Many apologies for not posting recently, but I’ve had one busy Memorial Day weekend! Matt Hotham came by and Yaeka and I got to play a bit of tour guide as well as enjoy this year’s Sasquatch Festival. Images of the performers are up on The PhiLL(er) and other images from another baseball game and the trip to the festival are on their way.
Jade Tree Records out of Deleware was kind enough to allow me to link to some MP3s on their server on The PhiLL(er). It would be tremendous if you would check them out here and download them all. There’s some really good stuff there and I want to make sure that Jade Tree knows I appreciate their help.
I changed the layout of The PhiLL(er) tonight. I started working on it yesterday and probably prematurely put it up as there are always changes and adjustments to be made, but I’d like any comments.
There are two main things I wanted to accomplish. The first was to change the background of the main text to white so that cover art wouldn’t clash with it at all and also I wanted to make the site more compatible with browsers other than Internet Explorer.
I’m far from satisfied with the top banner area as I think the white may be a little too much when present up there, but it was the quickest and cleanest solution. Something I am definitely happy with is the little symbol preceding all of the review/feature links in the left hand column.
After enjoying a game on Thursday night, I was suprised to get a phone call from Yaeka asking if I wanted to go to the game on Friday versus the Yankees. Turns out that my boss had gotten a pair of tickets from the owner of the company, but he wasn’t going to be able to make the game. This game was definitely a hot ticket before the season started and the Mariners began their steady decline, but while waiting to cross the street to the field, I overheard a scalper talking about how difficult it was to sell tickets despite the fact that this was a game against the Yankees who are always able to draw a large crowd.
Yaeka and I were excited to go to the game and were curious as to how the crowd would react to the return of Alex Rodriguez as a Yankee. Before we could enter the game, however, we had to meet up with one of the clowns — literally a clown — that Yaeka works with to return a magic prop. Unfortunately for us this clown lacks some common sense and didn’t seem to understand that there would be traffic getting to the stadium area for the handoff. This led to us missing the introductions of the teams as well as the enormous booing of A-Rod as his name was announced. Oh well, at least we got free tickets and stumbled across some secret free parking!
I entered the game in a pretty poor mood due to the whole ordeal of dealing with the clown, but seeing the field guys do their dance routine brightened my mood. I watched a news report last year — the first year they began doing occasional dances between innings — where they interviewed players and most of them seemed to be embarrassed about it for the guys, but they sure seem to have a good time dancing that I’m sure they don’t care what the players think.
Remember how I was upset about not being around to hear the booing of A-Rod? Well if you read the article linked above, you’ll know that Seattle loves to boo him and I had no reason to fear. He got booed every single pitch of every single at bat.
Here’s a nice shot of Safeco Field. This is definitely a nice field, not a bad seat in the house. I haven’t been able to witness the roof in action, but I did learn from Yaeka that it costs about $1.50 to close the roof. That’s pretty cheap to move a huge thing like that!
I’ve been known to question why in the world the Mariners would bother re-signing Edgar Martinez when he should have just retired last year, but on this night he proved to be quite effective hitting his 500th double and 299th career homerun as well as barely missing career homer 300 by about 5 feet. He finished out the night with 4 RBIs.
While I’m sure for most fans beating the Yankees was the highlight of the night, but for me it was getting this awesome picture taken with the Mariner Moose.
So I was checking out all the sites I have linked and happend to catch Kevin Rose’s posting on getting Visual Basic .NET 2003 Standard Edition for free.
I actually just bought a book on VB and ASP .NET so something I am definitely interested in checking out to help expand my little toolkit and maybe make it a bigger toolkit.
Basically, all you have to do is watch 5 of these Microsoft produced videos and rate them and then they send you a redemption code. As Yaeka likes to say, “Free is a price I like”.
The owner of the company I work for decided that this year would be a great year to get season tickets so that he could “watch a winning team”. Boy did he pick a really bad year as the Mariners are doing just plain awful. About a week and a half ago, he wasn’t going to be able to make the game so he gave his pair of tickets to, no, not me, Gabe the forklift driving expert at work. Gabe was pretty excited to get the tickets but as the day wore on he started having doubts about whether or not he’d actually be able to make it. After a quick phone call to make sure our busy schedules were free, Yaeka and I had scored some pretty good tickets on the Avaya Terrace Club level.
After a quick stop at home for some food and to check on the cat, we were off to see the Seattle Mariners play the Minnesota Twins on a Thursday night.
This shot is indicative of the usual state of gasoline in Yaeka’s cars with all of the commuting we do, but we had faith we’d make it to the stadium with no problem. It’s not like we were driving a short bus or anything.
In addition to the excellent gas mileage Rupert gets, Safeco Field is just a quick drive across Lake Washington on the floating bridges.
They weren’t giving away anything cool that night at the stadium, but as you can see it was Wheel of Fortune night. Not really comparable to a bobblehead night or anything like that but we did get to see a few cool things.
Here’s Vanna White throwing out the first pitch. As you can see, Vanna decided not to get her shoes dirty and throw the ball from about 25 ft away. Now that I think about it, she might have actually tossed it underhanded Rookie of the Year style. Her son decided that he couldn’t let it end that way and a pitch of his own from the mound making it to the plate in one bounce.
With all of the formalities out of the way, we were ready to hear Pat Sajak say “play ball” on his pre-recorded message shown on the big video screen.
As I mentioned before, we were sitting in the Avaya Terrace Club level. They have people that come to your seat and take your order as well as deliver it so you don’t have to miss one bit of action. We decided that the extra 17% gratutity wasn’t worth it though and did the walking around the ballpark thing instead like real people. While walking around and checked out Juan Rincon warm up in the bullpen. The ball goes really damn fast when you’re that close.
These aren’t the best shots in the world, but we at least capture Ichiro doing his vertical bat and shoulder touch thing as well as an action shot.
On the way home we had to stop and get gas at the low low price of $2.249 a gallon. Gas at that station today, a week and a half later, is probably about $2.349.
Many of you may not have been around when I declared Alchemy the greatest Yahoo! Game on the site right now, but I’m going to share my awesome new high score with you anyway. Let me know if you beat it.
I never really paid that much attention to online radio sites. I had used MSN Radio a few times and it was pretty cool, but ever since Sarah began raving about Launch Radio on Yahoo! on her blog I’ve been hearing more about especially since Yaeka checked it out.
Anyway, I somehow ended up at the site (I really don’t know how I got there, maybe Yahoo! Games) and found out that Franz Ferdinand is the official Emerging Artist of the Month. Go them!
The music videos are up there and there are also some exclusive video things as well. I figured that at least Marty would appreciate this information as he wrote an excellent review of the band that I posted on The PhiLL(er) here.
Okay, here we are at the final posting of this four-part series on the Pixies concert in Vancouver, BC. As promised, there will be photos courtesy of this guy.
I forgot to mention one thing about the Commodore that disappointed me. This was their lack of Labatt Blue. It had been a while since I’ve had a bottle of Blue and I figured, “Hey, I’m in CANADA! As that bear says, this is something from his country!” Unfortunately, I was denied.
While the first opening band was playing, the fire alarm kept going off. Everyone in the venue had one of those collective dorm-room thoughts of whether it’s worth getting up and going outside for this drill or whatever, but staying in won out. And there’s no way in hell I was going to give up my nice seat. I started getting worried after seeing about 5 firemen walk through with axes ready, but I knew it wasn’t serious, probably just my salmon cooking or something.
Once it was time for Pixies to come on stage, we were treated to quite possibly the largest spewing of smoke I have ever seen. Even in my days of working at the Palace I had never seen so much smoke. It was almost like everyone in the place was smoking, which they thankfully weren’t. I think we counted maybe one or two smokers the whole night.
The set moved along very fast and they managed to play over 20 songs during the pre-encore set. Talking was very very limited, there weren’t even any complimentary thank you’s to the crowd. I’ve always been a big fan of bands that interact with the audience and I know I wasn’t the only one to appreciate such things.
About half-way through the set, Frank Black broke the silence by telling a story of a fan pointing out that they really didn’t talk that much. Following this story was a brief moment of high-fives all around the band in a very sarcastic manner, but it was amusing to see big Frank Black sort of hop around the stage to give people high-fives.
Overall, the show was a good one. I didn’t come away from it feeling as though I had seen a bit of history, but it was a solid performance. I’m not sure if this perception was influenced by the fact that I was viewing from a balcony seat and not down on the floor with the crowd or just part of my ever evolving feelings toward concerts.
Anyway, here’s the set list:
Planet of Sound
Caribou
U-Mass
Is She Weird?
Gouge Away
Ed is Dead
River Euphrates
Debaser
Velouria
Crackity Jones
Hey
Monkey Gone to Heaven
Bone Machine
Levitate Me
Blown Away
Here Comes Your Man
Wave of Mutilation (UK surf)
Mr Grieves
Holiday Song
Vamos
Where is my mind?
encore:
Gigantic
Tame
In Heaven
Wave of Mutilation
My apologies for the long delay before this segment. I just noticed that Flynn posted a new blog entry as I was typing this so I’m getting my ass into gear.
Also a note, before we left for the show, I checked the Commodore Ballroom’s website and it said “No Cameras or recorders permitted” so we put our camera back in the car before going in. I know sometimes they say this and it isn’t true, but with this being a House of Blues venue I figured they might be more strict than your average venue. It turns out this policy is definitely NOT enforced and I should have had my camera and snapped away. Anyway, as a result all the following pictures are swiped from other websites.
The following images were gathered from the official Commodore Ballroom slideshow tour.
The Commodore Ballroom was honestly fabulous as this sign claims. It is a reasonably small venue (about 1,000 people), but very spacious inside. We got in line about 45 minutes before doors as it was starting to round the corner and we wanted to get a good spot. This is when we learned that there were 100 tickets still available only to be sold at the door.
Once 8 o’clock hit, the line was split into two and we the priveleged got to get in the shorter line for those with tickets. At some point during this split some French speaking Canadian that obviously belonged back east snuck in front of us jabbering on her telephone. The ridiculous part of this is that once we got in she just stood there on the stairs and wasn’t even trying to get in so what’s the point of cutting in line? Anyway, as you can see, The Commodore has some very nice seating. There were four bars in The Commodore, one on each side as well as two in the rear of the building on each floor.
Many people would call us lame, but rather than running straight for the stage, Yaeka and I headed straight upstairs to the second bar area. The Commodore has a full service kitchen and we sat at long bar type table facing the stage that was elevated to give us a very clear view of the stage. This is really the only way to enjoy a show. There is no losing your seat to some punk kid that pushes you or having to leave your spot to get a beer because the waitress took care of everything. While watching the opening acts, Yaeka and I dined on an appetizer of bruschetta and a meal of veggie burger with fancy salad and some honey dijon dill salmon.
Coming soon, like in a few days will be the final portion. I’ll have some pics from the show that I found online and a full setlist that I wrote out while enjoying the performance.