The Joys of Ska

Well I got an IM late last week, from someone who shall remain nameless, "what the F@$K no new blog?!?!!" and another in person talking to from a second party chastising me for not posting in a while and how they need it because they have nothing better to do at work.

Yes I know I haven't posted... I'm not going to apologize y'see sometimes some of us have work to do at work (sometimes) and well I was out of town for the most of one week. So yeah, I promise I'll post when I can and when I have something (somewhat) interesting to say. (that probably sounded a lot pissier than I meant it too... but you all must be sick of me starting out every blog apologizing for not posting...)

Anyway, as previously hinted at here I saw Less Than Jake at the 9:30 club with Steve and Lauren a few Fridays ago. It was awesome. The first band was Rock n Roll Soldiers (if you haven't heard of 'em don't worry, I only knew sort of who they were because they had one song on the soundtrack for the Baseball game we play on Xbox) and they were alright, I think their biggest issue was they were playing trendy-hipster rock and this was defiantly a Ska/Punk show. The second band was Big D and the Kids Table, a Boston based ska band that epitomize the white boy rapping aspect of ska. They were pretty good, a little hard to understand the lyrics but the horns and rhythm were awesome. The funniest part about them was the lead singer looked like a 12 year old (bowl cut and everything) trying to impersonate a monkey with ADHD. They got the crowd going and were just a lot of fun.

Less Than Jake as expected kicked ass. I sometimes feel a little self conscious about being 24 and still loving them when it seems like most of their fanbase is literally half my age, but Lauren pegged it perfectly, listening to them reminds me of 10 years ago (yeah scary to think that "Losing Streak" came out in '96...) and how it perfectly captured the angst/fuck authority/girls don't like me/I'm fucking bored that we all felt when we were 13-14 (ok maybe just me.. and Lauren (hopefully she lamented boys not girls) and I'm pretty sure Steve too). And they captured all this in such a catchy way that was fun to listen to. It's music you can dance (or in my case try to dance) to and smile while singing along to. (Why more people don't love ska never ceases to amaze me, like I said it's fun music you can dance and smile too even when it's talking about how much life sucks.)

They're just fantastic in concert, it's the third time I've seen them and they've impressed me everytime. They have such energy and chemistry on stage and they sound good live. They poked fun at themselves, saying how a guy who said before the show that they should just play the old stuff that their new stuff sucked and agreeing with him, before launching into a really impressive montage of their fan favorites. They played the first verse and chorus of maybe 6-8 songs so you got at least a taste of what you wanted to hear. I was really impressed. They did their traditional circle pit, which was awesome to see from above (yes we watched the show from the balcony... part of me hated myself for it, but my glasses thanked me b/c unlike my first LTJ show they stayed on my head and weren't crushed). The only real disappointments were they didn't play "Johnny Quest... Thinks We're Sellouts" or "9th at Pine." But all in all it was a fantastic show.

The rest of the weekend is now pretty much a blur... with highlights being seeing The Chroni-(what)-cles of Narnia (a fantastic movie, and yes I'm a big dork, bite me) and our yearly "see how much liver damage we can cause James during the Championship games" fest we call his birthday.

The first half of last week I was lucky enough to spend with my mom in New Jersey visiting all of my great aunts and uncles. Yes that might be a bit of sarcasm you detect and no it wasn't really that bad. Basically what it meant was two and a half days of having each meal with a different relative (or set of relatives), telling the same stories over and over again, explaining why I'm not taking classes this semester and getting scolded for it. It was nice to see my Godmother, who I hadn't seen in a year and a half, and I did get to spend one night hanging out with my cousin Amy (she's only a year older than me) and her boyfriend. It's kind of funny people keep asking me how my vacation was, and well it wasn't really a vacation and it wasn't like it was awful or anything, it was just "the right thing to do" as I heard my mother tell me over and over.

The biggest downside to all of that was by Wednesday I'd fully adapted to a sleep at night be awake during the day schedule, so once I got back here it was a bitch to get back on my schedule. I only got 3 hours of sleep from when I woke up on Wednesday morning until I finally passed out around 10am on Friday (I bitched a lot about it in awaymessages, I'm sure you've all heard more about it than you want to... sorry).

I guess just to wrap everything up this weekend was a lot of fun too. Dad and I made our annual treck to the DC auto show, and while the show was a lot of fun, some of the new cars didn't impress me very much (especially the new BMW's, they didn't even have a M3 you could sit in and that about made me cry) and there were fewer concept cars this year than last. But I'm still really glad we did it. And Saturday night I went to Adams Morgan for the first time in a really long time with Angela. We met up with some people at Madam's Organ then headed over to Asylum, nothing to crazy, just a good night out.

Saturday we had a party at our place for the first time since Halloween. It was a smaller affair, maybe only 20-25 people, playing beer pong, cards and raving. Yes towards the end of the night there was one of the more surreal events at one of our parties where Kay's friends and a few of the DG's were dancing in our front room, it was hilarious... I just wish I'd been quicker with my camera and took some pictures to illustrate how jaw droppingly funny it was. Ah well it was a good time.

Anyway, hope all's well in your world, on tap for tomorrow night are more musing on Jersey and later this week I'll post Super Bowl picks in the sports blog (and yell at Robert to actually contribute to it). I've got to go and take care of Toby some, this may be the last time he stays with me before he and my parents move to Jersey. Are you happy now Rob and Lauren? I posted again.

Later
-B

WILTN: Less Than Jake (of course) - (I'm listening to them on my Mp3 player so here's a top 10 songs of theirs for you) "Gainesville Rockcity," "9th at Pine," "Great American Sharpshooter," "Hell Looks a Lot like LA," "Help Save the youth of America (from Exploding)," "History of a Boring Town," "Rock-N-Roll Pizzeria," "Magnetic North," "Jen Doesn't Like Me Anymore" and "Johnny Quest (Thinks We're Sellouts)"