"Unable to resist his charms, the female comes running. Formerly rough skin suddenly because sensitive as she caresses him gently with her side and nose. Aroused, the male seductively slides on top..."
Sound like porn? Well it wasn't. The other night Lando and I watched the mating habits of crocodiles on the Discovery channel. Fortunately one of us was sober enough to change the channel before we actually saw the future pieces of luggage begin the act of fucking.

My project since last weekend was a database for all the tour dates, and I'll be damned if I didn't get it done. There isn't all that drastic of a change visually, save for the new pages, but I assure you it considerably more advanced. Now all I have to is enter a show once and almost as if by magic everything on the site takes care of itself. The right bar will always display current dates coming up the soonest with no intervention required by yours truly. I'm really proud of it honestly. Plus, tons more information is on the shows page; important stuff like oh, say, cover charges and addresses and such.

Thanks a lot to MSU for asking me to play a couple songs tonight. Though I must admit, singing with this pleurisy shit is for the birds. I still hurt. Hopefully tonight I'll be able to get some sleep.

So I wake up at 4am last night with a huge stabbing pain in my chest. I mean huge. So huge that it actually woke me up. And man, it really fucked with my dream too. I was in the typical fantasy fighting a whole mess of orcs in a huge epic battle yelling victoriously over huge masses of heaping dead bodies when suddenly I get impaled by an enormous ballista Homer style.
But, no it wasn't actually a huge arrow. I went to the doctor and found out it was pleurisy. You can imagine my disappointment.

Went with Lando the Commando, Jill, and Sarah to see AnchondO over at the venerable if incomprehensibly smelly Knickerbockers, a regional mexicali ska four piece with no small amount of tightness. Though their website still seems to be able to crash my browser when I bring it up, I listened to some of their online stuff and wasn't all that impressed. This changed rather suddenly when I was exposed to their live show. With a sound kinda similar to Sublime though definitely more hyperactive with more ska and less rap influence, Anchond0 will by appearing at South by Southwest and is one of the bigger names on the Nebraska music scene. Though I really don't know much about the band, the singer/lead guitar player had some pretty decisive shredding in between more melodic intimate licks and the rhythm guitarist was a true pleasure to watch play. The pair consisted of most of the stage presence for the group, though musically the drummer kicked out some thick beats with several odd and unexpected (but memorable) breaks and the bass player's harmonies, like the entire band's sound, was quite tight.
Definitely two thumbs up for these fellas, I only had three complaints over the evening. 1) I spent my cash on beer instead of a CD. 2) No one was dancing. and 3) Their set was far shorter than I would have preferred. And, I think if you are going to have complaints about a show, these are pretty minor.

So yeah, check this shit out.
In Hastings there is this place where you can go take stuff and they will take it somewhere else for you! You just show up, give them a couple dollars, and they use this enormous infrastructure to take your stuff to where it needs to go without you having to lift a goddamned finger. I guess it's called a post office and - get this - is actually run by the United States Government. I wonder if anybody else knows about this place, because dude, it is a trip. I asked the lady there if they would take my stuff to these people's houses and she was all, "Sure. No problem." The times we live in, I swear.

In front of the post office was an old guy handing out flyers protesting the war. This is what I'm talking about. Credible, polite, and informed information distribution far outweighs fat chicks getting naked. Though, ultimately, handing out flyers doesn't sway the decision-makers, it is far more credible than, say, telling people to pour concrete down a nuclear missile silo. I still believe the short-term battle is in Washington and not in the hearts and minds of the people, but it is good to see some quality education taking place. Americans have a nose for genuity.

The trip to The Granada Theatre was indeed a long one, but me and Howie made it with little incident. We came to the venue after only a small amount of confusion and checked in to a sold out show full of a veritible menagerie of punk rock people in anticipation of a great show. That being said, I think OK Go set up the headliners like champs. With a meek, unassuming, and almost timid lead guitar player Andrew ("pardon me... might I shred?") and the most intense tamborine player that I have *ever* seen, they had a truly energetic geek rock show that I imagine would have been duplicated if They Might Be Giants broke down and did garage rock in 1985. They had some tasty songs and rocked with hard ferocity, but were all-too-quickly shooed away for the headlining babe punk Donnas to come on.

Now, The Donnas happened to be two of my favorite girl punk rock bands ever, followed closely by Dance Hall Crashers. However, now that I've been to the show I'm trying to remember if I've ever had either of their records in my player for more than 15 minutes. Because, damn... 15 minutes is plenty for The Donnas. It is true that their drummer has a seemingly insatiable thirst for rock and the guitarist blazes with southern punk stylings similar to Lars Fredricksen of Rancid, but it is also true that they only actually have one song. It only *seems* as though the songs are different, however I don't think even the tempo changed once during the night, much less the key. Donna A or B or U or whatever-the-fuck-they-call-themselves that is the frontwoman for the group has the charisma of a soapdish and a voice that Ben Stein might envy. Don't get me wrong, they are a fun band and I do love their guitar... But, damn Gina. Calling the band "flat" is simply not enough, because that would imply two dimensions to work with. I can't believe they have multiple records, let alone multiple songs.

Something I was playing with tonight.

Some required reading this week. Paul Graham lets us know everything that we knew already and Dave Barry takes some time off of his blog to answer some questions in a geek rock Slashdot interview.

I was watching The Daily Show and Jon Stewart did an excellent job summing up my feelings about the liberal movement in America: all anger, no direction. Yes, I know that the Bush Administration is fucked up. Yes, I am pissed about it. But, you know what? Pissed only lasts for about 15 minutes before I decide that I need another Big Mac. The liberal movement needs direction and leadership in the sorest possible way and all it would take is a person to stand up, seem strong, and be able to present not only why the system is wrong, but how the system can be made right. "No Blood for Oil?" I rally behind the statement because it identifies with the greater argument behind the anti-war sentiment, but it is actually a pretty simplistic answer to a problem with greater complexity. Where's the catch-phrase for the millions of Americans who know Saddam Hussein is a horrible dictator but don't want to upset the fragile political situation in the region and further alienate the greater global community with a full scale invasion?
There is no catch-phrase because there is no one on the national or global political scene presenting an alternative. We know why the war is bad. We now need someone to present a different plan.

Woo! Wednesday I am totally set up to go join Howie on a punk rock roadtrip to Lawrence for an evening with The Donnas and OK Go. I'll have a review of their show up here the day after as well as a criticism of the spacious and legendary venue, The Granada.
The spring schedule is still being finalized but it is going to be loaded with a lot of dates. It occurred to me for the first time today that this is going to be my last tour in the Midwest. The plans after graduation are still sketchy, but they certainly don't include being anywhere near here. I'm going to have to start playing these shows like they are my last... until I get the national stadium tour, of course.

Yesterday, Lando, Kristin, and I braved the horrible driving conditions of I-80 to travel to Lincoln to attend a peace rally joined by millions around the world. Though the articles I read indicate some pretty serious vehemence on a part of the anti-war movement in these twilight hours of the inevitable Iraqi conflict, Nebraska was not the center of the storm. Honestly, the rally really had a dejected feel to it; the going-through-the-motions walk of some peace advocates that are resigned that the war is going to come no matter what we say about it. With every mechanism of war prevention effectively obliterated by the Bush Administration, it's hard for anyone to get excited about stopping the war.
One moment, a hopeful youth got behind the mic and shouted out, "What do you want?" Instinctively, I threw a fist in the air and shouted, "PEACE!"

Immediately my head sunk as I realized I was the only person who shouted. It was the singlemost pathetic thing I have ever seen. It wasn't that everyone wasn't against the war or believed whole-heartedly in everything that was said. It was just that they had given up. Bush, Colon, Dick, and Asscroft have made it utterly clear that public opinion doesn't matter anymore. So what recourse do we have? What else can we do?

12+ hours and a metric fuck-ton of learning later, the photo gallery is finally up. I've been working on getting this thing to not suck since 2:30pm. After asking the web host for some help in as non-stupid a fashion as humanly possible, they informed me that they would activate SSH so that I could install a necessary program I needed to get the script powering the new photo gallery to not suck.
Their help was lightning quick (6 hours roughly), but, of course, I didn't want to look like more of a jackass by admitting that I didn't know how in the hell to setup or use SSH. I've been a Linux administrator in several different circumstances and know my fair share of Linux operation, but to be honest, I have *never* had to install anything without telnet root access and an RPM. Stuff like sharing libraries with ldconfig, actually compiling programs from source code, or even running anything through the Perl interpreter that wasn't on a website I have never ever had to do before.
But, sitting on the other side of it, I'm glad I didn't beg the sysadmin to install netBPM for me. This was a pretty complex set of problems that required using a whole mess of different resources to build the necessary knowledge base to make the fucker work. And, all things considered, I think I made it happen in a fairly expeditious fashion. It's very helpful to learn to deal with account restrictions when you simply can't install everything under /usr/lib/ and call it "shared." I am Rob's sense of accomplishment. Enjoy the new pictures.

btw... the site has been experiencing a little bit of annoying intermittency. I'm told this is due to a AT&T backbone upstream being hit pretty hard. They're on the stick and solving the problem as we speak.

Holy bejeezus! A new issue of Birkwell Street Diary is out. Chandra is quickly leveling up as a Shading Master, with an emphasis in kicking ass, as any Shading Master should be.

Some thoughts about Utilitarianism... The greatest good for the greatest number far too easily allows for decidedly unethical practice to occur. Mills' lucid refutation of many of the easy criticisms of Utilitarianism fails to take in consideration instances in which a greatest good for a greatest number could be achieved at the horrible expense of a minority. The obvious genocides of human history become evidence of this; Germany had an awfully lucrative and lavish economy built on the back of war and executed minorities.
This criticism comes easily to mind when considering the Greatest Happiness Principle, but isn't so easily addressed. The natural refutation would be to say that a genocide isn't actually the greatest good for the greatest number: that depriving yourself of a great and diverse source of company actually inhibits your ability to experience happiness since happiness is derived from the use of our higher faculties with other people. However, in reality this refutation doesn't work. For the most part, the mass execution of a minority is usually a minority that is largely isolated and disassociated with the mainstream. You do not often see a Kurd on friendly terms with a member of the Republican Guard, for instance. One does not typically engage in those higher faculties with a member of the minority class for reasons of social isolation, mores, etc., which subsequently makes them much easier to kill unmercifully. In doing this act under the Utilitarian Principle, practically speaking, you are not inhibiting your ability to experience happiness in any way, or if by some indirect consequence you are, it is marginal compared to the large pleasure received from a booming economy, political stability, and the other tragic benefits of genocide.
For this and other reasons, I simply don't believe on can be fully Utilitarian in ethical practice. Though this is a rather extreme example, it uses hyperbole to exacerbate the greater point that the effects of action can not be the sole consideration of what is and is not a Good Thing. Motivation and action are of equal interest to the proper ethical consideration, and I think, as far as my examination so far is concerned, that is where Utilitarianism ultimately falls apart.

When I first came to college, I was advised to make friends with three different types of people: the registrar, the librarian, and the cafeteria lady. If I've been able to accomplish anything at Hastings College, I would like to think that I have at least made friends with these three types of people over the course of my four years here. Out of all three, the most obvious benefit comes from the cafeteria lady. From scoring an extra Dew in my sack lunch to getting a nice chicken marinade to gaining admission long after the cafeteria "closes," a simple friendly smile and a remembered name have done more for my immediate needs for food and drink than the other kinds of networking I've learned to employ. Recently, however, most of the folks I know over the cafeteria have moved on to bigger and better things. I find myself having to work the scene all over again, which is not at all a terrible thing.

In fact, as I remember it, it is something I did when I was growing up. In particular, I remember Uschi Angle. Though I thought it was just a nickname for the longest time (how many times to you actually see the lunchlady's name spelled out?), "OOO-sheee" was a plump, spooky looking woman who was the Tyrant Supreme for my school district's dining. It was a small town of 1200, so the food service was largely conglomerated under her aegis as Matriarch of Munching.
There were two interesting things about Uschi - her categorization of people and her fits of swearing. I suppose to better deal with the large number of diverse people she had to encounter on a daily basis, Uschi constructed a dichtomy in which every human being she encountered was classified. In short, they were either "Good" or "Shit." Now, this polarized view may seem very basic at first glance, but was actually something almost ritual in use. People were designated Good or Shit upon very immediate investigation of personal character and filed away with little reconsideration or revision. I had the amazing (and I assure you unintentional) fortune of being a "Good" kid. The often-envied bounty of free seconds and chocolate milk were mine to reap on a daily basis, though for the first five years of our relationship she was convinced my name was Paul. This irritating and persistent mistake notwithstanding, my status as Good Kid allowed me the luxury of third-party observation of Uschi's dealings with Shit People.
This is where the fits of swearing become important. Uschi had a temper that was random to such a degree that one could apply the metaphor of the next Extinction Level Event to it: everyone knew it could happen at any time, but predicting its many sources was a task so daunting that it was just better to live normally that try to guess when it would slam into the earth. And slam it certainly did. Frequently. In a torrential downpour of swearwords that verbally obliterated any who was at its tender mercies. The unique aspect of these fits of swearing, apart from their catastrophic effect, was that they were exclusively in German. It was only once I received a small amount of German training in college that I realized how extreme, creative, and downright eloquent these fits were. What appeared to be an old Eastern European ogre spewing the language of Satan at baffling speed was, as I know now, actually the elegant and insightful work of a true cussword poet.
I can only hope to aspire to such mastery in my own language, though I recognize the syntactical limitations of English will never allow the rapid watery flow that so easily passed from Uschi's lips to our young ears.

Son of a bitch!



you're as goofy and knowledgeable of retro pop culture as anybody born after 1975 can ever hope to be, but at the end of the day, you're just too darn "hawt" to be considered truly geeky. you don't even wear glasses, man.

which geek rock frontman are you?

This is total bullshit.

So yeah, you could say I'm pretty proud of the birthday tune. More than that, I'm happy to see the huge archive of stuff that only comes with having written consistently for a year. I was looking over the rob.plan archive and reading through some old posts. A lot has happened in a year.
The good news is that things are really looking up. After the show Friday, the feedback on a lot of the new material was really positive. More is coming. The sound of the record is starting to take shape as I finish up the demos for the next record. In a word, the record is going to be big. Huge sound with tons of layers and texture behind it. I really want to borrow from all the REM and Weird Al listening I did in my youth to create a quality record that's not so spartan in its production. Lots of time and lots of instruments and *lots* of percussion. Hopefully lots of friends too.
Rewrote the bio.

Many thanks to Allen and Co., the Blue Moon, and all of you for coming out to the show tonight. Yet again it is proven that the till will be filled every night the Shaft comes to play. I debuted a lot of new stuff that many weren't familiar with and I think it was received pretty well. I always love playing in Hastings.
More thanks to those of you who came out to hear DJ Kevin and DJ Milo do their electronica thing... It is a fine art I have a whole new respect for. I suppose some apologies are in order, as I was dancing like a Great White Idiot the entire night. But, after watching too many people walk in and out to worry about scaring people off, I just decided to see what this rave thing was all about. With that, I tried desperately to lose myself in the music (and I do mean *desperately). After a while, those moments of transcendence I talk about so frequently started to spark and soon I just tried to shut out everything and just experience the moments that keep heartbeats in time. It should be said that I looked like a complete goddamned idiot the entire time... But, no one was there so I was content with simply enjoying the talents of a couple spinmastering musicians.
I wish there'd be more of this around Hastings.

Woo... Show tonight at the Blue Moon Cafe in Hastings. The first one for a couple months for you Hastings folks and it will be good to rock under the Shaft banner once more. Allen and I are fully rested and prepared to thoroughly rock you with the theme of geek music. Show up at 8pm and bring enough change for a Jones and Allen's CD, but the rest of the night's entertainment will be at Hazelrigg Student Union for free. With DJ Kevin and DJ Milo kicking out the wicked electronic spin, one wonders if heaven actually is a place on earth.

And since its the end of a very long and trying week, pop on the punk and contemplate the value of listening to any other kind of music again.
Suggested listening:
NoFX
Rancid
Less Than Jake
Propaghandi
Choking Victim
Flogging Molly

I've been a pretty hard convert, but I'm beginning to come to the conclusion that all people online are dicks. Elitism is rampant with conversations usually degenerating with amazing speed into totally petulant exchanges. Which, in a way, actually just enforces a theory I retrieved long ago from an Age of Apocalypse comic...

No matter how strong...
No matter how powerful...
It always comes down to name calling.

That smell, that feeling is back to campus again. Interim is always a weird time at Hastings College. Tucked deeply between the fall and spring semester is an excellent intensive course period allowing a brief, but in depth three-week focus on a specific course. This inevitably leads to a massive amount of free time and some pretty serious boredom, which kind of destroys the specialness of the HC student body.
I am happy to see it is back in full force now, though. There's something different about watching students passing to and from classes at a liberal arts college. With the extra core requirements and general feeling of open discourse, I think there is less stratification of disciplines (though, I'm still trying to sow a rivalry between the science and humanities departments) which ultimately leads to the special vibrance that shows at Hastings during the day. The hellos, the goodbyes, the "what are you reading?"-s... It's what I really love about academia.

I had better enjoy it now. It'll be gone in a few months.

It should be said I hate quizzes. But ever so occasionally, one really hits the mark without me expecting it.


Hooligan Bear


Which Dysfunctional Care Bear Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

The next time the RIAA tells you something about mp3 piracy destroying their gloated profitshare, send them the way of NARAS. National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences bigwig John Snyder says what we all intuitively know with the added wonderful benefit of something Hilary Rosen has neglected to provide - "evidence." This is a one-two punch for the future of the music industry and is supported by Janis Ian who talks about her mp3 success in the LA Times. No lack of substance to be found in each article.

In other news, my last semester of college begins tomorrow, which means this dayjob hunt is going to have to become quite a bit more serious. I'm essentially just sending my resume out to everyone with an ear out, much like everyone else I imagine. Finally staring down the barrel of this big thing called "growing up" is starting to look mighty intimidating. After doing the school thing for so long, I don't think I can imagine doing anything else.

And happy birthday mom. :)

I woke up this morning, like all of you, to the unpleasant news that the Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart during re-entry over Eastern Texas. I've been searching around for some sort of way to help to put on the message board, but at this early juncture nothing quite seems available. Unless you are in Texas and have the opportunity to spend Sunday afternoon coming the debris field and logging the locations of any pieces of the Columbia, there is really not much one can really do but watch.
The families, the agency, and (as much as I hate to admit it) the Bush administration has not been reactionary in the least to the incident. Everyone, up to minutes after the discovery of the incident, stated firmly that the problem will be found, the issue will be fixed, and the program will go on. This will, however, inevitably cause a setback for manned space travel. One can only hope that the risks involved can be recognized, the expertise of those involved acknowledged, and the eye is kept on a prize that has and hopefully will serve us well into the future.