Bikers, Phelps, Godhatesfags.com, Oh My!

Fred Phelps, Westboro Baptist Church leader extraordinaire, decides to step over a fairly thick and defined line in order to protest soldiers' funerals in an agenda seemingly unrelated -- by a huge margin -- to the servicemen and women in the military.

Luckily enough, scraggly bikers from all across the United States go to these funerals in order to flush out the protesters.

Ahh, I love the first amendment and the sweet scenarios it provides. Protestors, check. Pissed off families, check. Bad ass motorcyclists, check. Fred Phelps... I wish he wasn't around, but check.

Since they can't really harm each other through physical action, they can at least yell at each other while wailing families cry in the background, adding to the overall cacophony of an otherwise peaceful funeral. I guess someone could "accidentally" ride their motorcycle into the crowd of protesters in order to somewhat solve the problem.

Valentine's Day: OVERRATED

What better to spend Valentine's Day on submitting homework that took hours upon hours of painstaking tedium to complete? Well... eh, perhaps that's just my own problem. But still, there are other reasons why Valentine's Day is HORRIBLY OVERRATED:

• Single men above the age of 21 (19 if you live in Canadia) can drink their Valentine's Day away in a conveniently placed tavern somewhere near their homes. They can freely stumble home and forget that the day even happened. HOWEVER, if you have a high alcohol tolerance and/or you are below the age of 21, what is there to do? Nothing.
  
• There's only so many "original" places that you can go to with whoever.
• It's a waste of money! Flowers? Fuck that! I need money to feed myself.
  
• There are, however, tons of those candy heart things that taste great. Too bad they're all filled with cliché phrases that elicit some sort of canned reaction.

But eh, who knows, maybe it's just the bitter single side of me that's saying this.

Valentine's Day still sucks, though.

What the fuck do you know about blues?

I'm not particularly fond of going around Downtown Seattle at midnight, but I am now kicking myself for not staying there longer tonight.

A random person walked up to me while I was waiting at the bus stop and started asking me if I played blues music (I had my guitar firmly attached to my back at the time, so it wasn't a wonder why they approached me about it.) I'm not even near that level at all, which I told him right away. He asked me what sort of music I even play on the guitar... which I had no clue of either, since I typically improvise.

He was telling me various things about music theory; various basic concepts like "relative minor" keys and dominant/subdominant keys were what he talked about mostly (bus came earlier than I wanted, so there wasn't much time to talk.)

I was about to pull out my guitar before my bus came exactly a second after. Dammit. The thought of staying for another thirty minutes crossed my mind, but I wanted to leave the old Downtown that I loathed staying in late at night.

I'm determined to find him in Downtown sometime this coming week and learn from him.

The thing he said to me right before the bus came was especially great: "blues scales? Do you know anything about blues scales? What the fuck do you know about blues anyway?"

Hahah, man... I really need to find him.

Wikisource

I stumbled upon this website while I was looking for various things on Wikipedia. It's a website filled with all sorts of FULL texts ranging from Shakespeare to Tolstoy to Chomsky.

The only gripe I have with such a resource is that I personally find it harder to read material online compared to printed material. But hey, it's thousands of free texts online for everyone to view at their own leisure; I'm going to give some of these things a read and see if I can stand looking at a monitor for hours in order to go through a novel.

V for Very Hungry

V for Vendetta.

This will be an excellent movie. However, I could not help but think of a potential scenario that stars the main character in the movie. I present to you the following scenario:



vs.



in a duel to the death. The stalker king will win, for sure.

Slowdive: Souvlaki Review

I was introduced to this band mostly after finding out about the Faunts, which many reviews on Amazon related to the likes of Slowdive, Mogwai, and Sigur Ros. I picked up this Slowdive album shortly after reading a few of those Amazon reviews on the Faunts' album High Expectations / Low Results.

Wow.

Yes, it is a very old album; it came out in 1994 and the band disbanded in 1995, but the texture of the audio and the layering of guitars and various other instruments seem to take this album beyond contemporary indie rock. The haunting vocals that supplement the melodic music in the background flow right with the music, supplementing the slow, shoegazing sound pioneered by this band.

Souvlaki Space Station is easily my most favorite song on the entire album, although I would say that the rest of the songs are extremely solid, all the way from Alison to In My Mind.

I know, you might be saying that this is a very biased review. It is. I love this album too much. Get it.

7/8 Pizzas

"Shit, I'm On Fire"

"Go forth and set the world on fire" - St. Ignatius of Loyola

I saw this on the front page of my university's library website after I opened up Internet Explorer.

I somehow can't see the entire world running around on fire.

Mission Statement

I figure that most blogs have a well defined, yet implicit mission statement behind the creation of the blog. Maybe this blog does too, although there's a few things that I want to explicitly clarify before proceeding to post various amounts of opinionated babble in the coming weeks.

Ephemera of all sorts will be presented to you in the form of various news stories, opinions leaning heavily toward "moderate and generally apathetic," and most importantly, a good dose of humor and wit.

I do care about politics, but not to the point of actually knowing what's going on in current world affairs.

I love music almost too much; I will occasionally post reviews of various albums that I have thoroughly enjoyed as well as reviews on albums that I may think of as utter trash. While I'm talking about reviewing music, I might as well come up with an improvised point system that will (hopefully) demolish five stars/ten points/2 thumbs up rating systems. It will be an eight point scale, 1 being worst, 8 being absolutely great. I'm hoping that reviewers will adopt this revolutionary point system in the near future.

I won't cry my black emo heart all over this blog.

I also won't stroke my ego endlessly through my blog posts.

There's nothing much more to say in this dry introduction. Tally ho.