If you live around here you can see me on two very different occasions this weekend. Friday night I'm DJing the Tommy Stinson/Jesse Malin gig at Voxhall, where I'll bring the block rockin' beats moody singer/songwriter jams from the days of yore (Parsons, Drake, Dylan, Reed, Cash, Springsteen, and Prine) and more contemporary stuff as well (Yorn, Tweedy, Adams, Kozelek, Farrar, and tons more). And if people get a little rambunctious I'll probably drag out some NYC rock to get us into party mode. Needless to say it's going to rule supreme!

Unfortunately, I have to get up at dawn the next day as we've entered a flag football tournament and have to be signed in at 8:30. I realize this act of insanity craves a smidgen of explanation, so here goes. I obviously love American football (Go Ravens!), but I have no wish to get my ass handed to me by a 300 pound linebacker on a weekly basis, so instead I play the occasional game of flag football with the boys (flag football is a no-contact version of football, where each player wear a belt with a strip on either side, which has to be pulled off when making a 'tackle').

Well, Zulu, the tv-station which shows NFL every Sunday night, has a tournament called Zulu Flag Bowl 2004 and someone entered us to play in the tournament (our team is called Aaby Pirates for some reason). So this week we've been practicing and Saturday at 9 AM we have our first game of the one day tournament. I'm not quite sure how it works, but I think first we have to play three games against the teams in our group and then we might qualify for quarterfinals and then the teams play until there's a winner. I believe the winner goes on to play the winner of the tournament held last weekend in Copenhagen, so you get a 'Super Bowl' with a team from each side of the country. We've been training trick plays, reverses, fake hand-offs, and what have you, so I think we'll be fairly disappointed not to make it out of our group. But after that we'll just have to see. It should be a lot of fun no matter what happens. So if you want to see me run slants and outs (or see the guys from Zulu play) we'll be at Tigers' training ground in Viby all day Saturday.

I've been fairly busy the last couple of weeks, but I did get around to see 21 Grams, which I had been wanting to see for a while. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite as good as I had hoped. The acting was good and the idea of the intertwined lives was interesting. But I felt the fancy editing got in the way of the intensity, because I spent more time trying to figure out when stuff was happening in the narrative timeline than getting engulfed in the character's lives. The acting was definitely strong, the cinematography was gritty and interesting, and the editing had you guessing and interested in finding out how all this was going to tie together. But ultimately I found the ending slightly disappointed and as I said I wasn't exactly swept away by the story while watching the movie.

Like most people I've been listening to the Interpol and the William Shatner records this week and I've been digging them both. At first I wasn't too hooked on the Interpol album and couldn't understand why they'd put the two best tracks at the end of the record. But after listening to it on repeat all day I'm now liking it a lot. It sounds a lot like the first one, but at the same time it's definitely different. I don't think it's quite as intense and desperate as the first one, but it has the same dark tone and Paul Paul Interpol's weird voice. So if you liked the first one you should definitely check out "Antics".

I probably won't be buying the Shatner record, but it's worth checking out all the same. I've been listening to the streamed version on the VH1 site and his version of Common People is absolutely friggin' brilliant! I like his voice, Ben Folds singing the first bit, and it's nice to hear Aimee Mann chime in as well. But the kicker is to hear Joe Jackson sing towards the end. Man, does that guy sound bitter! Apparently, Joe grew up liked common people in 1950s England and it would seem he quite effortlessly is able to relate to the lyrics.
While that version is both rockin' and amusing there's a lot more emotion to the song That's Me Trying about a deadbeat dad. The song was written by Folds and Shatner in collaboration with Nick Hornby, which is quite interesting.
Another interesting collaboration comes towards the end of the record where Shatner and Henry Rollins get pissed off by pretty much everything and everybody in the song I Can't Get Behind That. So it's definitely an interesting album, which I might eventually pick up, but right now I have to focus on buying stuff like food and if I have a few extra squid they'll be going directly towards getting the new Duran Duran record, which is out next week.

I noticed a few things this week, which I'm just going to throw out there:

I just realized today that The Mario Brothers are called Mario Mario and Luigi Mario. I always assumed they were called Mario Bros. because Luigi just came along later on and since Mario was already famous it was just the easiest to called them Mario Bros. instead of having to invent a new name for them.

I was watching the new Danish tv-station Charlie (whose demographic is 60 - dead btw), because they were showing Jeeves & Wooster one night. During that first episode Jeeves referes to himself as a valet, but pronounces it 'va-let' as opposed to 'va-lay' as Americans tend to. I wonder why that is? You'd think if anyone would pronounce a word with a la-di-da accent it would be Brits and not Yanks.

I've been doing weblog lectures lately and have another coming up shortly, so I've actually been reading weblog related articles and entries for the first time in a long time. One of the things I stumbled on was that 'Blogs' had actually been a Jeopardy! category recently. And the other was that Evan Williams quit Blogger. The former is a lot more shocking than latter, but the latter is still quite a surprise.

And the final thing is that apparently the cool kids are now wearing Danish Design.