The Who - Lakewood Amphitheater - August 89
This was a few months after college graduation. I was living at home and my parents won the tickets somewhere. They gave them to me. The tickets were 6th or 7th row center stage. I saw The Who, from the 6th or 7th row, center stage.
Drivin N Cryin / Drivin N Cryin - Fox Theater - 1990
I’ve seen DnC over 20 times, and could have picked several of those shows as most memorable. In fact, they would be in the top 10 at least twice if I didn’t impose a 1 show per band rule on myself. This was one (maybe the first?) of their famous Thanksgiving week shows at the Fox Theater in Atlanta. They opened for themselves and encouraged fans to bring a canned food donation. They did a 45 minute acoustic set, took a break, then came out and rocked for 2 hours. Setlists.fm shows them doing 31 songs at this show, which is why I’m picking 1990 as the year, even though in my memory it was a little later, like 91 or 92.
Queensryche / Suicidal Tendencies - June 91 The Omni, Atlanta
I don’t remember the Suicidal Tendencies at all. I think we may have stayed at Underground Atlanta drinking for the opening set. This is the famous tour where they played the entire Mindcrime album, in order. Also, I think this is the first show I attended that had a giant video screen. Queensryche was at peak commercial popularity as Silent Lucidity was hot around this time.
Iron Maiden - June 2008 - Merriweather Post Pavilion, Columbia, MD
The second time I saw Maiden live, the first being in college. Every Maiden show is awesome. This show stands out primarily because it was my son’s first concert. I’ve seen them 3 more times since. Also, this kind of marks the line where we started attending concerts again, as the kids were old enough to either bring along, or leave at home.
Dan Baird / The Del-Lords - Iota Cafe, Arlington VA, Sept. 2013
Those two bands, for like $15, in a dive bar? That’s basically music heaven. I’ve also seen Drivin N Cryin in this place.
Tesla - Sept 2017 - The National, Richmond VA
Tesla had been one of my favorite bands since about 1987, and I had seen them several times by this point, but always as an opener or at a festival with a shorter set. So this was the first (and only) time I saw a full Tesla set. It was everything I hoped for, and more.
Butch Walker - Aug 2022 - Lincoln Theater, Raleigh NC
IMHO, Butch is simply the best live rock and roll show that you can see today. Without the 1 per artist limit, all 4 of my Butch shows may have been on this list. It’s possible I’m dealing with some recency bias here, but there was an energy at this show unlike anything else I’ve experienced. Maybe it was both him and the fans being so damn happy to be back at a Butch Walker show after the COVID layoff.
Honorable Mentions
Has anybody seen January? It was just here, I swear. How the hell have we blown through an entire month already?
I completed 4 books in January, including two that were outright fabulous that you should read, The Cartographers and The Measure. Details are on the 2023 books page, which you can find via the “Books” link on the left if you are reading on a desktop. I don’t remember where that link is on a mobile viewport, I’m sure you’ll find it if you want to.
We had three concerts planned for January, and I made it to one with my son. Everything else was a victim of the flu and pneumonia that established a beachhead in our house for most of January.
Around the house, I’ve been listening to a lot of The New Roses, Ginger Wildheart, The Commoners, and Vic Ruggiero.
The New Roses are a German band creating music that would have sold millions of copies in 1987. Their songs carry influences from pretty much any major rock act of the mid to late 80s, from AC/DC to GnR, yet none of it sounds dated. Well, some of the power ballads I could do without, but the high energy stuff is all really great.
Ginger Wildheart is a classic barroom rock and roll band from the UK. I don’t know how else to describe them. They start with a solid blues based rock and roll base and mix in some country influences to produce songs that sound great at 2 in the afternoon, or at 2 AM coming from a jukebox on a beer soaked dance floor in a pub.
The Commoners are a Canadian act that clearly grew up listening to The Black Crowes. I saw a review of their new album online somewhere, clicked play on the embedded video, and was looking for a buy button about 15 seconds later. It’s one of those records that hit me right in the sweet spot from the opening riffs of the first song I heard. I still need to go back and explore their back catalog.
Vic Ruggiero is a real wild card. A friend posted a video on Mastodon and I clicked through out of curiosity, and found myself going back to it several times that day, before just buying the album. Vic is best known as the frontman for some Ska bands, I think, but this solo effort is him and a piano playing a modern take on ragtime, and it’s frigging good.
Never Go Back Home - Vic Ruggiero (On The Rag Time) - YouTube
I also found myself revisiting the Lawrence catalog last month. If you are not familiar with the brother-sister team known as Lawrence, your life is about to get much better. The amount of talent in that family is phenomenal. Go find them on YouTube.
On TV, we binged Wednesday on Netflix, which was fabulous. We should also finish up The Sandman tonight, which has also been excellent, although I could have done without the diner episode. We also watched the two part Netflix miniseries on Manti Te'o getting catfished back before catfish was a verb. I know the Internet made fun of him back in 2009, but in getting the real story, he is the real victim. We are still working our way through a rewatch of Warehouse 13 too. We are in season 3.
Not surprisingly, we did not travel in January. So that’s over 90 days, and it is definitely getting to me. Camping season can’t get here soon enough. Life has conspired to postpone the Spring camping trip on the Natchez Trace until fall, but we’ll fill in local state parks in April to make up for it. We are going to Atlanta for a week in February, though, and I’m looking forward to catching up with friends and family that live there.
What’s up with you? Hit that reply via email button below to let me know.
Last night we were at Kroger and I saw an ad on a shopping cart for the no-alcohol Guinness. Advertising apparently works on me because I brought a 4-pack home, even though I had no intention of buying beer, with or without alcohol, when I entered the store.
I've tried a couple of the newer no-alcohol beers, and although none of them were bad, none felt like something I would want to drink regularly. This Guinness is different.
It comes in the famous nitrogen charged Guinness can, and pours exactly like a normal Guinness, midnight black with a long lasting, frothy head. I noticed when done that the pint glass was laced with foam, just as you would expect from a pint poured at your favorite pub.
My initial taste reaction was...wow, this tastes like Guinness. After drinking two pints, that reaction holds. The mouthfeel is a little different, it's thinner, but not dramatically so. The finish lacks the creamy smoothness you expect from a Guinness. It's not bad though, more like a nondescript dry stout than that classic Guinness smoothness. The taste holds up. It basically tastes like Guinness, which is exactly what you want your alternative 0% alcohol Guinness to taste like. At only 60 calories per pint, it's very middle-aged metabolism friendly too. That unfortunately, is becoming a more important factor for me.
The bottom line is that it tastes like Guinness, and I plan to start drinking more of this. Now to find a really good no-alcohol IPA.
We seem to have finally bested the flu and whatever other virus' and bacteria have been causing havoc in our family in 2023. Everybody is feeling good again. We took advantage of a 61F sunny day in January by meeting the local Audubon Society group at Byrd Park for a birding walk around the three lakes in the park. We were focusing on aquatic birds wintering in the park lakes, so I didn't even pay attention to whatever birds may have been in the trees. Canada Geese and Ring Billed Gulls were around in abundance, as well Double-crested Cormorants and one juvenile Bald Eagle that we observed soaring over the lakes. In total I recorded 15 species in the one hour walk. I'm sure that would have been double had I bothered to look up in the trees.
Saturday evening I treated my best girl to an exotic dinner of cooked meat at Arby's, where a coupon resulted in dinner for 2 for $10. Dating like we are in college again! After dinner we went to our third place, Intermission Brewing, and hung out till closing at 9 PM. Back at home we watch the Luckiest Girl Alive, a Mila Kunis flick that explores the longer term ramifications caused by a teenage sexual abuse incident. It's a well done movie and the IMDB 6/10 rating is about right. It's well executed, but a little slow in the first half as the story builds, and pretty damn dark all the way through.
Sunday we headed out to the Poe Museum, located in the only pre-Revolutionary War building still standing in Richmond VA. It's a small museum dedicated to Edgar Allen Poe, who grew up in Richmond when he was orphaned here at age 3, and taken in by a wealthy family. Like a lot of America's great writers, nobody really appreciated him until after he was dead. Speaking of death, he died under mysterious circumstances at age 44. It's been a long time since I read any Poe. I think I'll remedy that soon.
We got several new boardgames at Christmas, but last night was the first time everybody was healthy and feeling up to gaming on a weekend night. The flu did some damage in this house in January. I shudder to think how sick we would have been without the flu shot.
Last night we broke open Azul, which combines both set collecting and pattern matching game mechanics in a way that is very similar to Sagrada. In Azul though, instead of moving game components straight from the community pot to your board, there is an intermediate step where you build sets first. That intermediate step adds a bit a twist and some different strategy that sets it apart enough from Sagrada that it won't feel like the same game if you play them both in the same evening.
The scoring field in Azul is not large, and the players are all likely to be fairly closely bunched in score, meaning slight advantages in strategy by achieving the bonus points for completed rows, columns, or sets is going to be the difference between winning or losing. Also, you can run up negative points in Azul, and it is very possible to stick an opponent with a large negative number if you can stick them with 4 or 5 unwanted tiles to end a round in the game.
It's definitely a game where you want a strategy looking several rounds ahead. A game takes 30-45 minutes, and the box says 8+ on the age range, which seems about right. An 8 year old might not grasp the more strategic elements, but collecting sets and scoring will make sense within 5 or 10 minutes, and the scoring mechanics keep everybody reasonably close until the end, so even just sort of randomly playing a kid will likely have fun and even occasionally win.
Drove up to Fredericksburg yesterday morning as my wife had a hair appointment. Yes, we drive 60 miles as she didn't give up her hairdresser when we moved 5 years ago. I'm told this is normal. Anyway, a podcast I had on was talking about the Tom Hanks / Meg Ryan flick You've Got Mail, and I realized I had somehow managed to never see that movie.
So we knew what we had to do last night.
But first, while in Fredericksburg I had coffee with two friends and spent some time "browsing" the fabulous Riverby Bookstore before we had lunch at J Brian's Tap Room. Once we got back to Fredericksburg I tagged along on an errand with my son, an errand that involved a stop at Final Gravity Brewing, where we ran into more friends. Beer, books, coffee, and friends. A++++ day, would do it again.
Anyway, so last night we settled onto the couch to watch You've Got Mail. I do appreciate that in 2023 I can pull up pretty much any mainstream release movie and rent it for $3.99 without leaving my couch. It sure beats driving to Blockbuster, although that did have its own charms.
The movie made me quite nostalgic for the early days of the online world. I never had an AOL account longer than the free trial, as I started with a traditional ISP dial-up account and considered myself too cool for AOL. Had I realized Meg Ryan was hanging out in the AOL chat rooms I may have been more open minded :) But the simplicity of checking your email once in the morning and once in the evening, and the ability to separate your real life from your online life, are facets of the 90s I wouldn't mind having back.
It's a Nora Ephron RomCom, so you know what you are going to get. But Hanks was basically catfishing Meg Ryan, and she should have been way more pissed at the end of the movie when she realized he had been playing her all along. But we were about 10 years from inventing the verb catfish, and I guess is was a simpler and more naive online existence in 1999.
Also, with the movie being released in 1999, I'm guessing they were writing the script in 1997 or 98? That was too soon to recognize Amazon as the threat it was, but it's funny how Barnes & Noble, err, Fox Superstar, is not the bad guy in 2023. Although we would all prefer The Shop Around the Corner in our neighborhood, I don't think any bibliophile is upset if there is a B&N nearby.
And since we talking about email, feel free to use the reply link below if you have something to say.
