Holy Shit it's the 90's. BTS, Dino Jr., Meat Puppets @ Terminal 5

So last night I saw one of the most solid line ups I have ever seen. The Meat Puppets, followed by Dinosaur Jr., followed by Built to Spill performing all of Perfect From Now On. Add the Flaming Lips (With Ronald Jones back in the band) and the show would have been absolutely perfect and I would have arranged for my death somewhere near the durring the Lips doin' "Mountainside."

The Meat Puppets started off... and were pretty fricking awesome. Curt (aged 49) was wearing sweatpants which is allways a sign that comfort is more important then making money. I only own 3 later albums and Meat Puppets II so I didn't recognize much, but they were still fantastic. Chris (aged 48) looked 60, and was clearly nutz. He's had drug problems, tragedy, 24 months in jail and shoot in the back... but he was pretty peppy on stage.

Below is a couple of songs from the ATP new york show (which I missed sob, sob, sniffle, sniffle)



Up next was Dinosaur Jr. They take me back to high school when they were, and remain one of my favorite bands. Since J Mascis (42), Murph, and Lou Barlow (42) got back together the band has really regained form. Lou obviously has gotten comfortable... even playing on dino Jr songs he wasn't involved in the making of like the Wagon, Out There, and Feel the Pain. There's just something about Lou's intensity combined with J Mascic's shy teenager lyrics. They ended the night playing quite possibly my favorite cover ever... this little ditty.



Built to Spill played their most acclaimed album Perfect From Now On. This album is filled with extended 8 minute long songs, and to be honest isn't one of my favorites... It all tends to morph into one long song for me. But they are one of the tightest rock bands ever. Doug Martsch (38) has been slowly gathering incredible muscisians around him and it shows. Though they are technically the best band of the bunch and the youngest they definitely move the least onstage. So I found a nice corner and enjoyed the music.



Ending the show Built to Spill played Carry the Zero with J mascis and the Kirkwood brothers on stage. It was pandamonium and went on for about 20 minutes... Curt yelling random shit into the mike. J playing a solo in the middle of the song then just noise. And Cris running around playing various instruments... including beating on BTS's poor cello. Fantastic I say.

Why I hate the Mets.

In honor of the Cubs mets series I am reposting this.

1. Why you ask? Cause their players seem to think they are god's gift to baseball and just that much better than the rest of the National League... Just cause you're a bunch of choke artists doesn't mean you have to watch every home run like it's a fucking rembrant. They are a team of goof offs.

2. Jose Reyes is not better than Jimmy Rollins... he's not just... deal. (BTW yankee fans neither is Derek Jeter... just cause a guy is cute doesn't make him better. God I'd like to knock some of Jeter's smug fucking teeth out.)

3. They do less with more than any team in baseball. Talent talent talent. But no heart. It's no wonder they choked and their coach is a joke... They're the knicks of baseball.

4. Omar seems to think that Carlos Delgado is still a good hitter. All he can hit is a hanging slider... I think I could throw my fastball by him.

5. That stupid ass Meet the Mets song. What the hell were they thinking? That is the stupidest piece of schlock in jingle history.

Here's the lyrics, now imagine the cheesiest jingle you can imagine over the top of this.

"MEET THE METS, MEET THE METS,
Step right up and greet the Mets!
Bring your kiddies, bring your wife;Guaranteed to have the time of your life
because the Mets are really sockin’ the ball; knocking those home runs over the wall.
East side, West side, everybody’d coming down to meet the M-E-T-S Mets of New York town!

Oh, the butcher and the baker and the people on the streets,
where did they go? To MEET THE METS!
Oh, they’re hollerin’ and cheerin’ and they’re jumpin’ in their seats,
where did they go? To MEET THE METS!
All the fans are tru to the orange and blue, so hurry up and come on down -
‘cause we’ve got ourselves a ball club, The Mets of New York town!
Give ‘em a yell! Give ‘em a hand! And let ‘em know your rootin’ in the stand!"
I want to vomit.

6. Mr. Met... really a guy with a baseball for a head? Along the same lines as the song. He came up to me at the game this week and gave me shit for wearing a cubs jersey... so I flipped him off. Come on. What is he gonna do? He's got a baseball for a head.

7. Met fans. For years I've been going to see met cubs games. The last two years are the first time that they have had more fans in SHEA than the cubs. That is just (pardon my french) fucking lame mets fans. I laughed out loud when in the pregame announcement david wright said "Mets fans are the best fans in the world". This is a team that can count on their fans to give up. Four runs down against the cubs half the stadium left, two nights after they made a comeback against the cubs. They got one of the best teams in the league and can't even stay to see if their team can make a comeback (which they did).

In 98' they could sell out the stadium when they were 2 games out of the wild card. Their fans were booing a team 2 games out. What a bunch of schmucks... (BTW cubs fans are starting to get like this, So I have a suggestion... if you weren't a cubs fan before 2003... start rooting for the devil rays they could use the help)

8.. Cowbell man. I got four words for you cowbell man. "Get... a fucking... job!"

BTW Ronnie Woo-Woo could bust your drunk ass up.

9. I have to go to and from Queens college in the evening and whenever there is a mets game I get bozos trying to clip the front and back of my car. Mets fans absolutely suck at driving.

10. Shea Stadium. What kind of fucking morons have to tear down a stadium that is about 10 years older than I am. They built a piece of crap, ugly stadium, perfectly symmetrical and completely lacking in character. 40 years later they go oops sorry can we have 180 million free bucks and 1.5 billion in tax free bonds so we can build a new stadium to replace the piece of crap we built a few years ago. What a bunch of assholes. Have some foresight.

11. Mets fans constantly complaining that there are too many Cubs fans in the stadium... then leaving in the 6th inning. At the begining of each game David Wright calls the Mets fans the best fans in the world... it's more like the best fans that root for a team in Queens.

12. This guy:










As I come up with more reasons I will continue this list.

In honor of the Cubs clinching I have two things for ya

In your face Milwaukee

This is still a little hard to take but Ted lilly has some Fire doesn't he.


http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dhrcmqxw_0dr2gqvdw&hl=en

New England Part 1

So this is Rachel, guest-blogging my account of our recent road trip through New England.

As we got on our way we discovered that Bill had forgotten his CDs and although I had brought mine, Bill did not seem overjoyed at the prospect of listening to Kate Bush and Yes the entire week. So we stopped at a bookstore and got two books on CD: one, a collection of stories told by survivors of the zombie wars; the other a Nelson DeMille book that started out pretty good and kind of went downhill, especially DeMille’s embarrassing attempts at describing sex scenes. You could practically hear the reader squirming when he got to the part where the characters’ “pubic areas touched.” We concluded that Nelson DeMille has a dull sex life, if any.

We spent the first couple days in New Hampshire and camped the first night. This was my first time camping in the pouring rain and I have to say it was not bad, all things considered, and my new tent stayed dry inside (thanks to Tony for the recommendation). The day was almost over by the time we had our site set up, but we took a short walk in the rain with our umbrellas:

















We also checked out the Old Man of the mountain, which is this rock formation that used to look like the face of an old man. But a few years ago a storm demolished most of the face, so now people stop and look at the spot that used to look like an old man. We paid our respects.

I wasn’t up for cooking in the rain so the first dinner of the trip was pizza hut. While waiting in the parking lot for our pizza Bill kept busy by shaving off the remaining hair on his face—a small uneven mustache that made him look a little special—with the help of one of his side mirrors. It was a good move, although he got a few looks from the other pizza hut customers.

The first morning in NH we ate breakfast at the Sunny Day Diner and they seriously made the best chocolate chip pancakes I have ever had. They were kind of crispy on the outside, and not too fluffy… I could go on but I’ll stop now. Here’s a picture:



That day we spent the morning walking around in a really beautiful park, Flume Gorge. I will let the pictures speak for themselves:
































Then we took a tram up one of the mountains and got out and walked around. It was kind of cold up there, despite the heat at sea-level, and the vegetation was noticeably different, it was quieter, fewer insects. We walked through an extremely fragrant forest of pine trees and there were occasional clearings that provided incredible views of the surrounding mountains. While we were walking, some clouds rolled in and the mountains disappeared in a haze that brought to mind “The Mist.”

That night we were ready for a nice, dry, quirky New England motel. We spotted this place, shown below, and were attracted by both the game room and by the assortment of geriatric biker types loitering in front of the entrance, smoking cigarettes and watching the lightening. A very nice man with lots of tattoos checked us in and showed us a picture of a bear that sometimes wandered through their parking lot. This was an exciting prospect, as I’ve never seen a bear and neither has Bill. [Incidentally, the other animal we were hoping to see was a moose, but despite much peering into dense foliage, we were not so fortunate as to spot either creature, although we did see a lot of chipmunks, a pair of eagles, some terrifyingly large spiders, and I saw some turtles.] The motel had a nice bed that would gyrate when fed quarters, but we saved our quarters for the game room. Bill kicked my ass at pinball and air hockey. The tattooed guy from the front desk came in and acted like he had some things to do in the game room, but it was pretty clear he was keeping an eye on us and making sure we didn’t mess up his stuff.

New England trip part 2

After NH we headed to Maine, our primary destination. The weather was still being uncooperative as we arrived. Our first night there we camped in Acadia National Park and it was raining when we got there, and while we put up the tent, and then put up a tarp over the tent. After much struggling to accomplish this and becoming very wet and covered in pine needles and dirt and mildly aggravated with each other’s tarp-hanging strategies in the process, it finally stopped raining.

After a late lunch of hot dogs and veggie sausages we decided to go for a drive, during which we passed a boat launch on one of Maine’s countless beautiful lakes. It was about 6:00 pm and after consulting the map, we determined that the lake from end to end was approximately 2 miles, easy to paddle across before it got dark. So we put my kayak in the water and off I went. Bill drove to meet me on the other end. Well, apparently we read the map wrong because the distance turned out to be more like 4 miles and it got very windy and the sun went down, and I got a little panicky. So did Bill, who called 911 and alerted the park rangers. We later celebrated my safe arrival at a local bar called Moose Nuts, or something like that, and this time I kicked Bill’s ass at pinball.















Our first morning in Acadia we went to Bar Harbor for breakfast, got stuck in traffic, looked around at the crowds and madness, and realized that this was NOT why we had left New York. So we left Acadia, stopping to camp about an hour away at a nice little campground run by a very friendly old man who I’m pretty sure was an alien living among us, and who had a basket of free cucumbers on his porch. This campground was located on another lake so I put my kayak in the water and Bill took a canoe out and we paddled around for a while, and Bill determined that he does not care for canoeing.



That afternoon we visited Fort Knox (not the one with all the gold) and also this tower that was part of a bridge spanning the Penobscot River.



















This is what we saw from the top:


















The next day we drove north, to Baxter State Park, where we planned to check out some more lakes, and hike up Mt. Katahdin, a little over 5,000 feet. We camped in the park and the next morning we got an early start because the rangers had told us that it was an 8-10 hour hike, and we figured we were more likely to take 10 hours than 8. This suspicion was confirmed as we began hiking, and families with small children and extremely old people overtook us. It was very beautiful. Here are some pictures.



We hiked to the end of the first trail and stopped at Chimney Pond, about 3,000 feet up. There we enjoyed some peanut butter sandwiches and Bill took the Christmas portrait for a family of 12 that included a baby, several very young children, and grandparents. While posing for their photo, the mother kept saying “Honey, smile! You love hiking!!” to the kids, who didn’t look sure that they loved hiking. But that must have been one sweet family portrait because this was the background:


After lunch and the photo session we continued up a new trail, this one much more steep, rocky, and actually somewhat dangerous. Bill’s funky knee had already been put to the test that day, and this new trail required leaping from pointy wet boulder to pointy wet boulder with deep gaps in between. We agreed it would be unwise to continue, so we walked down the way we came.

Later we drove to the campsite in the north end of the park. It was only about 35 miles but it took us 2 hours to get there because the speed limit was 20 miles an hour, and also we had to keep slowing down to look for moose. This was a really lovely campground, Bill thought it might be his favorite ever, and we were now far away from anything. According to the map there were no towns north of the park. The campground was on yet another gorgeous body of water, Lower South Branch Pond, known for its clarity due to lack of vegetation, and we paddled around—this time Bill got himself a kayak.

The next day we started the trip back to New York, via Boston. We checked into a hotel near Salem on a street that had a lot of very seedy looking businesses, and then went out to get dinner and to see Tropic Thunder. Bill may have a few things to say about the movie but in a nutshell it was awesome and you should see it, if you haven’t already. We had dinner beforehand at this Mexican restaurant that was roughly the size of a football stadium, and packed. A little surreal, coming so soon after the peaceful remoteness of Baxter.

The next morning we headed home, driving first through parts of Boston to have a look at my former neighborhood. When we got home we were pretty tired so we caught Pineapple Express and then called it a night.

no hitter

That's right.

Here's a fan video of the end of the game. Shaky as hell.. But the fans are goin' wild.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Po3Vwlkwi4k

Only bad part of all of this is that the Cubs probably will clinch before they play the Mets.

Ted Lilly

Is freakin' awesome.


We remember his frustrated glove throw from the playoffs last year. But check this out from Wednesday night.

Lilly Molina Collision
Uploaded by meechone

And I quote the St. Louis announcer, "might be playing for the Rams this weekend... They could use him... No Doubt"

BTW Molina isn't hurt.. which is good.