What is Bulgarian for "Oingo Boingo"?

Arrived early. Ate at the HOB restaurant, decent food. Fell in love with Lara, the waitress. How was I to know she was with the Russians too?

First band: Five white guys in their twenties, dressed up like a hard rock band from 1974: full beards, shaggy hair, one jewfro, lots of denim. I thought I'd never utter the phrase "Grand Funk Railroad imitation", but there you have it. The lead singer tried very, very, very, very, very, very, very hard to be wacky. He said they were from Venus. They are called Valient Thorr. THEY BLOW. Grade: D

Second band: Five white guys in their twenties, dressed up like white guys in their twenties who are in a roots music band. They played Americana Punk Rock. Basically it's the Real MacKenzies/Flogging Molly formula applied to bluegrass and roots rock. Since the Real Flogging Molly Mackenzie crowd is an imitation of the Pogues, who are an imitation of the Mekons, oh forget it. Anyway they were pretty good but not at all innovative or interesting. Would see as an opening band again. They are called the Scotch Greens. Grade: B-

Third band: Five white guys in their twenties, dressed up like the Stooges. Big local following. Lead singer is rail thin, covered in tattoos, takes his shirt off during the third song. Unremarkable Stooges/Sex Pistols sound. Lots of yelling about sex. Girls from the audience pulled up to sing onstage, causing near wardrobe malfunction. Members of Valient Thorr come on stage and sing with them, do the I'm Not Worthy bow, play air guitar. Guitarist has gigantic expensive Gibson guitar. Lead singer removes pants during last song. Constantly ordering various people in the audience to perform sexual acts immediately. They are the 2005 tweaker version of Social Distortion, which was the 1985 surfer heroin burnout version of the Sex Pistols, who were the London prefab fraud impresario version of the Stooges. They BLOW. Grade: D They are called Throw Rag.

Gogol Bordello were great. Five white guys in their twenties, dressed up as Dude Ranch Gypsies. They're from New York. The Flogging MacKenzies idea is used on Eastern European Roma music to great effect. Plus, they have washboard girls! Who also play big parade drums and shoot slingshots! And they have a mean accordion player. It's a double pantload of fun. The lead singer is just annoying enough to be a good lead singer. Their schtick might well be very annoying to people actually from Molvania, or to gypsies. I don't know. It's like 3 Mustaphas 3 that way: ha, ha, Eastern Europe funny! Yeah, also blood-drenched. Anyway it's got a great beat, you can dance to it. Grade: B+

logjam unjammed

I would like to thank evan, atrustheotaku, and logjam for reviving my faith in the open source software community. You can't get a 24-hour turnaround on bug fixes from a commercial software vendor for any kind of money. My problem is now gone!

...

Chicken lady?

One paper nation

The New Times chain just ate the Village Voice, LA Weeekly, OC Weekly, and a few other papers. Seventeen cities, one company.

I used to work for the L.A. Reader, around the time that the Weekly was crushing us. That was the same time the Herald-Examiner died and the Times owned the city's "big" newspaper market completely. Later the Reader was sold a couple times, and then the New Times people ate the Reader, the Weekly's only competition, and then shut down their L.A. paper in collusion with the Weekly, leading to an antitrust action that ended in consent decree. Now they've come back and bought the whole thing up.

A moment of silence for the American alternative weekly, folks. The Clear Channel death star has arrived. ALL HAIL THE NEW FLESH!

Sweet Zombie Jesus

Anne Rice has always been a crap writer, but now she's really losing her shit in a big way. $5 says "scientology in a year".

geek, nerd, dork?

( not sure about the genius part, but yeah )

A Norwegian would.

And now, here's an insane Norwegian taking his motorcycle up to 303 km/h (190 mph).

Mirrored from http://www.tuningtracker.com/crazybike.html where their page was all jacked up and I had to read source and heist the .wmv to see it, it's a 12 megabyte .wmv video. Please save locally to view, streaming is pointless.

Local news feed: OC Weekly

torgo_x has kindly made an RSS feed for the OC Weekly, which is syndicated here as oc_weekly or available to your feedreader at this RSS link.

more TM/Maharishi stuff

Guruphiliac has an update on the megalomaharishical antics of the TM people, worth a read.

Roky Erikson lives! ...

...well, kinda

.

Are you ready, I say are you READY to LOL? REALLY LOL???

Just so you know what you're getting into, this is an article from the Waco Tribune in Waco, TX. Okay. Ready? Sure? Don't click until you're ready.

( How are we to rid ourselves of this terrible stigma? )

Petrarch's Fannypack: The Accessory That Changed Poetry

CitizenX just sent me a link to a book called "Napoleon's Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History". I'd probably like it; I enjoy that kind of boutique pop science book. They can be awfully precious, and the writer often believes that THIS ONE THING IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVERYTHING, but they're fun like candy and I do learn from them. It's like the enjoyable bits of college lectures.

Anyway I realized that there are about a hundred books out in the last decade with titles in the form: [FAMOUS PERSON]'s [NOUN] and they're almost all this kind of book. Some of them are just [PERSONAL NOUN]'s NOUN

Examples: Galileo's Daughter, Halley's Quest, Miss Leavitt's Stars, The Mapmaker's Wife, Humboldt's Cosmos, Kepler's Witch, Einstein's Heroes... Those are just from a quick look at Amazon's "History of Science" category.

Maybe we should make a matrix of Famous Dead People and Nouns and write all the ones that aren't done already. Dibs on "Kropotkin's Bicycle", here!