Creed tix drop to 7.79/Next Big Nashville/weekend stuff
October 2, 2009
I find it absolutely hilarious to learn that tickets for the upcoming Creed concert at Sommet Center have dropped to $7.79. I can’t see how this show could go on with ticket prices that low… with the production costs in a venue that big, there’s no way this show could happen without the promoters or someone losing a lot of money. As one Cream commenter said, “these are cheap enough to buy [for] someone as a practical joke..” I hope Stapp & co. get the message here: Your band sucks. Your band is an embarrassment to humanity. Stop now. No one likes you. In fact, even Jesus hates you.
Every once in a while Oddee.com comes out with a truly interesting/ridiculous list of bizarre (insert phrase here). This list of “accidental deaths you won’t believe” is quite possibly one of the most hilarious/terrifying/depressing things they’ve published yet. A stripper suffocating inside a birthday cake? Falling into a vat of scalding chocolate? Being crushed to death by a woman committing suicide? You couldn’t make this shit up…
Next Big Nashville is only a week away! You can still get wristbands and VIP badges here. Don’t think you can just walk up to a venue and be able to pay a cover to get in… that may work in some cases, but I’d say there will be at least a few of these shows that will fill up to capacity with badges and wristbands, and walk-ups won’t be able to get in.
As for stuff to do this weekend, you probably won’t find us out quite as much as usual. As far as I know, I’m not shooting any shows until Them Crooked Vultures on Monday… so the main thing we’re doing is the art crawl saturday night. If you’ve never been, just head down to the Aracade on 5th Ave tomorrow night around 6-7pm. All the art galleries are free and open, and most have free wine and snacks. It’s a great way to hang out, look at some awesome art, and get drunk for free. There’s even a free shuttle to haul your drunk ass around to the other galleries that aren’t within walking distance. I actually have to work Sunday morning so I can’t stay out late Sat. night, but if you’ve ever been to the End, please do head over there for a benefit show to celebrate the life of Stacy Fleeman, the former doorman who passed away last month. Playing are Dharmakaya, Silent Friction, Creeping Cruds, The Billy Goats, Jah’s Addiction, The Destructions, Lovebucket, and Fire Walk With Me. These are all bands that Stacy had some sort of connection with and/or loved. The show will start at 3pm and go late into the night.
One last note: I’m really REALLY stoked for the series premier of Stargate Universe tonight on SyFy. I’ve been looking forward to this show for a good 6 months now, ever since the final episode of Stargate Atlantis. It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of the whole Stargate franchise, but I’m still cautiously optimistic about the new direction this show is taking. We’ll see how it goes.
Water on the moon/Stargate Universe/We are all made of germs
September 28, 2009
Image via Stargate Universe blog
Ok first of all I have to get out my excitement about Stargate Universe, the third show in the Stargate TV franchise. The 2-hour series debut will hit your screen this Friday at 9pm (8pm Central) on SyFy. io9 posted a fairly revealing clip from it today. Don’t get me wrong, no real spoilers there, just a good idea of the vibe and overall tone of the show. This series will be a much more serious take on the Stargate saga. I’m thinking it’s going to end up taking on a similar mood to Battlestar Galactica.
Ok now that’s out of my system….
I’m sure you’ve seen the headlines about how water was discovered on the moon recently by NASA’s mineral mapper instrument aboard India’s Chandrayaan-1 probe launched in 2008. First of all, this does NOT mean that water is swirling around on the surface of the moon. The moon has no atmosphere and therefore water can’t even exist in a liquid state at all. What’s happening is that the incoming solar rays are reacting with the material on the surface to create a thin layer of hydroxyl (OH) and normal water (H2O) in the very top milimeter or so of regolith. This layer is so thin that it would amount to 1 liter of water per ton of surface soil. That’s a VERY small amount, but it’s a lot more than we ever thought would be there. What does this all mean for the future of human exploration on the moon? Read this Universe Today article to find out.
Here is a great Daily Galaxy article about something that I had honestly never even heard or known before. I hadn’t the slightest clue that there are more bacteria/microbes in our bodies than there are actual human cells. That’s to say that if you counted the number of human cells and the number of microbial/bacterial cells in your body, there would be more bacteria/microbes. In fact it’s utterly awe-inspiring (and slightly terrifying) to think that some of the species if bacteria actually don’t exist anywhere else outside our bodies, and that we could NOT survive without them. Essentially they’re as important as any organ. We’re literally more germ than we are human, and it couldn’t exist any other way. Of course, we look more like us because human cells are MUCH bigger than bacteria cells. The crazy thing, as the article points out, is that doctors still don’t know anything about most of these bugs that live inside us. But they’re trying to change that.
Weekend shows/SyFy/Colbert covers guns in bars law
July 17, 2009
First of all, here’s what’s going down this weekend:
Photo by Lance Conzett
Tonight is the EP release show for The Comfies/Benjamin A. Harper. The actual EP is called The Comfies Present: Benjamin A. Harper in This Ship Is Going Down. You can grab the EP for however much you want to pay at their bandcamp page. Tonight’s show is at the End and also on the bill are The Nobility and Joel J. Dahl (from De Novo Dahl). In addition to the new Comfies material being awesome, The Nobility and Joel are both a perfect fit for the bill. I’ve been looking forward to this show ever since I heard about it and I highly suggest attending. I also hear that The Nobility have long overdue new material coming out soon in the form of a 7″ vinyl release.
Also of interest tonight:
Kindercastle, Pico vs. Island Trees, and the Winter Sounds at Mercy Lounge.
Overzealous, Millionaire Magicians, The Young, & The Icons at the 5 Spot.
Tomorrow night we will be partying in Murfreesboro with a friend who’s moving away soon, so we won’t really be out & about. But some good stuff to do would include:
Apparently there’s a bikini carwash at Halcyon Bike Shop featuring Heavy Cream, Caitlin Rose, and Natural Child. Whaaaa??? Kinda sad I’ll be missing this…
Also, Umbrella Tree will be doing an instore show at Grimey’s.
I’ve mentioned before that I don’t really like the Sci Fi channel’s re-branding as “SyFy,” but designer, photographer, and typographer Alfonso Gómez Arzola has posted a blog in defense of the new logo/name. Check it out here. He makes a decent case, but I still disagree with the overall decision. (Via i09)
Stephen Colbert unsurprisingly made fun of Tennessee, Nashville, and the dirty south in general because of the new “guns-in-bars” law that went into effect recently. You wanna know why people from other parts of the nation/world hate us and stereotype us as dumb, redneck, white-trash buffoons? This is why. See the video clip on Nashville Is Talking.
Via Ironic Sans
That image kinda made my day this morning. Click to get to the actual Ironic Sans post.
I’m pretty stoked to announce a DJ gig next week with one of my all-musical heroes Matt Mahaffey. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m an avid sElf fan and basically love anything the guy has done. The event is a benefit at Mai for Voices for Planned Parenthood (VOX). It’s next Thursday July 26th and starts at 10pm. DJ’s will be Matt Mahaffey, Me (DJ Burgers), and DJ Busta Window (Kelly Kerr). There’s no cover and 5% of the bar sales will go towards VOX. From the press release:
This special one night only event will be used to raise funds for PPMET’s Volunteer Program and area college and university student-run organizations known as “Vox®: Voices for Planned Parenthood.” Anyone who supports Planned Parenthood® can join Vox® as its members are a composite of young professionals and post-grads whose progressive values and volunteer spirit reflect the diversity of Tennessee.
I came across some amazing photos from the Glastonbury Music Festival today at the Boston Globe’s Big Picture blog. Do give it a look, your eyes will thank you.
Some more updates on the new “SyFy” series Stargate: Universe can be found at io9 today. They’ve also launched a new website for the full Stargate franchise. Give the Universe section a good look-over if you’re interested. It contains quite a few video clips and images of the new cast as well as the set.
The Ad Astra Rocket Company has been hard at work building a rocket engine that sounds like something straight out of Star Trek. It’s called the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR). This thing will greatly reduce the costs of space exploration because it’s many many more times efficient than our current chemical fuel rockets. Unfortunately it won’t work within Earth’s atmosphere, so we’ll still have to use conventional rockets to get us into space, but once we’re there, these engines will make space travel much easier. They build upon the idea of an ion engine (like the one used on NASA’s Deep Space 1 mission), but VASIMR will use superconducting electromagnets to accelerate the ions to much higher velocities (and thus generate more thrust) than past ion engines. (Via Daily Galaxy)
Evan Voytas=jam of the summer/Eureka finally returns/Asteroid may not have killed dinos
April 27, 2009
It’s pretty rare for me to instantly fall in love with a band/artist these days. I’ve just become so “Nashville” about everything- jaded/oversaturated/desensitized/insert-apathetic-synonym-here. But RCRD LBL posted some mp3’s from this dude named Evan Voytas on Friday, and I was instantly blown away. It feels good to be totally into something new. This guy’s stuff is a little bit of everything- the tracks I’ve gotten my hands on so far range from a shoegazy, fuzzed out slow pop jam to electro-driven rock with a touch of twee to a full on summery disco-pop groove. That last track I’m describing is called “Getting Higher,” and I have hereby proclaimed it to be the official jam of the summer 2009. Please, PLEASE go to RCRD LBL and download it now! Then go to the Hype Machine and you’ll be able to find several other great tracks. But “Getting Higher” is where it’s at. It’s an instantly love-able dancey track, complete with a 70’s funk bass groove, and straight-up disco beat, and uplifting sunny guitars and syths bathed in a healthy but tasteful dose of reverb.
In local news- Makeout With Violence, the locally made feature-length film starring several members of our music scene, pretty much owned the Nashville Film Festival, taking the best feature-length narrative film and best music awards, along with a few other smaller awards. It’s good to see these guys finally getting the recognition they deserve for their 3 years of hard work on this thing.
My love of science fiction is no secret. That’s why I’m quite pleased to know that one of my favorite TV series Eureka, has finally been scheduled to return to action on July 10th on the SyFy channel. (Yes, the SciFi channel is now SyFy…. go figure.) I read about this on io9, and I agree with their sentiment that moving the show to Battlestar Galactica’s old slot of Fridays at 10pm/9 central was a bad idea. That means I’ll end up watching most of it online because I’m normally out & about by that time on a Friday night…
So we all know that the dinosaurs were killed because of a giant asteriod hitting just off the Yucatan Penninsula in Mexico, right? That’s what they taught us in middle school science class, afterall…. Not so fast. As more and more new evidence is uncovered, that theory is starting to look more and more… extinct. Universe Today posted this morning about some new discoveries that date the actual impact at least 300,000 years prior to the mass extinction. At the same time comes the discovery of a supervolcano eruption (or even a series of supervolcano eruptions) called the Deccan Traps in India. Such an eruption could easily have thrown enough dust and ash into the air to block out the sun and cause a sudden massive cooling. My personal hunch is that the asteroid surely did have some degree of impact on the global climate, (pun fully intended) and obviously would’ve killed a ton of dinos in the immediate area, but ultimately it may have been the volcanic activity that dealt the lethal blow to our bird-like ancestors.
I’ll leave you today with this great image of the next space shuttle crew… I must say NASA has been doing a great job of marketing lately. First the whole C.O.L.B.E.R.T. thing, and now this:
Click to enlarge
steve cross loves music and science 