Disco Mickey Mouse!

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Ahhh, the memories. Quite possibly the edgiest record I ever owned as a kid. Rock music wasn’t allowed in our house because it was all satanic. Televangelists were really into playing records backwards at the time to prove it back then. Even our own church’s pastor had a lot to say about the evils of rock music and my parents believed every bit of it. I remember my older brother getting a huge lecture when they caught him listening to K-SHE 95. I think we got a joint lecture when they happened to come into the living room and heard the song Reproduction when I was watching Grease 2.

My neighbor Sarah used to let me copy some of her music onto tapes, which I kept a secret. When she got me into Weird Al around 12 or 13, they didn’t seem to mind that at all. Maybe they didn’t realize he did more than polka. I won’t even get into all the “Christian rock” we listened to back then, which was acceptable. Around 14 is when they both seemed to be working all the time and I got enough privacy to start listening to whatever I wanted, including the then-amazing MTV.

Bob Gale

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A couple decades ago, some guy named Bob Gale wrote these cool movies I like called Back to the Future. He didn’t do much else that I found interesting after that, other than the BTTF cartoon series, but I never watched many of those.

Last night, though, Kate and I were flipping around Netflix and saw some movie called Interstate 60. The description sounded interesting so we turned it on. And holy crap, it’s got Doc Brown in it! And Marty McFly! And then we see that it’s written and directed by Bob Gale. Michael J. Fox had just a small part in it, but he was actually yelling and cursing and being funny. It was great. The whole movie was just bizarre and really funny.

Yesterday I drove to Eugene for the giant flea market, thinking I might find some cool gifts for the kids. I found something awesome, which I can’t mention because they might see this page. I also got myself an army coat for $5.00 and a jigsaw with a broken blade for $2.00. The jigsaw guy said if I bought it, he would give me a free grahmcracker cookie. And he did. Then he tried to sell me this bulky tape recorder from the 70’s or 80’s, calling it a spy recorder. He was telling me I just need to put a couple D-cells in it and I could hide it anywhere and record things. It was so tempting, but I passed.

Aside from that awesome guy, I hate how those flea market vendors stare you down while you’re at their table, looking like they’re going to die of hunger if you don’t buy their stuff. I can’t stand to hang out at some tables for too long because they’re just LOOKING at me.

Saturday I went to the Albany tree lighting and parade, then to a Mexican restaurant to eat with Kate, James and some other girl.

I’m downloading all the BTTF Animated Series now, since I just noticed that Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis wrote them all. I remember not being that impressed with it in the 90’s, but it might be fun to try and watch a few of them.

Crazy Guy Across From The Post Office

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A few months ago, Spessa and I were driving around and she spotted a crazy sign in this guy’s garden, right across the street from the post office.

We drove around the block and I got out and took a picture of the sign while two guys on the porch eyed me. I sent it to the passive aggressive notes blog, but they never used it. All that month I kept noticing that kids kept drawing on the side of the post office, under the windows, with chalk. The only thing I remember is an anarchy symbol, but there was other random stuff too. They also kept writing WELCOME in chalk on the ground in front of the post office doors. Just kids being silly, right?

So weeks later I’m walking to the post office, past the chalk drawings under the window, and the guy in that house is screaming “FUCK YOU” over and over in my direction. I ignore it and continue into the post office. I’m not sure if he was yelling it at me, because it sounded like he was already yelling when I got out of the car. But weird…

The NEXT day, Spessa and I noticed caution tape all over one of the sets of doors. Then later that day, I’m reading the local police log from my RSS feeds and I see this:

Post office vandalism — Police received a call from the 520 block of Second Avenue S.E. at about 12:45 this morning, saying a man who lives across from the post office had been screaming off and on for the past two hours. A deputy responded and found a man visibly intoxicated and being very loud. Police calmed him down and were about to leave when an officer noticed one of the south side doors to the post office had been shattered by a rock. They also saw “disturbing” messages referring to Fort Hood and 9/11 scrawled on the walls of the building in what looked like chalk. Police talked to a witness and she said she saw the man at the post office then heard a loud crash. The man had fresh cuts on his hands. Trent A. Fox, 38, of Albany was cited for second-degree criminal mischief.

It seems as if this guy has been drawing on the post office with chalk for weeks now! Two or three weeks later, Payton and I are stopping by the post office and there’s a TREE in the middle of the road. Someone had dumped a bunch of potting soil in a pile on one of the lanes and it looked like there was a small tree planted in it. Next to it was a large potted plant. I grabbed a handful of change from my car to give to the Salvation Army bell ringer so I could ask her what was up with the tree. She told me the guy in house over there did it earlier that day and I told her about his other crazy antics. I don’t know why I didn’t think to take a picture of the tree in the road.

The tree incident didn’t make the police log this week, but I can’t wait to see what this guy will do next.

Punch You the in Jeans

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Last night Payton asked Emily what she would wish for if a genie gave her 3 wishes. She said she’d wish for 1,000,000 more wishes. “No, you can’t wish for more wishes,” he says. So she says she would wish for 1,000,000 more genies.”

That was lulzy enough for me, but when Emily asked Payton what he would wish for, he said he would wish to punch her in the jeans all 3 times. This is probably only hilarious if you’ve heard this Lonely Island song.

7-Eleven complaints

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At 7-Eleven, a customer in front of me was complaining at the cashier because they turned the pizza ovens off too early at night. He kept hitting his fist on the counter to make his point, so I started doing it along with him and he kept eying me, but didn’t stop yelling at the cashier. He started walking away from the counter, still complaining, and I picked up his keys and said, loudly and obnoxiously, “Don’t forget your keys, MISTER COMPLAINER!” He shut up and came back to take them from me, looking like he wanted to hit me. It ruled. That really made my day. Even moreso than this Slurpee and hot dog. Oddly enough, the cashier didn’t seemed amused by my behavior at all. If I worked there I would love for someone to shut up a loudmouth customer.

Spessas Week #87

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The Spessas & Family came to visit me for a week and left just yesterday. As usual, details are sketchy. On Monday we did The Phone Show on our brand new station, Manic Radio! That was a blast, because the regulars in the Manic Radio chatroom didn’t like us at all. The PLA listeners were saying hilarious things to the mods and other regulars, which was easily upsetting them. The station owner was woken from sleep and told to come in the chat room to see all the craziness going on. Things were crazy, both in the chatroom and on the air. Two days later, Manic Radio fired me. It was the best thing ever! More details are on the PLA Forums.

Wednesday I went to the Veterans Day parade with the kids. Eventually we jumped into the parade and started marching with everyone else, walking the entire length of the parade. Last year we kind of blended in, but this year we were in sort of an empty section so we were more noticeable. We got frequent claps from people and even cheers a couple of times. We had a little candy with us, so we threw that at some little kids. Some old guy yelled at us to throw some candy and Emily says “Okay!” and threw Nerds at the ground in front of him. Not boxes of Nerds, but open candy. It was great. There’s a small video clip of all this on my Facebook, which I will attempt to embed below, but I’m not sure if my privacy settings will allow it.

I think it was also Wednesday that we drove to Portland, sans kids, and saw the Mountain Goats. It was a pretty small venue and we were just 20 feet or so from the stage. Was an awesome concert. On either side of the stage there were giant flatscreen TVs and while waiting for the show to start I tried turning one on with my keychain remote and it worked. On the screen there was a Verizon page that allowed people to text words and pictures onto the screen, which people immediately started doing. I managed to get a few messages on it myself before the show started.

As the show started, the TV was turned off, but I kept turning it back on during the show. Since the lights were down, it was really bright on the crowd. The staff eventually decided to shut off the Verizon feed, so that the screen was black when I turned it on. But after about 30 seconds of blackness, the screen would turn bright blue, flooding the crowd with light. It was enough to make everyone squint. I kept doing it in between songs, hoping the Mountain Goat guy would say something about it, but he never did. Finally the staff cut the power to the TV so I couldn’t do it anymore. I resisted the urge to make my way to the other side of the auditorium to start in on that TV. I need to get a more powerful TV-B-GONE.

A lot of other things happened throughout the week, mostly kid-related. We took the kids to Wonderland (the nickel arcade) and to see 2012 and some other miscellaneous things that I can’t remember. On Saturday we went to see The Pixies in Eugene, which was really great. They played the entire album Doolittle, in order. Halfway through the lady announces, “Okay, here’s side B.” Then after that they played a bunch of stuff I didn’t recognize.

Halloween Weekend

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Friday: Jessica and I headed to Salem to go to a haunted house. On the way, decided to give Rocky Horror a try too, so called Kate and got directions to it. Before we got there, Angela called to tell us both shows were sold out. Stopped by a bar for food and drinks. Left after 1 drink cause the food menus sucked. Went to McMenamins instead to eat, then to The Nightmare Factory for the haunted house.

It was a standard haunted house – giant maze with people jumping out at you all the time. We took a few deliberate wrong turns, just for fun. Ended up in a back hallway at one point, where we weren’t supposed to be, and could stick our hands out through the walls and scare people. We ended up coming out of a hole under a desk/table thing. Found an empty room later that we hung out in for about 15 minutes, jumping out at people as they came in. After the haunted house we went to a bar in Albany and listened to horrible karaoke renditions of old country songs and played tons of pool.

Saturday: Tried to sleep in, but failed. I don’t know why I can never sleep very late. Hung out around the house most of the day with the kids. Made some Halloween cookies around noon and they ended up being our lunch. At 6pm, they dressed for trick-or-treating and we drove to a neighborhood that Jessica recommended. It was awesome – hundreds of kids walking around in the streets. Much more active than our own neighborhood. Went around a few blocks there, then headed home. Would have stayed longer, but Emily hasn’t been feeling that great. Left her at home while me and Payton hit up all the houses in our own neighborhood.

Got quite a few submissions these past couple of days for the PLA pumpkin carving contest. I’m surprised at how much effort some people put into it.

Sunday: Went to Salem to see Up at a ridiculously cheap movie theater, only to find out that it was sold out. So we bought tickets to Harry Potter 6 instead, which started an hour later. I hadn’t seen it yet, but the kids had. They both really wanted to see it again. The theater was awesome! There were long tables in ever aisle to set your food and stuff on, which meant tons of feet space. In the very back aisles there were reclining chairs instead of movie theater seats. There was a full bar in the lobby. The theater does all kinds of non-movie things like football games and comedy shows. Definitely gotta go back there someday.

Since we had an hour to kill, we walked across the street and I noticed we were in front of the same bar Jessica and I were at on Friday. Walked over to an ice cream place and hung out for about 30 minutes.

As long as I’m doing several days of updating here, I should mention Wednesday. I didn’t have much food in the house and didn’t feel like going shopping, so we went out to eat at Applebees. Turns out Wednesday is kids night there. You’d think that would just mean low prices for kids food, but not here. They had a magician going around to all the tables, doing tricks for everyone. He did tricks for us as we sat there and waited for a table, keeping us there for an extra minute or two after our table was ready. Then he came over and did card tricks while we were trying to eat food. It was annoying, but funny. They also had a giant table set up to decorate mini pumpkins, which the kids did for about 20 minutes after we ate. We’ll definitely have to try Wednesdays there again someday.

Man, xkcd.com has been doing amazing stuff lately. But that image up there, that’s just insane. Click on it to view the full sized version of it. I want to know how long those took him. And the Primer one cracked me up – I just happened to see that movie last year when Netflix recommended it to me.

HHGTTGMTV

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About a month ago, I was in a used book store looking for a Roger Zelazny book that was impossible to find and I ended up buying a used copy of the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. It’s the one that has all 5 books in it and looks just like a Bible. Since my HHGTTG collection was incomplete, this would be perfect! I took it home and Payton read the first book in it immediately since he wasn’t currently reading anything. I took the 2 books of HHGTTG off my shelf and threw them in my donation bag for Goodwill. I used to have all 5 books separately, but I lost a few in the move to Oregon and I think I loaned another one out.

So, complete collection right? WRONG! Less than a month later, a SIXTH HHGTTG BOOK is released. The author has been dead for like 7 years now! The fifth book was released way back in 1992ish. The new book is written by the guy that writes Artemis Fowl for some reason. I guess it’s based on stuff they found in DNA’s computer for a 6th book. But dammit.

The Roger Zelazny book I ended up buying on eBay for $15 plus shipping. For a 15-year-old used paperback! If I wanted an unused copy, it would have been $65. No kidding. It turned out to be a pretty good book, though, so thanks for recommending it, John!

I’ve got a stack of 5 books to read still. A Mark Twain that I’d never heard of until last week, a Carl Sagan, that book of crazy letters Angela gave me, and a couple others I can’t remember.

I miss MTV suddenly. That’s the only thing about not having cable that I miss. Watching nonstop music videos in the background all day while I work and do other things. I know it’s awesome that today every music video ever made is on demand on the internet, but it was nice just having them play nonstop videos at me all day. A big portion of them sucked, but there was the occasional gem in there. It’s so tempting to blow $60/month on a cable package, just to get MTV back. But I won’t do that.

I haven’t had regular cable since I left Illinois in 2005 and decided that the internet was so awesome that the kids don’t even need cable anymore. And that’s true. I never watched it much myself, except for the cartoons that the kids were watching and MTV. I think Yahoo streams videos like that somewhere. I should look into that again.

When This Song Is Over You Will Die

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When This Song Is Over Your Will Die – by Tom Smith

I can’t seem to get this song out of my head. I heard it last night while listening to Luke & Carrie’s Bad Rapport podcast. I ended up playing it on The Phone Show a couple hours later.

Two months since my last update. Hrmmm. I was in Idaho for a couple of weeks, doing all kinds of things. I built the Spessas a bathroom, which was great. I miss doing home renovations a lot. Now they can stop going out in the woods to poop. We went to see live music at a bar – a band called Stillborn. If that’s not an awesome band name, then I don’t know what is. Too bad it didn’t make their music awesome, but we still had a lot of fun there. We also went gambling in Washington and bar hopping, where Mr. Spessa kept disassembling bathrooms everywhere we went. And we did the best Phone Show episode ever.

This past weekend I went with Angela to a Facebook party in Portland which was lots of fun. I spent Sunday recovering from the Facebook party, which was not fun. Oh yeah, last week I went by myself to see live music at a local bar. I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this on here before, but this bar in Albany features tons of local hip hop bands. You’d think Albany would have lots of local country bands or lots of local hair metal tribute bands, but no, they have lots of local hip hop bands. And the music is actually pretty good. The problem is that this bar never has many people at it. When I got there, the band was hanging out outside, smoking. I sat down and commenced Facebooking. Soon I noticed that the entire band was playing video poker while a CD of their music played on stage. One of them was occasionally singing with the CD as he played poker. After about 45 minutes, I left. Guess they just didn’t like playing to a nearly empty bar.

I catsitted for a week for Kate’s cat. That was cool, having another cat here. I know there’s more that’s happened in two months, but I can’t remember. I always say that. Each Halloween I try to find scary movies to watch with my kids, which is usually really old movies. Tonight it was Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. That was fun to see again. My kids have seen just about everything by Stephen King now. This weekend we’re going to visit Albany’s House of Terror, then trick or treating on Saturday. On Friday Jessica is going to a haunted house with me.

I met a few old friends on Facebook recently. Jeff Boggs from high school and some other girl from the 80’s. It’s so weird seeing everyone I’ve ever known in my entire life on a single web site. I keep getting all these people from my high school adding me as friends, even some people that I never said a single word to. Which weirds me out a little, but I let them add me anyway. I guess they just want tons of friends and don’t care who they are. I responded to one with, “Wow, I’ve learned more about you in 5 minutes than I did our entire 4 years of not saying a single word to each other!” and she replied with, “LOL sorry i was such a stuck up bitch then but not no more!”

Speaking of wanting tons of friends and not caring who they are, add me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/bradthecarter! Facebook is the reason I don’t update much here anymore.

Oh yeah, I wrote a new song called Play The Game, based on Curtis Lee Jones. He’s hilarious.

Summer 2009

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I’ve been busy. It’s been a long time, but I think I spent about a week in Idaho earlier in the summer. I’m sure if I did, we had lots of fun and did incredibly evil things. Oh yeah, I got that tattoo then. The Spessas visited my house for a week too, either before or after that. All these trips I’ve taken have just kind of run together. There was Defcon at Vegas, which I wrote about in the previous entry, then maybe a week where I didn’t do anything. Then Illinois for 2 weeks to visit with my parents and other people. Immediately after that, Spessa visited me in Oregon for a couple of weeks.

Me and the kids took an Amtrak to Portland to catch our plane to Illinois, mostly just because Amtrak is cool. Except when it’s running late which is just about always. They only got us into Portland about 40 minutes late, though. We stayed in a hotel overnight since our flight left at 5am.

I know I’ve probably said this before, but flying is just a huge scam now. It sucks. They charge you for every little thing they can possibly think of now. I had to pay an extra $20 to check just one bag. They don’t even give you the first one for free. Emily wanted a blanket on the plane so we asked for one and they told us we’d have to pay $7 for it. Which I refused, because that’s just the kind of dad I am. They started all this scaminess when gas prices were around $4.00/gallon, but it’s been down below $2.00 plenty of times since then and they’re still doing it. They’ll never stop, now that people are used to it.

I can’t remember everything that happened in Illinois, but there was a day of City Museum for me and the kids. I think we only spent one day at the pool, because the weather got too cold near the end of our visit. We saw District 9. The kids and I walked to BP one night for Slushies and they were out of napkins (Payton needed one) so I asked the clerk for one and she handed me a used, wadded up napkin that was sitting on the counter next to her. Instead of demanding an unused napkin, I just laughed at Payton instead.

I did the Phone Show 3 times from Illinois, but mostly just played music since my microphone didn’t work very good. And I moved phonelosers.org to a new server, along with a bunch of my other sites. I’ve been meaning to do that for months now since the old one kept crashing. So far it’s been over a month and no crashes.

While Spessa was here we took a trip to the coast. On the way back, we saw a roadsign flashing something about construction, so we pulled over and Spessa spent about 40 minutes working at the controls to change it. It had a password on it, but she was persistent and managed to figure out what it was by guessing. We couldn’t think of anything brilliant to write on it, so she wrote HACK NAKED, which is the slogan for PaulDotCom. They posted a picture of it on their site and we also posted it on signhacker.com.

I was actually wearing a HACK NAKED t-shirt that day, but we didn’t think to snap a picture of me standing in front of the hacked sign. It was so nuts because it was in the middle of the day and it was a very busy road. Spessa was sitting behind the sign, but could still be seen by traffic and she kept getting up to open this giant door on top of the sign to reset the power. For 40 minutes. I hung out in front of my car, playing on Facebook on my phone and hoping to divert attention away from her and onto me.

Me and her also went to some casino last weekend and gambled. I normally hate gambling, but I played $20 on blackjack. I had it up to $30 before losing it all. We saw Extract and Inglorious Basterds. We saw a couple of live shows at local bars, played pool and drank too much. We did 2 Phone Shows together and went to the state fair in Salem. I think that’s it.

It’s been an overwhelmingly busy and fun summer for me and so far I’m really enjoying the complete isolation of this weekend. I’m hoping to barely leave the house and just work on projects that I haven’t had time for in the past couple of months. Last night I put together a commercial for Sign Hacker, which is here. I’ve got two other video projects that I really want to finish up song and I’m working on another song and have ideas for 2 others. I wish I could just be alone for an entire week and get all this done. I really need to clean this house up too.

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