Electric Josh

Yes, we enjoy watching the Red Sox win, but must every pitch of every inning be quite so painful to watch? We have at least discovered that turning the TV on at 9:00 means not having to watch the first four or five innings, which saves an hour or two of nerves. We understand that this is ridiculous.
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So back in the day, when this space enjoyed the privilege of having two roommates with full college radio credentials and two others with more excellent musical tastes than we could reasonably keep up with, it wasn't hard to come up with one or two new bands a month that were worth listening to. Now we're old and all adult-like, and drifting through a big musical desert—too many ads to listen to the radio, so I don't, and not enough time in front of the iMac, so not enough streaming indie radio. What happens instead is that every 18 months or so I stumble randomly across a new band, usually by watching Conan (Built to Spill), very occasionally listening to college radio (Cato Salso Experience), or reading local arts weeklies (Scissorfight). The source of the latest of these bands (The Decemberists) caught us by surprise, however: NPR. This is amazing for two reasons:

1. NPR's music review segment usually covers music that I have absolutely no interest in.
2. The reviews themselves, like the reviewers' voices, all overamplified and artificially bassy, are annoying to the point that their start usually signals the end of NPR for that commute.

But here I am, having dug around the NPR website for a two-week-old podcast of a live song they played part of, and the song is now stuck deeply in my head. So deeply that I must, as always, listen to the song repeatedly until I'm well and truly sick of it, and I've memorized it so I'm at least no longer plagued by not knowing what all the notes are. It's annoying that this is necessary. This will take three or four days.

So now I'm going around humming the same eight bars repeatedly. Even worse for the lovely wife, I'm now just competent enough with the guitar that I can approximate the chords as I sing along. The cute kid is nice enough to tolerate the doodling while she plays with her toys, but I figure I've got about three years before she starts insisting that I neither play nor sing anywhere within several miles of her. The iPod and my Happy Family brand bourbon will pull me through.

Anyway, The Decemberists is this space's new recent band. Based on one song. We'll see how that turns out.
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The President has asked Americans to drive less so they use less gas. This is, apparently, real. No word yet on whether he's noticed that buying oversized SUV's was a bad idea all along.
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But Get Your War On is back with a special hurricane edition. Everybody tried their best.
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Ach! The sidebar is was in atrocious shape, and will be has been thinned shortly. It seems that at least a couple of those sites also decided to take (at least) the summer off, as well.
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It's getting to be that time of year again where the Red Sox threaten to make the playoffs by the skin of their teeth, thereby demanding late nights watching NESN instead of sleeping like reasonable people would. Far better would be if they were to be ahead by fifteen games or even back fifteen, so at least there'd be no suspense and we could get to bed, but here we are for the third year in a row staying up way to late watching television instead of speaking much to one another after the kid goes to bed. Our consolation is as follows: we do both at least like to watch baseball, the quality of the baseball is at least mostly good, and the kid has still never seen the Red Sox miss the playoffs. Happens every year, right?
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Well, so the solstice seems to have hit, meaning that the seasonal hiatus should wind down. Been a busy summer, and the part of the brain that composes prose is more or less refreshed and ready to spew. At the moment, though, we're mostly sending warm wishes toward suburban Houston, where this space's aunt and uncle are presumably, if the Weather Channel, which despite being in hurricane mode is even more boring than usual, is to be believed, sitting in traffic. Do be safe, guys.
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Pictures! Iceland, without the usual girl, who was instead staying with her grandparents. Glaciers! Geothermal power plants! Reykjavik!
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