Weekly Rochester Events #221: What Kind of Garden are You Growing With Cookies and Milk, Friedrich?

Thursday, April 3, 2003

Let's see if these things are related at all. Last Friday after getting some sushi, I found an umbrella in the parking lot at Village Gate Square (274 N. Goodman St.) It was really windy that night and the umbrella was taped to a stick like it was stuck in the ground somewhere. It might have come from across the street or the other side of the city. I didn't any other umbrellas around, so I figured it was mine. On Saturday, I tried to burn a CD of some pictures I took of The Flour City Knuckleheads at The Bug Jar (219 Monroe Ave.) in February. I've got ... er ... had a SCSI CD burner that was giving me trouble. [Geek chat: I've been using an Adaptec SlimSCSI 1480 Cardbus card in my PowerBook, but Adaptec refuses to get the drivers done that have been in beta since April, 2002. I've also got an OrangeMicro FireWire to SCSI adapter which works basically like an unstable piece of crap.] Anyway, I managed to get a CD squeezed out with 10 megabytes of pictures and made six coasters [geek translation: failed CD's.] I decided that enough was enough, and I would not spend another five hours trying to get one disc done ever again. So, I took it outside, got a 14-pound splitting maul, and proceeded to cleave the piece of crap in two. It was actually much softer than my previous CD-R drive, and it only took five or so good chops to get it split down the middle. I felt better.

I broke my CD-R drive, but I added some oranges in a blender and now it's fucking art!

Coincidence? Yeah ... pretty much. So much for that theory.

What else .. oh, I added a stupid T-shirt to my JayceLand CaféPress store. I'll try to do that as often as I can until I run out of ideas. In case you're curious, I make like $2 on most of the things I'm selling (except the stickers which are like 50 cents.) You can check the "wholesale" prices somewhere on the site and do the math compared to what I'm charging. Speaking of money, Amazon.com has this new offer they're pushing to the Associates members (the way I get money when you click through Amazon.com links like these and buy stuff) for a Platinum Visa card. The only trouble is the ads they have are animated, and I refuse to put blinking, animated ads on this page, so I made a separate page so you can go to the link. It's probably against their rules or something, but I'll wait for the e-mail from them to take it down. Anyway, the big plus is that it's a rewards card ... you get 1% back on everything you buy (and 3% of everything you buy at Amazon.com) in the form of gift certificates to Amazon.com (well, you get points and when you hit 2,500 points, they'll give you a $25 Amazon.com gift certificate.) Plus, you get $20 store credit just for signing up, and best of all, I get $20 credit as well.

The last thing in the irrelevant part of the essay is this: What's the point of Baked Doritos? I got some at work and they've got 5g fat (1g saturated) which accounts for 45 of the 170 calories in the bag. I mean, isn't baked supposed to be virtually fat-free? It seems that they soak them in oil (super nasty cholesterol producing partially hydrogenated canola (or corn) oil is the second ingredient after corn) then bake them ... isn't that close enough to frying them? I feel ripped off. Plus they made me feel queasy.

Ok, on to what's going on. Thursday night the early show at The Bug Jar (219 Monroe Ave.) is really good with The Witching, Purrs,and The Meat Joy starting around 8. Purrs said The Witching is really good ... they played together at Richmond's (21 Richmond St.) a few weeks ago. Oh, that's like punk-rock kind of stuff.

The show at The Club at Water Street (204 N. Water St.) on Friday might be really cool. DJ Dangler used to have experimental and noise shows in the basement ("dungeon") when it was Piranha, and if they bring that back, it'll be cool. Otherwise, just okay. Oh, and that open mic thing at Verb Café at Writers and Books (740 University Ave.) might be cool too ... it's early. Er ... I guess I'll have to miss that because I've got to get together with people to talk about some art magazine idea.

On Saturday, the thing not to miss is Astronomical Unit at Monty's Krown (875 Monroe Ave.) It should be fun to see them on "home turf." I'll probably shoot over to The Bug Jar (219 Monroe Ave.) first because I've never seen Nogoodnix nor Goblet.