November 2003 Archives

This is and oldie, but definitely a goodie. A co-worker threw a printed copy onto my desk this morning and I couldn't contain my laughter. I take absolutely no responsibility for the original writup, which will be in black. I didn't write it, it's been around forever. My comments will be in red.

60°F: Southern Californians shiver uncontrollably.
People in New England sunbathe.

Well, for the most part this is right, but what people don't understand is that people in New England usually don't sunbathe at all. Even when it's 90°. Unless they were originally from Southern California, then they wouldn't be outside unless they were wearing their flashy new fleece from EMS. 60? is more like shorts, t-shirt and sandles weather.

50°F: New Yorkers try to turn on the heat.
People in New England plant gardens.

First of all, I don't understand why anyone would need to turn their heat on at 50?, unless you're my mother, but in that case, you're also wearing a sweater in July. Planting gardens, on the other hand, is pretty much right-on. Usually it's when it's 50° while the tempature is getting warmer; late spring.

40°F: Italian & English cars won't start.
People in New England drive with the windows down.

I've seen one Italian car in Vermont in my entire life. It was during the summer, too. This possibly explains why. Now English cars... most people I know who have MG's can hardly get them started in the summer. Windows down? Hell yeah! I'll actually let it get a little colder too, as long as my arm hairs don't freeze while I hang my arm out the window, it's all good.

32°F: Distilled water freezes.
Maine's Moosehead Lake's water gets thicker.

See, there's a reason we don't drink distilled water up here in Vermont. All of our water comes from wells and springs. It's not uncommon to have cloged shower heads and cloudy drinking glasses from all the mineral deposits. And after a few days of 32° or lower tempatures all lakes in New England become thicker.. even sometimes thick enough to walk on.

20°F: Floridians don coats, thermal underwear, gloves, wool hats.
People in New England throw on a flannel shirt.

Floridians don't go outside at 20°, they don't sell thermal underwear in Florida, and Floridian's have no idea where wool comes from. Never underestimate the power of flannel though. Baaa.

15°F: New York landlords finally turn up the heat.
People in New England have the last cookout before it gets cold.

See, at 15° it is getting a bit chilly on the outside, but on the inside, granted you don't have large holes in your walls, it should be at least comfortable to live without the heat on. Get some blankets you Sally. Cookouts should never end just because it gets cold. It's not uncommon to fire up the grill in the middle of the winter to get that good ol' bar-b-que taste year round. The fire in the grill doesn't care how cold it is outside.

0°F: All the people in Miami die...
New Englanders close their windows.

Who cares.. it's only Florida. This is right though, about closing windows. This is about the time that my bedroom window will shut for the season. It's not uncommon up to this point for me to keep it open a crack, especially when I sleep. I'd much rather have it cold in my room and be under nice and warm blankets than it to be blistering hot.

-10°F: Californians fly away to Mexico.
The Girl Scouts in New England are selling cookies door to door.

I suppose that flying to mexico is better than dissapearing into the earth along the San Andreas fault. I also never understood why Girl Scouts (and Boy Scouts alike) choose the coldest days of the year for selling their cookies, popcorn or going on bottle drives. Get smart -- hand your order forms to Mom and Dad and have them take them to work. Everyone loves Girl Scout cookies, and what's a bit of over-priced popcorn from the Boy Scouts?

-25°F: Hollywood disintegrates.
People in New England get out their winter coats.

Hasn't Hollywood been disintergrating for years? Who can name a good flick that's come out of Hollywood in the past 5 years? This is about the time the good ol' North Face 3 piece parka system comes out of the closet. Until this time, a simple fleece works fine.

-40°F: Washington DC runs out of hot air.
People in New England let dogs sleep indoors.

As long as we keep a Republican in office, Washington D.C. will never run out of hot air. This one's only on here for joke purposes. We only let our dogs sleep indoors if they don't have a doghouse outside. If they do, they're good to at least -60°.

-100°F: Santa Claus abandons the North Pole.
New Englanders get frustrated because they can't start their "kahs".

What?! Santa Claus is real? And just to verify, not everyone in New England speaks with a Massachusetts accent. Smart New Englanders have "block heetahs".

-460°F, 0? Kelvin, absolute 0: All atomic motion stops.
People in New England start saying, "Cold 'nuff for ya?"

It's great to see that the person who originally wrote this was up to snuff on his Atomic Physics. He hit that one right on the head, as well as straying away from that annoying Massachusetts accent and using one more universal to this part of the country.

-500°F: Hell Freezes over.
The Red Sox win the World Series.

This happened to me a week or so ago. I considered telling the story like it happened today, but I've already told it to a bunch of people since it happened.

Just for background, the building where my office resides is home to many other companies. The biggest, and the owner of the facility, General Dynamics, has their own parking lot with special "reserved" parking spots for their upper managment. In order to get to the peon lot, you have to walk through this perpetual degradation of class. The lot is peppered with BMWs and high-end Mercedes SUVs. In the summer there's an occasional Lotus, and I've even seen a Lamborghini.

Anyway, I was leaving work the other day making a bee line for my mid-sized Japaneese car when I saw a seemingly frustrated woman out of the corner of my eye. It was a middle-aged woman, definitely a professional; dressed in heels, black skirt and a blazer. She was standing next to her VERY shiny, late model, blue Audi A6 with her key ring in her hand. She was frantically pressing the button on the remote, either being very lazy and trying to use her remote starter, or trying to unlock her door.

I see this as an opertunity to help out. I do try to do at least one good deed a day, even if it's only letting someone go in front of me while I'm driving. I approach her and inquire about the situation.

"Is everything alright?" At this time she's fumbling through her purse, which is the size of a small suitcase looking for something, presumably her cell phone.

"Oh, my car door unlocker is broken. Don't worry about it, I have AAA." At this point I almost loose it. Can she actually be serious?

So I ask her, "Can I give it a try?" She scoffs and hands me the key ring. Almost like she meant to say, "Like it even matters.. what can you do differently?"

I take the key rings and for good measure try to unlock the door with the remote unit. Like I had expected by the way the woman was acting, the battery seemed quite dead, or the unit itself was broken. Then I implemented the ultimate fix: I rummaged through her key ring until I found a key prominently marked with the four rings of the Audi symbol. Now this woman must have been important, because she had a shitload of keys on her ring. Anyway, I took the Audi key, insterted it into the doory and turned.

"Click." Door unlocked.

I handed the woman back her keys, who with an amazed and spiteful look on her face could say nothing to me but, "Oh." She then got in her car and drove off. Not even a thank you.

Well, this is for you, woman: :flip: (I really like that smiley..)

But with all that aside, I did get my giggles for the day out of it. Sometimes people's ignorance just blows my mind.

Today's B&P is brought to you by the band:

Phish (3 CD-R)
04/04/94 Flynn Theatre - Burlington, VT.

Audio Source: B+K 4011 > DAT; transfer: D8 > Oade > Coaxial S/PDIF > ZA2 > CDWave > WAV > SHN > CD-R

Set 1
Divided Sky, Sample in a Jar, Scent of a Mule#, Maze, Fee, Reba, Horn, It's Ice, Possum

Set 2:
Down With Disease# > If I Could#, Buried Alive*, The Landlady*, Julius#*, Magilla*, Split Open and Melt*, Wolfman's Brother#* > I Wanna Be Like You#**, Oh Kee Pa Ceremony** > Suzie Greenberg*

E:
Harry Hood, Cavern*

* With 6 piece Giant Country Horns. ** With Dave Grippo on congas. # First time played.

I will take 5 of these.

Anyone interested should: E-mail me. I will notify you if you've made the cut.

I wake up this morning with a weird notion in my head, "Maybe at some point I should register a domain name for Brokedown Palace." I was pretty sure that any "brokedownpalace" domains were available, but I decided to check out what was there just for shits and giggles.

For those of you that don't know, I named this website after the Grateful Dead song Brokedown Palace (American Beauty). And until now, I thought that was pretty much the only thing that made this reference. I was wrong.

Here are my findings, first, the ONLY Grateful Dead related website:

BROKEDOWNPALACE.NET - This is Dar's BrokeDown Palace, a small site dedicated to the work of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead. She has info on tape trading, webrings and links. Not a bad little GD related website!

Quazi Grateful Dead related website:

BROKEDOWNPALACE.ORG - The title of this site says "site page 1", and at first I didn't think it was Grateful Dead related; although there are neat little graphics of something with a HUGE pipe in their hands. Upon closer inspection, though, I decided that the name possibly could be based upon the Grateful Dead tune. This website seems to be for a store in Maine, which sells amonst other things Hand Blown Glass. Anyone with half a brain knows what that means. Pipes! Close enough.

And now for the shocker of my morning:

BROKEDOWNPALACE.COM - You don't even need to click on this link, you'd be wasting your time in my oppinion. It leads to the "Fox Movies" website. Apparantly in 2000 Fox made a movie. It wasn't a movie of Jerry's life. It wasn't a concert movie. Doing a little bit of research i found out that Claire Daines starred in it, which is cool -- Claire Daines is hot. But then I found out that Sarah McLaughlin did the soundtrack. Wrong answer.

So we'll see what happens in the future. If there is ever a need to register a domain for here, it may happen, but it wont bear the name BrokedownPalace dot anything.

This is actually going to be a dual B&P offer, as soon as I get some feedback verifying that I can actually legally B&P part of the offer.

For those of you that don't know know what a B&P offer is, it's the act of collecting live, legally ownable, music by mail. You send the person who's copying the music for you blank CDs and return packaging and postage and they copy you the show and send it back your way.

For fun instructions on how a B&P works, go here: B&P Instruction Page

So now onto the B&P. First the sort of gray area part: This morning a friend of mine sent me a link to an FTP server that had a MPG file of Keller Williams playing on 7-5-2002. I pulled down the MPG and burned it to DVD. Please use the comments sections for your thoughts about B&Ping this item, if I can get a general consensus telling me that it's OK to do so, I'd like to offer this B&P Offer:

Keller Williams (1 DVD+R)
07/05/02 Three Sister's Park - Chilicothe, IL.

Video Source:
Sony DCR-TRV17 mini-dv ->Pyro 1394dv card ->adobe premiere 6.0 ->TMPGEnc 2.5 > DVD

Audio Source:
Sony ECM-HS1 ->Sony DCR-TRV17 mini-dv ->Pyro 1394dv card ->adobe premiere 6.0 ->soundforge 5.0-> tmpgenc 2.5 >DVD

Rockumal> Loup> Apparition> Johnny B. Goode, Roshambo, Alligator Alley, Yoni> In the Middle> Bob Rules> Restless Wind> Bob Rules, Loup> Love Handles, You Are What You Eat>Pedal to the Metal> You Are What You Eat, Freeker by the Speaker [1:18]

I'll take 5 of these. Again, ONLY if I can feel ethically comfortable doing so.

And the audio offer:

Keller Williams (3 CD-R)
04/20/02 Somerville Theatre - Somerville, MA.

Audio Source: Analog SBD > RCA > M1 > PCM-M1 > oade 7 Pin > CoolEdit2000 (Amplified by +6db) > CDWave > .shn > CD

Set 1
Instrumental, It's A Plant>Loup>Legalize It, Crator in the Backyard>Golden Years, Roshambo, Sally Sullivan>Surrender>Sally Sullivan, Dear Emily>Rockumal>Dude Loup>Revelation>Fuel for the Road>More Than A Little>
Fuel for the Road

Set 2:
Stay Human>Instrumental>Breathe>Bong Tube Loup>Breathe, Doin' That Rag>
Down Under>Instrumental, Kinky Reggae, Red Pebbles, 2 Dingalings>Dogs, Bob Rules>Restless Wind>Bob Rules>Slow Down>Inhale to the Chief>Drum Loup>One More Saturday Night

E1:
Airport

E2:
Bohemian Rhapsody

I will take 5 of these.

Anyone interested should: E-mail me. I will notify you if you've made the cut.

I will be posting more and more B&Ps as time goes on here. Check back often!

So I guess this where I say "Welcome to Broken Palace... the humble abode of my BLOG." There, now that that's over we can get to the fun stuff.

It was a few days ago I decided that I wanted to start my own web presence. I've done my share of websites, but this is a bit different. Here I will be posting my most up-to-date thoughts at whatever moment they might hit. I know it sounds bad, but I have access to a computer at any point of my day, so what a better way to get things down.

I'd like to start by thanking the folks over at MoveableType for their Personal Publishing System. The interface is slick, completely customizable, and more powerful than you'd ever really need. Thank you!

The layout you see here is only temporary. I've spent the past few days getting a general layout that I like. Now that I've done that, I can start posting to Brokedown Palace on a regular basis. Meanwhile, I'll be designing a whole new look.. keep your eyes open and you might see it shortly.

These are the things you're likely to see here at the Brokedown Palace:

Show Reviews: Probably my biggest hobby is seeing shows of many, many different bands. I will be posting my reviews of those shows, or my recollection of the show here. Interesting things happen sometimes.

B&P / Trading Offers: This goes right next to the last one. Along with going to shows I like to collect the recordings of shows I've been to, and even some I haven't. These are both ways to expand or spread my music collection. Details will come with the first offer.

Random Rants/Rambles: I guess these are the ones to watch out for. Hehe... or maybe not. This will just be what's on my mind at the time... you'd be surprised what I think up sometimes.

Poetry: Ok, I don't write poetry, but if I ever start, maybe I'll post it here.

I'm sure there'll be much more... we'll let the sky be the limit and see where this goes. Enough for now. Peace.