Red, White & Crue
Just found out from Marie that I got my tickets for Motley Crue comp’d (thanks Justin!). Marc & Hoo are coming with me, and you know we’ll be hittin’ a few red bull/vodka’s before the show. I never thought I would actually see these guys live, especially all the original members. They better kick it old school with Bastard, Shout At The Devil and some Too Young To Fall In Love to boot.
This concert is getting better by the minute. Check this out:
“It’s the tour everyone’s talking about and it’ll be coming to a TV channel and a DVD player near you.
Motley Crue’s outrageously successful “Red, White & Crue Tour 2005,” which has sold out arenas across the country since its launch in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, on Feb. 17, will be captured for posterity to be distributed on TV as well as DVD this fall.
Featuring the reunited band’s original line-up of Vince Neil, Nikki Sixx, Mick Mars and Tommy Lee for the first time on a concert for DVD, playing their biggest hits, the show will be filmed when the band goes to Grand Rapids, MI, on April 27, for a show at the Van Andel Arena. Clear Channel Entertainment, who are promoting the concert, will produce and distribute the TV show and the DVD on their home video label, Clear Channel Entertainment Home Video, from Clear Channel Entertainment TV.”
Hell yeah, hell yeah, hell yeah.
What Is It?
Last week Friday, James came down after work to hang out as we were going to Pinball at the Zoo in Kalamazoo the next morning. We watched a Sci-Fi Channel movie called Alien Apocalypse. It was some of the worst CG I have seen in awhile but it was a riot to watch. Bruce had some classic lines like “Your stupidity is terminal” …. shoots the guy “now your cured”. Good stuff. We set James up in the baby’s soon to be room as his allergies were kicking in big time so that was the safest place for him. We headed down to Kzoo in the morning and did a run thru of the games at the auction. Most of them were conversions tho they did have a few classic cocktails and a couple of mini’s like Tempest and Space invaders. We made our way over to the Pinball room and did a once thru. We met up with Kirby and chatted with him a bit. I guess the number of pins brought this year was less than last year. One of the Stern reps had the new Lord of the Rings & Sorpranos pin up and running but you couldn’t even pay to play them. Why the HELL would I even think about spending $3700 on a pinball machine if I can’t even play it first? What a moron. Got to play a few pins I’ve never played like Star Trek Anniversary, Last Action Here (man was that pin tricked out!) and some older EM games. One of these days I’ve gotta get a kick ass EM for my collection. Nothing compares to those old school sounds.
James picked up a complete Tron cab from a buddy of his that was in good shape along with a G05, Battlezone boardset, color XY power brick and an Asteroids plexi from Kirby. We decided to not stick around since I had to be back kinda early and the Tron filled up the Jeep. Shortly after leaving the parking lot, my bungie strap that was holding down the hatch broke. I put on the other one I had and then about 1 mile down the road it snapped too. Good thing it broke when it did since we were close to a motorcycle shop. James bought a couple of tie down straps and we were good to go.
After getting back to GR and seeing James off, I picked up Snook, Ryan & Rick and we headed down to Ann Arbor to see Crispin Glover at the Michigan Theatre. He did his Big Slide Show then showed a print of his movie What Is It? and then did Q&A after the film. The entire cast in the film minus Glover were actors with downs syndrome. The movie is described as “a bewildering, unnerving, surreal, blackly comic film from the visionary mind of Crispin Glover that tells the inner and outer struggles of a young man facing villains and demons on multiple planes.” I managed to get us seats in the third row which was great for the Q&A. Some of the idiots in the crowd were asking stupid questions and one girl even said “I’ve gotta go, can you sign my snail”. Some guy in the crowd shouted “Welcome to Ann Arbor”. Crispin was a real trooper.
After the Q&A, he was signing autographs and had a table setup with merch for sale, including his books and CD. I bought his book entitled Rat Catching. The theater set him up inbetween the double doors to sign autographs. People would go in one group at a time and get there stuff signed. He took the time to talk to everybody, which had us waiting in line for 3 hours! Rick & I drove Ryan nuts with quotes from Creepshow 1 & 2. Awww yeah. It was great to finally meet Cripsin after all these years. I’ve been a big fan for a long time. He asked us how we found out about the show, what we thought of it, etc. I told him about the Wealthy Theatre and that we would love to have him come and show his film and do Q&A. He said he was very interested, especially since he wants to play it in smaller venues around 400 seats - perfect for the Wealthy Theatre which has just under 400. We also engaged in some geek talk about video editing as I noticed in the film credits he thanked the support staff from Adobe Premiere. He gave me his email address and I sent him the information about renting the theatre. Hopefully I’ll hear back as I think it would be great for him to come to Grand Rapids.
“The things I do for my fucking friends”
-Crispin Glover in River’s Edge
It's a boy!
Marie & I went to her ultrasound appointment last week Friday and got to find out the sex of the baby - a boy! It was a pretty exciting moment for both of us. Marie got tears in her eyes and for a moment I thought it was because we were indeed going to have a boy a not a girl like she had hoped. But that wasn’t the case. She was just so happy to finally know. The last couple of weeks it’s been all she could think about. As I told Marie before, in my family, it’s always boy, boy, girl, and in that order, so we were pretty sure it was going to be a boy anyways. Having a boy is going to be so much fun! I’m looking forward to showing him his first horror movie and teaching him how to keep dad’s arcade games up and running. This kid is going to be such a dork - just like his dad! The first couple of years are gonna be full of late nights, diaper changes and vomit. But that great baby smell and all those baby ‘firsts’ will more than make up for it.
I brought in a blank video and they taped the ultrasound for us. I borrowed a miniDV deck from work to use as a pass-through to connect my vcr to my computer to encode the video. It’s just over 5 minutes long and encoded in Quickbtime format so you will need the free Quicktime player to watch it. I encoded it in the streaming format so you don’t have to wait for the entire file to download before watching it.
Click here to watch the ultrasound video
It took awhle for the nurse to be able to determine if it was a boy or girl. He wasn’t being very cooperative, either laying on his stomach or on his side. The nurse had Marie alternate laying on her side and stomach to try and help move the baby around. It was so cool seeing his little arms and legs move around, watching his brain activity and hearing his little heart thump away at 150bpm.
After the ultrasound, we waited out in the waiting room to meet with the doctor to go over the results of the ultrasound. It felt like we waited forever, which made us start to think something might be wrong. We finally saw the doctor and he said things look good, although the baby’s weight was a little lower than normal. He was 11 ounces, which on an average of 100 babies, is the 14th lowest. He said to not be concerned but that they wanted to schedule another ultrasound in the future to see how he is progressing. Apparently all those McDonald’s cheeseburgers and milkshakes that Marie has been consuming are not being shared with the baby!
Our next appointment is in a month and that’s the one were Marie has to drink a glass full of this sugary liquid 45 minutes before going in. This is done so that they can test for diabetes. Apparently the liquid doesn’t taste all that great, tho she did get to pick orange flavor. I would have been all about the grape.
Avalyn
It’s been one of those nights where I almost fell asleep in front of the tv. I’ve still got to get my workout in before I hit the sack. Not sure if working out right before going to bed is a good thing or not but it works for my schedule. I’m usually pretty tired afterwards and fall asleep pretty quickly. Tonight will be no exception.
Audra emailed me a couple of weeks ago and we’ve been chatting back and forth a bit. Sounds like she is doing really well. She’s coming to GR this week and I’m meeting up with her and some of the old crew at Diversions Saturday night. I haven’t been there in ages. Will be interesting to see what the place is like after all these years.
Next weekend James & I are heading down to Kalamazoo for the annual Pinball at the Zoo. Super Auctions will be there too. Hopefully this year draws a bigger crowd. I guaranteed Marie I wasn’t coming home with anything. I’ve got 5 games in the garage that I need to get fixed up and sold before I think of taking on any more projects.
Welp, time to go burn some calories…
Sin City
Snook and I saw Sin City Friday night at Celebration Cinema. What a great flick! Best movie I’ve seen this year. Everybody did a great job, especially Mickey Rourke. I’ve gotta see it again on the big screen soon. After the movie we went back to Snook’s pad and watched Pootie Tang. I’ve gotta admit, I found myself laughing quite a bit, tho it did start to drag towards the end. Saturday I helped my father-in-law remove a 17 foot awning that he bought off a guy he works with. It’s in really nice shape and he got a really good deal on it. We’ll be installing it up at the cottage this summer to provide some nice shade when it’s 90 degrees this summer. Later that night I went to Ryan’s and played poker with the regular crew. Stayed out till 4am and made about 4 bucks. It’s about normal when you play nickels, dimes and quarters. I keep telling everybody we need to up it to .25 minimum bet but nobody else is game. Wimps.
Marie and I went to church this morning, with me running on 5 hours of sleep. It’s my own damn fault. I was feeling pretty good until after lunch. When I got home I crashed on the bed and woke up around 7pm. Got a little bit of sanding done and then retired to the TV to watch Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy.
Last Thursday I installed a new web server to replace the current web server at work. I ended up working 14 hours that day. We ran into some issues with exporting/importing the 50+ MySQL databases that were on it. We also had some minor issues to figure out with the newer version of mod_auth_mysql. We got everything figured out and running fine tho I was there until 2am. This is the first server I’ve implemented running FreeBSD 5. Since 5.3 is stable I felt pretty confident doing so. So far so good. The new server is much faster than our old one. Dual Pentium Xeon 3Ghz with 2GB Ram. Quite a big improvement over the old server which was a Pentium 2 350mhz with 512MB RAM!
Going to see Crispin Glover’s What Is It? in Ann Arbor on the 16th. After the movie Crispin is going to do a Q&A which should be really interesting. I’ve heard the movie is pretty damn wacky. Can’t wait!