July 29 through July 31 is Merge Records' 15th birthday party - Saturday night with Spoon is sold out but the Thursday night show headlining Superchunk still has tickets available. I may have to get tickets to the August 7th show with Dillon Fence and Hobex (Greg Humphries is going to be a tired dude by the end of the night) - Hobex' Back in the 90s is awesome and U Ready, Man? is high on my gotta buy list. August 9th is Allison Moorer - I remember reading about her in No Depression when her first CD came out - beautiful voice! Oh, and she's sorta hot. August 14th is old fart night with Arrogance and the Woods. Hell, I'm old as dirt and I only barely remember Arrogance! But I actually wouldn't mind seeing the Woods - I always liked Jack and Terryknob and Mr. Enloe whether as the Woods or as the rhythm section of the Fabulous Knobs (the band that did more to get me going to clubs than any other). Old farts of a much different stripe are on tap August 19th when Sonic Youth are in town - I always admired them without necessarily liking them. August 27 and 28, Tift Merritt will be doing a different kind of CD release party - admission is $20 but includes a copy of the CD. I've never heard of anyone doing that before - I'll be interested in seeing whether people show up for it. I might - I've never seen her live but I love her voice and her music. Oh, and she's sorta hot.
Couple of things of interest already on the schedule for the fall, with Guided by Voices (I like their music but have no idea what a live show would be like) and... wait for it... El Vez just in time for Halloween and Election Day (not sure which will be scarier!)
Posted by Tony @ 01:15:00 pm |
Thursday, July 22, 2004
Campaign 2004
As I feared, we're starting to see a lot of Bush and Kerry ads in NC now that Edwards is the veep candidate. It has been my understanding that traditionally, the incumbent runs ads that are about his accomplishments in the previous term and how you should re-elect him so he can continue his good work. The challenger runs ads that attack the policies of the incumbent while often saying little about themselves except that they are for change. So what I've seen so far is a bunch of Kerry/Edwards ads talking about Kerry and Edwards. At least one of them doesn't mention Bush at all. On the other hand, the Bush ads have all prominently featured Kerry much more than Bush - one of them had no mention of Bush at all other than his obligatory endorsement of the ad. Does that sound like a confident administration to you?The thing that is bugging me more than anything else is the race to see who can work "values" into their ad the most times. Nobody has been bothering to define what the fuck they mean by it - I can tell you almost certainly that most of those guys have values quite different from mine. The good news is that I'm actually starting to see Democrats start to take the word back by actually defining it in terms that I am more likely to agree with, so maybe we'll get a real discussion about what these guys really believe.
I have no idea what to make of Vinroot's decision not to call for a runoff. If he finally realized that no one from Charlotte was ever going to win a statewide race, you'd think he could have done so before wasting all that time campaigning. I'm betting Cobey is pretty pissed right now!
Posted by Tony @ 09:55:00 pm |
Beer
Looks like Molson and Coors are talking merger - does that mean that their combined product will be even more piss-poor than each of their current offerings?I do have a confession to make though - I have become primarily a drinker of Miller High Life. It has nothing to do with any of their ad campaigns over the last couple of years - I neither resonated with the hip young urban rave party ads or the beer-bellied balding he-man ads either. What actually happened is that I was at Go! Studios to catch a couple of bands and was down to $2 in my pocket and for that price it was either a Miller or a PBR. The PBR would have left me change for a tip, but I felt I had kicked enough into the jar over the previous couple of hours that I was okay with splurging on the higher priced Miller. And you know what? It wasn't freaking bad. Sure, I'd rather be drinking Corona or Sam Adams or the local microbrews (the Davie Poplar IPA at Top of the Hill is absolutely out of this world!) but for $6 a 12-pack at Harris-Teeter, I've kinda decided that I can deal with the MHL. Occasionally I'll catch a Corona special for $10/12 pack and that's a happy day (calloo! callay!) but on the whole the Miller ain't bad at all.
Posted by Tony @ 10:15:00 am |
Frustration
I spend much of every working day in meetings. Some are productive, some are not. The one I'm in right now is most definitely not. It's tough when you're in a meeting with no leader-types (which never happens for me because I'm a leader-type). It's tougher still when you're in a meeting with ALL leader-types. Probably the worst is this one, where you've got people that aren't leaders trying to lead a meeting full of leaders who really want to participate but don't want to be stuck with or are not tasked with leading. Almost an hour and a half into it and we're still defining terms. AARRRGGGHHHH!!!Posted by Tony @ 09:15:00 am |
Tuesday, July 20, 2004
Election
So
far it still looks pretty tight between Vinroot, Ballantine and Jesse
Helms' sock puppet Bill Cobey. In a way, it might be a
good thing if Bill Cobey were our next governor, as he seems to be
followed around by extremely talented people. When he left his
job as Athletic Director at UNC, he was replaced by John Swofford,
widely viewed during his tenure as one of the best ADs in the country
and now the Commissioner of the ACC. After Ike Andrews got popped
for drunk driving on the way back from DC one too many times and Cobey
ended up in the House of Representatives, he was succeeded after his
single term by David Price, who has served my district for 8 of the
last 9 terms and done so in exemplary fashion. One might expect
if Cobey was elected governor that he'd last a single term and be
replaced by the best damn governor the state had ever seen!
Cobey's TV ads have been pretty bizarre, mostly consisting of pictures of Cobey with Ronald Reagan and of Cobey with Jesse. The last series actually had a live Jesse (who knew?) looking like he was sitting on Cobey's knee while Bill pulled the strings in his back. Pretty odd since it's obviously been the exact opposite for the last 25 years. If I didn't already dislike Cobey, his forcing me to look at Jesse Helms again would have been enough to put me squarely in the anybody-but-Cobey camp.
Looks like Shubert didn't take my advice about changing her name to Jim. 4% of the vote ain't going to get her into the run-off...
Posted by Tony @ 11:52:13 pm |
Drawbacks
One potential drawback that I'm already seeing to this approach is figuring out how to post from anywhere as opposed to having to do so from my workstation with Namo WebEditor. I'll have to think on that one, but I'll probably just set up a template that I can store on any computer I'm likely to want to blog from. Any comments on this are more than welcome!
Posted by Tony @ 10:06:40 pm |
I Give Up!
I've decided that I really can't hack Blogger.com anymore. Maybe it's silly, maybe I'm being too harsh, but I'm tired of Mozilla blowing up every time I post and I'm still determined to not use IE any more than I have to. Poked around the Haloscan website and it looks like I should be able to still use them for comments even without going through Blogger, so we'll see.
Posted by Tony @ 05:37:30 pm |
