There are times when you come home from a show excited, whether by the music you just heard and are about to hear or because you had a cool time and got a phone number. Then there are times when you walk 30 blocks or so before realizing how cold it is and how far you have yet to go because you are astounded at the wonderful new thing that was always there that you have only tonight been allowed to witness and enjoy. I had a freaking blast at this show. I had never heard Holy Fuck or Super Furry Animals before and had not seen The Fiery Furnaces live, either.

I should apologize to Holy Fuck as I missed all but the last couple songs due to the fact that I am an idiot. The doors opened at 8 and I got to the club at 9. I figured that the first band wouldn’t start until then, but I was clearly wrong. Holy Fuck sounded like techno-house with those annoying incessant beats that last for hours for the ecstasy-addled, except without being annoying or incessant. Imagine a house song with real drums, synths, a bass player, another drummer and all sorts of weird effects and the song actually ends. These guys play music like I cook, throwing stuff in because it is good and blends. You can roll a song around in your mouth, turning over new flavors and strange tastes with each chew. They are like pita chips and cheescake, but musical. An aural alchemy. I will be buying their two albums as soon as I can. (I have yet to buy these albums as of 8-18-08, but I am broke and unemployed.)

The Fiery Furnaces were on next and I was excited to see them since I had missed them the last couple times they were in DC. They didn’t seem to really get into it until they played Blueberry Boat, but the crowd also seemed rather reserved until then, too. I liked seeing them but felt sorta blase about it because they looked so tired or bored. After they perked up, the music felt a lot more vibrant. I suppose you can’t blame people for being tired, everyone has off days I guess.

Super Furry Animals were a complete unknown to me until Uncanny Canadian instructed me to see this show no matter the cost. They were amazing, awesome would be a completely appropriate description as I was was awed by their music. Live shows are almost always better for that certain something, even if the songs are played almost exactly the same way as they were recorded on the albums. You can let yourself get caught up in the performance and forget all that stuff that gets tacked on to a home listening, like that time you made out with some girl while listening to Wish You Were Here, or how you played Transmissions from the Satellite Heart to psych yourself up to ask out some person at a coffee house. If you have never heard the songs before you see them live, you will always have that experience to play in the back of your mind while you listen at home. I’m drifting but maybe you follow me. SFA blew me away. They played and seemed to really be having a blast, and that feeling transferred to the audience. I can’t tell you what songs they included in the set, but they were all amazing. I would recommend SFA to anyone. They sound like bottled joy. At one point, the lead brought out some sort of huge, red, Power Rangers-looking helmet and held the microphone up to a hole in the top right and sang though the helmet. It sounded like he was singing from the back of some cave, or with a helmet on his head. Uh. Anyway, I have some pictures of that on my phone:

Um, yeah, so…my pictures were so bad that they broke the bloggio. We’ll have to wait a minute or two for those.

The blob on the left is the singer.

That is the red helmet on the singer, the light blobs are his hands.

While I won’t have a chance to do much exciting this weekend (I’ll be spending most of my weekend engaged in out of town wedding festivities) I thought it might be a good chance to finally put up a post about the day trip I did last month to look for amphibians.

Many people may not know this but the mid-Atlantic region has the highest salamander diversity on the planet. Spring and early fall are supposedly the best times to try to locate these little guys, so around easter, my gf and I headed down to Prince William Forest Park (even though the Virginia vernal pools are supposed to be better, I don’t own any waders and I didn’t really want to hang out in a swamp anyway) to see if we could find any.

After some trouble getting there (Google maps is the new MapQuest–the bad directions combined with stupid Interstate 95 traffic managed to make a 35-40 minute drive closer to an hour and a half) we eventually hit the park and started looking for salamanders.

While the general time of year was right, the conditions were not ideal. It had been fairly try for the past week or two and salamanders prefer foggy and damp conditions. Still, we heldout hope that we would at least find a couple in the many little creeks and streams in the park.

Basically the way looking for salamanders works is, you find a creek or stream and then turn rocks over. Sometimes there is a salamander there. More often you find bugs.

We did get lucky though and found four or five salamanders.

In all, it was a pretty fun outing. It’s certainly better than just randomly hiking around. Goal oriented nature works for me. If you’re looking for a good way to spend a weekend you should definitely consider catch and release salamander hunting.

A few more salamander pictures in the full post.

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I am pleased to be able to tell you that due to the crazy amount of money that the National Zoo makes off the cute little fuzzy bundle of joy, they’ve managed to negotiate a deal to get Butterstick to stay a few more years.

This WaPo article gives more information than I feel like typing so check it out.  You do have to appreciate that they actually namedrop ‘Butterstick’ in the article.  Why’d we have to give him a lame Chinese name.

I’m sure there’s more that I could say about this but we’re all to lazy to post now.  I think the 3B! crowd would be amazed at our half-assedness.

Announced today, this new PS3 game (that will demo sometime towards the end of the year) called LittleBigPlanet looks like tons of fun.

Visually, the games graphics look pretty phenomenal but that’s not the only thing here. The co-op gameplay shown in the video makes it looks like something that could help people develop good and cute little puzzle/platforming squads. It would be so sweet if you can develop a little clan that is really good at moving through these little fantasy worlds..

Even cooler is the fact that it’s supposed to be a ’sandbox game’ in that users will be able to make their own levels and upload them to the site and other people will be able to play and enjoy these levels.

A person would be able to download an unlimited number of user created maps and play them single player or cooperatively online. It’s like swarm based co-op Lemmings with user maps. Plus, the little guys are cute!

Sorry it’s taken me so long to get these photos up. I went to go see Butterstick at the National Zoo almost two weeks ago and haven’t managed to get the photos online until today.

This is only happening because my work PC is hosed with a virus at the moment and my girlfriend went out tonight so I don’t really have much else to do (besides watching episodes of the A-Team that I TiVo’d).

Anyway, seeing the ‘Stick in person left me much impressed. He’s an adorable little ball of fuzz. Definitely worth waiting in line for about 15 minutes. He was just kind of rolling around and playing with stuff. It’s kind of hard to make out from these pictures though.

I’ve got some video I took (that’s of equally poor quality) that I’ll try and get online sometime soon.

Until then though, you’ll have to make do with these pictures.

Trash Lid!

Playing with a giant bong?

Yes, yes he is.

Man, he is really fiending for it

Papa Stick!

Hey, sorry for the incredibly long break between posts. I’ve been busy with work and all that. Actually, they got all new equipment and free weights at the gym so I spent a month wandering around disorientedly. Just recently have I managed to escape and begin to once again post on the WRN blog.

Anyway, this time of year it’s usual for people to anticipate the upcoming holidays, be it Christmas, Hanukkah, New Years, or whatever other holiday I’m not aware of. Often I would feel the same way. Not this year though. At least not as of 6 PM today. That’s when I officially reserved tickets to go see Butterstick at the National Zoo.

The tickets are only good for 10 minutes and there is no guarantee that the ‘Stick will be out. Still, the hope that I may get to see this cute little ball of fuzz romping around is enough to get me psyched. I’ll definitely be bringing my camera and maybe I’ll be able to capture a little movie of Butterstick scampering about.

Until then, I guess I’ll just have to get my panda fix from some of these pictures here.

Still, the countdown to Jan. 6, 2006 has begun. Hopefully Panda Day ‘06 will end in success.

Hey, I just wanted to give some love to Unrequited Narcissism for their awesome post on naming the new panda at the National Zoo. The official zoo page has some ridiculous Chinese names like Tai Shan or Qiang Qiang.

It’s perfectly clear from looking at the picture that this little guy’s name should be something far more accurate … like Butterstick. So check out the modified survey that the folks at UN put up here and vote!