Bwahahahaha. I love stuff like that. It reminded us all of the towboat story.

The best meme to make its way all over lately is hopkin green frog. Keep clicking on the images to go through the series. It's updated every day, and it's so funny...though I'm a FOUND Magazine fan, so it touches me particularly.

Ducks!!

I just got back from seeing a show with a couple friends. Two a cappella groups: Hookslide and the House Jacks. Hookslide was...well, the bass/vocal percussion guy is phenomenal. Other than that, the short critique is that 3/4 of your a cappella group should not be tenors who (a) sing like they want to be a cross between Queen and the Beegees, and (b) can't blend, can't modulate their voices to suit the song, and don't always sing in tune.

The House Jacks were phenomenal, though. I last saw them a few years back at the Red Devil Lounge in San Francisco, which was a really off night for them, so I was really happy to see them back in form (they've probably been back in form for several years, of course: I'm a performer, we all have bad shows from time to time). They were just brilliant.

The amusing thing is that I actually have some history with these people: I auditioned for Hookslide back when they were starting up in 1999, and the bass, Jon, recognized my name from the Harmony Sweepstakes program: the Irrationals sang in that competition maybe a couple of weeks after I joined, and I didn't know the music, so I couldn't do the show, but Jon reminded me that they put my name in the program anyway. And I met Wes Carroll, the House Jacks' vocal percussionist, in 1996, at the East Coast A Cappella Summit, when he was with the Boston group Five O'Clock Shadow; ran into him the following summer when FOCS played a wedding at a church in Concord, Massachusetts, where I was staying with my girlfriend's family, and I auditioned with FOCS as a sort of emergency understudy, and I've run into him often enough over the years that he remembered me. So I got to do some schmoozing and reconnecting.

Heh. The last song was a rocking funky tune, and they got everyone to dance...so I started doing vocal percussion, and they noticed, and one of the guys walked over and handed me the microphone for a few measures. Excellent.

It was a good night. I was me, in a way and at a level that maybe I haven't been for a very long time.