Braving the crowds

Are you kidding me? They delayed Family Guy for twenty minutes for the president’s speech? What type of country is this? I mean, we really need to get our priorities straight. They should have had the speech at 8:30 because no one would be that upset that American Dad is delayed. But Family Guy? That goes against everything that this great nation has been built on.

(Yeah, I watched the speech in parts. The Bears game is also on so I’ve been torn between stations. I figure it was the usual, “We’ll win the war though ‘win’ and ‘war’ have been really poorly defined. And if you disagree you are an unpatriotic communist.” That’s probably the gist of it.)

Not much going on this weekend. Took care of almost all of my Christmas shopping this weekend, which is good since Christmas is technically coming up pretty soon. I was able to avoid most of the crowds but I still had to brave the mall in December. Maybe this is a guy thing, maybe it is just me, but I just can’t stand crowds at the mall. When I go shopping it is a well organized process. I have primary and secondary objectives. I will go to these three stores, I will pick up these five items, if opportunity presents itself I may attempt to acquire three tertiary items. There are timetables, routes, everything is prepared to the nth degree. Then I hit the mall and everyone is just wandering around, looking at a tree like it’s the first time that they’ve ever seen one, and I just go bonkers. Thank God for Amazon and Ebay.

(But it did give me time to listen through the Paula Cole CD. A painful, painful experience. I’ll admit that it is horrible that I own this disc but it’s not like it was unpopular. Apparently a lot of people were idiots in the mid-90’s.)

Since I am completely out of material right now (and I don’t know if anyone would want to read play by play of the Bears game) I’ll hit on one of my housekeeping issues that I am going to bring up between now and the end of the year. As we near the year anniversary of the five random CDs I’ve decided to continue with the effort. It is a lot of fun and I get to hear music that I haven’t listened to in some cases over a decade. But there are going to be some changes made. First of all, starting on January 1 I will be implementing the “no repeats” rule. Given Excel’s random number generator isn’t this is what I have to do to ensure that I don’t have to listen to the same disc three times. Also, I’ll try to give a mini preview/review as I go along. Consider it to be like putting your iPod on shuffle, except you don’t actually get to hear any of the music.

The five random CDs of the week:
1) Laura Minor “Salesman’s Girl”
2) Old 97’s “Early Tracks”
3) Waco Brothers “Do You Think About Me?”
4) Gillian Welch “Revival”
5) Bruce Springsteen “Human Touch”