Funk Babblings

Friday evening I went up to Cleveland to see Room Nineteen and the Prodigals at the Grog Shop, sans nontacitare, who likes the music but not the process of driving an hour to a bar and standing around for a few hours. Unfortunately I didn't check the starting time of the show until after 7, when I discovered that it was scheduled to start at 8. It takes about an hour for me to get to Cleveland, plus a bit more to get to the east side neighborhood where the Grog Shop is, and attempting to follow the Grog Shop's unclear directions didn't help either. (On the last part, luckily the part where I diverged was close enough that my previous knowledge of the neighborhood got me there easily.) On top of all that, this was my first time going to the Grog Shop since their move to the opposite end of the Coventry Rd strip (to a former BW-3 location), and just figuring out which door to enter was difficult.

So I got there at about 7:40, in time to hear Room Nineteen's last two songs. Both were old songs from when they had Fletch in the band doing backing vocals, and it was interesting to hear the songs without her voice. But I really wished I'd made it there earlier.

The Prodigals were up next, on tour to promote their sixth CD. The last time I saw them was sometime in the late 90s at the Dublin Irish Festival, when they had only two CDs out. They were about what I remembered and expected, but with some rhythm section personnel changes, including an amazing bassist keeping up with the accordian note-for-note. (I could barely hear the guitar at all most of the time, but this is hardly a guitar-driven band.) I ended up buying three more CDs, omitting "Live at the Beachland Ballroom". But I got too tired to stick around for their second set -- and it was only 11:30 when I left.

At that point I noticed that the Coventry Rd strip really needs more late-night restaurants, considering the late-night bars there. A La Bamba ("Burritos as big as your head, open till after the bars close") would be great there, since Que Tal seems to close at 11. It seemed that my only choice for dinner at that point was a pizzeria. (My original plan had been to stop at Chipotle or Baja Fresh in Akron on the way to Cleveland, but my late start eliminated any hope of that, and they close at 10 or 11 too.)

Going home I attempted to follow the official directions (backward) that I'd only partially successfully followed to get there, but got fairly lost. Luckily my basic knowledge of Cleveland geography (E. 114th St is more west and closer to downtown than E. 116th St, and so on) became useful, so I was able to head in basically the right direction and eventually get to the freeway.

Saturday I took nontacitare to the local comics shop. Between the two of us we bought six graphic novels, among them:
1 "Sandman" ("The Dream Hunters")
2 "Amazing Spider-Man"
1 Batman ("Arkham Asylum")
1 "Black Orchid"
1 "Promethea"
2 written by J. Michael Straczinski
2 written by Neil Gaiman
1 written by Alan Moore
2 drawn by Dave McKean

I was blown away by the second volume of Promethea (a series recommended by featherynscale). The first volume was an intelligent and off-kilter, yet in many ways typical, superhero origin story. But the second one includes a "hyper-reality" sequence with digitized actors, a magic lesson performed as a tantric sex scene, and finally a trip through the Tarot linking the major arcana with evolution and human history and mythology and kaballah and magic and science -- it's impossible to get it all in one reading.


After the comics shop we went to see an entertaining performance of the musical Pippin. That show includes some interesting theatrical elements, the most striking of them being the climactic stripping out of all theatrical elements, down to the bare bright lights shining down on a stage empty of everything but a few uncostumed actors. Another thing I noticed was a high proportion of red-headed actors in the cast -- about a third of them. I started wondering if that was part of an intentional red-themed color scheme going on.

Lately I've been noticing a lot of cases where the successor to a given instance of web technology (specifically within the so-called "LAMP" stack of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python) isn't necessarily the next version of that instance, but rather something different. "Say what?" Let me explain with the specifics:

( Web Server: Apache 1.3 -> LightTPD )
( Programming Language: PHP4/Perl5 -> Ruby (On Rails) )
( Database Server: MySQL4 -> PostgreSQL ? )
( Operating System: Linux 2.4 -> FreeBSD ? Not much. )

OK, so not much happened on Sunday. So here's another bit of Saturday:

Around lunchtime I was driving through North Canton and came up behind a car in the left lane that was going a bit slower than the rest of the traffic. I moved right to pass (yes, passing on the right) and looked over at the car I was passing....

The driver had the sports page balanced on the steering wheel, and was reading it while occasionally trying to watch the road out of the corner of his eye. Or occasionally look at his toddler passenger.