Halloween Was A Blast

Paul came down from Chippewa Falls last night and we went down to State Street for Halloween.

I've made it down to State Street for Halloween every year since I was a freshman, and last night was the nicest Halloween night I can remember.  The weather was great, it wasn't raining, the crowd was well behaved while we were there, and we had a great time.

We stopped by Caroline's for a great party, and then wandered around State Street for a while and took lots of pictures.  Have a look at the pictures in my Halloween 2005 gallery.

My favorite costume was the Vikings Cruise Lines Ship.  The costume was a take off from the recent Vikings Cruise Sex Scandal.  I have a few pictures in the Halloween gallery.  The costume had a fake body in a recliner engaged in some hanky panky with a blonde doll and there were blonde barbie dolls scattered around the deck.

My second favorite costume was a group costume.  There was a group of guys that went as foosball players.  They had pipes strapped to their backs to connect them all together and a handle hanging off one end.  The costume didn't fly with the police though, so they got turned away from state street.

Just as we were getting ready to head home, we had an encounter with some public pissers.  Paul and I were walking down the stairs from the balcony of Wasabi, and there were about 4 or 5 guys all lined up down the stairs taking a leak at the same time.  I managed to dodge them, but one of Paul's shoes was hit.  Casualties are an inevitability on a night like last night.

I also provided the most directions to random drunks last night of any night that I've been downtown.  It was always directions to a place that you could see from where we were standing too.

The Truth About Santa

According to Santa's Slay, Santa Claus is really the son of Satan, and he's just nice because he lost a bet.  Now the bet's over.  I love B movies.

 

Lets check to see if it's a B movie:

 

Star: Bill Goldberg, everyone's favorite WWE wrestler.

Plot: Completely predictable, and cheesy whenever possible.

Flashbacks: A stop motion (a la Rudolph The Red Nose Reindeer) flashback of Santa losing a bet over a game of curling.

 

Yep, it fits the B movie criteria.

 

Oh, and Santa's slay is pulled by a man eating buffalo.

Getting Old Is Wierd, and Yes, Single People Can Be Happy

I just got back from a wedding in Eau Claire. The wedding was for my friend Michelle from high school I think I hadn't seen since high school. It was kind of funny go to her wedding and have the conversation start, "So, what have you been doing since high school?".

I also met up with Erin and Kelly, two friends that I've only seen a handful of times since high school, but we've almost completely lost touch with since then. It was great to catch up, and strange to see old friends married, owning houses, and having children.

I went to the wedding with Danielle, and she made a great point at the service. The priest was giving blessings, and said bless all of the happy couples, bless the president (blargh!), and bless all of the sad and lonely people. What about the happy single people? Where is their blessing?

Sometimes it feels like society views being single as a terrible state to be in, "Oh, poor Chris, if only he can find a nice girl and settle down". Well, I'm a happy single person! And instead of giving the married person's response to what they did last night ("we went to home depot"... "we visited my wife's parents"), I can say instead, "I went out dancing"... "I saw a great concert".

Anyway, to all you other single people out there, you're not broken, you're just fine.

One last thought - do Catholic weddings really need to be that long?

Update: I posted wedding pictures in my photo pages.

Al Gore's Speech at "We Media" Conference

I miss Al Gore.  Well, really I miss intelligent leadership of this country.  Every time I see Bill Clinton it just reminds me how much I miss those years.  Why can't we have a president that doesn't trip over his own tongue every time he speaks?  When I watched Bush addressing the UN a while ago, I just felt embarrassed.  Can't we have someone more intelligent represent us to the world?

Anyway, I just finished reading the text of Al Gore's speech at the "We Media" conference.  It follows the theme of the news media focusing on trivial issues and not spending enough time on issues that are really important.  He goes off a little at the end with a rant about the Internet (at least he doesn't call it "The Internets"), but it is well worth reading.

I particularly enjoyed his, "more than four years later, between a third and a half still believe Saddam was personally responsible for planning and supporting the attack" when talking about confusion around the invasion of Iraq.  The administration has done their best to muddy the waters confusing Saddam with Bin Laden, and the news media hasn't done a very good job of clearing this up.  I've seen this from my own personal exprience.  Around the time we were invading, I was discussing the invasion with a coworker at a previous job.  She said something along the lines of "We have to invade because of what they did to us on 9/11".  Further discussion revealed she couldn't keep Saddam and Bin Laden straight.  It scares me that a large part of the American public can be that confused on something so important.

Vonnegut on NOW

I just caught the second half of Kurt Vonnegut's appearance on PBS' NOW.

 

My Sunday morning ritual involves sitting in my pajama pants, drinking lots of coffee, and watching NOW.  During the week I usually flip around the news channels while I eat breakfast, but I find the news channels so irritating with their reporting of lots of news that I just don't care about that watching NOW on Sunday mornings is a nice sigh of relief from the regular news.

 

Kurt Vonnegut was fantastic, and now I might have to pick up his new book, A Man Without A Country.

Blog Posting Tools

I ran into a post about Qumana, a little blogging client to help you with quicker posting so I decided to test it out.

 

So far it seems pretty nice.  I figure if I have something to make it easier to post, then I might post in my blog a little more often.  So far I'm impressed.

 

I actually found it in a post somewhere about Flock, a new browser based on Firefox that is supposed to have integrated blogging tools.

Blog Posting Tools

I ran into a post about Qumana, a little blogging client to help you with quicker posting so I decided to test it out.

 

So far it seems pretty nice.  I figure if I have something to make it easier to post, then I might post in my blog a little more often.  Sounds nice.

A New Harvey Danger Album

Harvey Danger (you might remember "Flagpole Sitta") has a new album out called Little By Little.... It is well worth listening to. I just downloaded it last weekend and I think it's pretty good.

Downloaded you say? Isn't that what music pirates do? Won't the RIAA's jack booted thugs bust down my door? In this case, no. Harvey Danger is self publishing the album and they decided to publish the album as a direct mp3 download and via BitTorrent.

Right now my favorite song is "Cream and Bastards Rise". Read their "Why we’re releasing our latest album for free on the Internet" and then grab a copy for your listening pleasure.

I hope the experiment works out for them. I probably wouldn't have heard much of their new album otherwise, but now I'm considering buying a copy of the CD.