Dead Pool 2013 in the home stretch...

Unless we have some unexpected expirations this week, Dead Pool 2013 will end in a three way tie between:  Clay, my Mum and Self.  

Said participants currently have 8 breathing celebs which can be found here: http://september29th.tumblr.com/deadpool

The rules are quite simple.  Participants are asked to select 10 individuals that can be found in Wikipedia and elect them to their "Dead Pool".

If you have any interest in participating in Dead Pool 2014 - reach out and contact me.
The new URL will be: www.september29th.com/deadpool/

 

Adam West - Dead Pool 2013 Mascot

Adam West - Dead Pool 2013 Mascot

Year in Music : Honorable Mentions of 2013

Before posting my Top 10 albums of 2013, I wanted to quickly call out my honorable mentions of the year...  

I'm rather fortunate to have a workday where I can slip on a pair of headphones and listen to records all day with minimal interruptions.  

In many ways, these albums played a big part in soothing me through very stressful days at the office.

I've linked some of my favorite tracks of each of their respective albums.  Enjoy...

Disclosure - Settle
Savages - Silence Yourself
Kakkmaddafakka - Six Months is a Long Time
The Strokes - Comedown Machine
Rhye - Woman
Daft Punk - Random Access Memories
Cayucas - Bigfoot
Fear of Men - Early Fragments
San Cisco - San Cisco
This Town Needs Guns - 13.0.0.0.0
 

Learned how to delete a post by accident... Led Zeppelin (Again)

Managed to lose my first post on Squarespace yesterday...   The post was about my recent rediscovery of Led Zeppelin thru SPOTIFY last week.

I'm not going to bother typing it up again... seeing that I didn't really say all that much to begin with and I can sum it up in less that 140 characters.

I own nearly 2000 albums and Led Zeppelin is suspiciously missing from my collection.  I'm very familiar with their library of music...  I discovered them thru dubbed cassette that a cousin provided me when I was 10.  

My favorite Led Zeppelin song : 

it-might-get-loud-01.jpg

Anyhoo...   My friend Matt left a comment, a recommendation to see the documentary - It Might Get Loud.

A documentary, that had Jack White (White Stripes), Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin), Edge (U2) sit together, play guitar and then individually explored their "methods".

I caught on DVD a few years ago and recall enjoying quite a bit.  There's one scene in particular where Edge and Jack were sorta noodeling back n' forth... then Jimmy starts feeling out the riff to "Whole Lotta Love"... Both Jack and Edge drop their instruments and see Jimmy do what he does best.   

Here he is - taming the riff.

Visiting the Secret Stash

As luck would have it... my flight to Texas on Saturday wasn't scheduled till late afternoon, so I had a little time in the morning to visit Red Bank, NJ.

I'm an unapologetic fan of all things Kevin Smith and in recent years, I've become a little more interested in Comic Books - thanks largely in part to the show - Comic Book Men - on AMC.

When an opportunity presented itself to actually visit the Secret Stash, I had to seize it.

Getting to the City of Red Bank, from Mt. Arlington was a little bit of a drive...  I also had to drop a co-worker off at the Newark Airport who wasn't interested in visiting the shop.

On the way there, my co-worker (April) and I managed to run through a number of New Jersey Turnpike EZ-Pass toll lanes without paying.  The car rental had the ez-pass hardware, but it wasn't set correctly to be read for some reason.  At one point, my co-worker got frustrated and managed to completely knock it off the windshield and I had it bruise my right knee.

After fiddling with it for 10 minutes - I figured out how to set it up and we were good on tolls between Red Bank and Newark International.   Looking forward to hearing from our travel agent about missed tolls later this week...

But I digress, we make it to the Secret Stash and much to my amazement, both Mike and Walt are working the shop.  

With the show being aired on AMC for a third season, I presumed that their work duties in the store would be eliminated.  There were a number of other people working in the shop, but it was still nice to see them in their element.

The shop is a lot smaller than I had imagined... it was also darker and laid out a little differently.  The place isn't narrow... but it's sorta long.   The front part of the shop is dedicated to Kevin Smith projects.  Walls are covered with movie memorabilia and a variety of comic book collectables.  It wasn't heavy on toys, but they had a number of books for sale.  I slowly made my way through the racks - flipped through a number of long boxes - looking for nothing in particular.  I've never purchased a comic book.  I sorta flipped through stuff until I saw something that spoke to me.

Then I saw it.  Fantastic Four #269 - Who is Terminus? 

I don't know what about it spoke to me...  I guess it was the possible introduction of a new enemy.  I secretly hoped that it would spark interest from Mike or Walt upon check-out...  it didn't.

I picked up and then decided to put down Batman - The Court of Owls...  a book that I've been meaning to get for a while, but opted to pick up a copy of Batman - Cacophony.  I briefly got to speak with Walt and he signed (and drew) in my copy before I left the shop.

I also picked up a Zippo (Nails) and a Buddy Christ postcard...   I don't smoke and don't intend to send that postcard to anyone, so they're keepsakes that make absolute little sense to have in retrospect, but they're on my shelf right now.

Anyhoo... if you get a chance to visit the shop, I highly encourage you do so.  There's a number of things you can pick up that are related strictly to Kevin Smith.  The guys are pretty approachable and sorta chatty, if they're not busy doing shop related activities.

From Jersey w/Love : Chapter 2

I try and make it a point to make the most of business trips...  I usually try to find interesting places to visit and make it a point to eat at places I wouldn't normally get to check out.

Well...  this trip has been rather unforgiving in respect to downtime.   Classes run nearly 9 hours per day and they're so mentally taxing that I really don't want to go out after the work day ends.

On top of that... I've managed to contract a head cold of some kind and I've had a hard time keeping my shit together.  On Thursday night, I got back to the hotel before 6:00pm and opted to skip out on getting dinner with co-workers so that I could take a nap.   I woke up just before Midnight... missing out on places I could eat at - so options were limited...  

From Jersey w/Love - Chapter 1

Penning this entry from my hotel-room in Mount Arlington, New Jersey.  I've been here for a couple of days now and have been overwhelmed with work, a swollen right foot and severe head congestion.

Despite being an hour away from the center of the Universe (NYC) - I've managed to find myself in a pretty secluded part of New Jersey.  It sorta reminds me of upstate Michigan in some respects...  the scenery I mean.  

The work days have been unusually long, so I haven't really had a chance to go out and explore as much as I would like to...  there's talk of making out to Red Bank on Saturday to visit the Secret Stash tho'.

I hate December...

 

Three Stories

Thanksgiving just keeps giving today...  while surfing the net I ran across a story on the Verge about three unpublished stories appearing online last night.  

An eBay Auction recently ended for an unauthorized book titled : Three Stories

Someone dropped $110 bucks on this...  Ocean Full of Bowling Balls, Birthday Boy and Paula are within

Winner of that eBay auction has presumably scanned and uploaded the stories onto the Web as a PDF.  

It's not very hard to find online... proof being, yours truly has a copy of it.

Planning to curl up on the couch and read 41 pages of goodness that was not intended for release until January 27, 1960

2013 and Nothing Still Feels Good

Had two rather big surprises this morning...  

  1. Andy Greenwald and Chris Ryan of the Grantland Hollywood Podcast - put out a special TALKING ABOUT EMO podcast this week.
  2. Andy Greenwald is the author of a book I read a number of years ago called NOTHING FEELS GOOD - a book that touched on Punk Rock, Teenagers and "Emo"

I never put the two "Andy Greenwald" together until this morning tho'.  If you're a fan of said genre (ugh... its not a fucking genre) - I highly recommend you check it out.  

My copy of NOTHING FEELS GOOD.  It's one of the few books that I ever recall covering the scene of the late 90's and early 00's. 

Below is a small playlist put together by Andy...  BRAID's Urbana's Too Dark is featured in the middle of the playlist...   Other great tracks to check out by: Sunny Day Real Estate, Mineral, Texas is the Reason, Rites of Spring, The Promise Ring, Ida and Jets to Brazil

DNA Testing

I trust that I'm not alone in feeling that apartment announcements (typically tucked under your door or wedged between door and frame) are equal parts impersonal and bad news...

Yesterday's announcement is too good to not share with you.  Starting January, 2014 - my dog, Elliot - will have the privilege of having his mouth swabbed so that his DNA can be kept on record at some place that I haven't committed to memory.

DNA Testing for Dog Droppings

See... my apartment complex is one of the pet-friendliest-places I've ever lived at.  We have a dog park on our premises and they've thoughtfully placed dog-drop-stations all throughout the grounds.  They stock said stations with plastic bags - better than any place I've ever been to.

Despite their efforts, I have a number of neighbors who don't curb their dog.  Is it cringeworthy to walk around the complex and see unattended droppings?  Yes...  It's also a drag to notify the complex that your neighbor didn't pick up after their dog.

Hell, I was accused of not picking up after my dog once and he wasn't in the same zip code when it happened.  It took three weeks for the apartment to wave the fine...

Nonetheless, this shit feels invasive and a total misappropriation of funds.  I don't know if my rent (or pet rent) will go up any because of this.   I can think of 10 things I would like to see addressed/repaired around here before implementing Doggy-DNA-Tests.

I'm seriously considering the idea of asking friends to bring their dogs over when they visit so that they can shit on the grounds and they end up with inconclusive tests...

I tease of course... 

 

Dear Mr. Watterson

Dropped some much deserved money on a documentary titled Dear Mr. Watterson this evening...

I read a lukewarm review for it on Slate a few weeks ago and saw that it was available to rent on AmazonPrime - and wanted to quickly share my thoughts on it.

If you're on the fence on Calvin and Hobbes - I wouldn't recommend you go out of your way to see this documentary.  In fact...  I'm not sure if I would recommend to anyone who wasn't intimately familiar with the material.

Official poster of - Dear Mr. Watterson

The documentary doesn't feature any interviews with Bill Watterson...  the director goes out of his way in the opening seconds of the picture to state that this wasn't going to be a journey about the artist, but of the fandom that surrounds the artwork of Calvin and Hobbes.

Like many of the interview subjects... I discovered Calvin and Hobbes in the late 80's when my local paper - Valley Morning Star - syndicated his work.  It was one of two strips that I actively sought out throughout my life... the other one was The Lockhorns.  But I digress...  what drew me (and I think everyone who loves the strip) is the over active imagination of Calvin.

I can't think of too many other things that resonated so quickly within me after experiencing it for the first time.  Its up there with Star Wars and KISS tho'.

An interesting thing that the documentary touched on was visiting the home town of Chagrin, Ohio.  They took a number of location shots and within seconds you can't help but feel like you've been there before.  

The local high-school mascot is a TIGER!   

Watterson was heavily involved with his year book club, so his illustrations are seen throughout the 1978 Chagrin year book.

When they weren't visiting the town of Chagrin, they spent a lot of time discussing the integrity of Watterson.  He never allowed merchandising of Calvin and Hobbes so it never fell victim of what Snoopy and Garfield fell victim to.

Pogo - cited as an influence for C&H

I think the best part of the documentary was getting to learn about what influenced Watterson the most.  Comics dating far back as the 1920's that I had never heard of... but a few that I'll go out of my way to check out tho'.

 

Anyhoo... if you're a huge fan and if you want to spend an evening at home smiling - I  recommend that you check it out.