January 2009 Archives

I'm glad I saw the Police back in 2007, so that I wouldn't have to choose "which was my favorite concert of the year" between that show and last night's Metallica gig at Nassau Coliseum.

Holy. Fucking. Crap.

It was a setlist designed to appease... to make amends with veteran fans from way-back-when who were as much in denial about the existence of Load and Reload as Highlander fans are in denial about Highlander 2. In their two hour setlist, not a single song featured on the "Load"s appeared, nor did anything from their album after that, St. Anger.

All the setlist had in it was what could best be called "classic" Metallica tracks, from the black album prior, as well as "new classics", songs from their recent release, Death Magnetic, which was a clear return to their roots.

I've seen plenty of Metallica shows in my day. When they toured in support of the black album, I must've seen them a dozen or more times. There was a point in time where Little George and I could've talked ourselves through the inter-song banter, "insert-city-name-here"ing ourselves through two hours of great tunes.

Last night's show? Quite possibly the best show I've ever been at. The setlist was filled with tons of rarely heard classics: Phantom Lord -- only the second time since 2003 that song has come out of the vault)... The Thing That Should Not Be -- holy crap what a rush when they started into that....

I ended the concert completely dehydrated (major props, by the way, to the Marriott front-desk woman, who when I asked her to break a $20 so I could find a vending machine and buy some bottled water, just went into the back and got me, Big George, and Mark three bottles for free even though she knew I wasn't a guest... great service!)... my neck still hurts, and there's still a little bit of hoarseness in my throat from singing and shouting all night long.

The boys are definitely back. Felt like old times. Almost enough to make me forget the decade of crushing pain in between "then" and "now" .... :-)

Ignoring for a moment the heinous trademark-stupidity that forces local businesses to have to refer to "The Big Game" as opposed to "The Super Bowl", what's the matter with this ad/coupon from today's Sunday newspaper:

Is it that the coupon expires two days before the date in big bold letters at the top of the ad?

If you're counting on that coupon to help you not "miss the big game", you're going to be sadly disappointed.

Since Tom did it, I decided to do one of those "graph your political views" quizzes, just to see where it would peg me....

My Political Views
I am a right social libertarian
Right: 7.22, Libertarian: 7.01

Political Spectrum Quiz

My Foreign Policy Views
Score: -6.34

My Culture War Stance
Score: -4.63

President Obama said, in his inauguration speech:

Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath.

Except that's not true. Only forty-three Americans have taken the oath.

Grover Cleveland was both the 22nd and 24th President. Meaning that while Obama is the "44th President", there have only been 43 distinct people who have taken the oath.

It has just been a fuck-awful winter this year. I think we've had more sleet or freezing rain this season than we have actual snow by a factor of like two or something. It has definitely been non-conducive to commuting, which is kind of a pain in the ass. I mean, I feel lucky that my job it is at least possible to work from home, even it can sometimes annoy people when it has to happen unexpectedly. I can't imagine the level of "suck" for those people who looked outside today at their frozen cars, looked at the weather forecast of "when you're coming home it'll be far far worse than it is now and you'll be stuck out on the road so you'll have to deal with it," and have no alternative but to suck it up and risk life and limb to go get their paycheck.

Note To Mother Nature: I'm officially over "ice", please just send "snow" from now on. If you insist on ignoring me, I'm going to buy a fuckton of illicit CFCs and release them into the atmosphere so as to speed up this "global warming" thing. You have been warned! :-)

On Facebook, a friend of mine linked to this article, which claims that low-price airfares are damaging the environment because aircraft emissions are SOOOO much worse than other types, etc., etc.

Here are some of its claims:

Air travel produces 19 times the greenhouse gas emissions of trains

"produces" how? In terms of "ppm per hour"? per passenger? per passenger-hour? total?

Remember that a train by and large takes far longer to get from A to B than a train does. So while it may produce "more pollution per hour", an airplane trip from NY to LA only takes 6.5 hours, where a similar train trip takes 62 hours. Is it worth generating only 2x the emissions to get there 10x faster? I'd like to think "probably".

One return flight to Florida produces the equivalent CO2 of a year's average motoring

An average motorist drives 15k miles per year on their car, give or take. A round-trip flight (which in "Brit-speak" is a "return flight") is approximately 8k miles (4k each way). A British Airways 747, in its most "packed" variation, holds 295 passengers. So if the statistic that you get 2,360,000 flight-miles for the same emissions as driving a car-load (4 passengers) of people a total of 60,000 passenger-miles, then I'm perfectly A-OK with that.

Of course MY interpretation of the statistic provided doesn't provide nearly the gloom and doom value of their interpretation, now does it?

Who knows which of us is right? I don't. They didn't cite their source for the statistics so there's no way to go back and look to see what the statistics WERE (as opposed to how they were interpreted for easy consumption). My experience tends towards "oh, they didn't cite their source? Then it probably says what they say it does, but not what they say it means."