Posts from February 2006
February 28, 2006
Are you sure?
Today I was working behind the bar, and I got the standard oldtime newbie young Chinese drinker request, "Can you make it real strong please?"
I'm always curious whether some of these drinkers can actually taste the difference, or is it a matter of economy, so I decided to find out. I poured a full glass of rum on the rocks, at least 5 shots worth, and added a splash of grapefruit juice. "Here you go. This is pretty strong."
They tasted it, and looked at me quizically. "I can't taste anything. Are you sure you made it strong?"
Sigh...
February 09, 2006
First band in space
Our whole band was selected for the first "band in space" progam sponsored by NASA. Essentially what we had to do was give up a few years of our lives while living in a spaceborn mobile home on it's way to some far corner of the solar system. The concept was to monitor the effects of space on our musical works and lives.
It essentially turned into a two year party with instruments and weird gravitational forces. The biggest issue we had was that the gravity machine in our "mobile home" was incorrectly set up. Instead of having gravity on the floor, which would be normal, and we could do normal things like brush our teeth, shower, cook, walk around on the carpet, etc., the gravity was set up the be one of the four walls. So we essentially did the two year progam living sideways.
Being jazz musicians, we found this mildly amusing, and adjusted accordingly, setting up the entire mobile home sideways, so we were walking on the windows, and pissing sideways into the toilet hanging on the wall. Cooking was an entirely new experience as the stove was now jutting out of the wall, and the burners facing us. Showers were hilarious, as you had to jump up into the shower sideways.
Anyways, after two years in space, we finished the program, recorded a couple of great "spacy" albums, and wrapped up back on the ground with extensive physical and pychological testing.
Then they let us go.
Unfortunately, the sideways gravity thing never went away, and now our internal gravity was skewed, so that we couldn't walk on the ground anymore. Our ground was off 90 degrees. The weirder thing was that the our gravity was now based on the visual proximity of the horizon. For some reason, the visible sky always had to be the the right, not above.
February 04, 2006
Is Mickey getting even?
This interesting NY Times story on HK Disneyland's poor ticketing practices could be made even more juicy with some more information. Did Disney actually overprint the tickets? It says the attendance "numbers were larger than anticipated." Did they set up any inside deals with tour companies? It says mainland tour agencies "bought large batches of discounted tickets." Then when people arrived in HK from a ticket in hand, they couldn't get in.
Sounds perfectly normal, for China. Isn't that what already happens for all the big concerts in China? Hey, don't they call that ticket pirating?
Throws kind of an interesting twist on the whole pirating issue you always hear about. I'm sure someone is chuckling in some Disney boardroom somewhere about this irony.
February 03, 2006
Maybe I'm missing something
Irene and I love going to movies. We always just show up, pick the one that's showing next, and usually we have an enjoyable time. We are not picky, and rarely if ever pan a movie. We even avoid reading reviews so we are not influenced before we go by someone else's opinions. We are pretty much total non movie snobs.
Today all that backfired. We went to see Syriana, which looked like a smart intrigue movie, great cast, fantastic screenwriter/director. Wrong.
After seeing the movie, I feel angry for spending two hours of my time watching someones expensive mess. I felt like like this is what happens when you give people who are too smart too much control over something.
I kept asking myself - Was this what they really intended the movie to be? Did they actually play it for a control group audience with smart entertainment executives in the audience, and get a positive response? Did they all sit in the editing room and say to themselves, Yeah, baby, this is the shit. This is killer footage. We have a hit here. I couldn't believe it, so I came home to read the reviews to confirm what I was feeling, and was even more surprised that it was so well liked by so many critics.
I must be missing something.
I've never figured out whether it's pronounced "Moe's (like owned by one of three stooges) or Moss (like that guy out of Bonanza), but the one down the hill from me is open until 2am most days, which means that if I get out of the club early enough, I can catch the best burger in town, the muo si la bao or the Spicy Mos Burger. They have lots of jalapenos and 
