pitchfork reviews can be pretty great sometimes…

Post-rock journalists lobby for keyboard containing ó key
The new rumor is that the album is also going to be a partial return to the sound of Ágaetis Byrjun (disappointing those fans who were hoping for a return to the guitar-driven rock sound of the band’s breakthrough album, The Bends). [via: lex]

or:

Off the bat, I was disappointed in the no-frills presentation of this disc, which scores a fat 0.0 for extras. You don’t get the “Making Of” mini-documentary for “Svefn-G-Englar”. You can’t switch on subtitles in Hopelandish, Icelandic or Hidden Peoplespeak. There’s no wacky backstage footage of Birgisson practicing e-bow on the can in his boxers. You just get the three videos.

how ’bout:

Worst moment- 8 min. of “Transatlanticism”, akin to witnessing the reunion of high school sweethearts away for a field trip weekend across a 10 acre wheat field.

i think we’re in the market for another pooch. someone to keep jack company and maybe help him behave a little more off-lead. we had our neighbor’s chocolate lab for a day over the weekend and they both wrestled and played until they were exhausted. good times.

so we’ve been checking out RAWL and petfinder.com. looking for a pup around jack’s age (1-2 years), DARK coat (i don’t want all my dark clothes to have yellow doghair and my light clothes to have black doghair… ), and they need to be about as submissive and as mellow as jack is. yeah, we’re kinda picky. meh.

saw on two wheel tuesday last night that travis pastrana will be driving in the 2004 SCCA ProRally Championship. even after his car accident last summer and his attempt to backflip the little WRX last month i imagine he’ll excel just like every other sport he gets into.

so it’s all snowy and stuff here. braved the storm on sunday night to drive down to the skatepark and ride. it was nearly empty and definitely worth the slippery trip. nearly rode myself into the ground with exhaustion. with no other riders there to impede your flow, you can just ride and ride and ride without stopping. also found out that the giant parking lots at potomac mills are perrrrfect for 4 wheel drifts and wide open donuts in the explorer. eh, it’s in my blood.

more sold out show madness

old 97’s – willing to pay an unreasonable amount
Need Old 97’s — Make a girl with a broken leg so happy!
have 1 shins… need 2 old 97’s.

it’s a damn shame i didn’t buy more than 2 tickets when i did. for the life of me, i can’t figure out why A) the old 97s sold out the 930 club and B) there’s such a huuge demand for tickets. there’s no new album out, and the last album was pretty crappy. no radio play, no promotions. wha happened?

“i’m not dead matter. that’s for sure. i’m definitely just not, like, chemicals, like iron or… you know. i’m not blood and i’m not veins and i’m not this arm. and i’m not these legs and i’m not this hair. this stuff’s all in flux. what am i really?”

shelter’s “death and dying” and some basic tenants of krsna conciousness still hold up for me as an adult. [plz right-clicky]

some more fun with the new video camera: jack swimming [right-click and save please]

moving servers shortly, so there might be some impending outages. don’t worry about me, i’ll be fine.

went out for a frozen trail ride on saturday with jenn and jack. introduced jenn to mtb’ing on the singlespeed. i rode the cross bike and it loved the frozen terrain. giant amounts of traction.

bled the brakes on the gs last night. it was pretty easy until i removed the front brake assembly to bleed it above the master cylinder to definitively get all the air out. the cardboard i’d used to keep the pads separate got smushed and i had to pry them apart with a giant screwdriver. what a PITA.

purchased and installed a firewire card in my home machine over the weekend. makes interacting with the video camera much easier. now i can capture all the shot footage, edit out the crap and print it back out to DV tape for storage. eventually, i’ll get a DVD burner and store video there.

thanks to tivo i caught my first GNCC moto event on the speed channel. it’s funny to see the racing i grew up on get such media coverage. very cool.

wow, wickedly cold here. low of 11 degrees on saturday. can winter be over now? not for me, i’m tough … but i worry about the rest of you pansies.

got a bill from my health insurance company last week. they want to charge me $75 for an x-ray i recieved on my broken hand. they say “it appears that this service was provided in connection with a pre-existing condition” first of all, it was for a BROKEN HAND!!. that’s not something that i’d let slide for 7 months before getting an x-ray. secondly, they’ve already paid over $1000 for the emergency room, their x-rays and everything else. for the same injury. the most difficult thing was, the policy-blinded cyborg on the other end of the phone couldn’t or wouldn’t admit that there was anything odd in their request. it was frustrating to the point of being funny.

been catching the dakar rally pretty much every day. wicked stuff. yesterday there were 2 instances where grown men collapsed in tears at the end of a stage.

another cycle blog: BluepoofBikes Motorcycle Adventures

there’s some pretty insane stuff going down in my 11/26/01 post. apparently some folks really hate Tuesday Morning. glad they found such an appropriate forum for their campaign.

mmmm… pretty.

so it’s been a while, eh? i’ve been busy. well, not busy in a bad way just too busy with real life to deal with this internet stuff. that’s a pretty good and healthy thing, trust me.

had a very good holiday, two 4-day-weekends in a row. mom & dad came down and hung out just after xmas. got lots of riding in (pedal & powered), we had some sweet street rides on tuesday AND thursday (pix here) and then hit vans on sunday. took advantage of nearly 70 degree weather over the weekend and met up with a guy out in ashburn who sold (and installed) me new fork springs for the GS. remarkable difference in handling, braking and accelerating. the stock springs kept bottoming out over the smallest pothole and diving like a kamikaze pilot on braking.

we now have so much technology going on in our house it looks like a space station. tivo, xm radio, DV. we are spoiled rotten.

oh yeah, bought a lil sony DV camera. i’m still sorting out whether its the one i want or not. shot and edited some video of our “Totally 80s New Year©”. i look REALLY creepy with a moustache.

New Years Eve 2004 — video

coming up: 2004 International Motorcycle Show — Jan 9-11 — WDC Convention Center