"You Are So Much Bigger Than Me"

"Dude, you're so much bigger than me." Other men say that to me all the time... I believe this would be an appropriate time to insert the popular "LOLZ!" netspeak.

But seriously, I received this message today from my friend David, currently on a whirlwind jaunt through Europe promoting his new record.



You see, I played some bass/guitar/singing with him on his Daytrotter session, and the resultant artwork does sorta have my head about three times bigger than his, which I guess could be seen as a little strange seeing how it is kind of his thing, the artist name (DM Stith) sorta being his name and all. Plus I didn't even play or sing on one of the songs. Behold:



So yeah, check out MY band, DM Stith on Daytrotter. David, your humility will get you nowhere. But seriously, playing with a guy on a major label ;-) looks like it's going to be fun and full of exotic travels. I may make it to Australia before I'm 30 after all.

Important Announcement

I think amigo Tyler put it best when he called this video "Japan 101." It kind of covers it all.

Bedroom Anarchy

Bedroom anarchy, originally uploaded by stomach aches.

Flowing: I'm Here, Tired But True

More songs. It's good to have things flowing.

"I'm Here"



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"Tired But True"



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Transitions

From here.

Me Gusta This-a

It's from here.

Search for "Andrea Rosen WHAT!?!?"

So I was being my normally pathetic self and checking up on some search traffic sources for the ol' blog when I came upon the last result in this list:



At the top of the list, it's the usual suspects: Flea's stuffed animal pants, trumpet sheet music for "The Final Countdown," curly fingernails guy from India. The stuff that Googlooping gold is made of. But then WHAT?!?! Oh... there are some pervatrons out there, and apparently some of them (er, one of them) has the same celebrity crush that I do - The lovely and talented Andrea Rosen! And apparently this fellow would like to see her boobs. Well dude, sorry, but this is not the place for Andrea Rosen boobs. That would be here.

Anyway, then I got to thinking that I didn't really know what she was up to besides some new VH1 stuff. Was there some new boobs thing that came out that I didn't know about? So, I was looking at Ms. Rosen's IMDB entry like the total stalker that I am when I came across something that said that she was on an episode of "Flight of the Conchords" that aired just yesterday. Huh. A quick search on a shady-yet-dependable Swedish torrent site had me set up with said episode in no time, and away I went, waiting for her appearance, like a dude watching a downloaded premium channel TV show on a laptop.



There she is, looking as beautiful and clever as ever. Boom. She plays Caitlin Goodman, an ad exec who solicits the services of the Conchords for a jingle for a women's-only toothpaste called Femident. She is very professional, odd, and sassy in this role, and I must say, she really rocked it. Swoooon. Oh, Andrea... Why are you so famous, while I am so hopelessly weird and midwestern.



That being said, is it just me, or is this episode not really that funny? The cinematography is noticeably subject to a much larger budget (see Murray's musical number), and the production value definitely shows the signs of having some more money thrown at it, but does that kind of stuff really matter for a show like this?

Sometimes, people, they say to me "Why do you think she's such a babe?" or "She's not that great" or "I heard that her character on 'Stella' is actually how she acts in real life. Would you really want to deal with that?" Stuff like that. All I gotta say to those people is, whatever. Have you seen "VH1's 40 Greatest Pranks 2"? She is divine.

Taunt Us With Memories of July

I made a song for the somewhat snowy day today. I almost didn't leave the house today because I didn't have to, and honestly, that might have been fine because I was working from home and had plenty to eat. My needs were being met just fine from inside. In the end, I went out, but it was cold enough to drive home the point of this icy-cold track. Bump it, party people.


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the earth is surrounded in grey
pillows falling from the sky
soft, but turtleneck is strangling me
blankets were wrapped too tight
haul the heavy clouds and aerosol wings
taunt us with memories of July
steam our fingers with impossible leaks
see us, oh winter's glassy eyes

Always In My Hair

I got my new computer set up for recording, so I recorded a quick little ditty tonight. It's called "Always In My Hair."



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It's good to have a fanless recording system going. Now instead of hearing the wheezing fan of a six-year-old computer in my recordings, you can just hear all the cars driving by on Rogers street. I hope this will improve my flow.

Two Things

When I was 21 I worked at a Subaru plant here in Indiana as a translator. There was a woman who worked there named Deb. In Japanese, you can't end a word in a consonant unless that consonant happens to be "n." So all the Japanese guys who worked there would pronounce her name "Debu" but the problem with that was that "debu" in Japanese means someone who is a fatty. This wouldn't be such a problem had she been totally thin, but she was not. On the other side of the coin, there was a Japanese man who worked there whose last name was Yoda, and try as we did, it was hard to really draw any Yoda-like correlations between his personal appearance/demeanor and the Star Wars character of the same name.

I would like to coin a phrase or an effect. Like the domino effect, but have it be my own. The Dixon effect.* Here's an effect I've noticed, and I don't think it has a name yet.

It's what happens when something seems like a really big deal, but in reality, it only seemed that way because a small group of people were especially vocal about it. For example, this seems to happen on the internet a lot, especially when people are allowed to comment or voice their opinion freely with relatively high visibility. People will talk about how they can't wait for such and such a thing to hit the market, and it seems like there's a lot of buzz, but it's actually just the buzz of a few particularly vocal individuals who do not represent the market as a whole. Kind of like the guy who got a Zune tattoo. Maybe it could be called the Fanboy Hype Distortion Bubble Effect. I'm bad at this naming thing.


* Horrible band name. You saw it here first.

My Cruise Talent Show Performance

While I was on a cruise with my family, I participated in the ship's talent show. This show was hosted by our faithful Cruise Director, Big Tex, a Texan who was actually not that big (although at the time of our cruise, he claimed that he had lost 80 pounds in the last 6 months, the video of him linked here appears to be before he shed the pounds).

I can't specifically recall why this seemed like a good idea at the time. Boredom maybe? Big Tex came over the ship's intercom in his authoritative radio voice to give us another one of his famous "Tex Messages" (awesome, I know!) and when he said that there were still some spots open for the talent show, I just decided to go see what it was all about. When I got there, there was a book that listed the songs that the ship's band knew, and sure enough, my karaoke favorite, "Crying" by Roy Orbison was on this list (although I later discovered that aside from the band leader, nobody else in the band had ever even heard "Crying" before - This was a list of songs that the band could probably play, not necessarily songs they had ever heard before, a testament to their ability to sight read/fake it. I have always been strangely fascinated by this breed of musician, as I myself am not much of a sight reader).

I told them I'd be doing "Crying," and ten minutes later someone came back with photocopies of the fake book version of the song, one for me, and one for each member of the band.

The band leader asked his band if anyone besides him had ever heard this song. Silence followed. Not to worry, the band leader quickly rattled off some instructions and twenty seconds later the musicians all nodded their heads and seemed to "get" what this song was about despite never having heard it. We ran through it, and it went fine, except for the fact that neither I or the person who transcribed the song realized that the second verse has one extra measure during the line "You don't love me, and I'll always be..." At first the band leader said that they played it wrong, but I later realized that the transcription was wrong. So I had to mentally adjust, and I also had to make it a point to memorize the lyrics. No karaoke screen now. Crap.

Showtime came at 10 PM, and my brother Greg was there to record the sound of this event. The result is below, but I think that the most memorable part of this experience was not the song, but the awkward banter that takes place between Big Tex and I after the song. This gem starts at about 3:00.



I guess it's true, when you're on top of the world as the cruise director on a Carnival Cruise, going to graduate school to become a professor of Japanese is kind of absurd.

I received a trophy in the shape of our vessel, the M.S. Fantasy, and a $10 gift certificate to a store in Cozumel that I later found out only sold what appeared to be fancy women's clothing. $10 might have bought me one red plastic bracelet. But let's face it, the real reward was that this performance made me somewhat of a minor (minor!) celebrity on the cruise, my presence elicited awkward and misdirected praise for the remainder of our voyage.



Funny thing about this trophy
As I was getting off the boat, I had my trophy tucked into the side pocket of my Upward Bound backpack, and there was a woman behind me with two small children. She got my attention and said to her boys "Look, he got a trophy too!" She then asked me what I did to get my trophy. I told her that I had done a song in the talent show. She then told me that her sons had each received trophies identical to mine for decorating cookies while on the boat. Yup, decorating cookies.

Roommate Row

(Roommate Row from Torlando Hakes on Vimeo)

It's nice to see roommates doing stuff together. We don't fight like this in real life, I promise.

Put On Your Thinking Cap

via

Sweet Wishes

Long time, no blog. It was the holidays, and then I was on a boat. But now it is all back to normal. So here's something to kick off 2009, a year hopefully as sweet, weird, and creative as this video.