Steve is Gay

Posted on by grahams

Steve is Gay
Originally uploaded by seangraham.

Corinna and I pass by this sidewalk almost every Saturday on our walk to breakfast at Moogy’s. Every week I laugh my ass off at the thought of Steve, who (in my imagination) lives in the home directly behind this sidewalk, leaving his home every day and pumping his fists in the air at the kids who mock him. I doubt whoever wrote this in the concrete had any idea of the laughs they created…

One day I will pass another piece of freshly-poured sidewalk and have the balls to put "Steve is Still Gay" into it.

I wrote a letter

Posted on by grahams

I sent this letter to the city transportation department today:

As a pedestrian, it is pretty frustrating that vehicles on Parsons St. in Brighton are allowed to park on the sidewalk on a regular basis. It seems that everyone who parks on this street feels entitled to put one side of their car up on the sidewalk.

Looking at Article IV, Section 1:

“[..] No driver shall stop, stand, or park a vehicle in any of the following
places, except when necessary to avoid conflict with other traffic,
pedestrians[…]

2. Upon any sidewalk.”

Now, I’m sure those who are parking over the curb on the sidewalk are doing so to protect the drivers’ side of their car from sideswipe, but the fact of the matter is that Parsons St. is a very wide street, providing plenty of room for cars parked on both sides and moving traffic. I park my car on a much narrower street which has parking on both sides and nobody feels the need to park on the sidewalk.

I’d appreciate it if the city started enforcing this regulation.

Turkey Weekend

Posted on by grahams

and I headed down to Jersey after work on Wednesday.. We waited until 6:30pm or so to avoid traffic, which worked, until we hit torrential rain in New York state. The traffic wasn’t bad, per se, but the rain really slowed us down. We arrived sometime around 11pm, and crashed pretty quickly. Thursday morning I woke up to the turkey preparations, which were already under way. This year, my parents had access to two kitchens, as our neighbors across the street were out of town and we were watching their house. This inspired my mom to pick up two 20lb. birds! This way we were able to feed 16 people with plenty of leftovers! Corinna prepared Alton’s Cranberry Dipping Sauce, which I was always curious about, and was awesome.

Friday was pretty crazy… Corinna and I were planning on traveling into Manhattan to visit her friends Sara and Dave. Corinna decided that she wanted to do something “touristy” in Manhattan, so she plotted out a window shopping route that would take us from the 33rd street PATH station up 5th to 60th St. This wasn’t something that I was terribly interested in, and expressed displeasure, but never really made it clear how little I wanted to do it… When we got there, Corinna witnessed the power of this fully armed and operational battle station. It was a total sea of people, we could barely move, and by the time we hit Rockefeller Center we gave up. We jumped on the subway to head down to Sara and Dave’s (down by the World Trade Center pit). The rest of the night was tons of fun, though, so we were able to erase the bad taste of Black Friday Retail Hell.

Saturday was ‘s birthday, so we mostly celebrated that, going out to the townie bar Tidal Wave to celebrate after cake. It was a really weird bar; They had a football game playing on the big screen and pool tables in the back, but they also had a DJ spinning the worst dance dreck of today. I also, somehow, ended up as DD, so I couldn’t even drink it away. :P

The trip home on Sunday sucked SOOOOOO badly… A normally 4 hour trip took 6.5 hours, and Corinna and I were ready to tear our eyes out by the end of it… I was so freakin’ crabby and just wanted to find somewhere to hide…

Today I had a physical, my first real physical in ages… Apparently I am still inexplicably healthy, although I will have to wait awhile for the cholesterol and other blood tests to come back. My blood pressure was still pretty good at 110/76… Obviously I have to lose some more weight, but my walking to work seems to be helping in that department.

Brainwaves

Posted on by grahams

This weekend was the Brainwaves Festival over in Arlington, which was a ton of fun. Jon really did a great job pulling the whole thing together, and while I wasn’t in to every artist, it was great seeing so many different bands. The highlight for me was The Dresden Dolls turning out a great set (even if they seemed out of place in the midst of the other bands on the lineup). Amanda and Brian brought out Edward Ka-Spel (from The Legendary Pink Dots and The Tear Garden) for “Missed Me”. I’m not the biggest Ka-Spel fan (I actually left before his set, closing out Friday, was over, but I was mostly just exhausted).

After a Kelly’s brunch, I made it back to the theatre on time on Saturday Afternoon. This daytime lineup seemed to be mostly noise artists, which can always be hit-or-miss. Fortunately, none of them seemed to take themselves too seriously, which made it more palatable. came out Saturday night to join me, and it was great seeing him again and catching up. Saturday night was definitely my favorite overall night of the show. It was dedicated to Steven Stapleton, who did a “DJ” set playing some of his favorite records. All of the artists Saturday night were enjoyable, but the stand-out band were also the headliners, Volcano the Bear. They had great energy, and while at times they seemed to be in Schtick Coma, they really rocked it out.

I missed the final day of the festival as I had previously committed to heading over to ‘s place for some Nintendo Wii love. He has preordered his and was having a big party to celebrate (and play). We mostly played Wii Sports, Tennis and Baseball are the standout games, but Bowling is pretty cool too. Golf and Boxing were a bit spottier though. Boxing definitely felt like your actions with the remote had the least correspondence to what happened on screen. That, and Corinna kicked my ass at Boxing, so I can’t like it. :P

We played from like noon until 6pm, when and I had to run off to see “Casino Royale”. I really, really enjoyed it, as did seemingly everyone who showed up to the club this week (17 people!). Definitely removed the crappier aspects of Bond for the past however-many years and stuck to spying and action (Parkour FTW).

Worlock, Remastered

Posted on by grahams

Skinny Puppy’s video for Worlock is considered by many one of the scariest music videos. I don’t know about “scary”, but it’s one of my favorites.. It is an assemblage of clips of horror films, and with that inherited all kinds of copyright headaches. I have it on VHS somewhere, but no longer have a VCR to play it with. Even if I did, it’s a late generation dub..

Some saint painstakingly recreated the Worlock video, using modern DVD-quality video where possible (and it seems to have been possible for most of the films “sampled”. It is amazing. Be sure to grab the WMV9 version as opposed to the overcompressed EewTube version. The creator has promised a MPEG-2 version of the video, which should be awesome.