Fantastic music tonight! Saw Rodrigo Y Gabriela and they were incredible. (Thanks Dano!!) It was acoustic metal flamenco. So many sick covers throughout the show, with an amazing Stairway to Heaven in the encore, sandwiched between 2 other metal tunes I recognized but could not place. The crowd was lovin' them, too. Their passion and energy was powerfully contagious, and they are sick guitar players taboot (taboot).

We're off to Big Sur tomorrow night for Lu's birthday. I can't wait!

Oh and here are some interesting myths about America. If you're into that kinda thing.

Got to go behind the scenes tonight at AT&T Park. Batting cages, the visitor dugout and clubhouse, even got to stand on the field and all of it was awesome. Couldn't actually go on the grass or around the bases, but seeing it all from that low, cool level was fantastic. I took some video. Perhaps some of it will be worth showing.

Here are some dogs in ridiculous costumes.

Next are messenger bags, haversacks and other items created from recycled inner tubes. Durable, 'green' and rather awesome. I definitely want the wallet.

And although this has been all over the net and the news recently I gotta post it up. The chances that this is second one that has actual sentient creatures on it is extremely remote, but the simple fact that we could detect and discern the aspects that make it even remotely possible, from 20 light years away, is pretty damn awesome.

So we're moving. Back to the back to the east y'all. Looking at Sept/Oct to be living in CT again. I left that place when I was 18 for school, came back for one summer and then stayed in Boston for the rest of my college years, and beyond. 11 years total in Beantown then four years ago I headed west for SF. Lu soon followed and we've loved every second of our time out here. But family calls so we're on the go. I'm looking forward to summer-eve thunderstorms, but I dread the bitter wind of winter. I left the Northeast for specific reasons, and those frigid facts haven't changed.

No matter where we end up, tourfilter will be a tool I use often. I hate it when a band I like comes through town and I don't even realize it until they're two days down the coast. That's a problem when you're living in a great music city like SF. Too many venues!! I hope we end up close enough to NYC to see great music there, too.

Woke up at 6:30am this morning, sorta wondering why I was up so early. After not really falling back to sleep for the next 1/2 hour, I sat bolt upright and realized that I had a 7:30am meeting I had to attend. My subconscious knew something was up, but I didn't put it together until just the very edge of too late. I was out of the house, showered and ready, 13 minutes later. I was at the train just pulling up 4 minutes after that. By 7:27am I was exiting the Montgomery station and I wasn't even close to the last person to show up at the meeting. This clock would have made everything far simpler and less rushed, provided I could find it.

Which brings me to the fact that I'm friggin ti-red. And therefore, goodnight.

Kickball tonight. We didn't win, but almost the entire team showed up despite the fact that it was drizzling and then raining and really not that nice out at all. The other team had clearly played in previous seasons, but we were all essentially newcomers to the WAKA league. Each of us had played back in grade school, though, and the passion was still there! Just not the runs, this time.

I listened to this song last night and now sitting at the computer I want to hear it again. If that happens one more time, I just may have to put it on the iPod. I need good new music bad. I haven't been keeping up with the musical offerings of the web recently and it shows. I need new bands! Wilco still hasn't released West coast dates while Radiohead is done touring and making an album, I guess. The BBoys are coming out with new sounds shortly (and it's going to be sick), but for now it's just theoretical. I do have to buy the new Arcade Fire. I haven't heard a bit of it, but I'm confident I'm going to like it.

The New Mastersounds are in town this weekend at an awesome venue for a kickass latenight show. We've seen them there before, and it was exceptional. Deepfunk boogie basslines and thick grooves until the wee hours of the morning is always a treat.

I need new music, and lots of it. If you have tunes you love please tell me what they are. I'm ready for anything.

This post was brought to you by the awesomeness that is moe. Their show on Tuesday night was fucking ridiculous. They nearly tore the filigreed beauty of Hall down around our ears. Seeing live music that thoroughly consumes me is one of my favorite things in the world, especially in a gorgeous tiny venue like the Great American.

Hangman. Insanely addictive speed typing game. Ridiculous dog costumes.

The net is filled with passing ephemera. Websites drift in and out of view as we click-stroll window watching, window shopping. Somehow it still manages to feel like a way to take the collective temperature of all of us connected by the internet.

Another way to figure out what's going on in the world is to talk to your friends. And I have a feeling if you friends are anything like my friends then the new Planet Earth series on the Discovery Channels always turns an idle conversation about the bullshit on the bus into a rapt discussion about migration habits of the Tuscan Tern. The Planet Earth series is fucking awesome. Lu and I are fishing for an invitation to a friend's house with a highdef flatscreen and all the fixins. (!!??!)

The Earth is as solid a thing as you or I will touch, ever. There is nothing ephemeral about the Earth. Witnessing the crisp connections between complex natural systems and creatures, on the Planet Earth series is truly remarkable. Another natural phenomenon that amazes me is the march of the planets, sun, stars and moon through the skies every night. An asteroid passed by the other day. We nearly missed it. Luckily this guy caught it.

This entire post was written while listening to Bright Eyes on Morning Becomes Eclectic. I enjoyed them more than I thought I would.

It's Thursday, have fun. Play Hangman during lunch and win.

Really didn't feel like blogging last night. The horror at Virginia Tech is a little too overwhelming to let me sit around writing about games, web pages, music or whatever. Too much. Too sad.

Green is the buzzword of the moment but it is also a really good idea. Seems like since the Goracle started his quest to spread the word about the "Global Climate Crisis", this Green trend has really picked up speed.

There's a bank in SF called the New Resource Bank that focuses on sustainability, investment in green-friendly companies and uses green practices in their physical locations. Figures it would start here in SF, but I'm hopeful it'll spread further as more and more people decide to change their habits.

Then there's Playgreen, a wiki for green living, and Ideal Bite, which is a daily newsletter devoted to sustainable living. And to get them started young, here's a fun green resource for kids.

NPR did a story about the growing demand for construction companies that use green practices, back in 2006. Give it a listen. And just a few weeks away is the Green Apple Festival, which takes place all over the US on Earth Day. The Chicago lineup sounds the best to me, but I know a lot of people going to the one in Golden Gate Park.

If everyone changes their habits just a little bit, together we can make a big difference. Once you go Green, you never go back!

I was halfway through a whole other post tonight when I saw the news. Kurt Vonnegut passed away today. He was 84 and one of the most brilliant writers in the whole fucking world. I'm so sad. His books changed my life. I'll write more about him when I can, but for now I need to just go read.

Thank you Kurt, for everything. You were the best there ever was.

So it goes.

This game slash puzzle is quite a bit of fun. Frustrating at times, but I really enjoyed figuring it all out.

This is a bottle that's also a puzzle and something of an impossible shape. I want one.

Here are some techniques for remembering your dreams. I kept a dream journal for a while many years ago, and I was shocked by how many dreams I started remembering after a few weeks. It is amazing to go back and read them years later. They definitely reveal a lot about what was going on in my life at the time. Now I just have to remember to remember to put the journal near the bed!

I really love these two images, too. That right there is what I believe in. That this whole universe we are part of is just a single neuron in the vast brain of some profoundly huge being. Maybe it's God. Maybe it's God's God. Or maybe it is the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Anything is possible in this crazy world of ours.

Tonight's a quick one because I've spent the last four hours working on a submission for Common Ties. The due date for a story about "Travel" is tomorrow and I have been rewriting our adventures at the Gibbon Experience in Laos, transforming the journal entry from our blog into a more coherent, conventional piece. It was hard work but a lot of fun. Still, I feel like there is so much more I could have said. Getting all of it into a measly 3000 words was no simple task. This is only the first of many stories I am going to submit to this site. I'm really looking forward to this challenge and I am confident that eventually they will use something I write. While I slog away finishing this up, check out these amazing photographs from Antarctica.

I also rather enjoyed this best-of-craigslist post from 100 years ago.

And last link is a story of a bus-riding cat that seems to have captured the collective imagination of the global interwebs, but somehow I just can't believe it's real. I'll be checking Snopes over the next few days to see how this shakes out.

Saturday is too great of a day to have such a sad post at the top. To lighten the mood check what kittens do all day, a great, easy prank to play on a friend, and then a game that starts off really easy, but gets tough, quick. If you're drunk you might have trouble! Happy Saturday people! Have a great night.

Tonight turned out to be rather awful. Just as I was walking up the block I heard two women screaming and wailing on the steps across the street. Both of them were on their cellphones, one of them practically falling down and they were just screaming and crying. It was quite upsetting. Then a cop car's sirens started echoing off the buildings and seconds later it pulled up, going the wrong way on Oak street. Within minutes 3 more police cars and officers had entered the front door of the apartment, but both women were still screaming, demanding to know where the ambulance was. A few minutes later that arrived, too. But things didn't get any better.

Lu and I watched from our front window as more officers arrived, people came out of the house, and neighbors came out to offer blankets and tea to the crying women. A boy and girl around ten or twelve, and an older man, who had all exited the apartment were put into police cars, but none of them in handcuffs. We surmised that they were witnesses to whatever had gone down. A while later a white van pulled up with the words 'San Francisco Medical Examiner' stenciled on the side and rear doors in black, capital letters. The fog rolled in and the wind picked up thrashing the blankets of the women consumed by grief and the yellow plastic of the police tape stretched from tree to post in front of the building's entrance.

More time passed, the many police stayed, but the ambulance left, as did the firetruck. Oak Street had been shut down to one lane, but now traffic could flow more freely. Still the family waited outside. It got dark as dusk settled over the street. I read on the couch, glancing out the window as a police officer spoke to a knot of cameras and I watched as a man in a suit arrived and spoke to some of the people out front. Our doorbell rang as friends arrived for dinner and TV. We told them what we had seen and we tried to figure out what had happened, what awfulness had transpired across the street. No one in handcuffs meant maybe someone had hurt someone else but then ran away just before I arrived. Or maybe it was a suicide. Turns out it was even more tragic and stupid and terrible than any of that. Just a weapon, a young woman, some horsing around and then a bullet ending a life, accidentally.

As they finally came down the stairs with the body shrouded in white, laid on a stretcher, there came a keening and crying from a woman outside. "My baby! My baby!" she cried as they loaded the lifeless form into the Medical Examiner's van, and her family had to hold her up and hold her back from the future that had just turned so awful and dark.

Lu and I are so sad tonight. And Friday will not be good for the poor family across the street. I hope they have the strength to carry on. I know that Sunday will not bring any miraculous relief. This is real life, where miracles don't happen and bad shit does and all you can do is find a way to carry on. Our thoughts are with them. It was terrible to watch. I can only imagine how much worse it was to be a part of it. They will never be the same again. And I don't think I'll ever forget the image of that shrouded form being carried from out the door and down the steps and into the van and they away forever as her mother and father sobbed in anguish.

With each passing year in SF, Lu and I have become increasingly enamored with the delicious fermented juice produced by crushing copious amounts of grapes. Here are some tools to make accessing the liquid and storing those precious bottles just a little bit easier. Yes, we are wine geeks, and we love it.

Here's a game! It's easy to play but hard to master. I spent 45 min on this thing before I had to step away and chill. There's a lot of other cool games to the left, so check them out, too.

Another great diversion is Atom Films. Lots of crazy short films on that site. Two I really like are Nun Fu: Found (a graphic, sacralicious parody of Lost) and Animator vs Animation II. Lots of other good shit on there, so, again, surf around.

I also really liked the interface on this web site. It's like nothing I've seen before, and I'm not even sure what it's all about, but it was fun to mess around with.

Last offering is an article by my sister-in-law Laura, about fishing in Naples, FL. The photos are amazing and her article is fantastic. It is incredible that her work is getting picked up by New York Magazine, but once you read it and see her images, it is obvious that she deserves the exposure.

Alright, pizzatime and then on to a late viewing of Monday's 24. I hope we win. I'm pretty sure we will, and I'm certain it'll be ridiculous.

Some nights food, friends, fun and tradition supersede sitting at the computer alone, surfing far and wide to find the best and the most interesting sites.

We had a Passover feast here, a Seder, and it was fantastic. Everyone brought something to the table and even though I'm not Jewish, it was wonderful to celebrate this holiday with my wife who is. Other gentiles attended as well as others of the Tribe. But one of my favorite moments was after the meal when we all sat around to discuss just exactly what we thought about spirituality, religion and all those complex ideas they always tell you never to bring up in a social setting. We brought them up, and when everyone went home, we were all still great friends.

Passover celebrates a release from bondage and recognizes the difficult times you often have to experience in order to rise above a terrible situation. We are lucky to be as free as we are, even in those times when we feel constrained.