Archive for April 2007

April 18, 2007

Mine Eyes Have Seen the Stanton

5:45 pm | Culture | Comments: 1

If you know me at all, you know I often rave about topics such as funk music, Galactic, and Stanton Moore. Last night, they all came together at the Intersection in downtown Grand Rapids. I’d been looking forward to the show for months, ever since I discovered to my amazement that Galactic had indeed been booked at the Intersection. Galactic? Here in Grand Rapids? Unthinkable! Absurd!

Galactic, by the way, is Robert Mercurio on bass, Rich Vogel on the classic Hammond organ (it’s an original, looks about 60 years old), Ben Ellman on saxophone and harmonica, Jeff Raines on guitar, and Stanton Moore on drums. Say what you will about funk music, but Galactic knows how to put on a good show. Not only are all five band members freakishly good at what they do, the stage itself is visually stunning throughout the show. The truth is that Galactic has departed a bit from pure New Orleans funk and incorporated a wide variety of modern genres into their music - it’s hard to nail down exactly what type of music it is; it’s just Galactic, and it involves major amounts of sock rockage.

So there I was, 20 feet away from Stanton Moore. I got right up on the front railing for the whole show, so I didn’t see the mass of awkwardly-dancing Grand Rapidians behind me. For a few hours it seemed like just me and Galactic. Stanton was amazing. At the end of the show the band left the stage for the obligatory maybe-we’ll-do-an-encore pause, after which they came back for a few numbers and ended with a stunning Stanton drum solo which I’ll never forget. So I’ve decided to start a Grand Rapids Galactic knock-off band and name it Grandraptic. Who’s in?

April 17, 2007

The Wrong Answer

6:10 pm | Culture | Politics | Comments: 3

The question on everybody’s mind is why, as always. Why did this guy decide it was time for 32 random people to die? I can give you the answer: sin. That much is obvious. Sin itself is a problem which also has a solution, that solution being Lord Jesus Christ. What I want to address at this time is the wrong answer being trumpeted by ignorant morons everywhere, which is that America needs more gun control.

I was angry enough to yell at my computer monitor when I read the statement of that Australian official who gloated about having tightened the noose around his own citizenry by increasing gun-control laws. The idea that gun-control legislation will stop shootings, as I’ve pointed out several times in the annals of Set It Off, is absurd. The reasons for this are plentiful, the most obvious being the fact that gun-control laws only apply to people that care about the law - something which most criminals don’t seem to care much about. The only way it could work is if you physically removed every single weapon from the world - which will simply never happen, and even then would-be murderers would just get more creative in how they murdered people. Remember Prohibition? It drove the alcohol industry underground, making alcohol trafficking a goldmine for the underworld. Gun-control laws will never reduce crime, they will only make criminals who sell illegal weapons richer and criminals that buy illegal weapons more powerful.

America’s gun culture did nothing to facilitate Cho Seung-Hui’s heinous crime. In fact, if students had been allowed to carry concealed firearms on campus, he could very well have been dead long before the thirty-second person was killed. The fact that U.S. citizens are banned from carrying concealed firearms in many public places in the United States should be a matter of grave concern to us all because it leaves us at risk of having no effective way to fight back when someone threatens us with our lives. I know that the moment I can afford a decent handgun, I will buy one legally and obtain a permit to carry it concealed on my person. As citizens of the United States of America, that is our right and I think that we should all be aware of it, and when we arm ourselves we should remember the 32 victims of Cho Seung-Hui that found themselves defenseless and at the mercy of a cold-blooded killer.

April 14, 2007

It’s That Time Once Again

6:51 pm | Sport | Comments: 3

NHL Playoff Season is back! And for the 16th straight season, the Red Wings are participating in the party. The last time the Wings weren’t in the playoffs was when I was 7 years old, years before I even knew what a Red Wing was (actually, I still don’t). This is the second stab at the Stanley Detroit is taking in the post-Yzerman era, and they can’t really get any worse than last year. Seriously. Getting swept would have been better than winning two throw-away games.

There’s a good chance that you don’t give a crap about hockey. Well tough luck, because this webrog is about me, not you. Me. And I like hockey.

April 13, 2007

Night at the Cottage

6:01 pm | My Life | Stories | Comments: 3

It’s about time I told my side of the story. There are many important perspectives on this event, and my version isn’t a complete picture. But it’s what I remember. It starts with a small group of homeschoolers, like 4 families and their kids, that would always hang out together. One night there was this big sleepover we were all at. All the boys slept in one room, girls in another, etc., and during the night they drew marker faces on us, so we obviously were pretty upset about that and we vowed revenge.

So later that summer there was planned another such thing, only out at some lakeside cottage. And one of the guys didn’t disguise the fact that we were going to get the girls back this time. In fact we all took great pleasure in hinting at the girls’ impending doom. We had this great big plan, actually, but were so excited about it we couldn’t keep quiet. So anyways this time, the girls were inside and the guys were sleeping out on a covered pontoon boat, so we wait a while after “bedtime”, and then begin trying to sneak into the house with all manner of huge, black, permanent markers.

So there’s four of us sneaking into this little cottage and suddenly stuff starts going wrong. One of the moms walks out and exposes us after we’re all inside and does the mom thing, you know? Like what are you boys doing in here, you should be in bed, and so on. So she lectures us for a while and we feel kinda ashamed and head back out to the pontoon boat. We get back and start looking around, and quickly notice that ALL OUR STUFF IS GONE. No sleeping bags, no pillows, no nothing. So we run back to the house, and bam! all the doors are locked tight and there in the back hallway we see all our stuff, at which point we proceed to go crazy trying to break into the house.

Well, we weren’t actually trying to break anything, more like trying to annoy them (I guess trying to annoy them into letting us back in… at this point our planning abilities were pretty much dead). Banging on all the windows, honking car horns, ringing the doorbell, etc. We even tried shining one of those portable spotlights into the windows. Eventually we realized that one of our buddies wasn’t around. We thought maybe he had been kept inside by the moms and was in big trouble for our little stunt and that he was getting a talking-to, and we felt really bad. After walking through the woods a bit to lament our woes and think up ways to get our buddy out of trouble, we decided that we had to keep trying to get inside. In reality, our missing buddy knew a secret way in through the half-height basement and he got inside and eventually managed to let us in as well. So we got in, got to the hallway with our stuff and in rush all the girls, and they attack us.

And I mean really attack us. One of the moms was trying to put me in a headlock and break my fingers off, while the other girls basically just grabbed onto the stuff and wouldn’t let go. So we kinda wrestled it out until one of the dads woke up and appeared in a doorway in his boxer-briefs with half-open eyes wondering what was going on. At that point it was mutually decided that we had won our gear back, and that was good enough for me and my one buddy.

So we take our stuff back to the boat and try to get some sleep, but my other two buddies still hadn’t given up hope of doing something to the girls, so they refused to leave the house (no problem for the girls - they just locked the door to their room and slept soundly). The next morning we found the poor guys asleep on the floor, blue screen on the T.V. in front of them, both looking like trainwrecks. After they finally woke up they evidently had another brilliant plan in mind, because while I was having a friendly chat with the mom that I had done mortal combat with only a few hours previous, there they were with cans of shaving cream and aerosol deodorant trying to coax the girls out of their bedroom. At that point it was just kinda sad.

In retrospect we did alot of things poorly. First, we broadcast our plans of revenge before we got to the cottage, so the girls were 100% certain we were going to try to marker-face them. Second, we didn’t wait nearly long enough before going in. We should have waited until at least 4 or 5am, when in reality we probably went in no later than 2am. There is a bit of contention about exactly when we went in, but I’m fairly certain it was much earlier than it should have been. Third, we should have known about the secret entrance beforehand and used it to our full advantage. Fourth, we didn’t need all four of us to go in at the same time; we should have just sent in one or two guys at a time.

The really sad thing is that we never had a chance after that to do anything of consequence, and the balance is still clearly tipped in the girls’ favor. It’s probably better that we failed, because we brought along the biggest, fattest permanent markers we could find - if we had succeeded, the girls would still to this day be trying to get the marker off their faces. All that being as it may, it was still lots of fun.

April 12, 2007

House Commentary

6:43 pm | Culture | Comments: 3

Chase should have seen it coming. If anybody should have known that Cameron was a total nut job, it’s Chase. But there he goes, off on a raunchy fling with Cameron that in any other circumstance would have cost them both their jobs. On top of it all, he gets feelings for her? Come on, man. You should have seen this all coming. At this point, I have to say that Foreman is the only normal person on the show. That being said, I like the progress that House has been making lately in his personal life. It’s obvious that he’s rethinking his position on abortion, and the brain-cancer episode showed him how he was completely alienating himself from the only people that care about him in the world at no gain to himself - and the difference was that it almost seemed to matter to him.

I’ve often tried explaining how House, M.D. as a TV show is better than the rest of the shows on television (other than American Idol for the sake of Sanjaya). The writing and cinematography is superb of course, but that’s no different from a number of other shows right now. So what makes House, M.D. stand out from the rest of the crowd? It’s Greg House. House is the show. Sure, we watch to see which psychopath Wilson will fall in love with next, and we watch to see if we can guess what catastrophic thing is about to go wrong with the hapless dying patient. But ultimately the brilliance of the show is the brilliance of the House’s character, brought to life by the brilliance of Hugh Laurie.

April 3, 2007

Guns Don’t Kill People, Nature Kills People

6:03 pm | Nature | Comments: 7

Yes folks, water can kill. Megatrillion-ton pieces of rock grinding against each other can also kill. Reading about the deadly earthquake and resulting tsunami that recently hit the Solomon Islands prompted me to read up on these catastrophic natural events again. They’re quite terrible and awe-inspiring things, really. I caught up on the latest data from the December 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake/tsunami that rocked the region, killing upwards of 229,000 people. The thing was so big that it vibrated the entire earth by a half-inch; it disrupted the earth’s rotation enough to shorten the day by an estimated 2.something microseconds.

During my research I also came upon a phenomenon known as the “mega-tsunami”. The mega-tsunami is generally thought to be caused by an underwater landslide and in 1958 a mega-tsunami was recorded in Lituya Bay, AK, at a height of 1,720 feet. 1,720 feet! I think we can all agree that the idea of such waves is simply ludicrous.