If I were..

.. easy, I'd blog a tag ages after I had stopped writing proper posts. So here I am.

If I were a month I would be: June, carrying the hope of spring and the promise of summer - yeah right!

If I were a day of the week I would be: Saturday night baby!

If I were a time of day I would be: 11pm, the time i'm either fast asleep or at the peak of my creativity.

If I were a planet I would be: Uranus.. lol, that was too easy. Probably Mars, like Earth, but not quite.

If I were an animal I would be: a lion.. lazy as f*ck but when things need to get done they get done.

If I were a direction I would be: going down. Yes.

If I were a liquid I would be: beer. Vatfuls of the stuff.

If I were a flower/plant I would be: barley or hops, going with the beer theme.

If I were a kind of weather I would be: sunny yet breezy, like the Northeast spring.

If I were a musical instrument I would be: a rusty trombone. UrbanDictionary that one up!

If I were an emotion I would be: empathy - i usually look out for the others of the species, but i do NOT "suffer fools gladly" (2 Corinthians 11:19)

If I were a color I would be: Pepsi blue baby, look at what i put up with and yet go back to work every day.

If I were a sound I would be: a fart! hahah!

If I were a car I would be: the Ford Mustang Shelby GT500KR

If I were a song I would be: Mad Season's 'Long Gone Day'

If I were a food I would be: thick-cut steak, grilled medium-rare with mashed potatoes

If I were a taste I would be: see above!

If I were a scent I would be: Old Spice underarm deo.

If I were a word I would be: awesome.

If I were a facial expression I would be: a raised eyebrow.

If I were a number I would be: 665, just a little short of the devil himself.

If I were a cartoon character I would be: Animal from The Muppet Show.

up close and Hurt

you might have heard me raving about the band Hurt in the past.. so when we found out they were coming to Harper's Ferry in Boston, the gf and i jumped at the chance! late Monday night concert notwithstanding, it also happened to be St. Paddy's Day, there we were right up in the front. what i love about small club gigs is that the band hangs about the bar there, waiting for their turn to go on stage, hobnobbing with the fans, vis-à-vis with the gf and me!

it turned out to be a fantastic set, nice and loud, and up close and personal. of course we got to talk to all the band members before and after the show. of course we told them how much we loved them. of course we got pictures. heh!

great idea #29

in this era of recycling and all that environment-consciousness, something i see every day really bothers me. why the heck do we waste so much wood, money and other resources on making spanking white envelopes? we're already making greetings cards, place-cards and all sorts of other paperware out of some sort of recycled paper, then why stop at envelopes?

the one place i saw recycled brown paper envelopes turned out to be a bitter disappointment because it was one of them fancy-ass handicraft places that actually charged about a buck per envelope! which brings me to my other point, about how 'the man' never makes it easy for people to recycle and actually give a hoot about the environment. so everyone has to either go an extra step to recycle plastic, cans and glass or worse, actually pay more to get what should be a government and private industry sponsored service! is that hypocritical of me to expect at least that from the big corporations?!

shuffle-o to buffalo

so one day i'm browsing through the bookshelf, and suddenly i realize i cannot find any of my andy mcnab's!! now those of you who don't know me too well probably also don't know how much i love his books, and so it really bothered me to also realize that the books were still in a box back in my old apartment in buffalo! so then i got a-thinking about what the heck else i had left back there! it appeared that there was actually a good chunk of my wardrobe and books and other important documents still back at old 122H..

then i also got thinking, that it would be fantastic to go go check out the Buffalo Sabres play at home, surrounded by raving raging buffalonians rather than in the stodgy confines of boston, in enemy territory! by the miracles of ebay and travelocity, credit card info was transferred and tickets were bought, and before you could say "let's go Sabres" we were headed off to buffalo to watch the Sabres play the Capitals, with the added bonus of watching Ovechkin play - his rugged jawline makes the gf swoon, apparently..



unfortunately the Sabres lost, but the rest of the two-day whirlwind trip was fantastic, despite the snowstorms and biting cold. i retrieved all my missing stuff, had strong sensations of deja vu walking the streets of University heights, past 33H and 122H, eating at Just Pizza, dropping by the library i worked at, peering into classrooms that i rarely sat in and finally meeting up with my thesis advisor and being surprised by how warmly he welcomed me back!


one final note, these small puddle-jumpers for local direct flights make for some rough flying in bad weather, definitely not for the queasy ones!

push my buttons?

Blog buttons are a fascinating thing to play with, especially if you have lots of time and a handy website for a button maker. If you scroll down to my sidebar links, you'll see some I made. However, these nifty little buttons can be made to say anything you want. Yes, anything. Look at these -

(These buttons originally made by Jeremy Zawodny)

I can't claim ownership of these buttons, however awesome they are! Here are a couple of links for making buttons - some of them allow you to make buttons with graphics while the others are plain-text versions: McKnight, Zappa, Kalsey.. enjoy!

the luxury box

after months of nagging the bosses at work that i'm a huge Buffalo Sabres fan and wanted tickets to go watch them in Boston when they came to town to play the Boston Bruins, finally they relented.. and how! i mean, there's a five foot by three foot flag of the Buffalo Sabres hanging in my office, how much more of an indication could i give!!

anyways, the Pepsi luxury box was fantastic, top notch food - prime rib, shrimp cocktail, etc.. beer in the mini-fridge.. the view was awesome too, with exclsuive replay tvs and the works..




of course, it was all the sweeter that the Sabres won!

NB:- I'm headed to Buffalo tomorrow for a short holiday, to catch the Sabres play the Washington Capitals.. now that should be a helluva game

Batalla De Los Tambores

in case i hadn't mentioned this before, but Godsmack is one of my favorite bands. why? a bunch of reasons - any band that mentions Alice in Chains as their primary influence already has my vote. any band that actually names themselves after an AiC song is flying pretty high on the radar. these guys from Boston make some pretty good music, nice heavy guitar riffs, excellent rasping lyrics and a bass drum that will blow you away.

lead singer Sully is an accomplished musician in his own right, and not just a mic jockey. he plays an absolutely deadly drum set as well, forming the encore piece of their live set - Sully plays with drummer Shannon in a makeshift drum duet-battle which is absolutely amazing.. and here's the clip

i've watched them playing at a college spring festival on an open lawn, a small club scene packed to the rafters, a closed hockey rink opening for Metallica and at an open plan arena on the summer rock festival circuit and they have been fantastic every single time.

'Image Too Large To Display'

i have a Canon PowerShot A520 digital camera. it's not the greatest digicam in the world, but it fulfills most of the basic requirements of digital photography. for the most part it has behaved itself. the only issue i have had with it in the past was its snobbish intolerance of not indubitable SD memory cards, by haughtily proclaiming "Memory Card Not Readable".

during our recent trip to Chicago, this dinky little device threw a new tantrum. after taking a picture, when i tried to review the image on the camera itself, it shrunk the image to a postage stamp size, and announced "Image Too Large To Display". what the #%&@?! since when did cameras start taking pictures bigger than they could display?! it actually got better - i took out the memory card and slid it into its slot on the computer to see if i could download the pics. on trying to open one of the pictures, the computer promptly hung. when eventually it shook the cobwebs out of its head, it gave me a very interesting nugget of info. apparently twelve of the pictures were each 4Gb in size. at four gigs a pop, these would have to be super high resolution snaps where even specks of dirt would show up on the picture! of course, the biggest irony is that the memory card itself was only one gig in size.. no wild guesses that the data on the card was corrupted.

it's feb. 20th today, kurt cobain would have turned 41 today were he still around. would he still have been making grunge music? who knows. one thing for sure is that he would have been pretty shocked at what passes for music these days. also, it's taken a few years, but it appears finally the stigma surrounding his death is wearing off. memorial concerts have been organized, his hometown Aberdeen changed its welcome sign, the album 'Nevermind' has been inducted to the Library of Congress National Recording Registry (reserved for historically significant recordings), a memorial park and youth center are being planned too. RIP Kurt.

quot et demonstratum (qed)

came upon a most interesting quote today, which has been happening every day now that i have changed my browser homepage to Google. previously it was the CNN page but i did get quite wearisome of waking up, switching on the comp and being blasted with details about gory deaths, sordid affairs and lurid politics while i was still rubbing sleep out of my eyes in a haze of smoke

oh no, i'm not pretending i haven't seen the date or don't know what day it is - i think i have done my fair part in keeping the commercialism of v-day going. ever since i was a scruffy undergrad trying to scrounge together some change to pick up any flowers bearing a shade of red, i have bowed to the gods of marketing who have deemed that this fourteenth day of february be used to not only enshrine the female half of every relationship equation, but further propagated onto pretty much every other girl/lady/woman who plays some part or the other in your life.

it is thanks to these glamorous denizens of television commercials who in breathy voices gasp their ecstasy to the men in their lives who shower them with jewelry that a pretty comic moment was played out between the gf and me yesterday. having procured well ahead of time a pretty necklace which was proclaimed on the idiot box to be the flavor of the season, i sat confident watching men everywhere scramble to get out of the doghouse. so here we are watching tv, and an ad comes up for the very piece that i have purchased. i ask the girl what she thinks of that, and with a cursory glance she goes "nahh" with nary a thought that there might be subterfuge involved in why i was asking her that! now when i fish the necklace out from behind my back, she ends up looking sheepish and i end up green to the gills. i dunno, i guess you just had to have been there.

anyways, back to the quote i referred to in the beginning:

"Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted than when we read it in the original author?"

Philip G. Hamerton, "The Intellectual Life"

January flying by

this month of January has been whizzing by at warp speed.. between work life, school life and home life, there's really no time to do anything else. besides, it would help if i had exciting or groundbreaking news to reveal, but you've already read or seen or heard the news, and i don't have much to report beyond the death, destruction and distractions that life throws up.

here's a picture i leave you to ruminate on as i am off on a long weekend holiday to Chicago for SuperBowl weekend..