adrian is rad

Now that Lance Armstrong is riding for Team Discovery Channel, he’s doing a series of commercials for the various tv channels they own, including Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet and the Travel (or as I call it Poker) Channel.

These commercials are called Welcome to the Family, Lance and are viewable online here, I saw the Discovery Channel one which has the guys from American Chopper and Lance and I laughed a lot. I’d recommend it. The Animal Planet one with the crazy crocodile guy and the Travel Channel one with the guys from the World Series of Poker are both pretty funny as well.

You sort of have to know the people in each spot for it to be funny.

this week’s playlist. I’m doing an hour of indie, an hour of old-timey and an hour of motown. special edition of the show!

and if you read this before 9am PST, you can listen.

Results of the voting for covers contest #1 entries:
Best cover:
Adrian 1
Andy 5
Dave 1

Most Original Cover:
Adrian 1
Andy 1
Dave 5

So the big winners were Andy and David.

This week’s song is Wait by Secret Stars (original). Here are the entries:

• Adrian
• Andy
• Dave

Vote here for the Best and Most Original cover version.

Covers Contest #3: Sassafras Roots by Green Day (original) Entries will be accepted until next Tuesday.

I have a project for which I need a Canon Powershot A40 or A70. If anyone has one to sell, let me know and we can make a deal. It can even be broken in certain ways–it needs to power up and take photos at least, but the zoom doesn’t need to work and battery doors and the like can be broken.

I swam at the Palo Alto Riconada Pool last night because the Stanford pool didn’t have evening hours.

It was my first timed mile in a long time. 36 minutes. Take that Roger Bannister! That puts me on pace for a 54 minute Alcatraz swim

It’s weird swimming in a 25 yard pool again. It feels too short and I could really get into my stroke before I had to turn.

Myron Cope has retired. What will a Sunday game be without him?

Maybe sometime I’ll write a post about Listen/ Silence.

But for now, I’ll just tell you to listen to my show till 9am PST.

And/ or check out my playlist.

And you should listen to and vote on the entries of the previous post. I know that more than 6 people read that post!

Last week, I announced the Covers Contest.

A brief recap of the idea of the contest:

• Andy, Dave or I are the lead for the week. The lead picks the song to be covered. He posts the original. The song will be announced each Tuesday and linked here.
• We each do cover versions of this song by the following Monday and post them online as mp3s.
• You, the readership, listens and votes.
• Lead rotates to the next person and he picks a new song.

The original this week was Never Ending Math Equation by Modest Mouse.

Listen:

• Andy
• Adrian*
• David

*[update: new mix]

Personally, I found it pretty hard to conceive of and record a cover in a week–especially because it took until Saturday to get my laptop to a point where it’d run Protools again. A week definitely doesn’t give you time to make things perfect.

Vote for the best and most original cover. Voting will be open until next tuesday.

You can also comment here about the songs, if you’d like.

Covers Contest #2:
Andy’s choice. Original: Wait by the Secret Stars. Entries for this will be accepted until the end of the day next Monday.

Yesterday was the second time I swam in Aquatic Park in San Francisco. Aquatic Park is an area of the Bay that is protected by two piers, so you get all the coldness without any of the ship traffic or crazy currents.

I’m getting ready for a swim from Alcatraz in just under a month. The best preparation for swimming in that cold water is to swim in similarly cold water. Aquatic Park was probably about 58 or 60 degrees.

I knew what to expect this time and I still went into panic breathing when I went underwater. Once I forced myself to put my head in the water again and start swimming, I relaxed.

I did probably a mile and it didn’t feel too bad. I mean, it was cold, that’s for certain, but it wasn’t painfully cold after about the first five minutes. My injured elbow did nag a bit and I’m a bit worried about it, but I think it’ll be okay.

I was wearing a Barracude Hot Head neoprene hood and I had in silicone ear plug, which did help with the coldness. I figure I should be okay to swim without a wetsuit.

At this point, I’m going to start swimming a mile twice a week, one in Aquatic Park and one in the pool down here and probably two shorter work outs a week of kicking and whatnot to still get in the water but to not overwork my elbow. My previous regiment was 3 half-mile swims a week.

the local public access TV channel is on right now with kareoke! it’s awesome. this guy in a stupid hat is singing YMCA out of tune. it is really stupid.

he’s not even doing the hand signals.

It appears that last week you morning blog checkers did check my blog and listen to my show, so let’s do it again.

Listen to KZSU 6-9am PST.

Playlist. (refresh during the show to update the playlist)

Tonight at 10pm is the premier of the show 30 Days on FX. It’s by Morgan Spurlock, the guy who did Supersize Me. In Supersize Me, he took 30 days to live the all-American fast food diet. Each episode of this show, he’ll follow himself or someone else living another experience for 30 days. For example, oie episode is about an evangelical Christian living in America’s largest Muslim community in Michigan for 30 days.

This is like a short documentary more than a standard reality TV show with its share of schadenfreude.