ZOMGWTFBBQ and CAKE

I first started listening to CAKE during my junior year in high school. A close friend made me a mix-CD for my birthday that included “Short Skirt Long Jacket” and I was hooked like so many others. Their website has a list of released albums and tour dates on their respective pages. In addition, their Music page contains previews of songs.

Positives:

• John Macrea’s deadpan, rap-style delivery (sans bitches)
• Unexpected syncopation
• Sweet guitar riffs
• Soulful lyrics
• Environmentalism
• Concentrated essence of JAWSOME

Negatives:

• (sans bitches)
• Listening to CAKE makes other music not sound as good
• It doesn’t flow well from Daft Punk in a shuffled list
• High percentage of swearing for an indie band. Many songs are not radio safe.

The point to this introduction to JAWSOME is that CAKE is coming to Colorado in early June! They’re playing in Boulder and Denver at the Chautauqua Auditorium and Denver Botanic Gardens, respectively.

I’ve been remarkably poor of late but I believe I can willingly consume PB&J sammiches for a couple more weeks to see these guys in concert. The tickets aren’t up for sale yet but you better believe I have ticketmaster on refresh for when they do actually go on sale.

In an interesting side-note, Weird Al apparently did a parody of the distinctive CAKE style in “Close But No Cigar.” I like this song on its own merits, aside from my inner-parody-lover’s laughter.

Note: The animator is another favorite of mine. John Kricfalusi of Ren & Stimpy fame.

EDIT: WHY GOD WHY

EDIT #2: Just kidding! :D I’m in Section B in the Chautauqua Auditorium in Boulder!

Ostrobogulous: Summer

The show for the last week of the semester wasn’t as much fun for me, I’m afraid. I had been sick since the Tuesday of that week with some sort of flu-like disease. The good news is that I’m better now, with the exception of snot demons lurking in my nostrils.

We had a guest DeeJay to take the burden off our liminal host, Lazarus Longhair. My good friend (and adoptive older brother) David Danford took over my mic that evening. His lack of trivia knowledge and pop culture was more than made up for by his newly blue hair and the fact that he brought me dinner after the show. Highlights include: odd noises, green with golden sparkles, and questions answered later than intended.

The Playlist:

Wake Me Up Before You Go Go - Wham!
Blister in the Sun - Violent Femmes
Summertime Blues (Live) - Stray Cats
Love Shack - The B-52s
Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye) - Steam
It’s Raining Men - The Weather Girls
Don’t Turn Around - Ace of Base
Hot Hot Summer Day - Sugarhill Gang
C’est La Vie - Ace of Base
Long Hot Summer Night - Jimi Hendrix Experience
The Bad Touch - The Bloodhound Gang
Hot Stuff - Donna Summer
Tamarindo - The Beloved Invaders
Hot Hot Hot - Buster Pointdexter
Pass the Dutchie - Musical Youth
Best Years of Our Lives - Baha Men
Inside Out - Eve 6
What’s My Age Again? - Blink 182
Why Don’t You Get a Job? - The Offspring
Semi-Charmed Life - Third Eye Blind
I Believe in a Thing Called Love - The Darkness
Meant To Live - Switchfoot
Mexican Radio - Wall of Voodoo
Cruel Summer - Bananarama
Hot Blooded - Foreigner
Jack Slap Cheer - The Matches
Gotta Get Away - The Offspring
Graduate - Third Eye Blind
Summer in the City - Regina Spektor

The songs were chosen for their “summeresque” quality. Each of these reminded me of high school summers where everything mattered and nothing was really important. My college summers have been a little bit different. In college I haven’t felt as much like I was simply waiting around to get out of a place. Instead I’ve felt a bit more like I’m waiting around to find my place.

Bah! I love each and every one of these songs and they get me boogeying often. Several were re-plays from past shows, eagerly revisited by Longhair and I out of adoration.

As with the Techno show, this week’s show is also available for download. Enjoy!

I’ll post again in the fall when we re-open with a new and more vigorous set list! Thanks again to all our liminal listeners.

Ostrobogulous
Saturdays, 8:00pm-10:00pm
Mines Internet Radio - Studio One

DeviantArt

I’ve had a deviantArt account since early high school. It’s held my creative endeavors (and much of my ego) for years. It may seem a bit odd that an engineer has an online page for the express purpose of sharing their creativity but it’s really not all that uncommon. I think every human being of my generation was at least tempted to create one during their adolescence. Most of us did, if for no other reason than someone else said they should.

I’ve also always been a huge dork and a lot of my drawings were of D&D characters, anime/manga-inspired flights of fancy, more D&D characters… Occasionally I drew other fantasy creatures or pencil sketches of random crap when I was in the mood.

All this isn’t really important though. I recently took down all of my “stuff” from DA because there was no way to delete the account and I was tired of having so many pages on the grid. I backed everything up, of course, and decided later to re-upload my favorites and try to contribute something new every once in a while. I still want to try to be creative, after all.

Interestingly enough, all my data was lost in a terrible fiasco and I was left with nothing to immediately upload. A couple of days ago, however, I embarked on what front-desk guru Ron called therapy (and what I called spontaneous.) It’s viewable on my deviantArt account.

The whole point of this post is coming up, I swear.

And here it is: the upload process. Uploading work to DA used to be the most teeth-pulling experience on the internet, aside from the bandwidth limitations on the Virginia Tech network. It was a multi-step process that could fail at any moment, requiring you to start all over again. Now, they have some flash thingy that’s right around thirty times easier to use.

Back in the day, there was a lot of controversy about copyrights and DA. People weren’t sure about their rights to their own material and art thieves were (and are still) running rampant. Most users were nervous about the DA Terms of Service. Did the company reserve the right to reproduce your work? Horror! It’s hard to decode that stuff.

This time, when I uploaded, I was given the option of attaching a Creative Commons license to my art, which is pretty cool!