I just had the best idea.

When I compare showering to shaving, shaving is on the "pain in the butt" end of the scale, and showering is on the other end.  I love showers -- who doesn’t love hot water and cleanness?  But if you shave at any time other than immediately after showering, your skin is way less soft and smooth, making shaving a lot harder and more nick-prone.  It’s cruel irony: showering makes shaving better, but shaving puts a big damper on the overall joy of the showering process.

So... I’m going to buy a suction-cuppy mirror and shave in the shower!  It will extend my time in the shower and make shaving even easier, since it’s also a pain to have to splash water from the sink all over your face and neck trying to get rid of leftover shaving cream, etc.

What a fantastic idea.  I can’t believe I never thought of this before.

Telefon Tel Aviv: instrumental, sort of techno-ish/electronic but not the crappy dance-kind.  Dreamy... sometimes slow and soothing, sometimes lots of crazy alien sounds for no apparent reason.  Somewhat like The Postal Service.  You can listen at telefontelaviv.com (which unfortunately is offline at the moment).  Update: looks like they’re back online.  In their "Listen" section, check out the tracks from the album Fahrenheit Fair Enough; the other stuff is cool too, but so far I’m liking FFE the best, I think.

Rainer Maria - Long Knives Drawn: this is their newest album, and I just got it... it’s so rock and roll.  As time has passed, RM has gone from a dual-vocal format to just the female vocalist, and she is amazing.  I can’t get through many of the songs on this album without bursting out in song, and one of them is "Long Knives."  At first, this song makes no sense.  I mean I think it has verses and a refrain and even a bridge, but they just make no sense... the guitar is crazy on the verses, the drums are crazy on the chorus, and the vocals the whole time are just... like, repeating the same word/phrase a few times in a row almost spokenly... and her inflections are just very unique.  So anyway, after the first listen, I was like, "what?"  And after a few more, I’m in love.  This song rocks, it’s just different.

Emery: this is a pretty new band (I think).  They’re "another one of those" indie rock bands whose sound is highly dynamic, with intense screaming parts followed by pretty mellow parts.  But I like those kinds of bands, so I like these guys.  Similarish to A Static Lullaby, and maybe a little bit to The Juliana Theory.  Listen to almost the whole album at theweaksend.com and a couple songs at purevolume.com.

Freemartin: they just relased a new EP that’s unstoppable.  They are punk rock + emo, I guess... mostly fast but with slow and pretty breakdowns.  Their sound is really tight, with incredible drumming.  (Update: I forgot a sounds-like.  Sounds like... sorta like old Get Up Kids stuff, especially the vocals, but way faster.)  Listen at freemartin.com.

Tasha and Dan have a precious new puppy.  Go see!

I drove out to Arch Springs last night.  It was among the best two hours I’ve spent anytime recently.  I didn’t take my camera, because it was nighttime (after midnight, no less), so of course I came across a really awesome overlook of some towns and lights while driving over this one mountain.

I love to drive, I love to drive and listen to music, and I especially love to do both around here.  There are so many neat little villages with neat little houses in the country.  And so often you find yourself surrounded on all sides by fields, and just beyond them, completely surrounded by mountains.  And it’s often about pitch black at night, because of how sparsely populated it is out here.  The sky, even on starless cloudy nights, is brighter than the black mountains below, and that’s so neat to see.

One of the albums that my stereo picked for me to listen to was No Need to Argue, by the Cranberries.  What a spectacular album this is.  It’s one of those albums that came out while "alternative" was really big, and that managed to completely avoid that kind of sound, thank goodness.  Here’s a bit of it.

It’s also lots of fun to have straight, empty backroads that have stretches covered by patches of snowdrifts.  Since the patches are followed by dry road, you can slide around a little without much risk.  It’s neat to see how the car reacts to turning into a spin as opposed to turning away, etc.  They say that you’re always supposed to turn into the spin, and it’s true that that causes the spin to eventually stop and puts you back in control, but you’re also going off the road at that point... if you turn against the spin, you lose your traction and slide, but you’re sliding forward at least.  And if you take your foot off the gas and the brake (which you probably should have done long ago), then the tires actually regain traction fairly quickly.

Of course, it’s easy to say all that when you’re driving slow on empty backroads.

I also saw some interestingly-named things: Baby Boomer Celebration Hall, Sickles Corner Back Road, and Skelp village.  I saw a Limekiln Road too, which reminded me of home since we have one of them there.

So anyway, drive=love and the country out here definitely =love.  I could drive around forever and never get tired of it.  Sometimes I think I’m easily amused.  Then I think, shut up.

How does everyone feel about the new movie? Does anyone feel it is violating the second commandment? What about Mel Gibson and his comments on salvation?

If there are 2 scoops of raisins in every box of raisin bran and there are several different size boxes, shouldn’t you get the smallest box so you get the highest ratio of raisins to bran flakes?  Do they use the different sized scoops for each size box to ensure that you get the same ratio in every box?  Is this all a hoax?  This is driving me nuts and I can’t sleep.

I just registered a new domain name for $7.49 per year, through namesecure.  When I registered nodivisions.com back in August of 2000, it cost me ten times that: $70-something for one year.  Amazing.  I don’t know whether to be glad it’s so cheap now, or mad that it was so expensive then.