adrian is rad

This city that I’m in, it is crazy. It is tall unlike any other city I’ve spent reasonable amounts of time in. Even London, another massive city, is unlike this in shear tallness.

But there are some cool parts. I’m trying not to judge this based on previous experiences and this one day, but I feel sort of like it’s a city that has cool stuff that I’ll never love.

Maybe. It’s hard to tell.

I had a pretty fantastic dinner at Hallo Berlin with jwerberg, perlick, liz, mim, and qwdigbo. It was a great time and the restaurant was a good choice (thanks to jdawg on that one).

I don’t have a lot of time now and I don’t know if I’ll post a full write-up later. I have a hectic week coming up.

AND! I don’t know if I’ll write a full blog entry about the Chadwick-Amrhein wedding, but it was, well, incredible. If my wedding is half as much fun, I’ll be a big winner.

I’m on the east coast for a couple weddings so I probably won’t be posting much until next Sunday.

Have a nice center-of-the-summer week.

So I completed a year of Spanish at the prestigious Palo Alto Adult School and I’ve learned some stuff. I’m totally like

me llamo Adrian. soy ingeniero mecanica. soy de Pittsburgh.

like boom!

but yeah, I don’t know if I’m going to continue on to the second year, but I’d like to continue learning. do any of you have recommendations for spanish learning CD sets that I could use to learn more Spanish?

Two to 4 CD sets would be good. I have a 14 CD Berlitz set for German and that’s a bit too much.

Also, if you’ve had good experiences with a series of language CDs but not the Spanish one, let me know; the same series might have a Spanish one.

I’m pretty sure I’ve written about Phoning It In on WMBR before. It’s a radio show where the host gets bands and artists to call in and play a mini set over the phone which is then broadcast over the air. He’s had some great guests.

Two that I enjoyed recent were:

• Jens Lekman performing from his bathtub in Gothenburg, Sweden, at 1am, trying not to wake his neighbors
• the Wrens performing from their pea-green semi-dining room in New Jersey and just being nice people and doing a great set of songs.

The same guy ran the show at BSR before that. My favorite of those shows is John Vanderslice who gets interrupted mid-song by some one coming into his apartment, only to take up right where he left off when the person leaves.

Patbird and I saw the Rex Stockings beat the A’s last night, 7-3. It was a good game and a nice time.

There were three home runs by some big guys: Ortiz, Manny and a bomb from Nick Swisher. As always with BoSox v A’s games out here, there were a ton of Sox fans there; to the point where one could hear chants for both teams at the same time.

I also learned yesterday that Oakland has closed the upper deck for the season, reducing the seating capacity to 35,077, which was almost reached by the 33,370 in attendence last night.

I’m going to move Online Mix Tape, Vol 1 into a password-protected folder tomorrow, so you have one more day to download it. Get it now while you can!

If you’ve missed it, feel free to email me [first name @ domain.com] and I’ll let you know what the username and password are.

received earlier today

Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2006 17:44:23 +0200
From: beer <beerchant @xxx.xxx>
To: xxxxxxx@xxx.xxx
Subject: Pay attention to this stock,
it will most likely return the investment increased., New and hot

Normally I trust beer; beer has rarely steered me wrong, but I also know it doesn’t know a lot about stocks, so I think I’m going to give this one a skip.

from Aquarius:

1. Beirut Gulag Orkestar
2. Sufjan Stevens Avalanche
3. V/A The Sound the Hare Heard [Kill Rock Stars compilation]
4. Ben Gibbard and Andrew Kenney Home Splits Series, Vol. 5

from Amoeba:

1. Built to Spill Keep It like a Secret
2. Built to Spill There’s Nothing Wrong with Love
3. the Long Winters When I Pretend to Fall
4. Nedelle From the Lion’s Mouth
5. Johnny Cash American V: A Hundred Highways

saw zach rogue at rickshaw stop STOP second trip to rs STOP jens lekmen previously STOP

zr acoustic and without band rogue wave STOP new and old songs STOP enjoyed both STOP intersong space filled with awkward humor STOP zr has singular gift at melody STOP

old telegraph style played out STOP any of you ever received a telegram?

Did anyone else watch Floyd Landis today?

They’re calling it the greatest single day in Tour history. Landis, down by over 8 minutes to the leader attacked early and rode alone for most of the stage to come within 30 seconds of the lead. At one point he reeled in a group that was 10 minutes out. Incredible!

The other day I finished King Dork by Frank Portman, (former) front man of the band, The Mr. T Experience who I remember coming through Pittsburgh a few times in my youth.

It’s a “young adult” novel, which is a genre that I don’t delve into often*. Tom Henderson is the main character. He’s a dork, surprise, who is well outside of the “normal” clique in his high school. He has one friend, Sam Hellerman, who he’s friends with largely becauses of alphabetical ordering. They’re in a band together. In fact, they’re in many bands together. Tom maps out his school year so far, in fact, by what their band was named at the time. They have lots of trouble finding a drummer (which I might relate to—my high school band, Where’s Luke?, got its name from our missing drummer). Tom gets harassed daily by the alpha males of the school. He has a bit of a disfunctional family, with a step-father that he doesn’t see eye-to-eye with, a mother that’s still disturbed by Tom’s father’s death some six years in the past. The book finds him struggling with the bullies at the school, his family, Sam’s new friends, his first experiences with girls, and mysterious notes left in some of his father’s books from his childhood.

It was a quick read and I liked it a lot. I related to Tom in some ways. I liked that it was sort of like taking an normal YA novel and jamming in a little bit of music geekery. And it was a good and interesting story. I found myself wanting to find out what happened next. It’s nothing groundbreaking but it was worthwhile.

* The last YA novel that I read was The Perks of Being a Wallflower (in a day back in the spring of 2003) which was written by a guy that went to my high school. I related to it for my similarities to the main character but also because of the connection to my high school, which was pretty subtle, small references to teachers I had and phrases we used. One of the acknowledgements at the beginnig of the book was of a person I used to play ultimate with. The main characters of King and Perks come down on polar opposite sites of whether Catcher in the Rye is a good book or not.

nice!