Review: Dashboard Confessional on Conan O'Brien

Last night I had the good fortune to find out that Dashboard Confessional would be on Late Night with Conan O'Brien as the musical guest. While this would mean I would have to stay up a little later than I planned, it also meant I would be able to check out a live performance by an interesting acoustic emo act that I've grown to be quite a fan of.

Dashboard is the "solo" project of Chris Carrabba, formerly of Further Seems Forever. I say "solo" because he is only actually playing by himself on about half of the songs on his newest album, and indeed on Conan he was joined by his backing band of indie-rock clones with their indie t-shirt and jeans ensembles. I expected Chris to also be an indie-rock clone as well from the sound of his music, but I was shocked and horrified to a Frankenstein-like patchwork of other genres. His head, with its slicked back hair and nerdy apperance, looked straight out of Weezer. His arms were covered with an unnecessary excess of tattoos, a la Fred Durst or some other generic rap/rock frontman. Only the lower half of his body, with the same indie-rock jeans as his bandmates, portrayed his musical style accurately.

But that was just the image, the music also left a little to be desired. For some reason he chose to perform "Screaming Infidelities", which is not one of my favorite Dashboard Songs. "Your hair, it's everywhere" he screams over and over again as the song comes to a close. "Again I Go Unnoticed" would have been a much more apropos selection from the new album, especially since this would showcase more of the whole band, and it has infinitely better lyrics and music.

It was not a good introduction of Dashboard to the world, as now the populace probably view Chris Carrabbas not as the songwriting genius that he is, but instead as someone who tried to be a rap/rocker and in failing begrudgingly took up the acoustic guitar instead. It was disappointing, but it does not change the fact that the music of Dashboard as a whole is excellent and unique. Rap/metal image or not, expect the band to continue to release quality music in the future, so that I have even more CDs to spend all my money on.

Pete just attempted to make a post to my weblog, but alas he was foiled by not knowing the login and/or password to the negative273 ftp server. I accidentally signed on to Blogger, then had to leave the room to help someone since these are my TA hours. During my absence Pete swooped in, made a post referring to some fictitious drinking that I purportedly did last night. Unfortunately for him, none of you will ever read of my imaginary drunken revelry.

[Pete] Just remember, I hacked into Dev's computer. I can do it again. hehehe..... [/Pete]

I have been remiss. In almost all posts I make some reference to Vanessa's homepage in an effort to subliminally direct my readers there, but I have not reciprocated a link from Adam's homepage. It is common netiquette in the weblog world that if someone links to your page you should reciprocate and provide a link to their site. Therefore when Adam links to my page, I need to link back to Adam's page. So I recommend that everyone go read Adam's webpage, even though he does not update it very frequently.

In four days I will be on the high seas, soaking in the sun and sipping non-alcoholic Pina Colada's while stuffing my face and gambling. What a life.

I could resist posting this. There is a website where you can register yourself as a clown with the National Clown and Character Registry. For $18.95 plus $2.00 S&H, you send in two pictures of yourself (painted as a clown of course), and in return you get an official ID card with your real name and clown name. The real perk, of course, is that now your face is a registered trademark that cannot be copied by other clowns. I am not kidding. And that's not all. For archival purposes the Registry paints a replica of every face on a goose egg. Does that mean that somewhere out there, there is a vault of thousands of goose eggs with clown faces painted on them? How are they organized? If, as a clown, I reported someone using my trademarked face without permission, how would they verify this?

Registry Official: "Well, they are similar, but we can see from trademark egg 5872b that your face has green circles around the eyes while the clown in question clearly has red circles around his eyes."

And why the ID card?

Police Officer: "I'm sorry sir, I'm going to have to book you for two counts of spraying seltzer water from a flower without a license."

You can even have the National Clown and Character Registry visit your group, convention, or (I am not making this up) alley. All of this is possible by contacting Tom E. Boy, who is a member of Clowns of America International, World Clown Association, Mid-Atlantic Clown Association and the Kanawha Klowns, as well as (I am still not making this up) the Charleston, West Virginia Chamber of Commerce. He is an alumnus of the Northeast Tennessee Clown College, as well as a number of clown post-graduate programs that are listed on his webpage.

This is why I love the internet.

Yes, yes, I've been a slacker and not posted to the weblog recently, but you can't yell at me because today is my birthday. That's right, today I celebrate 22 years on this planet without accomplishing anything of note. One guy in the engineering school here has synthesized a new polymer. I have written a lot of Java code. Another guy can quote medical journals. I can quote the Simpsons. Alas, alas...

In celebration of my birthday, the fickle St. Louis weather gods decided that after being 70 degrees and balmy yesterday, it would sleet and snow today. Right now all of the outdoors are coated in a thin layer of ice, making it impossible for me to walk from Vanessa's suite to my own in less than half an hour. In just six short days I will be out on the ocean, where it will (hopefully) be sunny and warm. Until then, I do not leave my suite.

I haven't had much time recently to post or make the updates I've wanted to for my weblog. As you've probably noticed, I still don't have the FAQ page done. I aim to post some questions to it soon, most likely Tuesday or Wednesday, but I want to make this an interactive FAQ. If you have any questions about the site, or about the world in general, email them to me and I'll answer them on the FAQ page. They can be as serious or silly as you like.

This weekend I have had way too many meetings, it has been ridiculous. Yesterday I met with my WUGrade and Robot Simulator groups, and today I have a meeting with my Marketing Strategy groups and a Tau Beta Pi initiation meeting. I also found an apartment on Friday along with David and michael, so as soon as our applications go through we will be on the waiting list for an apartment.

Next Sunday I leave to cruise the Caribbean for a week, so I promise to provide some interesting content before I leave to hold you over for the week.

Random musings:

-Today at lunch I overheard someone use the phrase "naked sorority".

-Last week Bryan and I saw a television show about a monkey bartender from the early 80's. The monkey would mix and serve drinks, give people their bills and accept money from them, and even light their cigarettes for them (as well as one of his own occasionally).

-Never fear, preteen pop fans, Lance from NSync is not going to outer space, although he's already out of this world...

-In Romania a man is selling plots of land on the moon, even though he doesn't actually own them in the first place. Hmm...

-There is a movie out right now that stars Britney Spears. And it's #2 in the box office.

Sometimes I think our society has advanced incredibly since our hunter-gatherer, cave-dwelling days. Then I read articles like this.

I got you. Just when you wrote me off and thought "great, after only a week and a half he has already run out of material", I return. I left my dorm to walk to the grader's office this morning, and had no idea on what to write about today. I have a few feature ideas, but I can't very well post features every day can I? "No, Chris, we want to hear more of your observations about your everyday life." Great.

So I leave the dorm fresh out of ideas, and after 1 minute of walking I encounter the most recent bane of my existance. [in slow, stoned-out, hippie voice] "Hey maaaaaaan. Fill out a postcard to protect our national forests, maaaaaaaan?" [end stoned-out hippie voice]. For the last month, no matter where I go on campus he is there. The path between the rabbit and Mallinckrodt? He is there. Inside Mallinckrodt? There too. Under the underpass? Yup. I even saw him on the Delmar Loop one day.

And it's not just him, he has a whole army of minions who do his bidding and pass out postcards when he isn't around. One day I was late for class so I was running through Mallinckrodt when I was accosted by a female compatriot of his. After standing right in my path and blocking my way, she gave me the same song-and-dance about how if I fill out this one postcard our entire world will be much better off. I politely declined and tried to be on my way, as I was already 10 minutes late, but she would not let me by. I tried to move laterally, but she sidestepped along with me. I tried to move forward, but she would not give an inch. Finally I managed to wiggle around her and keep going, or else I may have remained there in stasis all afternoon, under the control of the hippies.

Solicitation on campus is nothing new. Unwashed, dreadlocked hippies are preferable to the cavalcade of credit card corporations that frequented Mallinckrodt and Wohl in past years, but not when they barricade my progress to class and are seemingly everywhere at once. The whole situation begs a few questions:

Do any of these people have jobs?
How are they filling a petition with the same people filling out postcards? Shouldn't they move to different areas?
What would they do with my personal information once they obtained it?

and most importantly:

Are postcards printed on PAPER the best way to save trees?

This last one is especially vexing. Wouldn't an online petition on some official website be much more informative and much more environmentally-conscious? They could do IP logging in order to make sure the same person doesn't fill out the petition over and over from the same computer. It would be so much more environmentally-friendly, and I would be able to walk to class in peace and on time. Now that would make my world much better off.

Today's Quiz: What do the following words have in common: Jordan, Bamboo, Cross, Seven?

Today's Answer: They are all names of children of the rap duo OutKast. Neither "artist" is married.

  What Were They Smoking When They Thought Up: Motorcycles on Ice

At someplace called the "Family Arena", you can bring your whole family to an event that is sure to please even the pickiest of motocross fans: Motorcyles on Ice (ice...ice...ice...)! In the television ad on tv we see only glimpses of the fun that is had by all. Cyclists skid and crash into walls! Cyclists slide into each other forming a giant pileup! Children and adults alike cheer on the carnage! What could they possibly have been thinking when they combined motocross and hockey into this one huge mass of blood and wreckage? Here's how I envision it...

Family Arena Executive: Attendance to our events is down because of 9/11, what can we do to draw crowds?
Forward-Thinking Young Yes-Man: How about motocross? Midwestern and southern folk love it for some inexplicable reason.
Family Arena Executive: That's a good idea and all, but the only thing people pay to see are the crashes. And the Family Arena is an ice rink, it would cost us too much money to cover up the ice surface with dirt.
Forward-Thinking Young Yes-Man: Then don't cover it. If the motorcyclists have to ride on ice, there is no way they won't crash.
Family Arena Executive: But won't that be dangerous to the drivers, never mind the impressionable young children who will run home and try it themselves?
Forward-Thinking Young Yes-Man: Of course it will, but think of the money we'll make! $$$!

And with that, middle-America saw the birth of a fabulous new sport. Look for it at an arena near you, the weekend after the monthly Gun and Knife Show and two weeks before the Jeff Foxworthy Stand-Up Spectacular.

Sometimes, no matter what you do, bad luck will find you. I had managed to live the last two weeks without even a hint of bad luck, but this afternoon it came back to bite me in the ass. This afternoon, David and I were happily working on the big red robot (affectionately named "Big Red Trashcan" because of its shape and size), and actually making progress. After implementing a new section of code, we set out to test the code on the robot. Unbeknownst to us, there was an infinite loop in the code that caused it to not avoid running into walls, which the old code we had written did. Therefore the robot careened, at a slow speed, smack into a wall. It stopped itself, and on its screen came the choices "shut down" or "restart". We had been told many many times by Dr. Smart to never do either of these, so we looked at each other and pondered our predicament for a few seconds before the robot took things into its own hands and shut itself down. After pushing it back into the Media and Machines lab, we realized that there was no discernable way to turn the robot back on. This was not good. "Never turn off the robot", Dr. Smart always said. But the robot was off. This was not good.

No one has sent me the graphics I requested, which is your loss, dear reader, because it just means more of a delay until I can start doing the semi-regular features that I want to post. I've already done a few reviews, which was one of the features, but I'm itching to write a "If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck..." or a "What were they smoking when they thought up this idea?". Sadly I will not write either until I find appropriate graphics of a duck and some sort of smoking implement. How long can you hold out, folks? Send me graphics.

  Review: Phantom of the Opera

Today I saw the Phantom of the Opera with my wonderful girlfriend at the Fox Theater downtown. It was very good, and it is the first time I have seen any incarnation of Phantom, which got me thinking about the plot. I can't figure out if the phantom was intended to be a sympathetic character or not.

[Warning! Spoilers! If you haven't seen the play and you plan on it don't read any further!]

Throughout the play we see the phantom drop chandeliers precariously close to people, hang folks from the rafters, kill people and then masquerade as them, and threaten total disaster. At the same time, however, he is courting Christine and bemoaning his fate as a "freak" with an altered face. Are we the audience supposed to feel sorry for his physical plight despite the fact that he is a completely despicable character?

Elizabeth claims that on an emotional level she feels sorry for him, but I just can't look past the fact that while he is in love with Christine he kills at least two other people and threatens to kill the man she is in love with. At the end, the phantom lets him go and allows Christine to go with him and be with the man she really wants to be with, but he never says "gee, maybe I shouldn't have killed those two other people". How noble is it really for him to not hang Raoul and keep Christine trapped as his love slave in the grotto for the rest of her life? Isn't not hanging someone behavior we expect from people, not behavior that we normally view sympathetically? If anyone has any thoughts, email me and I'll post them to the site.

Real honest-to-goodness phrases taken from things found at Chinese establishments and their real meanings:

"Monday Close" -- In reality I'm guessing that it means this particular establishment is not open on Mondays, but wouldn't it be cool if it meant that on Mondays the restaurant became physically closer to my place of residence while returning to its normal driving distance on all other days?

"Welcome to Chinese Restaurant. please try your Nice Chinese Food With Chopsticks the traditional and typical of Chinese glorious history. and cultural" [spelling and punctuation (or lack thereof) in context] This one starts off so well, reminding me that I have indeed walked into a Chinese restaurant and not a Mexican or Thai restaurant by accident. Although I'm not exactly sure which Chinese restaurant. Then it gets a little wild. First they state that all Chinese food is "Nice", which is not necessarily true (especially if I'm consuming Assorted Eel Parts or one of Pete's favorites). Then they assert that by being a stupid fat American and using a fork I am insulting their long and glorious history and traditions. As an afterthought they point out that I am insulting their culture too in a tersely-worded sentence fragment. I can't help but think that this translation is an insult to our language.

"Let our chef make special food." -- Actually I think I'd rather the chef stick to making food he's familiar with...

"You will be surprised!" -- ...especially after reading this.

"We do all kind celebrate catering" -- 'I know those words, but when you put them together they don't mean anything'--Lisa Simpson

"Have a party? Call us!" -- Maybe I will, I bet they'd be more fun than drunken frat guys or scantily-clad sorority girls. On second thought...

Have you found any other great phrases like these in Chinese restaurants or in fortune cookies? Send them to me and I'll post the best ones to the site and give you all the glory. Go ahead. You know you want to.

The links page is up, now you can read the same webpages that I do and like the same music that I do. Conform dammit!

A very odd occurrence happened at lunch today. About five of us were eating in a booth in the corner when we heard Vaughn, one of the Bon Appetit employees who was picking up trash, yell out "I thought you were my friend" to a student named Kevin who was sitting at a table with a female companion. After a few moments, Vaughn went over to Kevin's table and started being belligerent and accusing him of saying he would eat with him when he was instead eating with the girl at his table. They had a verbal exchange, where Kevin tried to calmly tell Vaughn that he told him he would be eating with a friend, but Vaughn kept saying that Kevin "did it on purpose" in a loud voice. After a few minutes, Vaughn went back to doing his job. This is the second strange Bon Appetit employee incident in the past two weeks (the first being a recently-fired employee chasing another employee with a knife behind the counter during lunch hour), which makes me wonder how much control they have over their workers. While as students we should be courteous to the workers and help them out by picking up after ourselves and being pleasant to them, we should not also be required to justify who we eat with or be subjected to being yelled at by them for no reason.

I am in search of graphics for feature posts. Keeping in mind the color motif of the site, if someone could point me in the direction of some small-ish icons of a spotlight, a duck, a person or man-shaped figure, and a question mark, I would be eternally grateful and give you due credit on this site. Email me if you can help out. "I will take care of you"...

  Review: The Vagina Monologues

With my guy card left back at the CEC, I attended the Vagina Monologues this evening with my girlfriend. No, before you get all riled up she did not force me to go, I was actually kind of curious after reading about it every year and how controversial it was. You can imagine my disappointment, then, when after an hour and a half I was not the least bit offended. One of the monologues was graphically painful, one was frought with cussing, and one was basically ten minutes of moaning and fake orgasms (note to self: girls are masters of deception, this skit proved it), but there was never that sense of uneasiness in the crowd that I expected. During one of the monologues, the crowd even began chanting "cunt! cunt! cunt!" along with the performer. Still no controversy. In fact, the only awkward moment came when the show was over and one solitary girl stood up to give the group a standing ovation, then looked down at her male companion and ordered him to stand up with her. He declined, and she looked rather silly until a minute later when everyone stood up while the cast gave their final bows. The show had its funny moments, the girl with the angry cussing monologue was fantastic, but I still left with a feeling of lacking. Where was the edginess? Where were the religious protesters outside? Where were the immature guys giggling like schoolgirls every time someone said the word "vagina"? Oh well, if past events are any indication there will soon be a bevy of mockingly-created frat posters that will stir up some good old campus controversy...

I think it's about time to unplug my phone at night. This morning I was awoken by yet another phone call, this time it was (judging from the caller id) someone from the WashU med school who wanted my suitemate Bob to do some illustration for him. Normally this wouldn't bother me, but this particular call came in at 9 am, a time when I am normally fast asleep.

Tonight I will put my guy-ness into the closet for the evening and attend the Vagina Monologues. Check back later for a review.

I've added pages for my music, a site FAQ, and assorted links. Nothing is up on them yet, but I should have some content in them by later today.

I spruced up the site a bit today, which should make the art majors out there happy. I'm still a little bit torn about the links at the top, however. I've tried a lot of different arrangements for the two link bars, the top being links related to myself or this page and the bottom being links to other weblogs/pages hosted by -273. Should I split them up into two different tables? Put my links below the community links for easier navigation? Put the community links on a separate links page? Let me know so I can make this site pleasing to the eye and easy to navigate.

For about the tenth day in a row, the hallway of my dorm smells like smoke. This is especially vexing considering I am on the second floor, so someone is deliberately smoking indoors and not just propping open a door to the outside. Some days it smells like cigarettes, others it smells like cheap quickie-mart cigars, but every day it smells like a pool hall.

One final note. I'd like to make a shout-out to my wonderful girlfriend Vanessa and encourage everyone to visit her webpage.

I was planning to do a lot of editing last night, but unfortunately blogger was down so I didn't get the opportunity. Therefore you'll have to hold out at least another day for the page to be prettified, right now I'm just using a template.

This morning I received a phone call from Mellon Financial, a company that I interviewed with back in October. They were supposed to fly me out for a second interview in Pittsburgh back in November, but because of "time constraints" (read: "money troubles") they postponed it until January. At the end of January I received an email that a new person was in charge of recruiting (read: "we're still having financial troubles"), so they wouldn't be able to fly me out until the beginning of February. Then I received the call this morning, where instead of giving me flight information they scheduled a phone interview for the end of this week. I'm puzzled by a number of things:

a) What could they possibly have left to learn about me over the phone? They already talked to me in person for about an hour, doesn't the progression usually go phone interview -> in person interview? Why are they doing it the other way around?

b) Would I really want to work for a company I've never visited in a city I've been to once?

c) Would I really want to work for a company that is obviously in some sort of tight financial spot where they can't even afford to fly me there for one day? Who is to say that they wouldn't decide two months into my employment that they needed to cut back even more and fire me? And it's not like they were even honest about their dire financial straits, they made up stories about not having enough time for goodness sake.

d) Which day did I actually schedule the phone interview for? I was half asleep at the time, so while I believe I scheduled it for Friday at 2, I could just as well have scheduled it for Thursday at 2 (when I will be in class) or some other random time thanks to sleep-induced psychosis.

Speaking of sleep-induced psychosis, according to my Ask Jeeves page-a-day calendar if a human is not allowed to sleep for 10 days they will either die or go into a psychotic state. If I go even one night without sleep I go into said psychotic state, so I can only imagine what it's like after 10 sleepless nights.

Hey everyone, this is the first post to my weblog. I've finally joined the ranks of the nouveau-cyber-elite and decided to post my daily (or semi-daily) rantings. I also plan on linking to my solo musical projects here as well as other interesting tidbits I find. Keep reading, it will get interesting...