Manchester Photos

Al gets her shoulder signed by Bob 1


Al is about to get her shirt signed by Jerry


Al in a borrowed Energy Dome


Assorted Loot (Tour shirt, signed Slack shirt, ticket)

Pattern Recognition At Its Finest
#falls over laughing#

So if you're got broadband and you wish you were there with us last night, here's Devo doing Jocko Homo live at the Manchester Apollo.

(And yes, embarrassed as I am to admit it, that's me screaming the loudest when Mark starts to take his Tyvek off. #grins#)

Although I was shouting as loud as anyone when they asked us if we believed De-Evolution was real, I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to be as happy about it as everyone in the audience always sounds. Likewise, we're (I've always assumed affectionately) referred to as Spuds, but although Gerald Casale was quoted as being reasonably positive towards the Spud concept ("Spud became another symbol of those common folks that weren't born with a silver spoon in their mouths. The unsung soldiers of the world. Potatoes are a staple of all diets and looked upon without any glamour whatsoever. But they do have eyes all around and we all learned in Ohio how to use potatoes as conductors of electricity. So we thought, you know what? Potatoes aren't such a bad thing.") the appellation Spud isn't used overly positively in the context of the songs, ("Think I'm only a spudboy, " "Let me tell you about a boy, An average spud, " "A stupid spud staggering to the flame, " etc.) so I've never quite known how to feel about it. #shrugs# I do often overthink things. I feel it's better than underthinking them, though.

I found the Particle Board guy!

At the time I couldn't find any reference to him online via the lyrics, but now everyone can enjoy the Particle Board song and others here at Rob Paravonian's site. Considering I have been singing the chorus of it randomly off and on for the past couple of years, I feel it's only fair that you get to hear the actual one and not my bastardized version.

It's funny, because I don't feel lagged, but I've been sleeping about thirteen hours a night since I got here. I'm hoping to actually get up in the morning sometime soon.

Apparently, the extra eight hours in Philly, even though I slept a little on the floor there and a bit on the plane, and a bit more on the train ride to York, sufficiently wiped me out to sleep sixteen hours straight last night. That may be a personal record.

Still getting the time change thing under control, will post more tomorrow.

I'm reading Warren Zevon's biography, and I was barely a page into the first chapter before I was crying. A page or two later though and I was laughing, and when that first chapter, about his death, was over, I smiled through the tears and got it all together. But when I turned the page, I saw the first section about his life was called "Piano Fighter" and I started crying all over again.

I wonder how many times I'll have cried before I finish the book?

A link to Wheadonesque on the subject of a woman's murder. There is nothing of honor in these so-called "honor killings, " and how can there be? A crowd of men against one unarmed woman? It's butchery. And it happens more often than most of us would like to think about.

A human being died that night, defenceless and in agony, while others taped it to show their friends what a cool time they had. There is nothing more I could possibly say to show how utterly, absolutely, incalculably wrong that is. There is no moral relativism here; if the brutal death of an unarmed person by a pack of butchers isn't wrong, then nothing is. It's as simple as that. Shades of gray only come into being through the blending of black and white. For neutrality to exist, there must be, somewhere, some things that are either solely good or evil. I believe that this kind of slaughter is one of those rare pure evils untouched by any vestige of good.

There are a number of things I would like to do to the people (and I use the term loosely) who participate in killings like this. None of them are particularly fit to print, and I imagine anyone who reads this will have formed their own ideas as well. Mine are bloody enough that I suspect there's a good reason that I wasn't put in charge of meting out punishment for this sort of thing. And I don't know if it would solve anything. It would certainly make me feel better, but me feeling better isn't even remotely the point. So as for something nonviolent we can all actually do, I'm including this link to Amnesty International, in the hopes that enough international pressure will do something positive for a change. We can only try.