Insignificant Bits

Nature Valley granola bars are the official energy bar of the PGA tour. Because, you know, golf is such a grueling sport (not that anyone accused those granola bars of having any positive nutritional value). At least the bowling association is more realistic. I love the fact that they are sponsored by both beer and aspirin, a pair matched only by the team of Dexter bowling shoes and Odor-Eaters brand foot care products.

By the way it’s Ryan’s birthday. Someone give him a hug.

Paul Hewitt, Georgia Tech men’s basketball coach, gave a talk to an attentive crowd of DC area alumni last night at Guapo’s mexican restaurant in Tenleytown, where I was in attendance. He fielded questions about his philosophy for the program and college basketball in general, then the club auctioned off a signed basketball to the tune of $360. I’ll try to paraphrase his best anecdote:

One of my fondest memories from the season was the Duke game. That night as you may have seen I wore a camel-hair jacket for the first time — my wife bought it for me but I thought it was the ugliest jacket I’d ever seen (of course I couldn’t tell her that). Our boys played a terrific game that night and it was just incredible. After the game, as I always do, I called my dad, and then my wife. My dad, no matter what, always says I could have done something better. He said that was good but… and I said, come on Dad, we just beat Duke at Duke! Then I called my wife, and told her we’d finally had a great win against Duke, at Cameron no less. She only said, “Maybe if you’d worn that jacket before, you would have won a long time ago.”

On the way home a pair of silver-haired class of 1950-something Tech grads tried to get us younger guys to sing the fight song on the Metro — we weren’t having it. To be polite I made small talk with them about, what else, slide rules and calculators.

SounDriver is playing tonight at Ned Devine’s in Herndon, sometime after 8 PM. I updated the SounDriver website to reflect this and some other upcoming shows, and I added a fancy new logo.

(Yesterday was one of those days where I attempted to atone for months of inactivity all at once: woke up at 8AM, worked out, picked up printer ink cartridges, came home in time for the termite inspector, lunched at Boston Market, shopped Home Depot and American Carpets for new carpeting, mowed the lawn, bagged some leaves, cleaned out the gutters for the first time in the current era, took a ziplock bag full of change to Coinstar (where I spilled about $30 worth to the amusement of many grocery store patrons), cleaned particularly dirty portions of the siding of my house, cleaned the deck, cooked up some ribs on the grill, made a band logo, made ghetto band business cards, updated the band website…went to sleep at 2AM.)

Note also the Cinco de Mayo date. I’ll be wearing a sombrero; you have no excuse to miss that one. People celebrating birthdays that day get a free shot of tequila on me.

In case there was any doubt, here’s one sure sign I am a cynic: I’ve noticed lately that the only time I click on the comments from fark/slashdot/etc. is to make sure that someone else picked up on, and pointed out, the bad grammar of the poster. “Unfortunately for us, if satellites can more precisely measure this rise of the Earth’s temperature, they cannot cure this fever.” Better not upgrade them, then!

Anyway, heed this implicit warning from my Snapple lemonade: “Your eye expands up to 45% when looking at something pleasing.” [Avoid pleasure to prevent retinal damage.]

SounDriver is playing tonight, at 11pm, at Jimmy’s. For some reason (blame the drummer) my email to that effect didn’t get through to the mailing list. This is a for-real start time so no waiting for hours for us to eventually get the 1am slot. We’re playing a mostly originals set.

I’ve been having a lot of nightmares lately. Not the usual one where you are late for a final in an English class that you just remembered you have to take or else your diploma doesn’t count anymore, oh and by the way you just happened to forget to attend classes all quarter long. Instead it’s the one where some really evil looking fellow is running after you because he would like to open your insides up with a salad fork. I gotta lay off the health food.

Went to the bookstore after giving up on the possibility of seeing Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver in paperback in this century. I took this book to the counter and the woman checking me out asked (about Stephenson), “My friend was talking about him, is he any good?” Keep in mind that this hefty 900 page tome weighs at least 5 lbs. If I was quicker on the draw I’d have said, “nah, I’m just a masochist.”

I don’t understand fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt. I mean, I understand how it works, but not why. Seems like I’m just paying the same amount for them to be lazier.

Fans of Chipotle, be sure you visit today for lunch and pick up your BurritoEZ 2003 form. Fill it out and you get a free burrito this weekend.

Oh yeah and do your taxes; they are due today, you know.

Last night at Firehouse Grill was interesting. We hit the bar about 8:30 thinking the thing got started about 9. Nothing really happened until about 10pm, but at least we got a couple of $2 beers in before the 7-9 extended happy hour finished up. As the host Tony started to set up the equipment, I was growing concerned about the lack of physical evidence of a drum set, which tends to be a key part of our equipment requirements. We had talked with the guy a couple of weeks ago and he assured us that there would be two mics, a kit, and a bass amp, so eventually I went over and asked him what was up. He said, “Sorry dude, not tonight; we usually have one. Sorry for any inconvenience this caused.” Oh crap. Well Howard couldn’t be convinced to go back and get his kit from my house (can’t blame him, it’s at least an hour round trip) so he does the reasonable thing and returns home. The rest of us decide we’ll try to pull off a set without drums. Keep in mind that the bar is pretty much empty so we don’t really care how it sounds. The first act is a guy who adeptly played a few songs on classical guitar: “Bouree in E Minor,” “Take Five,” “Canon in D,” “Crazy Train”.

After he finished, open mic temporarily stopped for the TLC show Spymaster. Really. Apparently, the people who live at the bar (I gather there is an apartment on top — it is an old firehouse after all) know one of the dudes on the show. So yes, now our band can say we’ve been pre-empted by a television show. We sat through that for one of the longest hours on record, then the show resumed with a solo guitar/singer who covered a few Pumpkins songs.

Next we are up. Clint starts with the disclaimer, “We thought there would be a kit and we have never played before without a drummer, not even in practice, but we didn’t want to be cowards.” In the opening bars of “Funky Bitch” I was sure this was going to be a debacle, but we muddled through it and managed to end together without the cue from the drums. Then we played all of our originals except “Traffic Jam” and they all actually sounded pretty good — “Cycle” particularly was very laid back and spacious. Mind you, they are all much better with a beat but we did alright under the circumstances.

I have been worried about my improvisation lately because we’ve been playing a lot of songs without solos. As it turns out, I had some really good solos last night, which I think is a product of us playing everything a bit slower, the lack of a driving rhythm which forced me to think more about what I was playing, and of course the adrenaline rush of being up in front of people (it’s like a drug). My technical ability is a bit worse than it was a year ago because I haven’t put in a lot of metronome time recently, so in the end I played fewer fast licks but perhaps that’s to the benefit of the musicality. It’s really gratifying to hear some random person in the audience say “Yeah!” as those 16 bars come to a close.

After us was a really hot blonde girl playing acoustic and singing. Prior to her set she was going on to anyone who would listen about how her friend might set her up with RCA execs and crap like that. So she sat on her stool, legs crossed with her black Takamine (as Clint said, like that scene from Forrest Gump where all the guys try to grab her guitar), and proceeded to stun us all with her lack of any discernable talent. She did a tortured version of “I Kissed a Girl” that had a couple of stops and restarts, and was followed by a prompt facetious “That was really pretty!” yell from the audience. Clint was talking about how awful it would be to have her as a girlfriend, imagining this sequence:

Girl: I wrote a new song, would you like to hear it?
Guy: (half-convincing) Uhhh..sure, that would be great.

Here’s where we are playing this month:

Firehouse Grill: Tomorrow, 4/13, some time after 9pm
Jimmy’s: 4/21 time TBA
Ned Devine’s (Herndon): 4/25