Well, I got tired of that one pretty quick.

From this ARS article:

Quoting roman:

Kids get forgotten in their car seat and die of hypothermia all the time. Happens a lot during the summer months and in the southern states.

Somehow I doubt it.

Billy Corgan released his first solo album today, titled The Future Embrace (or, "TheFutureEmbrace").  You can supposedly listen to the whole thing on his website, billycorgan.com, but it seems to just play 2 or 3 songs over and over; however the whole album does play properly from his myspace page.

Also on his website, under "confessions," he is writing his autobiography.  There are 32 chapters done so far, and I’ve enjoyed it immensely.  You might have to be a Corgan or Smashing Pumpkins fan to appreciate it though; I’ve lived through each album since the early 90s and they were my favorite band for a long time (and still are one of my favorites), so to get such a deep and personal look into his life and what went on recording Pumpkins albums (and the Zwan album) is fascinating to me.  But I do think his writing is also funny and his story is generally interesting anyway, so maybe you don’t have to be into him or the Pumpkins to enjoy reading his memoirs.

The Wikipedia has a wealth of information about him too, in a short summarized form.

Billy also put out a full-page ad/memo in today’s edition of his hometown paper, the Chicago Tribune, in which he announced that he wants to bring the Pumpkins back together.  Given the way that guitarist James Iha broke the band up five years ago, and the fact that bassist D’Arcy Wretzky has been characterized as a "mean-spirited drug addict" by Corgan, I wonder if that’s really possible.  On the other hand, Corgan and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin (who is one of the best drummers I’ve ever heard, particularly evidenced on the SP box set "The Aeroplane Flies High") have always been 95% of the band, and they have remained good friends through everything, so it could technically work without James and D’Arcy.  The amazing Zwan album is evidence of that.

Here’s part of what Billy said in the ad:

Quoting Billy Corgan:

For a year now I have walked around with a secret, a secret I chose to keep.  But now I want you [his hometown fans] to be among the first to know that I have made plans to renew and revive The Smashing Pumpkins.  I want my band back, and my songs, and my dreams.  In this desire I feel I have come home again.

The part that I bolded captures and conveys some of the magic that is in the Smashing Pumpkins, and in everything that Billy Corgan writes.  He is jaded with the music industry, but he has none of the "look how cool I am because I’m so jaded" attitude that many rock stars (wannabe or otherwise) seem to have.  He puts his heart and soul into his music, bringing that dream to life in a contagious way on every recording.

Oh my gosh!  I can’t believe someone else is ranting about not being able to find Icy Mint Striped toothpaste!  It’s our all time favorite--It’s getting harder and harder to find.  I found some on MediShop Express online.  Hmm.  Maybe that’s how I’ll have to get it.  I even emailed Crest to see if they were discontinuing it!  Thank goodness--no but still.  So many other stupid flavors--not the one I want!  :)  In crest we brush.

Barb

I just got back from an awesome little vacation with Kim and her parents in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.  If there were such a thing as heaven on Earth, I think it’d probably be in Colorado.  There are rivers and mountains everywhere, and the civilization (mostly farms) is sprinkled so sparsely across the landscape.

The little town of Steamboat Springs is wonderfully quaint and cozy.  There is a walking/biking path that runs along the Yampa river right on the edge of downtown, and it takes you past bridges and mountains and restaurants and stinky bubbly sulfur springs.  From literally everywhere in the town, and for that matter everywhere we drove in Colorado, you can see huge snow-capped mountains either right next to you, or off in the distance.

The only downside is that the sun is more intense there (seemingly a LOT more intense) due to the high altitude, and we got some sunburn pretty early-on in the trip.  The only time I ever wear sunblock is at the beach, so I didn’t really think about it for the mountains.  But on the upside, I wore a baseball hat for the first time in probably 10 years, to keep the sun off my head and face and ears, and I rather enjoyed it.  I think I’m going to look for a hat to wear more regularly now.

Between myself, Kim, and her dad, we took over 2.5 gigs of photos and movie clips.  I’ll be posting some of them here soon.

I’m reading this book called  Eats, Shoots & Leaves that Kim got as a (gag?) gift from her boss.  It’s a book about punctuation, and it’s also a "Runaway #1 British Bestseller" apparently.

If you are interested in good writing and punctuation, or more to the point: if you are bothered by bad writing and punctuation, then you will love this book.  It’s laugh-out-loud funny, to me at least.  Here are some excerpts:

Quoting Lynne Truss:

I tend to feel that if a person genuinely wants to know how to spell Connecticut, you see, they will make efforts to look it up.  Or, failing that, if a book announcing itself as The Only Way to Spell Connecticut is This is to be found in heaps on a table in front of them, they will think, "Hang on, I might get this!"  But it turns out there are people whom you simply cannot help, because it suits them to say, with a shrug, "Do you know, I’ve always wanted to know how to use an apostrophe -- and oh dear, I don’t know how to wash my hair either."  [xxiii]

Either this will ring bells for you, or it won’t.  A printed banner has appeared on the concourse of a petrol station near where I live.  "Come inside," it says, "for CD’s, VIDEO’s, DVD’s, and BOOK’s."  If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put down this book at once.  [1]

No one understands us seventh-sense people.  They regard us as freaks.  When we point out illiterate mistakes we are often aggressively instructed to "get a life" by people who, interestingly, display no evidence of having lives themselves.  [4]

In the spring of 2001 the ITVI show Popstars manufactured a pop phenomenon for our times: a singing group called Hear’Say. [...] newspapers, who insist on precision in matters of address, at once learned to place Hear’Say’s apostrophe correctly and attend to the proper spacing.  To refer in print to this group as Hearsay (one word) would be wrong, you see.  To call it Hear-Say (hyphenated) would show embarrassing ignorance of popular culture.  And so it came to pass that Hear’Say’s poor, oddly placed little apostrophe was replicated everywhere and no one gave a moment’s though to its sufferings.  No one saw the pity of its position, hanging there in eternal meaninglessness, silently signalling to those with eyes to see, "I’m a legitimate punctuation mark, get me out of here."  [36]

Guess who’s the #1 result for the Google search lorenzo’s nazi philadelphia?  That’s right.

That’s right, Pgh.

After ranting the other day about not being able to find Crest’s Icy Mint Striped flavor of toothpaste anywhere for a month, I found it at a Shop ’n Save the very next day.  That’s still the only place I’ve seen it in, including two other Shop ’n Save locations, in the past month.

There are two snacks that I really want that I can’t find anywhere though: one is Golden Krackle, which is a Greek/Mediterranean flour-based chip, and is sold at Giant (not to be confused with Giant Eagle) and Wegmans back east.  I love the Garlic and the Cheese & Oregano flavors.  They’re sold in thin white cardboard boxes that are about one foot square and 1.5 inches deep, and they can be hard to find even in stores that do carry them; they’re usually not with normal chips/snacks, but rather by the deli or produce areas.  The second snack is Utz Pub Mix, which I’ve ranted about before, and can’t seem to find anywhere anymore :(

But on a happier note, Kim and I bought an old-fashioned push lawn mower, the kind with no motor, that instead has a set of curved blades that spin when you push the thing.  It’s really fun to use, though probably not as much fun if you have a big yard.  The only drawback is that it doesn’t mulch the clippings, but if you go over the lawn a second time, mowing over the trails of clippings, that mulches them pretty well.