Devil Baby

Paige has four little teeth on the top of her mouth, and four on the bottom. Yesterday I was sitting on the couch, minding my own business, when she tottled over to me and climbed up on my lap. She wrapped her arms around me and buried her head in my chest. (Is that a sweet baby, or what?) And then she sunk those little eight teeth into my chest and didn’t let go. I now have a bruise exactly the size of a baby-sized mouth on my chest. She’s such a daddy’s girl.

February Consumption

Music

Peter Bjorn & John - Writer's Block
Alkaline Trio - Remains
Grizzly Bear - Yellow House
Kraftwerk - Computer World
Kraftwerk - Trans European Express
Bloc Party - A Weekend in the City
The Shins - Wincing the Night Away
The Rapture - Pieces of the People We Love

Books

Alternadad by Neal Pollack

Dunzo...The Day After

How I am supposed to feel? I'm just so confused and conflicted. Here it is, the day after the Series Finale of The OC and I'm still trying to wrap my head around it all. It all just happened so fast. Everything was going along and then, boom, Josh Schwartz and the boys had to find away to a wrap up the whole show right in the middle of an abbreviated season.

I was kind of hoping for a Seinfeldish bring-every-character-ever-back episode, but I guess they couldn’t figure out a way to fit Anna, Alex, Luke’s gay dad, nutso Oliver, Lindsay, and Volchek into one episode. (I was a mildly surprised that Marissa wasn’t resurrected for the final episode, if we’re being perfectly honest.)

It just seemed like any other episode – babies being delivered by a gay midwife, marriages happening/then not happening, etc. – and with five minutes left I thought the show was going to end with no real ending at all. That thought made me very upset.

And then came the epilogue clips. Seth marrying Summer, fine. Julie going to college, being supported by both Hercules and the Bullit, whatev. Sandy teaching school, hoorah. Ryan taking in a mini-me, lame. As cheesy as it was, this offered me some much-needed closure. I don’t have to spend the rest of my wondering what happened to my favorite fictional friends. Phew.

But I’m not ready to give it all just yet. Anyone want to join me for an OC DVD marathon next week? Paige’ll be there…

Death By Peanut Butter

I almost died. I think Traci was trying to poison me. My friend Internet told me the following:

FDA advised consumers not to eat any Peter Pan peanut butter purchased since May 2006 and not to eat Great Value peanut butter with a product code beginning with "2111" purchased since May 2006 because of risk of contamination with Salmonella Tennessee.

Peter Pan? But that's the kind of peanut butter Traci buys me. So I went home and checked the lid. Sure enough, 2111. So I've probably got salmonella, and I'll probably die. If I died, how could I go to scout camp this summer? Wait, I'm getting an idea...

Please Tupac, Don't Hurt 'Em

Oh, the wonderful world of cable. I have now shifted from my nostalgia for grunge to my love of '90s rap. Thanks to VH1's Black History Month programming, I watched "Tupac Resurrection" last week and I finished up the MC Hammer movie "Too Legit" tonight.

I thought I was familiar with the Hammer story, but I guess I stopped paying attention, you know, in the mid-90s. Did you know that Hammer signed to Death Row Records? Whah? I thought that the movie was lying, but Traci checked the facts (if you can call a visit to Wikipedia 'checking the facts).

From Wikipedia: "Hammer next signed with Death Row Records, then home to gangsta rap stars Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur. The label did not release any of Hammer's music while he was with them. However, Burrell [Hammer's real name] did record music with Shakur, and the album he recorded leaked onto the internet some years later. Their collaborative efforts are yet to be released. After the death of Shakur in 1996, Burrell left the record company."

Rumor has it that "Unconditional Luv," Hammer's track featuring Tupac is floating around out there in internetland, so I'll have to see if I can track it down. Again, Hammer on Death Row? Who knew?

Computer [Cruel] World

There's a pretty good chance that I deleted all of the work that we have done on the Johnny Tightlips album for the past year. For some reason, last night I decided it would be a good idea to back up all of the song files, which I've never done before.

Somehow, while trying to burn those files onto a DVD, I managed to ruin everything - without doing anything at all. Now all of the song titles are there, but each of the individual song parts (e.g. guitar 1, clip 1, fade in file, fade out file) have relocated themselves to one big folder. That means the rhythm guitar for "Record Store" and the drums for "Overdramatic Me" are just chilling in some folder and I'm (fingers crossed) going to have to try to patch everything back together.

I hate computers, even after listening to the super radical 1981 album "Computer World" by Kraftwerk last night. (Sample lyrics: "I'm the operator/With my pocket calculator." Sweet.) Thanks to all the beep-beep-boo-beep, I've been thinking in 1s and 0s all day.

Fare thee well, Orange County

There's only one episode of The OC left, and then it's dunzo. I'm just trying to keep it together up in here. I know this season was going to be disappointing the very first episode, when Ryan decided to deal with Marissa's death by joining a fight club, but I've hung in there. (That's more than I can say for my eternal companion, who keeps saying "This is why this show is being canceled...because it's stupid!)



I've stuck with The OC for four seasons. Heck, I was just 23 years old when Ryan first moved next door the Coopers. I've lived through Luke's gay dad, Marissa's drug-abusing psychopath boyfriend Oliver, the exit and return of cute Anna, Marissa's lesbian girlfriend Alex, Summer's boyfriend Zach and Seth's boyfriend Che. What am I going to do now? What am I going to do?

The Hills just isn't the same, and I think there's only a few episodes of The White Rapper Show left. First Arrested Development, now The OC? Fox Network, what have I done to deserve this?

Greetings from West Valley City

We took Paige to her first hockey game this past weekend, and it was a good one. There was a fight four seconds into the first period. Four seconds! That must have been a pretty intense face off. What I think is classy about the E-Center is that they play the theme song to Rocky while the fight is going on. By three minutes into the game, there had been another fight and the Grizzlies had scored a goal. What more could you ask for?

Paige seemed to have a good time. There was lots of stuff for her to look at and lots of lights to be dazzled by. She also had fun grabbing the lady's hair sitting in front of us. We'll probably buy season tickets and become hockey people.

New Favorite Band

Ever since I saw this Silversun Pickups video on IMF, I was hooked. For the first three-fourths of the video, I was surprised that it was about two young boys falling in love at a club, but it turns out one of the boys is just an androgynous girl. Phew, that was close! I can't stop loving the old school-Smashing Pumpkins fuzz guitar and the girl bass player. (Traci thought the girl was singing the whole time; the guy singer just has a high voice.)

I am listening to the album, Carnavas, right now. It is beautiful all the way through. Really, really good stuff.

Well Thought Out Twinkles [MP3]

Johnny Tightlips vs. Slayer

Slayer won. The club owner in Ogden said that there probably would have been another 15-20 kids at our show, had Slayer not been playing that night at the Great Saltair. With those 15-20 kids, there would have been close to 25 paying kids in the crowd.

From the moment that we got to the club, I knew it was going to be a good night. We walked in the front door and the guy running the show said, “Can I help you?”

“Uh, yeah, we’re with Johnny Tightlips.”

Awkward silence.

“We’re playing tonight.”

“Oh, you are? Huh. Well, we’ll rearrange the lineup and fit you in.”

Rock and roll is not exactly organized or efficient.

Though the crowd was sparse, we had a pretty good night at our first showing in Weber County. (We’re basically almost an international supergroup now that we’ve played in Summit, Weber and Salt Lake counties. Watch out Dagget County, you’re next!) Not that we necessarily played well.

I continue to be amazed by stage fright in all of its many forms. Though I have mostly gotten over playing in front of a crowd, I am still deathly embarrassed by having to tune my guitar in front of people. I absolutely hate it. Anyway, what surprised me the other night was that even though we have played all of these songs hundreds of times, the second we get in front of people we start forgetting things.

If you have never performed music in front of an audience, you might think that the musician is thinking about the music while he is playing. Not me. The second we start playing, my mind is everywhere – thinking about the people I’m looking at, wondering if House is going to be able to solve his next medical mystery, thinking about how I shouldn't have eaten so many peanutes before the show, etc. And then, POW! I remember I’m playing a song, and frantically start trying to figure out if it’s time to switch to the chorus or back to the verse.

We were playing “Record Store” on Tuesday night, the first song we ever worked on as a band. I’ve been playing for close to five years now. But when Danny’s drum intro finished up, I looked at my hands and said to them, “I have no idea what you’re supposed to be doing right now.” No idea. I knew there was a lead guitar part, but heck if I knew what it was. I muddled my way through it, then I skipped a chorus and played a guitar solo, and when we got to the part where the guitar solo was really supposed to happen, I just played the same thing again.

So it wasn’t really our best technical performance, but I still felt like it was a good show. It seemed like the handful of kids that were there were into it, which made it easy for us to be into it. Oh, and we’re getting better at covering up our many mistakes.

I talked to the club owner after our set. He said that they draw their biggest crowds with 8 Mile-style rap battles. He said on some nights they are getting upwards of 400 kids out for those shows. Because of my addiction to The White Rapper Show on VH1, I have now made it my number one goal to get my skillz together and enter a rap battle in Ogden. To practice, I will spend now until then insulting every person I see…and your mom, too.