doodledee

This year I got my act together and bought all our Halloween candy several weeks in advance. This stands in stark contrast to my well established candy buying routine, whereby I spend my lunch hour on the 31st running out to scrounge around for the last 6 or 7 bags of reject candy left on the shelves at Target. Those of you familiar with this routine will know that this means I usually get stuck passing out a bunch of Almond Joys and those little Hershey bars with almonds in them. I know, gross.

But not this year. This year I'm all set. I went early and I went often and when I did, I tossed bag after bag of The Candy Kids Want into my cart. And then I brought it home. And then, over the next few weeks, I pretty much ate all of it. I just sat here and tried to do the math and I'm pretty sure I've eaten something like 750 mini twix and/or fun-sized kit-kats over the last two weeks. That's gotta be a record!

In other news, sorry kids, the good candy's gone. Hope you like coconut. Whoops.

I was walking to breakfast at Hells Kitchen* the other morning when I passed a familiar looking girl on the sidewalk. I work at a lot of different places, and I'm horrible with names, so I figured it was an ex-client or something. I locked her gaze and kind of half smiled, hoping to reinforce whatever impression I had made in the past with a friendly and casual sidewalk encounter in the present. After maybe two seconds, I realized that I'd never met her before and that she was, in fact, the local girl who was on this season's Project Runway. Gah. Eyes to sidewalk. Whimper softly. I'm such a tool.

I've since been debating if I should formally score my sidewalk rendezvous as a local celebrity encounter and, after some thought, I've concluded that I will. The way I see it, it falls somewhere between running into Julie Nelson at the Galleria and being stopped at a light next to Troy Hudson and his posse in a pimped-up SUV with a massive custom T-HUD paint job. Both make your day, but you're kind of embarrassed to admit it. Especially if you rolled down your window and gave T-HUD and his posse a big thumbs up and they responded with a wave and cranked up the T-HUD tunes for us all to enjoy. Because that would be seriously embarrassing to admit. Or not.

In reality the encounter mostly reminded me of the time I ran into my doctor at Menard's. I was all "hey!" and smiley and stuff, right up until it hit me who he was. He was all Mr. Cool Doctor Guy and pretended he didn't know me, which in reality is probably because he honestly didn't know me, so I don't hold it against him. If I had had been wearing a hospital gown and booties – like I usually do at Mendard's – then he'd have some splainin' to do, but as it was, his blank stares and accelerated pace in the opposite direction was more or less justified.

In other fake celebrity sighting news: An anonymous reader (initials: K.C.) called recently to report a Diamond Don Shelby sighting at the Minnetonka Lunds. Don was seen driving a black Jeep (+1), but was parked at the yellow curb fire lane instead of the regular parking lot (-100). Why won't you park with us, Don? We're just like you. Simple, regular folk. Only with smaller pinstripes. It's just not right.

* - Hells Kitchen update: still overpriced and under-portioned, but oh man, those huevos rancheros. The best, Jerry, the best.

Project Runway - Katherine Gerdes [bravotv]
JoePa.JulieNelson.sighting recap from 2004 [doodledee]
Hells Kitchen [hellskitcheninc]

zooooooom

Interesting conversation came up at work today. I'll call it "Albums You Own But Have Only Listened to Once". It's pretty self explanatory: You get all psyched up about some new disc, you go out and buy it, you play it once, it turns out it sucks, you put it on the shelf, you never listen again. There's also a variant whereby you subject yourself to repeated listening over a short period of time in a [pathetic?] attempt to convince yourself you like it. For the purposes of this discussion, that still counts as 'once'. Sorry.

The causes of this phenomenon are varied. A common one would be a crappy solo album or side project by a musician you like(d) when they were/are in a band. Or maybe it's the ol' one hit wonder situation, or its somewhat rarer cousin, the follow-up album from a one-hit-wonder band that got lucky and made an okay one-hit album but probably should've quit while they were ahead. Or maybe it's simply because the album is just straight-up worthless (every Grateful Dead studio album after American Beauty, anyone?). I'm sure there are other less-logical reasons, too. Like does anyone buy an album just to have it on the shelf to look cool in case someone comes over and looks through their CD's? Methinks they probably do. Should that count? Methinks hmm.

There's a term in IT called 'shelfware', which is what we geeks call it when a company spends a ton of money on some fancy piece of software that they never end up using. That's probably not a great analogy, but it's close enough that I'm gonna go with it anyway. If I was feeling extra creative I'd try to come up with a term that mapped 'shelfware' to music… something like 'discware' or 'whatwasithinkingware', only more funny.

Anyway, back to the music. I'll start:

- Down With Wilco by The Minus 5. Never liked it. Tried. Tried again. Gave up. Put on shelf. (see: side project)
- Lovegod by The Soup Dragons. I fell for that "I'm Free" song. Whoops. Put on shelf. (see: one hit wonder).
- Justified by Justin Timberlake. Ha. Just kidding. I played that thing into the ground.

I'll also confess to having somewhat of a monster of a live music collection, much of which I obsessively collected years ago and much of which has only been listened to once and/or not at all. (A not uncommon affliction amongst my peer group. Then again, my peer group is obsessive music collectors, so that's probably not a surprise.) Thankfully, I'm mostly through that little phase. And by that I mean "I'm totally kidding myself".

I wonder if this is a non-issue for the mp3 generation? Too bad for them.

My old college buddy Tommy came to town on Friday night. He's a professional jazz musician. I am not making that up. He's one of those guys who started playing saxophone back in 4th grade when they made you chose an instrument to play in the school band. He's never really stopped. Most of us stopped. Not him.

Today he's out in California. He's lived all over. He hangs out in clubs, he calls people "cat", he goes to coffee with musicians he grew up listening to. He's got great stories. We talk about how our lives are different. It's an interesting conversation.

He played a few songs for us out in our side yard. That was really cool.

It was good to see him again.

Let me start by saying that I enjoyed much of their album. I'll even go as far as to call a couple of the songs insanely good. Not all of them, of course, but some. But that's just me, your mileage may vary.

Now let me also say this. I've listened to the NPR broadcast of one of their shows from last spring and it didn't do much for me. The album is brash, but it also can be light and airy and melodic in places. The live broadcast didn't really convey that.

So it wasn't without a certain degree of trepidation that I drove downtown last night for their First Avenue appearance. Not just because I feared the show wouldn't be good, more because I was expending some serious personal capital to go see a late night concert with a 10 day old at home, so if it *was* bad I was going to be doubleplus pissed.

Nutshell review: Too loud to review, even in nutshell form. Maybe I'm too old - I was wearing jeans and a long sleeve softball t-shirt, so that case can be made - but several of the scenesters around me were also complaining. Earplugs were in for most of the show. Also, the mix was capital A awful. I don't know if it was the b-squad board op or if it was some random dude who was just there for his make-a-wish fantasy day, but it was brutal. Loud, muddy, gross. Both keyboards were more or less entirely lost in the mix. On the plus side we could hear the thrashing "lead" guitar and the drums just fine; on the minus side, thrashing lead guitar and drums don't really carry the melody. The setlist was also weak; a down tempo new song 4 songs in? Uhh.

There were some highlights - the crowd was clearly hungry for them - and I got my dance on for at least a handful of songs, but all in all I'd say it was a bit of a letdown. I still bought a poster, though, because that's just the type of guy I am.

And closed circuit to the water buffalo in the black headband who knocked me over 6 times on her way back and forth to the bar: methinks 5 vodka tonics should be enough for a 70 minute show.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah [clapyourhandssayyeah]

I've been gone for so long I'm not sure I remember what I was going to write about when I got back here. I've got all these crazy stories about spending 4 nights sleeping on a roll away cot in a hospital room, drunk from lack of sleep, living on coffee, 'race diva' ho-ho's, yogurt-n-granola parfaits, and banh mi sandwiches eaten standing over a sink. (You regular readers out there may recognize this as "my preferred diet".) But after thinking about it for a while, I'm not sure anyone really wants to hear stories of cot-sleeping and temperature-taking and diaper-changing and how I drove back and forth from the house to the hospital like 12 times and how each time I did I would listen to like the same 4 songs off disc 1 of 'Kicking Television' because, hey, it's never too early to establish a routine when kids are involved. I've got nurse stories and doctor stories and nintendo-playing parking attendant stories and cafeteria stories and cleaning lady stories. I could easily do a couple thousand words comparing and contrasting my experiences as an observer and participant of health care in action to those outlined in the new PBS documentary Remaking American Medicine. Lucky for you, I'll put that one the shelf. You should still watch it when it airs, though. And cling to the hope that I make good on that offer.

Then there's all the "hey look, we're home, remind me what we do now again?" stuff. Clear some more shelf space.

Here's some more, uhh, trivial doodlebits:

• I fake tivo'd that Studio 60 show off a workBuddy.hoffmaldo recommendation because when I told him I was thinking of watching it because I liked the West Wing when the West Wing was good and that I heard S60 was supposed to be good like that he confirmed that it was both a) like that and b) good. We've watched all 3 of them now and so far, he's right. I actually stood up and applauded 10 minutes into the first episode. And by "stood up and applauded" I mean "I told Libby that if anybody asks, I'm going to say that I stood up and applauded when that scene ended." I'm sure this all makes me some sort of SuperTool, but for the time being I can live with that.
• We watched a lot of Twins Baseball in the hospital and it was neat to see everyone charged up for the home team again. Everyone was talking about it; it's a neat vibe. (Except for the people who are a little *too* into it. I'm sure you know the type of people I'm talking about. Creepers.) On a related note, if I took this blogging thing seriously, I'd find the time to write up a critique of the champagne soaked wild-card spot celebration and how silly it all came off. At least to me. But kudos to them. Special kudos to whomever that was wearing a "things were better when Anne Hutchinson was here" t-shirt. And for the record, that would be nobody.
• I saw some headline in a grocery store tabloid about digging up the Crocodile Hunter's body and I laughed out loud.
• We went down and watched the marathon on Sunday morning. Same sentiments as other years apply. Though this year an ambulance roared through the field with its lights and sirens blaring and it was kind of a surreal buzzkill. The moment passed quickly, though.
• The old owners of our new house left their old garbage cans here. I've been having fun wrapping my head around the riddle of how I'm supposed to throw away a garbage can. Think about it. Ok, ok, I'm sure you got it the first time.

That's good for now. Thanks to everyone who's been helping out or bringing food or stopping by or calling or whatnot.