First try: “Cheeseburgers”

Second try: “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”

The “cheeseburgers” search was an obvious one (just open the application for the first time, or look at the image to the right and you’ll see why… I can’t have been the only one to use that as my first experiment!), and then I figured I ought to see how well it did with something a bit harder, and I got
"super cala fragilistic expialidocious". Not bad!

2006: Warner Theater, Washington, D.C.
2007: Ram’s Head Live!, Baltimore, Md.
2008: The Birchmere, Alexandria, Va.

This was part of of their “You Can’t Fit On Stage Anymore” tour – designed for the more devoted fans, it had a few things that you wouldn’t expect from a normal concert:

• A few days before the concert, an email was sent to the attendees with 70 songs to pick from. Each person could vote for up to five songs, and the top picks were included in the setlist for the evening. (The website says folks can vote for up to ten songs, but the email I received specified five.)
• The concerts are being held in smaller venues that hold just a few hundred people at most, for a more intimate setting with the band. Smaller stages, too, hence the name of the tour.
• Admission includes being able to download a recording of that night’s performance in MP3 format about a week after the concert, at no extra cost.
• The performances also include a guitar giveaway, and the winner is able to go up on stage to claim their prize, plug in their new guitar and jam with the band.

Or, in a more entertaining version of my four bullet-point recap:

I only wished that I was able to get there earlier: I went to the concert straight from work and drove through the District in order to get to the venue, and arrived only 10 minutes before the show was supposed to start. Since the Birchmere is set up like a dinner theatre, I ended up in an open seat at a table to the right of the stage. Not the best vantage point – I saw about as much of the sound man as I could of the band itself – but being close to the stage door meant that I was the first one who noticed the band coming out and was the first one who started the applause as they came towards the stage, so that’s got to be worth something, right? Anyway, I didn’t care too much since I’ll be able to hear the whole performance when I can download the MP3 files soon. Hopefully they’re good quality! It’d be nicer if they were lossless, but I’ll take what I can get. Here was the whole setlist for the night (from the ZPZ review forum):

Inca Roads
Tell Me You Love Me
Dog Breath
Joe’s Garage
Packard Goose
Peaches en Regalia
Billy The Mountain
Pound for a Brown on the Bus
[ Guitar giveaway ]
Blues Jam
Dirty Love
Echidna’s Arf (Of You)
G-Spot Tornado
Oh No
Son of Orange County
More Trouble Everyday
Token of My Extreme

Encore:
Camarillo Brillo
Muffin Man
Zomby Woof
Willie The Pimp

Hopefully they’ll return to Baltimore again soon. The band does such a good job of entertaining (I like concerts to be experiences, not just musical performances), I can’t not go when they come by my area.

Me with John Hodgman

This past Thursday I had the opportunity to meet Famous Minor Television Personality John Hodgman at Politics & Prose in Washington, D.C. during an in-store event and book signing of More Information Than You Require, sequel to The Areas of My Expertise. Nice guy, and very funny too!

More photos of the event are up on my Flickr.

I think it’s obvious whom this fine periodical endorses for this upcoming election!

With iRollingInDough, you can use your iPhone to show people just how many virtual bags of money you virtually have! And, since they’re virtual bags of money, they can hold a virtually unlimited amount of valuables!!! THINK OF THE POSSIBILITIES!!

• Cash!
• Bullion!
• Arcade tokens!
• Wooden nickels!

Plus, with the handy web-clip feature of your iPhone, when you add a bookmark to iRollingInDough to your iPhone, Benjamin Franklin’s visage adorns your home screen as if to say, “I could show you all the virtual sacks of money I have, but I don’t need your approval to build my self-esteem!”

And iRollingInDough is portable! View on any mobile phone, in any mobile browser! And, last but not least, it’s green! Just look at how green that background is! If it were any greener, it’d be good for the environment as well!

DON’T DELAY! Visit iRollingInDough.com today!

Ok, folks. As yesterday was my birthday, and since I have put up with people spelling my name wrong for the last 25 years, I am taking a stand and will not put up with it from year 26 onwards — please expect to be gently corrected (where possible) when spelling “Glenn” incorrectly. I had to do it the other day, and I felt bad about it*, and I know it may seem petty to you, but it’s my name, I’m proud of it, and I consider it a basic courtesy to be addressed appropriately and a responsibility to address mistakes when mistakes are made.

* Actually, I lie: it felt great and I have no regrets.

Woohoo! Traded in my MINI about two weeks ago towards a new one, and I just saw on the online status today that it’s now scheduled for production so now I’ve got a VIN and it should be built this week! It feels weird not driving a MINI in the meantime, but I’m happy with the trade-in value I was given and I didn’t want to risk something happening to it in the meantime. It’ll help me appreciate this new one a lot more once it comes in, I think.

See, on first glance while scanning through the stacks of CDs, I originally thought it was this one by The Who:

But on closer inspection, you’ll notice that’s not Big Ben, that’s the Bromo-Seltzer tower here in Baltimore. Clever mimicking!

Dad recently took this picture of Savannah, the same cat in the previous video post. Unfortunately, on Tuesday we had to have her put down — she had a tumor that made it hard for her to breathe, and since she couldn’t eat or drink and breathe at the same time, she had become very dehydrated and malnourished. Her health deteriorated gradually in the last month and rapidly during the last few days. You could tell that she still wanted to be affectionate, but you could also see that she was doing very poorly.

Poor kitty. :( I’m glad she doesn’t have to suffer any more.