I’ve finally gotten around to recount the events of last Thursday. The original plan was to go see The Handsome Family at Voxhall and then head home, but I met a friend who invited me to a party, so I went to that after the concert.

I went to the concert along with probably 25 other paying customers. That’s not exactly a lot of people in a venue that usually fits 500. But thankfully they’d set up tables and chairs, so the room didn’t look completely empty. The Handsome Family consists of three members. A husband on guitar and lead vocals, a wife on backing vocals, bass, and miscellaneous instruments, and a brother-in-law on drums. The concert began with the members wandering onstage and shuffling papers around and then eventually starting in on the first song. From then on every song would be introduced by the wife (who’d say stuff like; “This next song is about birds. And death. Birds and death.”), which would lead to a couple of weird comments from the husband, then some bickering between the two of them, and then finally a song. She would occasionally rush him and he’d say stuff like “It’s not like they’re going anywhere” and she’d be like “They could leave any minute” and then be like “This is the slowest sinking ship I’ve ever been on” (Sorry if I sound like a character from Clueless, but it’s the easiest way to retell the conversation).

This went on for an hour and a half, but it was actually quite amusing. It is definitely the first concert I’ve seen, where the singer kicks of a sneaker and then runs backstage to get a pair of slippers. He then returned and kicked off the other sneaker, put on the slippers, and did a couple of tap dancing moves to show how comfortable he now was.
If you don’t know The Handsome Family I think their music can best be described as slow country music. They use pretty dark humour and even though I didn’t really know any of the songs, the combination of their weird stage presence and entertaining songs meant that I quite enjoyed the show. During the concert they made a couple of reference to the band Lambchop, who had played a concert the night before. Supposedly, the concert had been great, but I unfortunately missed it. But now I know that they took their name from a television show about a puppet called Lambchop, which had to be cancelled, when the woman who supplied the voice of Lambchop died.

A friend of mine works at the venue and he had stopped by to check out the band. After the concert he invited me to an art school party, which we went to that straight after the concert. I knew a couple of people at the party, so it wasn’t completely weird for me, but it was still a different scene from what I’m used to. It was most mostly students from the school, who was there, and I don’t think I’m offending anyone when I say they all looked weird. I think they were going for that look and in my opinion they succeeded quite well.

A lot of them acted weird as well, so inspired by BradLands I’ve transcribed an example of a conversation. So here’s a scene from the Aarhus bar scene:

[A guy in a huge parka with huge headphones around his neck walks up to me]
Guy: Take a flyer for this concert I’ve arranged.
Me: You gave me one of those already.
Guy: Oh well, you should come. We’re going to play some fucked up music.
Me: Like this? [Referring to the music being played in the background]
Guy: Oh, a lot more fucked up than that. Like fucked up. Like totally fucked up.
Me: ‘Cause the stuff they played before sounded like someone violently cleaning his toilet.
Guy: Ha ha. Well yeah, more fucked up than that.
Me: Great.

That sums up the intelligence level of the conversations I had at that party, so after a couple of beers I took off. But somehow I still managed to have a massive hangover the next day, so I had to cancel on the party I was supposed to go to Friday night.

I just came back from seeing Arsenal beating Bolton, so I’m a bit knackered (which should explain spelling errors and so forth). But they’re now definitely on the way to winning The Double and I just got a new apartment and new CDs today, so I’m a happy knackered.

Today is turning out to be an amazing day. I received my order from Amazon today with the new Wilco CD, a The Hives CD (which is kind of a Best Of), and the Design for Community book that I'm looking forward to reading. But the really big news is that I've made plans for moving into a new apartment in June. My friend, who came over from Copenhagen this weekend, had sorted it all out, so today I called his brother, who's in charge of renting it out, and I can move in June 1st. I costs the same as this place, but it's a bit bigger and has a balcony. It's not as downtown as my current apartment, but it's closer to my brother, sister, and some of my friends, and they don't have junkies lying on their doorstep up there. So along with the fact that the weather is amazing and we're going to see the Arsenal - Bolton game tonight this is a pretty great day.

And the "reunion" thing this weekend went great, but more on that later along with details from the concert last Thursday.

Just a quick entry to say that everything is cool with Google now. I received an email from Dan Hersam, who is an editor at dmoz, and he could tell me that not only had he added my URL to the right category (as opposed to the one I had added my URL to. D'oh!), but you can actually add your site to Google here. After studying information and media science for seven years and working for a streaming media company for two years you'd think I'd be a bit more computer/internet literate, but I guess not. So thanks goes out to Dan for making everything alright.

In unrelated news a friend called my today and said that there's a very good chance that I'll be able to move into his old apartment this summer. His parents own an apartment, which he lived in while going to school and when he moved to Copenhagen they rented it out to some girl. Apparently, she's been nothing but trouble and since she's moving out this summer they'd like to rent it out to someone they already know. And this is where good, old, trustwhorthy John enters the picture. My friend is coming to town tomorrow for a get together we're having for a couple of old friends (nothing like The Big Chill. Just a couple of guys going out to dinner and a club) and he'll fill me in on the details. So if that works out it'll really solve a major problem for me, so wish me luck.

I have a major headache today, so I have to postpone writing about the concert I went to last night at Voxhall. I went to see The Handsome Family and it was a lot of fun, but more on that, when I feel a bit better.

Google is a pretty incredible search engine. I remember when everyone thought Altavista was amazing, but these days all you hear about is Google. It’s a bit weird, because you can’t add you own site to their search engine and there is no structure to the results you get from searching like at Yahoo!. But they seem to be able to find the most relevant pages for you, so I guess that’s why they’re so popular. I’ve been reading articles about Google bombing and things like that lately, but I’m not completely sure I get how Google works, so they don’t always make sense to me.
But I was very excited, when Google picked up my site. It meant that people searching for my name or some of the records, movies, or TV shows I had written about would be able to find my site.

I checked Google today to see, which other sites are linking to mine. I’ve done that before and been surprised that it said that no sites linked to mine, because I know of at least ten different sites that do. But I was even more surprised today, when I noticed that my website couldn’t be found on Google at all. A search for my URL and for the site title both came up empty (the second one didn't actually come up empty, but it didn't show my site). After looking around the Google site I found an email address for their webmaster and sent him/her this mail:

My website disappeared

Hi

My website (fauxhemian.blogspot.com) was picked up by Google a few weeks ago, which I very much appreciated. But now searching for the URL or the title of my site doesn’t bring up anything. It’s like everything regarding my site was erased from your database, which I think is a shame.
So I just thought I’d mentioned this with the hope that you’d add my site once again to your excellent search engine.

Thanks,

John

My guess would be that the webmaster over at Google gets more mail during a day than the entire White House, so he/she probably won’t get back to me right away. So if anyone reading this has any idea as to why this happened and perhaps even when my site will be back in the Google database, I’d appreciate it if you left me a message in the Comments section to the left.

I’ve postponed it a couple of times already, but now it’s finally time for the third and final leg of the tour de force know as John’s Excellent Nightfilm Adventure (Had I thought up that name, when I wrote the first instalment it would probably have had a bit more cache by now, but what are you gonna do?).
The first movie I saw Sunday was the Todd Solondz movie Storytelling. I really liked Happiness, I knew that Belle & Sebastian had recorded a bunch of songs for the soundtrack, and I had read about a couple of scenes from the movie that sounded both funny and disturbing, so my expectations were pretty high.

The movie is funny, disturbing, and the actors are great. Unfortunately, the movie will be a disappointment if you’re expecting it to be like Happiness. The movie consists of two stories: One is about a girl, who is dating a guy with cerebral palsy, who gets involved with her creative writing teacher. And the other is about a guy, who wants to make a documentary about a high school kid, who doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life, but dreams about being the next Conan O’Brien. Oddly enough, the first story takes up the first third of the movie and the second takes up the rest, but with no crossover in the storylines. The feeling I had when I left the theatre was that I’d been entertained, but that I never really learned anything about these characters. The movie was intriguing and funny, but didn’t resolve any of the conflicts it presented leaving the characters to continue their weird little lives after the movie ends. So I was actually a bit disappointed in the movie, but since it was so different that anything else you’ll see this year I’m glad I went all the same.

The music by Belle & Sebastian wasn’t very prominent (except for the use of The State I Am In, which is an old favourite) and I thought most of it sounded like Air, so I won’t be rushing out to get that soundtrack anytime soon (nothing against Air, though. I like them a lot).

Later Sunday I got together with a couple of friends for pizza (mozzarella, ruccola, and fresh tomatoes make surprisingly good toppings together on a pizza) and went to see In the Bedroom. I honestly had no idea what this movie was about. I knew who was in it, but I didn’t have a clue as to what the story was about. But actually that’s kind of nice as opposed to going to see a movie, where you’ve already seen all the action bits and the funny bits in trailers and behind the scenes programs. So with that in mind I won't say what the movie is about, but just reveal that it’s about a family, which has to go through some serious changes. It’s actually a fairly suspenseful story, but at times I thought it was told in a too slowly paced tempo. As a friend remarked afterwards, “We haven’t seen a movie that slow since Ulee’s Gold”. But generally speaking it was a pretty good movie with a cast of pretty incredible actors.
However, I just have to mention that I still get spooked whenever I see Sissy Spacek. I don’t know if it’s Carrie or those pale eyes and that pale skin of hers, but she really freaks me out. Big time! And for some reason Mare Winningham has kinda the same effect on me. Don’t ask me why.

But getting back to Bedroom, I thought it was a good movie and it made for a nice ending to the five day long tour de force know as John’s Excellent Nightfilm Adventure (now that I made up a name for it, I better try to sneak it in a couple of times). I saw eleven movies in five days, which was a bit much, but still fun was had by all and I got to spend a lot of time in Øst for Paradis hanging with my buddies. So that was great and now I can get back to chronicling my exciting everyday life again.

I’ve just found out that unless something truly incredible happens I’ll have to move out of my apartment before the 1st of July. I knew this was where things were heading, but now it's a fact. I've thought about moving to Copenhagen, but given my current financial situation I very much doubt that I'll be able to afford it. I’ll probably have to try to find a smaller place here in Aarhus, which leaves me with the same problem I had, when I moved from a two bedroom apartment into my one bedroom apartment last year: Where will I put all my stuff? I have so much stuff that I could fill up half of Buckingham Palace and still have shelf space issues. But that seems to be the only alternative to living on the street, so I guess I’ll just have to deal with it. The thing that bugs me the most is that I know this will only be a temporary solution and that I’ll have to move again sometime next year. And as I’ve stated previously I’m not really into moving.

But I’ll dispense with the whining for a second and tell you about a cool thing that happened yesterday. I’ve been asked to write a couple of reviews for musik.dk from the Spot 08 Festival, which takes place in May. The festival is a showcase for up-and-coming Scandinavian artists and it’s usually pretty cool. And this probably also means that I’ll get to see David Fricke give his speech on Scandinavian music, which ought to be interesting. This will be the first articles I write for them, so hopefully they’ll like them and decide to give me more assignments later.

Monday I mentioned a couple of online golf games, but if you want a real time stealer look no further. Yesterday I rediscovered the genius that is Rock & Roll Jeopardy! I had played this before, but had completely forgotten about it until yesterday, when my brother and I had trouble logging on at the online darts website (What’s that you say? I should be working instead of playing obscure online games? Well, you should be working instead of reading my blog, so I guess that makes us Even Steven!). Anyway, it’s a really cool game and if you’re nuts about music trivia like I am you should check it out.

I usually read the Miss Truth column over at CDnow every day and it's usually pretty good. But today's entry yesterday's entry is one of the dumbest things I've seen in a long time. Robbie Williams is quoted saying: "They just don't get it," he said jokingly. "But actually, I could blame it on a really crap record company, or I could blame it on the fact that every time I've been over there, I've been drunk." To which Miss Truth adds: "Or you could blame it on the fact that considering manufactured, made-for-TV, purely factory-built pop stars generally shoot straight to No. 1 in the U.K. (see Gareth Gates, Hear'Say, etc.), America's tastes may be slightly more highbrow."

Now I don't want to offend anybody, but the members of the American record buying audience is anything but highbrow. If they were highbrow NSync wouldn't have sold 2.4 million copies of No Strings Attached the first week it was released. Hell, if they were even remotely highbrow NSync would be using those cool headsets to take orders at Mickey Dee's. Just look at the charts or go one step further and look at the crap that was nominated for at the Grammys this year and then tell me there's a highbrow record buying audience in the US. I'll agree with Miss Truth that the state of the British charts is pretty appalling, but that doesn't mean the American charts aren't equally horrific.

I’ve already covered the first three days of my five day Nightfilm festival extravaganza, so now we’ve come to Saturday, which was the only day I only saw one movie. That movie was John Waters’ Cecil B. DeMented starring Melanie Griffith as the famous actress Honey Whitlock and Stephen Dorff as guerrilla filmmaker Cecil B. DeMented. Cecil and his merry band of filmmakers kidnap Honey, whom they want to star in their movie Raving Beauty, and then force her to participate in the shooting of scenes where they storm a local cinema and trash a banquet. Obviously, Honey goes Stockholm on them before you can even say Patty Hearst (which is punched home by having Hearst play the concerned mother of one of the kidnappers) and starts doing scenes voluntarily. The point of their movie and guerrilla group is to bring down Hollywood, which leads to a long line of jokes at Hollywood’s expense. But even though the movie packs quite a few laughs, the over-the-top acting is too much and the story (and subsequent ending) is beyond weak. I like John Waters and I love the fact that he gets to make movies like this. But both Pecker and this one weren’t up to the standard of Serial Mom, which is my favourite Waters movie.

However, it was great to see a movie shot in good, old Charm City again and I enjoyed seeing shots from Inner Harbour, a shot of the Washington Monument in Mount Vernon, and I think one of the movie theatres in the beginning is located out near the Towson Mall and is called Towson Commons. According to this article there has actually been made quite few movies in Baltimore, so if you're not sure where the scenes from Sleepless in Seattle were shot (before she goes to Seattle, silly) here's your checklist.

The weather here is amazing right now. The sun is up and it's quite warm, but even if they were giving away free ice cream and sodas I wouldn't be caught outside for all the world. Because today is Blue Monday! I don't know how things are where you live, but here when people reach the age of 13 they usually have a confirmation in church with all their friends. The confirmation (the time when you're confirming your belief in Jesus and God of your own free will as opposed to the baptism) is a nice enough tradition, but here it has become this monster, where families throw huge parties for their teenage sons and daughters, which results in the kids getting an obscene amount of gifts. It's not unusual that someone will get cash gifts to the amount of $1000 or $2000 plus a variety of other stuff, which I think is an insane amount of bread to throw at any kid.

So if you've been confirmed on a Sunday and you have a thousand bucks and change burning a hole in your pocket, what do you do? You get together with all the other people who got confirmed and the next day you swarm into the city like a pack of wealthy Cossacks turning the city centre into Mardi Gras for 13-year-olds (which means no beads, no beer, and therefore no flashing). Kids get confirmed on different Sundays in different counties, which means that this Blue Monday thing doesn’t take place on one Monday a year, but rather on a long line of Mondays in April and May. I realized it was Blue Monday today, while going to get bread this afternoon, but fortunately I was only outside for a few minutes, so I wasn’t in direct contact with any of these Donald Trump for-a-day teens.

I don’t want to come off sounding like a bitter, old man. It’s just that almost once a year I forget what day it is and I go through town to pick up an album or maybe a t-shirt. And the intensity of these kids, who are high on sugar and a mob spending mentality, is just too much for a peace lovin’ hermit like me. They run around screaming and laughing, shooting off this sticky, multicoloured snot-in-a-can, while stuffing their faces with Big Macs and whatnot. So instead of going outside and getting agitated into a heart attack I think it’s safest for everybody if I just stay inside today.

I’ve been searching for interesting blogs for the last couple of days and so far I’ve bookmarked a bunch, which I’ll link to if they keep on interesting me and they get updated on a regular basis. However, I did find the blog Catch Dubs maintained by NYU student Nick Barat interesting enough that I thought I’d link to it right away. Coincidentally, it turns out that he reviews music for Silent Uproar (a site my brother pointed me towards recently), so that just adds to the coolness of his site. More on other blogs and the missing movie reviews will follow shortly.

I noticed on Blogdex that a lot of people were linking to FHM Magazine's mini golf game. I've played Electrotank's mini golf game previously, but this new one is fun as well. And it didn't hurt that I got an amazing 7 under par in my first game. Now you give it a try.

The Nightfilm Festival ends today, which means I’ll be able to get back to living a normal life as soon as I’ve seen In the Bedroom tonight. That’ll be the last of the eleven movies I’ve seen over the last five days, so I think I’m all movied-out for the next couple of weeks. I’ve already talked about the movies I saw Wednesday and Thursday, so now I’ll get to the ones I saw Friday.

Friday afternoon I went to see Waking Life with my friend, who works at the local art house cinema Øst for Paradis. Waking Life is the animated movie, which a lot of critics think were robbed of an academy award nomination. I’ve seen four of Linklater’s movies so far, and although they weren’t all brilliant (Dazed & Confused is by far my favourite) at least he’s trying to do something innovative. Like Slacker this movie doesn’t have a storyline, but is more a series of conversations between characters. But where Slacker was carried by characters bumping into each other in bars and on street corners, Waking Life seems to take place in a dream state, which means that characters sometimes just seem to appear from out of nowhere. There is a main character, who encounters a lot of different people, but there are also scenes with other people, who have nothing to do with the main character. The whole movie is a string of intellectual conversations about life, dreams, movies, reincarnation, and connecting with people, and although this might sound pretentious (and also might feel pretentious while watching the movie) it is bound to spark conversation afterwards. Some of the conversations in the movie are carried out by actors, while others are carried out by professors, friends and there’s even an appearance by Steven Soderbergh. This means that a few scenes don’t work that well, but in general there’s a real enthusiasm to the discussions which can be really infectious.

I think we spent an hour discussing the movie afterwards touching on everything from who the actors were, the technique used to make the movie, when the main character was dreaming and when he was awake, and some of the points made in the movie about filmmaking. I thought it was a truly beautifully made movie and although some of the philosophic rants went over my head I still quite enjoyed it. For more information I recommend reading Roger Ebert’s review and the checking out the official Waking Life site.

Later that day we decided that I should postpone watching Hedwig and The Angry Inch (which was playing at midnight), so I could watch Fast Food, Fast Women with some of the people at Øst for Paradis, who would then watch Hedwig afterwards. They were only playing the one movie late that night, so the employees, who had gotten of work, could put on whatever movie they wanted on one of the other screens. So around 00:30 a.m. we saw Fast Food, Fast Women and then at 2:30 a.m. we saw Hedwig. I didn’t know the first thing about Fast Food, Fast Women, but I thought it was pretty good. It’s a very sweet, slow paced movie about people trying to find love in New York. The main character, Bella, is a waitress, who gets set up with an author/cabdriver. She’s already seeing an older, married Broadway director, so she’s not too interested in meeting someone new, but obviously that changes. There are other characters, who also try to meet someone and although this movie doesn’t really bring anything new to the table it’s a sweet and life affirming movie.

Later we saw Hedwig, which I had already seen. I liked it, but I wasn’t as impressed this time as I was the first time I saw it. John Cameron Mitchell is still fantastic in it and I quite like the music as well. But I think it loses tempo in the final third of the movie. The part where Hedwig meets Tommy Gnosis and the final concert doesn’t really hold up second time around, which was disappointing. But more surprising was the fact that the people I saw it with were a bit disappointed by it. They found parts of it amusing, but didn’t think it was that great. I was completely blown away, when I saw it last year, so I had hoped that they would be as well. After the two movies we sat around drinking beer for a bit, so I wasn't home until after 5 a.m..

In an hour I’m going to meet some friends for dinner and then we’ll go see In the Bedroom. I have no idea or expectations as to what this movie will be like, so we’ll just have to see if I’ll like it or not. I’ll try to add my thoughts on the other movies I’ve seen tomorrow, so I can move on with my life. I haven’t bought groceries this week and I haven’t worked on my thesis this week and I still haven’t decided if I should buy Design for Community, which sounds interesting and could be helpful to my thesis. So I’ll have to look at all that tomorrow.

Draft Day started about thirty minutes ago and if you go to ESPN's Draft Day site you can follow it live. I don't know anything about college football, so I have no idea how good David Carr is or any other player in the draft for that matter. But since the Ravens (my team) have fired pretty much all of their players, this year's draft is very important if they want to be able to build a competitive team for next season. So I'm following the draft hoping that they'll select talented players. And because ESPN's live radio coverage is pretty entertaining (the just referred to Cincinnati as the graveyard for football players), I'll probably hang in there until I have to go see Cecil B. Demented.

I’ve read quite a few blogs during the last year or so and not surprisingly they haven’t all been good. I think that is the main reason it took me so long before I started writing my own blog. I’ve been part of a small blogging community called Interesting Stuff since August last year (it’s in Danish in case you were thinking of following the link) and when I found out how easy it was to create a blog I immediately started thinking about creating my own. But I kept putting it off, because I was convinced that my life was so incredibly boring that I couldn’t imagine that anyone would want to read about it. But I kept thinking about it and reading more and more blogs and I got really fascinated by the fact that I’d go back every day to check up on the doings of complete strangers.

But I realized that I didn’t think about writing a blog in a very focused way until I read an essay called Why Web Journals Suck by Diane Patterson. In the essay she lists a lot of reasons why most people shouldn’t be writing blogs and she gives a lot of helpful advice to people, who decide to do so anyway. The main thing the essay made me think about was why I wanted to write a blog in the first place. And the conclusion was that I wanted to write again. I didn’t want to write a diary and I don’t feel the need to reveal my dark secrets to strangers. I want to write about things I’m interested in and fascinated by with the hope that others might read what I’ve written and perhaps discovery something they didn’t know about. I’ve written a lot of articles in the past on music and movies and I really get a kick out of it. As tough as it can be to meet a deadline for a review of an album that you can’t stand listening to twice I always felt like I’d done my best, when I sent it to my editor and no matter what I’d written about I felt like I’d worked hard to put something interesting out there.

The cool thing for me about publishing my thoughts on the net is that it pushes me to read, re-read, and re-write what I’ve written, so whoever reads it doesn’t think I’m an illiterate jackass. I get annoyed, when I visit blogs where the author obviously hasn’t read through what he or she has written in order to weed out errors in spelling and grammar. And even more so when there are complete sentences, which are so ineptly written that they don’t make sense thereby depriving you the point of the story. I try to make sure that whatever I put up here has been read through and checked for spelling errors and that it’s fairly comprehensible for whoever might read it (you might not notice that, but that’s because you haven’t read the horrible first drafts I’ve written).

So I started writing again and almost immediately I started looking forward to doing so every day. I try to make time for writing every day and I try to write while whatever I want to talk about is still fresh in my memory. The first weeks I just wrote for myself. Nobody visited the site and Google hadn’t picked it up, but I didn’t really care. I felt confident in the old saying: “If you build it, they will come” and besides I was writing more just to get into the habit of writing again every day. Then suddenly I got mentioned on the Blogger site and people started coming by. And my friends suddenly noticed that I’d been writing here for a while without mentioning it and they started coming by. And that’s great. It really is. But at the same time it has made me aware of some of the things that I have to stay away from, because my blog is actually getting visited now.

There are two things I hate, when bloggers do:
1) Make entries without content added to let readers know that the blogger is bored, but still around.
- I can imagine that at some point I will have to start prioritizing my time, so I don’t spend hours every day writing. But hopefully I’ll never be so unimaginative that I won’t have something to say about a story I’ve read, a show I’ve seen, an album I’ve heard, or a person I’ve met. If my life was so boring that the only comment I had to make about my life was that I was bored, I’d reconsider wasting people’s bandwidth and time with my entries. If you're bored living your life, how do you think we feel reading about it?

2) Make entries mentioning life changing events, but then saying that they’re not ready to talk about them yet.
- I met a guy last year, who had a blog that he’d been updating for a while. I checked it a few days after we’d met and then I checked it again this week. The blog has been discontinued, but the last entries are filled with references to changes in his life, but no hints as to what they might be. Maybe I’m being selfish, but I find it annoying that someone would hint at an interesting story and then not tell it. If you know you’re not going to tell the story, then don’t mention it in the first place.

You might find these two points idiotic, self-righteous, and condescending, and you might even be right. But if you are a blogger, or you’re thinking about becoming one I suggest you read Why Web Journals Suck all the same (I also enjoyed reading this article). If nothing else it’ll make you think about, why you are writing or thinking about writing and what someone visiting your blog might be looking for from your writing. A blog isn’t a secret diary. It’s public and eventually someone will read it and when that happens I think it would be nice if they enjoyed it enough that they’d like to come back some other time. Don't you?

Today I went to see The Business of Strangers and Pollock with my sister. Both movies were good, but we agreed that Strangers was the better of the two and that it was actually a quite impressive movie. It stars Stockard Channing and Julia Stiles and besides a guy they met in a bar they’re pretty much the only people with lines in this movie. It’s filmed in a lot of neutral locations (hotels, airports, a company meeting room and so on) and could just as easily have worked as a play. The movie focuses on the relationship between the two women and is both funny and engaging the whole way through. Channing is pretty incredible in this movie and Stiles is also very believable. The plot is interesting enough that you’re hanging in there to see where it’ll take the characters. But the real strength of the movie lies in the dialogue between the two women. They’re constantly trying to figure out the other one’s strengths and weaknesses and at the same time their actions are reflections of their own strengths and weaknesses. They’re two interesting people and although they do some pretty disturbing things you’re not repelled by them, but rather getting still more interested in why they act like they do.

After that we saw Pollock, which started out good, but couldn’t sustain the intensity and got a bit meaningless towards the end. The movie begins with Pollock signing autographs in 1950 and then it goes back to 1941, when he was a struggling artist living in his brother’s apartment. Pollock was a real man’s man. He listened to jazz, smoked like a fish and drank like a chimney, and made sure to repress all his emotions until he snapped like a twig. But since he managed to stay out of the loony bin long enough to become a successful painter this only makes his life story more interesting. The problem is that after about an hour and ten minutes we’re back to 1950 and from then on Pollock’s life deteriorates until his untimely death in 1956. This part of the movie isn’t nearly as interesting as his development as an artist and his transformation into a respected painter. So the movie falls flat towards the end, which is a shame because for the most part the movie was actually pretty good. Ed Harris gives his all in the portrayal of the alcoholic and deeply troubled painter and Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden is perfect as his wife Lee Krasner, who tries to help him and supports him unconditionally.

After the movies we went for pizza and had a loud discussion in the pizza place about the merits of abstract art. My sister likes his work and the work of other abstract artists and claims that she gets something from looking at it. In the movie Pollock says that his art doesn’t have a message. It’s like looking at a meadow and asking what message does the meadow have. You should just look at it and enjoy it. I can appreciate that, but when I look at abstract art I just see colours and I can’t recall ever getting something from it other than being amazed at their technique. I like Pop Art, because I understand the language they’re painted in. I understand the choice of objects and fascination with brand names and consumer culture. I mean I like people like Francis Bacon, Magritte, and Dali, but generally I just like Pop. Everything else I just look at and then judge it based on whether I get fascinated by it or not. But it rarely affects me on a deeper level, because I don’t get it.

I just realized that there hasn’t been made a movie about Salvador Dali and that’s actually a bit strange. There are movies about Bacon, Warhol, Basquiat, Van Gogh, Goya, Picasso, Pollock, and probably a lot of others that I haven’t seen. You’d think with the crazy life Dali had someone would be dying to make a movie about him. Someone probably will someday though.

On an unrelated note I just remembered that a friend of mine recently found a song he’d been trying to find for almost 20 years. Tonight I found a song that I have been trying to find for a couple of months. It’s not quite the same, but it was still nice to get that of my mind. The song is Summer Sun by Koop and I actually found it, because I was reading an article over at Parallax View. So once again thanks goes out to Dead Kenny.

I had to change the archives today, because some of the posts were missing. I guess there’s a limit to the length of the main page, so quite a few dates had gotten cut of. But that should be fixed now.

I totally forgot that I'd been to see The Curse of the Jade Scorpion and The Royal Tenenbaums last night. It's gotten really late now, so I won't go into details, but I thought both movies were really funny. Scorpion was very much like an old fashioned slapstick comedy and Tenenbaums was just so bizarre that we laughed through the whole movie. They were both very good and I'm looking forward to seeing Tenenbaums again, because the first half hour was just so packed with jokes and information about the characters I'm sure I missed some stuff.

I’m back from Tax Hell and the movies, so now it’s time for me to get my blog on (imagine me flashing fake gang signs while saying that). The tax situation was actually worse than expected. I owe about $3300 dollars and I had about $2900 worth of deductions. If all goes well (and when does all really go well?) I’ll probably end up having to pay about $2200 in back taxes this year. I have no idea how I’ll get my mitts on that kind of money, so I’ve been contemplating changing my name to J-Fo and entering a line of work that’ll include me saying either “Stick ‘em up, punk!” or “Everybody be cool! This is a robbery!” on a regular basis, but nothing’s set in stone yet. But at least I’ve sent in the forms and the deductions today, so now all there is to do is play The Waiting Game.
I actually got to see both 24 and The Practice with my Dad last night. 24 was cool and they’ve added a new element, which will take the excitement up another notch. The Practice was a bit of a disappointment though. The Jimmy Berluti high roller story that’s been playing out over the last couple of episodes is pretty stupid, and in last nights' episode Jimmy messed up again. Jimbo breaks attorney-client privilege by telling a little boy that he has a brain tumour (the boy, not Jimbo although there’s room for a handful of tumours in his huge noggin), which in turn saves the boy’s life. He then threatens the client (an insurance company) with making a big scene thus creating a lot of bad press, which makes them decide not to turn Jimmy in to the bar association (I think that’s what it’s called). However, Eugene has had it with Jimmy screwing up, and turns him in himself. This leads to the Jimster using every opportunity to preach about ethics and how sometimes you have to break the law to do the right thing. The climax is the court hearing, where Jimmy bangs on about not being sorry and says that he’d do the same thing in a heartbeat if he had to even though he knows this might cost him his license.

Well, since we can’t have lawyers break attorney-client privilege when they feel like it Jimmy obviously got disbarred and since he already quit the company, he’ll be serving burgers at McDonald’s in the next episode. Wrong! They made up some wussy slap-on-the-wrist judgment, where he was banned from the court rooms for three whole weeks. I guess the writers needed to believe that there’s room in the American judicial system for people, who break the law because their morale tells them it is okay. That might be so, but it sure makes for lousy television. Jimmy and Rebecca are already my least favourite characters on the show, so having to listen to him lecturing three judges for half an hour didn’t exactly make me like him more.

I saw Things Behind the Sun this afternoon with two of my friends and it’s a pretty rough movie. I have to leave in an hour and I haven’t eaten yet now, so I’ll make this brief. The movie is about a singer (Kim Dickens of Zero Effect fame with the worst haircut you ever saw) with a drinking problem and a troubled background and a reporter (Gabriel Mann), who knows what happened to her and why she has problems. The movie is a lot heavier than Anders’ other movies and it’s shot in a gritty style that suits it well. Dickens and Mann are good in it and so are Don Cheadle and Eric Stoltz. Since it’s the story about a singer and a rock journalist music is pretty important in this movie. The score is by Sonic Youth and the soundtrack features Lefte Bank (Walk Away Renee), Nick Drake (Things Behind the Sun), Shocking Blue (Love Buzz), and Charlie Rich (Most Beautiful Girl). This might not be your bag, but I thought the music all through the movie was great and it fit the movie perfectly. I’m not completely sure what I though of the ending. I’m glad that they didn’t go for the obvious happy ending bolony, but still I felt they focused too hard on getting the singer's demons worked out and left the writer with a lot of unresolved problems when the movie ended. But it was still an above average movie and I’m glad I went to see it.

Today I will join the thousands of people, who for the last couple of weeks have been cursing and sweating over their tax returns. I’m going out to my parents’ house, so I can sit undisturbed and sort through a year's worth of receipts, bank statements, pay slips, and all the other junk that got thrown into the bottom drawer instead of being sorted right away. The plan is that I’ll sort through all the paper work and then I’ll have my Mom go over the numbers, while I watch 24 with my Dad. We’ll see how that works out later.

For the last couple of years I’ve had a freelance writing job for opasia.dk and for some reason the money I make isn’t automatically declared, so I have to declare it myself. That means I have to put away the money that I’ll later have to pay in taxes. That worked out great last year, but this time not so much. Actually, I had put quite a bit of money away, but because I had to move last November and because I stopped getting writing assignments around August I had to start spending the money I had saved. So now I have to pay $3000 in back taxes and I haven’t saved up anything. That means that I have to get my receipts sorted out, so I can get as many deductions as possible, so I won’t have to pay the full amount. I had a bunch of deductions last year and they were all approved, so hopefully it’ll be the same this year.

I received a wedding invitation in the mail today. I knew it was coming and as I expected the wedding is scheduled for the 29th of June, which basically means that I won’t be going to the Roskilde Festival this year. This would have been my tenth time since 1992, but I guess it’s just not going to happen. However, I’m considering going to the Midtfyns Festival instead, because my brother wants to go there and Coldplay and Muse will play there. I’ve been there three times before and it’s just not the same as Roskilde. It’s much smaller, usually the bands aren’t as cool, and it’s very much a festival for the locals instead of being an international festival like Roskilde. After last year I’d actually pretty much sworn I’d never go back to Midtfyns, but now we’ll just have to see.

Microcontent News directed me to an interesting article called Blog Nation. The article does a fine job of summarizing some of the things going on in the world of blogging (and how can you not be impressed by someone who uses the term "highfalutin"?). However, I found it extremely odd that the author, who mentions a lot of blogs and articles, only links to three sites in the entire article, two of those being Salon.com and Amazon.com. Like we couldn't have figured out those out ourselves? Whereas for instance the blog of Virginia Postrel, which is a lot harder to find, is not linked to.
And if Tim Cavanaugh's essay Let Slip the Blogs of War is so interesting that he can spend a paragraph refering to it, you'd think he would want to help people find the article, so they can read it themselves. Just a thought.

I think his best point comes towards the end, where he notes: "More sorely missing -- to my taste, anyway -- are blogs dedicated to cultural pursuits written with the same enthusiastic, hobbyhorse zeal as the breaking-news blogs." I totally agree! I've linked to a couple of blogs, which deal with television, but I've yet to find sites that deal with music and movies other than sporadically (like this one). Hopefully they'll appear eventually.

Apropos nothing I've been listening to Le Tigre, The Moldy Peaches, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs lately and I'm not sure I get them. I think I've come to the conclusion that I don't like the Yeahs and that the Peaches are too weird. I mean Who's Got The Crack and D.2. Boyfriend are pretty funny, but the rest of the songs are just so bizarre that I can't stand listening to them. Le Tigre are fairly weird as well, but Deceptacon is one of the catchiest song I've heard in a long time, so I'm giving them an another chance.

Just thought I'd mention that I saw a fun article about "customer service" over at What Do I Know. It reminds me of the service I've gotten at a local record store, where any record they don't have is "temporarily sold out" or "only available on vinyl" and if you ask for the new James record they go "James who?".

Oh, and I'm listening to Rival Schools' United By Fate, which I didn't dig two hours ago, but now it's growing on me in a big way.

This week the annual Natfilm Festival (translates into Nightfilm Festival) begins here and so far I’m going to see the following movies:

Wednesday:
14:00 Things Behind The Sun
19:00 The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
21:30 The Royal Tenenbaums
Thursday:
14:00 The Business of Strangers
16:00 Pollock
Friday:
16:00 Waking Life
24:00 Hedwig & The Angry Inch
Saturday:
22:00 L.I.E.
24:00 Cecil B. Demented
Sunday:
14:00 Storytelling

I might not see all the movies, or maybe friends of mine will want to see something else and we’ll do that. But this is the movies I plan on seeing.

I saw Hedwig last year in New York and I thought it was so good that I’m going to see it again. I didn’t really know a lot about the movie before I saw it, so I was totally blown away by the weird story, the characters, and the music. Oddly enough, besides Tenenbaums, it’s probably the movie I’m most excited about seeing. Most of the movies are chosen mainly because of the directors (Anders, Allen, Anderson, Linklater, Waters, and Solondz), but also because a fair share of them received favourable reviews. I rarely watch movies because of actors, but I often watch movies because of directors (in the same way I also try to avoid movies made by certain directors... Michael Bay, I'm looking in your direction). And I usually prefer dialogue driven movies as opposed to action driven movies, which I guess is obvious since my list doesn’t include Panic Room, We Were Soldiers, and The Mothman Prophecies, which were also on the programme. So it looks like I’m heading into a pretty great week although The Curse of the Jade Scorpion is on at the same time as Denmark plays their last friendly before the World Cup.

I actually had a huge rant prepared about the recent rash of Rolling Stone Magazine covers featuring teen pop sensations, but as it turns out there’s only been pop stars on six of the fifteen covers featuring musicians in the last year (counting Alicia Keys, but not No Doubt and Staind). I guess it was just the sight of Shakira that made me flip out a little. But it still creases me that the people at RS would put her on the cover instead of The Strokes, who are featured in a large article in the same magazine. The same goes for the two occasions during the last year, where Britney made the cover instead of first Weezer or Nirvana on the ten year anniversary of Nevermind and later instead of pretty much anyone else mentioned in the People of the Year issue. And Alicia Keys on the cover instead of Ryan Adams? Give me a break!

But even so, it’s still a pretty good magazine (although I'd wish they'd cool it with the 9-11 articles already), who’ll put both Slipknot and Bob Dylan on the cover, which I think is great.

On the weekend of the 10th and 11th of May there’s this thing here called the Spot 08 Festival. It’s a festival, which showcases new bands, but there are also more well-known bands on the bill to draw in the crowds. But the thing I’m most excited about is that RS writer David Fricke will be speaking there. I just found this out, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to get tickets yet, but I’ll definitely try. He’s a good writer and a cool guy, so I bet he has some interesting things to say. But even if I can’t get in to hear him speak there’ll still be a lot of cool, new bands playing here that weekend, so chances are it’ll be a lot of fun.

I just found out today that I might have to move out of my apartment in two and a half months. I hate moving! It’s the pits and I just hate it. A lot. I’ve moved seven times in as many years, and the thought of packing all my stuff in boxes, schlepping it up and down stairs, getting people together to help me, driving a moving van (I crashed the last one I rented), going to IKEA to get new stuff for the new place, and all the logistics of changing addresses, moving magazine subscriptions, cable, internet, phones, and so on for the eight time just drives me nuts. And I haven’t even mentioned the hassle of actually finding a new place to live. That’s the reason I’ve moved so many times in the first place. This is the third time my lease has been terminated and because I wasn’t able to find a new place the two first times, I’ve had to move in somewhere temporarily until I could find a place I could afford, which wasn’t located in the middle of nowhere. So in conclusion: Moving is a major bummer!

Okay, with that out of the way I actually have a major decision to make now. Should I stay here in beautiful Aarhus or should I move to wonderful Copenhagen? I’ve said for the last couple of years that I’d move to Copenhagen, when I finished with University, because I figured chances of finding a job in the media industry would be better there. But I won’t have finished my master thesis by July, so if I move there I’d still be a student (in other words: I'll still be broke) and I’m not sure that moving to Copenhagen would necessarily make it easier for me to finish my thesis. The main reason I wanted to leave this city wasn’t really so much jobs or access to concerts, art, movies, or cooler shops as the fact that some of my best friends live there now. The people I travel with, go to the Roskilde Festival with, go to concerts with, and generally just talk to the most live in Copenhagen, and it bugs me that I can’t visit them, whenever I feel like it.
But on the other hand my family lives here and especially my brother, who I see several times a week. We hang out all the time, and I’ll miss that a lot if I move. I still have a couple of good friends here, who, ironically, I don’t see as mush as I’d like even though we live in the same city. Oddly enough one of the things that I dislike the most about this city is probably also one of the things I’ll miss the most. I’m talking about the fact that because this is actually a fairly small place (there are 286.000 people in the entire county) we miss out on a lot of things. But at the same time you always seem to run into your friends, whenever you go out, which is cool.

So I honestly don’t know what to do. I’ll definitely look into finding a place in Copenhagen, but chances are I’ll stay here for awhile until I’m ready to start looking for a job. So if you have access to an apartment in Copenhagen or Aarhus feel free to drop me a line.

And a Thank You goes out to Dead Kenny over at Parallax View for mentioning my site. I go there every day for movie news and interesting titbits and you should too.

I woke up at 8:15 with the worst headache I've had in ages. I tossed and turned for a bit until I noticed that my stomach started to cramp up and I felt totally nauseous. What a way to start your Saturday morning. I thought I had the flu or something and I wanted to stay in bed, but my head hurt so much that I couldn’t lie down. So after a quick shower I headed down to the store to get a bag of coffee and on my way back I went past a coffee shop to get a cup right away. All this took less than fifteen minutes, so in order to stay outside in the fresh air for a bit longer I went to the top of my building, where we have a terrace. It was grey and a bit cold out, so I’ve probably looked pretty pathetic at 11 a.m. on the terrace clutching a Styrofoam container, while leaning over the railing and looking out over the city. So that was only fun for so long, so I soon went back downstairs. I headed straight for the couch and the remote, but after flicking through reruns and documentaries for a couple of hours (a highlight was a look at Victoria Wood’s career, which ended with The Ballad of Barry & Freda, which I think is a funny song) I had had enough and I popped Beautiful Girls in the VCR.

I think if I had to make a top five list of my all-time favourite movies Beautiful Girls would be on it alongside When Harry Met Sally, Reservoir Dogs, Annie Hall, and Singles. It’s just one of the most well-written, perfectly cast movies ever with a killer soundtrack to boot. I actually felt a little sad, when Ted Demme died recently. Not because I'm a huge fan of his other work (although Denis Leary: No Cure for Cancer is an absolute killer), but because that means he’ll never make another movie like this again (selfish, I know). The script is written by Scott Rosenberg, who also worked on the High Fidelity script, and it has some of the best dialogue (not written by Woody Allen) ever. You don't believe me? Then check out these quotes. Everybody in that movie is great (even Michael Rapaport), but there can be no doubt that Natalie Portman steals every scene she’s in. Maybe that’s why I like the movie so much: Because I understand Timothy Hutton’s character’s fascination with this girl. And I love the conversation he has with the Mo character about waiting a few years until she old enough for him to date, and he says that all he wants is for her to say to him: “Take me with you, when you go” (which may or may not be a reference to a song by The Jayhawks). But he also knows that he’s like a dirty old man (not Roman Polanski, but like a character from a Nabokov book), which brings on the necessary guilt for him to do the right thing.

So after watching Beautiful Girls I actually felt a lot better. I went out for ice cream, made some coffee, and now I’m considering getting ready for my friend’s birthday party. But I have to clean up a bit, because I haven’t shaved for awhile and I look like The Wild Man of Borneo (which my uncle Cathal, after having used the expression, noted was a weird expression, since no one seems to know if there ever was a real Wild Man of Borneo, what he looked like, and exactly how wild he was). And it would probably also be wise to eat something other than a strawberry sundae before going to the party.

I went to the Blogger site, so I could post this and noticed that I (alongside TrendMacro) was one of yesterday’s “Blogs of Note”. I think that’s totally amazing, especially since I’ve only been writing here for about five weeks. So a big Thank You! to the good people at Blogger and to you for stopping by.

Everything was quiet, when I feel asleep around 2AM last night except for the low rumbling coming from the club down the street. However, when I woke up at 4AM I could hear loud R'n'B music and people laughing and running up and down stairs. Who starts playing loud music at 4AM? My neighbour, that's who! At first I couldn't make out, where the noise was coming from, because the acoustics in this building are weird and I was a bit groggy from having just woken up and all. But after awhile I could tell that the music and the sound of excited, drunken, hoarse voices came from next door.

My neighbour is a 20-something girl, who's apparently the only one in her group of friends, who doesn't live at home with her parents anymore. Or else it's just that they prefer partying at her place, because she lives downtown. Either way they party here a lot! She appears to be a big fan of J-Lo and Destiny's Child, but actually the music didn't bother me last night until they started playing the same Enrique Iglesias song over and over. Obviously, they sang along as well, which didn't exactly improve on the vocal stylings of Old Molehead. I hate that guy and his stupid videos, where he gets to make out with Jennifer Love Hewitt and Anna Kournikova. Hero, my ass!

So this went on until around 5AM, where suddenly they turned the music off and within 10 minutes everything was dead quiet. But I didn't fall asleep again right away, which meant I didn't wake up until around 1PM, which means today I haven't done anything besides answer emails and get movies tickets.

Thankfully, my cable came back on this afternoon, so I get to watch the Andy Warhol special on Swedish TV and The Osbournes tonight. It's gonna be awesome.

The Natfilm Festival begins next week here, so I went to get tickets for The Royal Tenenbaums today. On my way to get tickets, and later food, I saw a couple of weird things:

1) A guy painted completely yellow sitting on a box in the lotus position staring straight ahead. He had a jar in front of him and quite a few people were standing around looking at him. Why? I have no idea.
2) A guy driving a remote controlled mallard that had a "Feed the hungry mallards" sign on it up and down the street.
3) A vagabond, who called me "Chief".
4) A guy walking his dog and wearing sunglasses (although it was completely clouded outside), while singing Guantanamera, substituting the lyrics with "Tom's karameller", into a cell phone.
5) Kellogg's Cornflakes boxes now come with CD-roms with computer games instead stickers and plastic figurines.
6) Two drunks hugging in front of my building (which wasn't cute in an Ironweed sort of way, but just plain creepy).

A guy from my old company emailed and asked if I could stop by today and help out answering phones. I said I No Problemo, because I'm still good friends with the people there and I'm sure they'll rehire me, when they find a project I can work on. So for three hours today I answered phone calls (10-15 calls at the most), got a free lunch, surfed the net, and read parts of the new issue of Rolling Stone with Shakira on the cover (I have a rant brewing about RS and their choices for covers, but more on that later). And as a Thank You, they gave me three bottles of wine from this awesome shop around the corner, which I thought was pretty generous.

While I was making dinner a friend of mine came by to eat his dinner at my house. I live next door to a pretty great burger joint and my friend eats there whenever he gets the chance. Personally, I'm not crazy about their burgers (however, their pepperoni pizzas are pretty great), but that's just me. Everyone else thinks they're the best around, so whenever people stop by we usually get food from there. Anyway, my friend has a car for the next couple of weeks and he drove from his house to this place to get food and then decided it would be nicer to eat it at my place than in some smelly burger joint. So he stopped by and hung out for a bit, which was a nice surprise.

Other than that I've just been listening to Four Minute Mile by The Get Up Kids, because someone has been dropping Get Up titles like a juggler with arthritis (because if you had arthritis and tried to juggle, you'd probably drop your balls oranges frequently, you know? Ah, forget it!).

I just watched the two first episodes of Andy Richter Controls The Universe and they were pretty funny. I thought the pilot episode was better than the second episode mainly because it was weirder and the second one focused too much on Richter's relationship with the Wendy character. I thought Richter was very funny on Conan and I think he's just as funny here. The only thing I didn't quite like about the show was the Byron character, who I thought was a bit annoying. Oddly enough the cast consists of people, who were on shows which were quickly cancelled (Love & Money, Grosse Point, The $treet, and the impossibly named Encore! Encore!). And how do I know this? Unfortunately, I've seen these shows and although some of them had their moments they weren't exactly great.
But with Andy's new show and Greg The Bunny, it looks like the fall replacement shows are pretty good. Unfortunately, in my opinion both of them have "Destined for cancellation" written all over them, so I'd be surprised if there around in June.

I'm so unbelievably old it's not even funny. I went down to get a refund on the DVD thing I bought Saturday, and then I went over to this new record store called Music that opened a couple of weeks ago. I honestly went in to get albums by The Hives, BMRC, or something like that, but because the store just opened they don't have a lot of new stuff yet (they did have the new Gomez album, but for some reason I didn't get that), so I started looking for old stuff instead. Apparently, the thing you do, when you open a record store, is get a hold of a lot of back catalogue albums to fill up the shelves. And for some reason the people at Music have decided against getting newer indie albums and instead getting stacks of Billy Idol, Grace Jones, and Beatles albums. The last thing makes sense, but how many copies of Nightclubbing are they honestly expecting to sell?

So I look around for a bit and notice that a lot of the old CDs have a Nice Price sticker on them and cost about 8 bucks. That means all plans for buying new, expensive CDs are out the window and I end up picking up Springsteen's The River and Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited (I also came close to buying Dylan's Blood on the Tracks and Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys, but didn't). So all indie cred is out the window and I'm now officially an old geezer, who listens to old geezer music. But I don't really care. I listened to the lyrics to The River, and they're honestly better than anything you'd ever hear on the radio today.
And I just love the opening line from Hungry Heart:

"Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack
I went out for a ride and I never went back"

As previously mentioned I love TV. And because we don't get shows when they premiere in the US, no matter how many shows I follow I feel a little behind the times. So when I found out at there are people, who encode shows and make them available through Kazaa and other file sharing tools I could barely believe it. So I started downloading all these shows, and it's just incredible. Without Kazaa I would never have seen Undeclared, which is probably the best new show since Sports Night, or The Tick for that matter.

The latest show I've found is the pilot for Greg The Bunny, which caught my attention for different reasons. Wil Wheaton mentioned that he really liked it, Seth Green is in it, but more importantly so is Sarah Silverman. I saw her on Conan O'Brien once and I laughed so hard I damn near fell out of my chair. Her sense of humour is unbelievably black and apparently it has caused some controversy over there, because someone misunderstood (or chose to misunderstand) a joke she did. She is really funny (and hot!), so I knew I had to get a copy of the show as soon as possible. So I found it and watched it this morning and it's great. Unfortunately, Silverman wasn't featured that prominently in the first episode, but that was to be expected as they had to establish the Greg character and introduce all the other characters. But overall I thought the show was really funny and I can't wait to see more episodes.

This is the funniest article I've read in a long time.

I really like Jimmy Eat World. I first noticed them, when the appeared on a Duran Duran Tribute album and about a year later I bought the Clarity album. That's a really good album, so my expectations were pretty high, when I heard JEW were releasing Bleed American. The first couple of times I listened to it I was a little disappointed, because it was a lot more straight forward rock (and therefore less Emo) than their earlier stuff, but after a while I really got into it. Rachel Haden appears on the album and I love her voice. I'm a huge fan of That Dog and I love the stuff she's done with people like The Rentals and Beck.

If you don't know that much about JEW you can now check out the Members Area of their website for free until the the 12th, and after that you'll need to buy Bleed American to access it. I recommend downloading the acoustic version of The Middle and the bonus track (Splash) Turn Twist is also pretty cool. And supposedly they'll update it after the 12th, so all the more reason to pick up their album.

While I was making breakfast (around 1PM) a card was thrown through my mail slot. When I picked it up I could see it was a notice that the cable company had switched my subscribtion from Premium to Basic. So I ran out to catch the guy, but he was long gone. So I called the cable company to tell them that they're idiots and that they should get someone out here right away to fix the mistake. But before I even got to that the customer service person told me that apparently the tenants association in my building (who collect the cable fee through the rent and then pay the cable company) had ordered the switch or less they wouldn't have performed it. So now a representative from the tenants association has to contact our contact person at the cable company and get it fixed, so I can get my channels back. Can you see where this is going? Yeah, chances are they won't get it fixed this week, so I'll miss ER, The Simpsons, The Osbournes, Smallville, and whatever else may be on this week.

And yet I'm not as bummed as you'd expect. When I read the card I completely flipped my lid, but after watching the finale episode of Clerks and eating my "breakfast" I visited the Adidas website. They have a contest there, where you collect hidden logos (trefoils) and then you use them to enter a raffle for Adidas items. I won a t-shirt i January (which I haven't received yet) and there are some cool items I'd like to get as well. It's like a treasure hunt and it's really quite addictive. So finding a bunch of trefoils cheered me up a bit. And listening to "God Bless the Blake Babies" also helped.

How often do you get to read articles about the Masters of the Universe or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons? My guess would be not that often, so it's nice to know that you can find stuff like that over at X-Entertainment. I haven't read that many articles there yet, but so far my favourite is a review of an episode of Saved By the Bell. It has to be one of the dumbest shows ever and the review does a great job of summing up a lot of the questions you'll inevitable have after watching an episode. Now if they would only review a couple of Sweet Valley High episodes we'd really be onto something.

I'm in a really pissy mood now. I can't find the power cable for my record player, which I wanted to hook up last night. I've been down to the basement three times to look throught boxes and bags and I just can't find it. And every time I go down there it's like I'm in a Laurel & Hardy movie. There's a light switch by the door and when you hit it the light stays on for about 30 seconds. So while you're going through a bag the light will suddenly go out and you have to make your way back to the door in the dark. That goes on for a while until you finally drag the boxes and bags you want to go through up to the door, so you don't have to run back and forth like an idiot. So I go through all this crap several times and I still can't find the damn cable. So I give up and go through the apartment knowing full well I won't find it there and I didn't, so that pisses me off even more. And I honestly have absolutely no clue where the damn thing could be, so now I'll have to figure out some way of getting a new one.

So then I go to the weird electronics store and get the scart thing I needed for my PS2. And I hook the machine up to the TV and it still doesn't work. I try everything and get a hold of a friend with Trillian, but it still doesn't work. So according to the manual the only answer is that my TV isn't NTSC compatible, which is weird because my VCR can play NTSC tapes and that works fine with the TV. So I've just wasted 40 bucks on useless junk and spent hours trying to make it work, when the whole thing was doomed from the beginning because of my stupid TV.

So now I'm completely bummed! I wanted to listen to albums and watch DVDs and I can't do either. And because I've been trying to get all this stuff to work I haven't done anything else today, which means the stuff that I should've done won't get done until tomorrow. The only good news is that Michael Rosenbaum is hilarious. He plays Lex Luthor on Smallville and he's the main reason I watch the show. I read an article about Smallville in Rolling Stone last night and he was really funny. The other two didn't come off as charming as they do on the show, but Rosenbaum came off as an absolute riot. There's even a reference to him having sex with Superman in the article, which completely cracked me up. So that rocked! But other than that things here are sucky.

How come every time you buy something it doesn't work or there's a part missing or you can't get it to work and you end up feeling like an idiot? Or is that just me? Either way, I bought a thing so I can watch American DVDs on my PS2 and after trying different stuff it turns out the scart adapter I have isn't "fully loaded", so I'll have to get a new one on Monday. And this I find out after I've bought the thing and visited a friend to get actual DVDs to test the sucker out. And obviously they only sell the adapters at this obscure electronics joint that for some reason closes an hour earlier than regular shops.

But thankfully until then it can still play European DVDs, so I watched High Fidelity (again), which I had also borrowed. I think John Cusack is about as cool as you can get. I saw Say Anything for the umpteenth time last week and he's just great and you can totally tell how much he's learned from Cameron Crowe, when you watch Hi-Fi. So now I’m listening to the soundtrack and half watching Fucking Åmål (which might be called Show Me Love where you live) and thinking about how I need to get some old records. I have about a thousand records and less than five percent of those records were made before 1980. I love The Velvet Underground and I would love to have a bunch of records that sound like Who Loves the Sun, which is weird because I’m such a huge fan of Love Reed and it’s actually Doug Yule, who sings on that track although it was written by Reed. I think I need to get more Dylan records and at some point I should definitely buy some Beach Boys and Beatles records. I don’t really get black music, so y’all can keep your Otis, Aretha, Wilson, and Stevie records, while I concentrate on music written by depressed white guys.

I did some other stuff today, but my main concern and the main thing on my mind has been that I'll probably miss this years Roskilde Festival, because a friend of mine is getting married that weekend. That totally sucks! I don't want to miss his wedding for the world, but I don't want to miss the festival either. The programme kinda sucks right now (except for The Beta Band), but who cares? There's always something worth watching and those four days just make my year... every year! I live for going there with my friends and when I walk onto that field with my tent and bags I feel like I've come home. Like a footballer at Wembley or a druid at Stonehenge. This is where I'm supposed to be and missing it will bug me for years. I'm going to try to work out some compromise, but I already know it's going to be an either/or situation that'll end up with me going to the wedding, which pissed me off even more, because I hate not having a choice.

I just saw the first episode of The Osbournes and I laughed my ass off! And because this is lovely, liberal Europe they showed the uncensored version with all the curse words (they did, however, blank out Ozzy flipping the bird at the camera), which made it a lot more fun than the censored clip I'd seen on the net. Ozzy is absolutely out of his tree and his kids are a pain in the ass. And in the midst of all this chaos is Sharon, who has to be the most patient and forgiving person in the world to deal with all their crap and not kill them or just go plain mad. And it's funny that even though everybody thinks Ozzy is the shit his daughter gets completely embarrassed by everything he says. That's pretty reassuring for the rest of us. The show was just one long string of highlights, but I loved the bits at the beginning, where Sharon is unpacking some lamp that got a bit broken off during the move. And later when she makes a couple of choice comments about their pool. I can't wait until next week to see what they'll think off next.

And then my favourite episode of Jackass came on (where Johnny tests a protective cup and has 10-year-olds kick him in the nuts), so I saw that and then I popped Ozzmosis in the CD player and chilled to the soothing sounds of Ozzy.

Oh, I actually turned down an offer to go out and drink with a couple of friends tonight, so hopefully this is the first step towards a more sober future.

I've added a Comments section where visitors are invited to leave me a message. I saw it over at Ev's and it seemed like a fun thing to add. I had been thinking about adding some kind of comments feature to each posting (and I might eventually), but for now I'll use the Tag-Board.

I've also settled on using the Sitemeter tracker. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than the other two I tried out. Their banner is really small, the information you get at their site is better and the code you need to add is a lot simpler than the others I tried, so it works out great.

I went out to dinner with my parents tonight to celebrate my mother's birthday. I'm not going to go into too many details, but I will mention that no matter what I do with them in public I feel like one of those teenager you see in movies, whose parents call them Pumpkin or Sweetie in front of all their friends at the mall or in school. They can't do or say anything that doesn't can my cringe and wish I was a million miles away. Everyone else thinks they're really great and funny, so I guess it's me who's an idiot.

But before going out I had to get a present and let me just say that shopping for women isn't easy. And clothes shopping for women is damn near impossible. I went through several shops just completely baffled at all the strange items, which were available. I don't have a large knowledge of what colours are in and out, but it would seem that beige and various sand-like colours are all the rage. And oddly enough if you find clothes that are say white or red or something they look like pirate clothes. I kid you not! T-shirts with red and white stripes and puffy shirts apparently are the next big thing. I haven't seen a lot of pirates around here lately, but if you're to believe the selection at H&M it's just a matter of time till this place will be crawling with Adam Ant look-alikes (which will actually be pretty cool for me, because I've always wanted to paint stripes on my cheeks and wear huge shirts). I ended up buying her a peach coloured shirt, which I think she liked, because she asked me three times if I'd picked it out myself or if someone had helped me.

So today we've learned that I embarrass easy and I'm a great shopper. Another thing I've learned this week is that it's not easy to quit drinking. I don't mean that it's difficult to not drink, when you get the urge to drink. Because I rarely get the urge to drink during a normal week, so that's a breeze. It's difficult to function in society and not drink. This week I'd decided to take drinking to a minimum, because I was hammered Saturday. But Sunday I went to an Easter Lunch at my parents' house, Monday we went to a football game, Tuesday a friend came by to use my computer and brought along a couple of beers, Wednesday we saw a football game here, and tonight we went out to dinner. So I've basically been drinking every day this week. And unless I lock the doors and don't answer the phone until Monday chances are I'll have a drink or two this weekend. I never really thought about this before, but you get some really weird stares, when you're out with your friends and you mention that you'd rather have a Coke. It's not socially acceptable to not drink unless you have some medical condition or you're the designated driver. So I'll either have to make up some rare disease, so people won't pester me about not drinking or just accept that I like drinking and accept the hangovers like I have for the last 15 years.

I kinda got a job today. "How does that work?" I hear you ask. Well, I answered an email in regards to some freelance jobs opening up and then I had an interview. I thought the interview went really well and I was told I'd hear from them really soon. Then four weeks go by and nothing. So I send them an email asking if I'll ever hear from them and they answer right away. They were very impressed by my experience and thought the interview went well and they would love to hire me. The thing is they don't have any work for me right now. So when they get a project I could work on they'd hire me. So I'm excited that they liked me and that they want to hire me. But I'm bummed that they can't use me right away. And now I don't know if they'll ever hire me, because I'm supposed to represent a new marked that may or may not open up. It's weird, but at least I have the right to be hopeful now that I've actually heard from them.

So what do think happened on my quiet night out, where I wasn't supposed to get drunk and end up at Train? Well, other than I did get absolutely faced and did end up at Train, then frankly I'm not completely sure. However, I do know I woke up late because of Daylight Savings Time, which meant I was half an hour late for the Easter Lunch thing at my parents'. And I was too hungover to eat anything, so my parents looked at me like I was being a complete brat. So the rest of the day I just moped around and watched TV, which was okay, but I felt really bad and when I got home I was too exhausted to go to bed. So I lay on the couch watching bad TV until 4 in the morning.

I was woken by the phone ringing at 12:30 the next day. A friend of mine invited me to the AGF - Vejle game, which I jumped at right away. The weather was really nice and I was dying to get out of the house and do something. I haven't been to an AGF game in ages, because they suck like you wouldn't believe. And yesterday's game was no exception. The played a 0-0 game, even though Vejle played with only 10 players for the last 40 minutes and this was a game they had to win. So people were wicked mad, when we left the stadion.

I spent the rest of the day in front of the TV, because my energy level is just below zero. All I do is eat, sleep, and watch TV these days. And now that I don't even have a job I'm going to turn into on of those weird shut-ins with the long beards and funky B.O.. I really need to get my act together and start doing stuff or else I'm going to get even more depressed and weird than I already am. Thankfully, some people are coming over tomorrow night, so I'll have to get around to cleaning out this dump, so they'll have somewhere to sit down.