For various and sundry reasons, I had lost touch to varying degrees with some of my friends–some for only a year or so and others for nearly a decade. Fortunately I’ve managed to locate a couple of the better ones, and I love how I have cool friends. One such is my friend Buffi the cellist, who after some typical running around, I managed to talk with tonight.

To wit, I present Buffi J, with her cool purple electric cello:

(click to see the full size)

She had just played a Rocky Horror tribute show before talking to me. As I said, cool.

My only shot at ethnic coolness (and it is a long, long shot) is my Scottish ancestry (MacKinnon and McIlhatten), which is possibly swamped by my boring, roast-beef-eating, white-bread making, vegetable-boiling English ancestry. Nonetheless, it’s as close to a minority as I’ll ever get, so in today’s group-identity-based culture, I’m clinging to it like, well, a Scotsman clings to a penny.

That’s the stereotype in England, so I hear, that Scots make Jews look like spendthrifts–because we would never allow our religion to deny us free ham. (Note the “we”? Cute, how I slipped in my more-or-less created identity in there). Whether genetically determined or not, my family, we know how to save-a da money.

So it gave me a deep-ethnic-roots thrill a week ago when I had more than $10 in savings on a $28 grocery bill (net owed, $18–sweet!). But this week, I managed to have:

Total before savings: $32.40
Your Total Savings: $14.77
Total After Savings: $17.63

All bonus card buys except for one item, which I had a coupon for. And one of the bonus items? I had a coupon for that, too, biatch! (OK, I’m fairly sure my ancestors never said “biatch”. Some of my still-living, extremely distant relatives may, however–and say it with a funny accent t’boot.)

Two things to note, however:

1. A real penny-pinching Scot would never spend as much as I do on dining out and Internet access, to name a couple of luxuries, so please don’t imagine I live on milk crates or take dates to places for which I have coupons if you don’t yet well know me.
2. My skeptical side reminds me that I’m overpaying for those goods the rest of the time, so really I’m just not losing as much as I normally would on the transaction. If I actually consistently switched to the lowest-price version of each item and bought in bulk, I could save far more regularly. Nonetheless, I have a small apartment and like what I like, so slap! I’m Scottish, biatch!

Countries I Have Visited

create your own visited countries map

Geez, I think of myself as well-traveled, but look how frigid and white my travels have been!

U.S. States I Have Visited

create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.

I did better here than I suspected. Still, a little too southern-heavy for my tastes. I need to flesh out the Northeast, northern tier, and pacific Northwest.

So I’m in Qatar again, and I thought we’d had a sandstorm already.

I was wrong.

This still isn’t the red death that our troops in Iraq faced, but it’s this foggy haze that leaves a smell in the air and a gritty taste in your mouth, even inside an air-conditioned building.

And here I thought the weather had taken a turn for the nicer, after being a little chilly the previous night.

I’m still glad I came here now instead of during summer. 120-degree Farenheit heat does not sound attractive.

…or at least, that’s the way my blogging has been lately. But then lately I’ve been a codin’ fool. Hopefully before long I’ll have a non-work site I can point to and (no, not laugh) talk about exactly what went on in developing it.

I have also begun working out again after a year-long drought on that front, as well.

As you were.

So my day starts out, shittily enough, at the dentist. Not only that, but it’s a cavity filling. And not only that, but as usual, when he takes out the old filling, the dentist says “uh oh,” and I spend an hour in the chair, pay more money, and have to come back for another piece of my growing in-mouth porcelain collection (I hear they’re going to do replicas at the famous Franklin Mint. “See the famous Gigantic Cavernous Hole-Filling in Freakishly Decayed Tooth, with adorable hand-painted, one-of-a-kind teddy bears in honor of 9/11!”). I find it strangely depressing to know that no matter what I do, my teeth will eventually rot away into nothing and I’ll star in Fixident commercials at age 45.

So, as you can guess, I wasn’t in a great mood afterwards.

Fast forward just a little bit to lunch. Much of the dev team (the cool part of the dev team, anyway) goes out to the pseudo-swanky place along the ‘nue, Evening Star. It features old-tymey Pizza-hut-of-yore-style booths with tall backs. Not the sort one can easily see over.

Now, let it be said that I hate children. I hate yours most of all. So it’s nothing personal against the little twerp who sticks his shaved head over the side of the booth–which necessitates climbing up and putting his disgusting, germ-laden feet on the fucking table–and tries to entertain himself by attracting our attention.

Now I’m long skilled in restaurants frequented by selfish bastards who inflict the litter of their loins upon everyone else in the assumption that if they think a fart smells lovely, then everyone else will want to share in the aroma. The secret normally is: keep your gaze unaverted and let the Rhesus-monkey-like attention span be distracted by the next mote of dust that flies by.

But oh, no, this one is fixed with the singularity of purpose that only the progeny of the truly cow-like of intellect can achieve. He keeps doing it while his mother continues reading her menu or talking on her obnoxiously-brandished cell phone or whatever Yuppie Scum behavior that future matricides engage in to the extent of NOT NOTICING YOUR VERMIN IS OUT OF CONTROL. So he keeps it up.

That’s fine. I am used to this and am able to continue my witty and sparkling conversation unabated, with only the occasional mention of the impending death of the little darling to my rapt audience–and nary a glance in his direction.

Well, that’s not enough for the birth control failure, so he proceeds to THROW SOMETHING INTO OUR BOOTH, bouncing off my (subsequently un-drunk) water glass and falling between my colleague Oscar and I.

Oscar is a very forgiving sort and not prone to violence, so he is determined to stay where he is with only a mild comment. I, however, am past passivity and prepare to lob the offending missile back in the carpet monkey’s general direction, hopefully hitting his goddamned mother’s food, when I see what it is: A FUCKING USED BANDAGE.

Oscar’s immobility coupled with my extreme desire not to catch encephalitis or whatever fun disease was going around the viral factory that the mother clearly dumped the kid in daily before the crumb-creep doubtless got kicked out, causes me to refrain from confronting the mother immediately, loudly, and with threats of lawyers.

OK–I’ll say this one last time. I believe that it takes a family, in their own home or property, to raise a child. It does not take a village, unless I get a vote on whether you get to have a child. I do not owe you a damn thing because you choose to end your social life forever by contributing to overpopulation. I do not have to understand you, I do not have to make allowances, and I do not need to help you out. Are you a suffering, struggling mother? Then you shouldn’t have reproduced until you were able to care for it.

I do not go into restaurant with my cockatiel. I do not let him screech over the conversation of other diners. I do not buy a monkey and let him crawl into your booth and then fling his crap into your food. Any of these things would get me ejected at best and probably arrested, in addition to sued down to my skivvies.

So why the fuck do you have the gall to bring in your yard ape indoors before it has learned to behave in a manner that at least doesn’t bother others who didn’t participate in the sex acts that created your bundle of post-partum depression?

As Ginger, who no doubt finds this post far more entertaining than 99% of my blog, would say, GROSS! NOT OK.

Mandarin East, in Rockville, has dim sum nearly as good as the aforementioned Mark’s Duck House, and the service is better. Eating there yesterday was almost an experience in fast food.

The owner is enthusiastic and attentive, and the staff will get you anything you want while ensuring your water never hits bottom. That would be impressive for any restaurant, but dim sum usually brings out the worst as it consists of a couple hundred people all consuming little plates of food at once.

The only complaint I have is that even getting there at 12:30 is too late to grab some of the pineapple buns I love for desert. Those are popular and go fast. I’m guessing there’s either a late church service or an early service that lets out at 11 or so, causing the rush to be done with by 1PM. Still, that’s where I go for dim sum in Maryland.

It’s at 12710 Twinbrook Parkway, between Rockville Pike and Weirs Mill Road.

Noticing that the date had changed here in the Eastern Time Zone, 9AM will mark an important anniversary.

Of course, I refer to my Four-year anniversary as an employee of Forum One.

What, you think I meant something else?

Well, at least this isn’t as awkward as my first anniversary when the boss congratulated me on the way to the local pub to see our first TV images from the day.

“Uhh…thanks…” was all I could manage at that one.

Today it was much easier, as it was commented on the day before the anniversary, and I think the last two anniversaries of 9/11/01 have gotten most of the memorializing out of people.

This, I think, is a good thing. Americans don’t do well when we dwell on the past overmuch. Just look at…well, the entire American South for a textbook example. In fact, I’m not sure anybody does that well–Serbia still celebrates a great defeat on the battlefield from 500 years ago…and since the battlefield happens to be in Kosovo, that was an almost direct cause of the horrors of Bill Clinton’s brush with unilateralism in the 90s.

I don’t want to become Serbia–which is one reason I’m not sure I like the World War II memorial in the middle of the Mall in Washington, DC. We should remember our wars but not wallow in them.

However, that doesn’t seem likely, given John “I served in Viet Nam!” Kerry and George “Iraq is not Viet Nam!” Bush and the Swiftboat Vets and the Memos that may be 30 years or 30 days old.

Of course, the latest memo looks especially damning, though experts have some doubts about the letter spacing.

Anyway, happy anniversary to Oscar and myself, the lone survivors of the four who joined that day. We will po’ a fo’ty on da groun’ fo’ our fallen homiez.

So I saw Yes in Allentown, PA on Friday night, and I loved the concert. It included some of the best lick-trading I’ve ever heard from any band in any genre between Steve Howe and Rick Wakeman.

However, as I went to write a post to crow about it, I looked up the set lists on Forgotten Yesterdays, a fan site that tracks the set lists of every venue the band has ever played. When I bought the Allentown tickets, it was the closest venue to DC.

Of course, I found out that they played the Nissan Pavilion just a few days earlier, and they played some songs I’ve never heard the band play, especially not in the classic configuration they’re in now (same as recorded Tales from Topographic Oceans and Going for the One). On the other hand I wouldn’t have heard the aforementioned lick-trading on their cover of Paul Simon’s America, though I heard this lineup play that in 2002.

On the other hand, I’ve heard Steve Howe play The Clap before, and I really don’t care if I hear this bunch play Owner of a Lonely Heart, though it would have been interesting. Hopefully I’ll run across a bootleg, the phenomenon to which the concert program was a paean.

I do regret not having heard this bunch do Close to the Edge, though again I heard 4/5ths of this lineup play that in 2000. I also wish they’d played their cover of Every Little Thing, as I generally like Beatles tunes when played by anybody but the Beatles.

On the plus side, I finally got to hear this lineup play Roundabout, which, as Jack Black noted, has the best organ solo ever…with Karn Evil 9, First Impression, Part 2 being a close second. But I didn’t get to hear Long Distance Runaround.

One thing this concert had which no other I’ve been to (I’ve been to six now, from February 2, 1988 to the present) has had: a Roger Dean stage design. This was inflatable, for shipping and cost reasons, the program said. There were pipe-organ like structures behind Rick, automated drums around Alan, something very like the tree-like structures from Steve’s solo album Beginnings behind him, and a spider/manta ray/bird thing above Jon and Chris. Very trippy and cool, in white with black and grey accents. The bird thing flapped during Awaken, if I recall correctly. Or possibly it was trying to eat Jon. Either way, it moved in time with the music. Chris whipped out his Spinal Tap-like three-necked guitar (guitar, bass, and fretless bass) for Awaken.

All in all, I had a wonderful time, and Yes proved that at age 60, which Jon Anderson turns this year (impossible to believe, he still moves around like an elf with the enthusiasm of a hippy kid), they can still produce incredible, energetic music.

Update: Forgot to mention, Dream Theater opened. I hit traffic and only got to hear the last few songs of their set. It was OK, but for whatever reason, they have never thrilled me much. A little too much high school metal band self-seriousness, not enough prog beyond “look at our cool licks and unison lines,” and definitely not enough successful metal rebellion/fun.

However, they’re still better than 99% of what’s on the radio. But then I don’t listen to the radio, either.

So after returning from NEARFest, I bummed around a day or so (including a trip to the very cool Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air & Space Museum at Dulles). Then I headed off to do something I’ve always wanted to do — drive the entire Skyline Drive and Blue Ridge Parkway.

Continue reading →