And tons and tons of cheese goes blub blub blub

Saw a really neat band tonight with Jeremy and Ann called the Jazz Mandolin Project, they were superb. All instrumental... a mandolin, a real bass, and a fantastic jazz drummer.  One of those "holy cow he’s so good" drummers... plays in his socks, with his eyes closed, holds the sticks so gently yet plays so precisely, so powerfully.  He’s the kind of drummer that makes me want to just practice my drums all day every day.  Also, the bass player used a bow sometimes, and I realized that that’s why the bass (and probably lots of other instruments, by tradition) is shaped like it is, with cutouts in the middle of the sides.  If those cutouts weren’t there, he wouldn’t have been able to play the endmost string because the bow would hit the body of the bass.  So I thought that was really interesting.

Oh yeah, and for those who know, the a-to-the-wizzy factor is in full effect.  Moreso with every encounter, it seems.

And speaking of the Full Effect, today was such a nice, cool, breezy day.  After classes I drove around a little, with the windows down and Reggie blasting on the stereo, and it was good.

So over the weekend I got a new external zoom lens for my Sony DSC-S85 digital camera.  It’s a 2x zoom lens, so combined with my camera’s built-in 3x optical zoom, that means I now have 6x of zoom power!  I can’t wait to try it on a nice, close, full moon.... of course, now that I have some decent zoom power, the next lunar perigee isn’t till APRIL 2003     : (     which means that the moon is about 5000km farther away now than it will be in April.  So I’ll have to zoom in on other less interesting things in the meantime.

Oh, Nate has a neat picture of himself with his hands on fire, so go see it. No, he’s not satan, he’s just a little crazy.