Does Hope Know It’s Christmas Time At All?

Christmas has come and gone, and for Hope, it was a wonderful, if overwhelming time.

In the last few weeks, our house has undergone a lot of internal modifications- weatherizing some windows and doors, adding a Christmas tree in Hope’s playroom, and setting up Hope’s play area.  There’s enough room for the three of us and a plethora of Hope’s toys.  Our home is safe for Hope and it’s great to have a spot for her to play in that we can completely control.

As for Christmas, it’s safe to say that Hope had a good time.  We’ve seen a lot of family and friends over the last few days.  While she’s shy at first,  she eventually opens up and joins the party.  The three of us have spent time with both sides of the family and we think Hope knows that something special has been going on lately.

Christmas morning, Hope awoke to find her play room filled with some new toys- a farm playset, a 100-piece set of styrofoam blocks (that were already set up) and a wrapped box.  Hope’s approach to the toys has been interesting.  She loves to knock over the farm.  She has no use for 99 of the blocks, as her favorite thing has been to take one of the blocks and chew on it, ignoring all the others.  As for the box, well, it’s still mostly wrapped and makes noise as you touch it (rumor has it that it’s a remote control).  Hope has torn away at some of the paper, but seems more content with toppling over the farm or chewing on one of her blocks.  If we’re lucky we can recycle the mystery box for her birthday!

For the past few days, King Classic, my sister and stepmother have been in town.  Hope has had a lot of fun playing with them.  For Christmas dinner, King Classic and I made pierogies, kielbasa and scallops for dinner.  After spending the day playing with her new toys and relatives, Hope joined us in chowing down on pierogies and kielbasa.

Update: Hope was playing with her mother and tore away a little more of the mystery box’s wrapping.  But then she saw one of her blocks out of the corner of her eye and was distracted.

Anyway, I’m off tomorrow and it will be fun to spend more time with The Civee, sister and Hope.  Maybe soon Hope will be interested in more than one block at a time.

Here’s a little of Hope on Christmas morning:

King Tom4 Comments

It’s A Shame YouTube Didn’t Exist Back In ’95

Fifteen years ago, I was stuck overnight alone in the Pittsburgh airport.

If I had a video camera with me, I could’ve been a YouTube sensation (that is, if YouTube existed back in 1995).

While I didn’t dance or do ballet splits on the moving walkways, I did lay down on them and have other fun that would have been frowned upon after the TSA started making security changes.  And it’s kind of funny- I was waiting on a U.S. Air flight too.

While I wouldn’t ever want to be stuck in Pittsburgh again, it wasn’t that bad an experience (and I got a steak at Friday’s out of it).

I hope everyone gets where they’re going and has an awesome Christmas this year.

King Tom

Who’s Faxin’ You Now? Who’s Dialing Your Car Phone?

Columbus is one of a handful of lucky cities to have hosted two Weezer concerts this year.  I went to both, a show at the State Fair and another free concert at a local college.  Both shows were good.  Unfortunately, the other cities with two concerts were stops on the Memories Tour, a two-night event where the band will play a setlist containing the complete Blue Album with a second setlist containing Pinkerton on back-to-back nights.

And if that’s not enough, Saturday night, in New York, they busted out this gem:

This was the first time Weezer played Jamie voluntarily since the mid-90s (a few years back, at an event where the band was accompanied by their audience, the audience started the song, pretty much forcing the band to finish it).

Did I mention that one of the Columbus shows was free?

I did?

Congratulations, New York, you win.

Thanks to allthingsweezer for the video.

King Tom1 Comment

We’re Still Here

I don’t know why, but it seems this time of year is always busier than any other time of year.

Even though the days are shorter, you would think that with more time spent indoors to avoid the below-freezing temperatures, you would get more done, but that’s not the case.  And the end of the year, thanks to Christmas, New Year’s and the social occasions associated with both mean there’s more to do with unforgiving deadlines looming.

Having a baby who’s on the verge of walking means I don’t get to spend as much time wasting time as I’d like.  I was surprised when I realized that my last entry was a week ago and I’ve only had two entries this whole month.

So yes, Hope is still growing, Weezer is doing their Memories tour (and fans are still waiting for Alone III) and LOST is still over.  Hope, The Civee and I are still here, enjoying life and getting ready for the events of the next few weeks.

In case I’m not able to make it back before then (I will try), have a great Christmas and an awesome New Year’s.

King Tom

Will Weezer on the Simpsons be Perfectly Cromulent or Utterly Craptacular?

If you were to have told me ten years ago that Weezer would be guest starring on The Simpsons, I would have set my VCR months in advance and cleared my schedule for whatever Sunday night the episode aired.

This week, upon hearing the news that Weezer will be guest starring on a future episode of the Simpsons, I’m thinking that since The Simpsons airs during Hope’s bedtime routine, if I miss the initial broadcast, I can always catch it later on Hulu or somewhere else online.

My changed attitude reflects three things. First, (obviously) technology has totally changed the way most of us watch TV. Secondly, having a daughter has changed my priorities (as I type this with one hand, I’m feeding her with the other). And finally, I just don’t feel the way about new Simpsons as I did about the old Simpsons.

I think that Simpsons seasons four through eight are some of the best seasons of television ever produced.  There are whole episodes I can do line-by-line.  But after that, the show started getting full of itself.  Random guest starts (just for the sake of having guest stars), pointless storylines and a list of producers, co-producers, assistant producers and executive producers that lasted the whole first block turned the show from must see TV (for me) to well, I guess I’ll watch it if I have nothing better to do.  The last season in which I went out of my way to watch involved the family going to London, where Tony Blair greeted them at an airport, only to jet off on a rocket pack.  I’ve watched a few episodes since, and while I’ve enjoyed them, it hasn’t been enough to get me back every week.

Well, according to some tweets by band members, the members of Weezer are among the newest random guest stars.  If anything, their appearance will probably be more along the lines of each member gets one line rather than guest stars who are integrated into the episode.  I wouldn’t call Weezer a group of fringe musicians and while they don’t need an appearance on The Simpsons to embiggen their exposure, something like this can only help them.  Sure, I’ll watch, but I’m not sure that a Weezer appearance will get me to watch The Simpsons every week again.

Besides, 8:00 every night is Hope’s bedtime.

King Tom

Apartment Living With Hope

So I noticed the other day that it’s been a while since I’ve last blogged (last month was pretty sparse on the blog entries).  And as some family members have informed me, it’s been more than a month since I’ve blogged about Hope.

That doesn’t mean that nothing is happening with our soon-to-be eight-month-old.  Quite the contrary.  The Civee and I have been so busy following her around and trying to keep her out of trouble that it feels like we haven’t had much time to sit back and brag about her.

In the past month, she’s been crawling all over the place, even managing to make her way up the stairs (with supervision).  She’s pulling herself up on couches, tables, chairs and people and can walk while holding on to things.  She can stand for a few seconds (but seems to fall whenever she realizes she’s standing without holding on to something).  She can wave (but not yet do the wave) and give high-fives.  The sounds she’s able to make have grown (and should grow even more in a few months once she’s had her palate surgery).  And her diet has expanded, now including:

  • Peas
  • Artichokes
  • Carrots
  • Pears
  • Avocados
  • Squash
  • Potatoes (sweet and normal)
  • Crackers
  • Cheerios
  • Ham
  • Pork
  • Turkey
  • Salmon
  • Parsnips
  • String Beans
  • Bananas

Perhaps most important (to The Civee and I at least) is that she falls asleep (or gets quiet) right as soon as we put her in her crib around 8 at night and doesn’t wake up until sometime after 4:30 the next morning.  Getting her to nap is still a chore, but we’re making progress.  (Having said that, we know her sleeping patterns will change tonight and we won’t get any sleep for a long time).

We’ve had to do a lot of childproofing and because we don’t have a lot of open space, it still feels like we have to keep an eye on her while she plays.  Hope doesn’t like her playpen, possibly because she knows she can’t get anywhere from inside.  But some of Hope’s relatives got a garage sale deal on a little tykes playset, which has helped out a lot.  The Civee and I call it her little apartment, and as you can see below, it does a great job of keeping her occupied:

King Tom2 Comments

Staten Island, Home of the Turkeys

A few years ago, the makers of Grand Theft Auto said the fourth chapter of their game franchise would be set in a city that looked like New York.  True enough, GTA IV featured a pretty faithful re-creation of New York City, with the exception of Staten Island.  Rockstar Games said they would not include the forgotten borough because “it would not be fun to play there.”

As I’ve pointed out before, exciting things do happen on Staten Island.  The Island is home to the fourth-largest boardwalk in the world, the (now defunct) world’s largest garbage dump and the ninja burglar.  And now, just in time for Thanksgiving, a pack of wild turkeys now roams the Island:

The flock, numbering around a 100 birds, starting forming about a decade ago when a woman released a small number of the birds.

The birds cause major traffic headaches, according to residents.

Fox 5 saw one turkey playing chicken with a car.

Back when I lived on the Island, South Beach had a bunch of arcades and small-time amusement parks.  I leave and exciting things happen.

Supposedly, they can’t get rid of these turkeys because they’re a protected species.  I can offer a simple solution–the turkey cannon:

King Tom

Break A Leg, Coco

The day is finally here for fans of Conan O’Brien: the whiskey snortin’ leprechaun cavortin’ wizard of late night returns to television.

Unfortunately, I won’t be watching.

It’s not that I don’t want to.  I watched (through the miracle of DVR) pretty much every Tonight Show he hosted (yeah, I know there were seven months worth of them, so that’s not saying much).  And as someone whose bedtime falls between 11:00 and midnight, his show is on at a great time for me.

But when The Civee and I moved back in March, we chose not to subscribe to cable.  In the past seven months, this is the first time I’ve missed having a few hundreds of channels.

Luckily, I’ll be able to catch up with Conan eventually.  His Website (or TBS’) will stream each show the following day.  So it’s not like Conan will go unwatched (but if things keep going the way they are, the talentless Jay Leno’s show may well go unwatched).

Even though I won’t be able to watch live, I’ve gotten caught up in the buzz around Conan’s new show.  Last week, the show hosted a contest giving away 10,000 t-shirts (1,000 each day, with a new shirt every day) to Web users who followed the Team Coco Twitter.  Each day, you had to be one of the first 1,000 people to go to a Web site and enter a code that was tweeted.  The first day, I won a shirt.  For the rest of the week, I didn’t schedule my life around the contest, but I was often around a computer when they would tweet the secret code.  Three of those days I entered the code within 30 seconds, but was not one of the lucky thousand.  And another day, I misspelled the code. But at least I won one t-shirt. And it has a blimp on it.

Thanks, Conan!

King Tom2 Comments

Weezer Raids Secret Warehouse, Fans Reap The Rewards

One of the most striking endings to a film is that of 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, where, after seeing Indiana Jones’ heroic rescue of the Ark of the Covenant, the government boxes the artifact up and stores it in an immense warehouse with an untold number of other mythic artifacts.

Weezer fans imagine the band’s “vault” of unreleased material to be similar to the warehouse. Over the past 18 years, the band and its members have recorded an untold number of songs, most of which have gone unreleased on the band’s eight official albums (or the two solo efforts from frontman Rivers Cuomo).

To go back to the Raiders analogy, for Weezer fans, today is the day Indiana Jones stormed the warehouse and made it out alive with two boxes of precious artifacts.

A day short of a year after the release of 2009’s Raditude (and less than two months after the release of Hurley), Weezer has released two more albums. These aren’t albums of new songs; rather they are comprised of material that has been boxed up in the warehouse for years.

Death to False Metal contains ten tracks from different recording sessions dating back to the lost summer of 1998. Pinkerton Deluxe is a reissue of the band’s seminal 1996 album, along with all of it’s b-sides, a number of live tracks, studio outtakes and some songs that have never before been heard. Both feature some recent updates from the band, but are, for the most part, as they were originally recorded.

For a Weezer fan, it’s all too easy to fixate on what isn’t part of these albums rather than what is. For example, of the numerous songs the band has recorded and not released (yet talked up throughout the years), it’s easy to complain about what didn’t make the ten-song cut. And for Pinkerton Deluxe, the band recorded a number of songs for the album (part of the attempt at realizing Songs From the Black Hole) that have not been included. Yet those takes were either lost to time or lost in a shipment that never reached its final destination.

Still, for what they are, these two albums are enjoyable listens – whether you’re a Weezer fan or not.

Pinkerton Deluxe, which fans have clamored for since 2004’s reissue of The Blue Album receives the same deluxe treatment. The original album has undergone a remastering (or some other type of sonic updating). Following the ten Pinkerton tracks, are the album’s b-sides which are nice to have in one place and radio remixes of The Good Life and Pink Triangle. Then there are a slew of live tracks- some from an acoustic show in Philadelphia from the summer of ’97 (the same show that was responsible for this slice of awesomeness) and some from an English festival from the previous summer. The acoustic tunes are nice (and from a different source than the version of the show that’s out there). On the other hand, the festival songs just seem superflous. There are also some early versions of Tired of Sex, Getchoo and Butterfly, which have more raw energy than their album counterparts.

But the true standouts of Pinkerton Deluxe are the three songs most fans are buying this collection for: Getting Up and Leaving, a full band Longtime Sunshine demo with a coda and Tragic Girl. Getting Up and Leaving was an unreleased b-side for Pink Triangle that fans have awaited for 13 or so years. The full band Longtime Sunshine is a nice (if not rough) attempt at a song many fans feel reached perfection on Rivers’ first Alone disc. Here, the band adds drums and bass and (when Weezer’s second album was still part of the Songs from the Black Hole concept) a vocal coda at the end recalling some earlier Pinkerton tracks. The coda is far from perfect (some voices sounding off-key, others too loud), but it’s still great to hear how Weezer’s second album was originally supposed to end. The album closes with the lost (and subsequently found) Tragic Girl, a song attempted during the final Pinkerton sessions. The song contains the same energy as the rest of the Pinkerton tracks, an untraditional structure and a great performance by the band. There are some lyrical and tonal references to the rest of Pinkerton, and as great as it is to have the other tracks we’ve waited for on this collection, Tragic Girl is an amazing listen.

The other treat for Weezer fans today is Death to False Metal, a collection of ten previously unreleased songs that were recorded for one album or another. Rivers is calling it the band’s ninth album, and considering Weezer hasn’t had a thematically linked album since Pinkerton, it’s hard to argue with him. The songs span the band’s redording efforts from 1998 through 2009. However (and a small complaint about the collection), half the album focuses on the sessions for Weezer’s fifth album, which eventually became 2005’s Make Believe.

That’s not to say the songs aren’t good. For the most part, they’re nice additions to Weezer’s catalog.  Standouts from the Make Believe sessions include Blowin’ My Stack (even if the riff does sound a little like Heard It Through The Grapevine) and I’m a Robot, which is more down-home than rock.  More recent songs include Turn It Up (the results of Rivers’ Let’s Write a Sawng process), The Odd Couple and Autopilot, which has one of the best bridges of any Weezer song (possibly due to my nostalgia for BASIC).

Possibly my favorite song on ‘Metal is 1998’s Trampoline, a simple pop rocker that would have fit in great late 90’s pre-nu-metal alternative rock radio (which is kind of ironic, since Rivers spent the years after Pinkerton trying to develop a chart-topper and here is a song he had all along which would have fit right in).  Trampoline and Everyone are the first original Weezer songs we’ve heard from the mystery year of 1998, where they demoed and recorded a bunch of songs and then promptly threw them in a box in the vast government warehouse.  But unlike Trampoline, Everyone is harsher and more riff-oriented, an homage to Nirvana that doesn’t get interesting to the solo.

The only song on Death to False Metal that’s a letdown to me is the closer, a cover of Unbreak My Heart.  It could be my aversion to 90 percent of things R&B, but this song does nothing for me and the fact that Weezer is performing it doesn’t change that.

Death to False Metal is supposed to be released with a plethora of bonus tracks, but to date, we’ve only been told of three – a version of Mykel and Carli attempted during the Blue Album Sessions in 1993, and Yellow Camaro and Outta Here, both from the early Album Five sessions.  I’m hoping for more bonus tracks, and hoping they come from some other time than the period between Maladroit and Make Believe.

As I mentioned earlier, the one drawback to Death to False Metal is they’re trying to squeeze a large number of songs into ten slots.  There’s way more under lock-and-key that the band claims isn’t the best quality, but I’m sure the fans would rather be the judges of that.

By the way, Weezer isn’t done.  Rivers has already announced plans to record Album Ten.  And releasing material from the band’s vault will continue as well- the band has announced a third edition of Rivers’ Alone series should be in stores before the end of the year, this one focusing on the Pinkerton years.

King Tom

Hope’s (Early) First Halloween

Because Columbus is backwards and celebrates Halloween on any day that isn’t October 31, we dressed Hope up on Saturday.  The Civee and I decided to keep it simple:

Actual things that I’ve said about this costume:

  • If this were anyone else’s child, I’d have to ask what parent dressed them up like that.
  • She’s not a pumpkin. She’s Kermit the Frog after getting stuck in  tanning booth.
  • She’s not “a pumpkin.” She’s The Pumpkin, the little-known villain from the old Batman show. I think Jackie Coogan played him.

But I have to admit, she looked really cute.

King Tom