K-Squared Ramblings

Line Items for 2009-10-02

• Why do people get take-out fast food, then sit and eat it in their car in the parking lot, idling with the AC on? #
• Cool! Butterfly Boucher’s “For The Love Of Love” is today’s Free Song of the Day on Amazon MP3! #
• Problem: Twitter trending topics are quickly flooded with in-jokes & spam. There’s no context if you don’t already know what they’re about #

Fragile, Mondays, Eyes & Saturn

• Great indie rock: Butterfly Boucher’s Scary Fragile for #musicmonday #
• Speaking of Butterfly Boucher, here’s our writeup of the concert we went to back in June. #
• Via @lol_spam: “TPA Report.” It should be a TPS Report, but the keys are, like, right next to each other. I guess even spammers can get a case of the Mondays. #
• Yes! Realized eyestrain was a problem & finally got PC set up on my original monitor. Bigger is nice, but more importantly, it’s NOT BLURRY! #
• Still not sure how I went 1.5 months w/o fixing the refresh rate on the temporary monitor. Usually the flicker drives me *consciously* crazy. #
• Via @ThisIsTrue: GORGEOUS new high-rez image of Saturn released. #

Scary Fragile on CD

When Butterfly Boucher’s new album, Scary Fragile, came out in June, I didn’t really pay attention to format. I just bought it as an MP3 album for convenience. I didn’t even notice that it was digital-only at the time, but I just got an email for the “physical release” of the album on September 15 and a new concert tour.

The newsletter was a bit confusing, though, because we bought a CD at her concert in June so that we’d have something for her to sign! I guess she must have had a small run printed just for the summer concert tour.

San Diego and Butterfly Boucher

We’ve been following singer/songwriter Butterfly Boucher since 2004 — in fact, since the first day we tuned in to the now-defunct Indie 103.1 and heard “Another White Dash” for the first time. We caught her opening for Barenaked Ladies a few months later and picked up her album, then caught her again opening for Sarah McLachlan later that year. Her second album, “Scary Fragile”, finally came out on Tuesday (it’s very good — Katie says it may be the best sophomore album she’s ever heard), and she’s doing a concert tour. She’s playing in Los Angeles most of this month, but timing worked out better for us to go see her in San Diego on Saturday. So we bought some tickets and made a weekend trip out of it.

Historic San Diego

We drove down after lunch on Saturday and hit Old Town San Diego on the way in. (More Highlander Grog!) I could swear I don’t remember having trouble finding it before, but the last few times it’s been hard to get to even following a map. At least we managed better than we did in December, when we ended up several miles inland before we could find a place to cross the inlet.

I don’t remember much going on the last time we were there, but this time Old Town was in full-on living history mode, complete with tour guides dressed up in 1800s outfits and a horse-and-buggy ride.

I’d booked the Courtyard San Diego Downtown because it’s literally next door to the House of Blues. It took a while to negotiate the one-way streets, but once we arrived, we stepped inside and were blown away by the lobby. It turns out that the hotel used to be the building for the San Diego Trust & Savings bank. After the bank closed in the 1990s, Marriott bought it and converted it to a hotel. The vault, safe deposit rooms, and other rooms on the first floor became a conference center, and the offices on the upper floors became guest rooms. They’ve preserved as much of the old look of the place as possible, down to keeping the mail slots on the former office doors. (Don’t worry, they’re blocked.)

We ate dinner at Chopahn (6th Ave. near F St.), an Afghan restaurant we first visited during last year’s Comic-Con. It was empty when we got there, which I hope was just because we were there on the early side, because the food is great. Another couple arrived while we were eating, but they were the only people we saw other than the waitress. She had started pushing tables together as if they were expecting a larger party later on.

After dinner we wandered the Gaslamp district for a while. I kept making notes of where various hotels or restaurants were located. Eventually I realized I was basically scouting for Comic-Con next month.

Around 7:00 we made our way to the House of Blues.

Concert

That’s when we discovered that we’d been under a misapprehension about the nature of the venue. Read the rest of this entry »

New Butterfly Boucher!

Woo hoo! New Butterfly Boucher album, “Scary Fragile,” in June! And touring! (via @butterflyb) #

Fluttered By

Just discovered Butterfly Boucher is doing a show in LA at the Troubador tonight (with Ten Out of Tenn). Sadly, it’s too late to plan on going. #

Upcoming Coolness

Some entertainment stuff I’m looking forward to this year:

Movies: Coraline

YouTube also has the trailer in HD.

I discovered Sandman late, borrowing the trades from one of my (younger) brother’s friends around 1998 or so, then immediately tracking down my own copies. I lucked out and got a complete set on eBay for something like $70. Since then I’ve devoured most of Neil Gaiman’s work, be it in comics, prose, or movie form. The original novel of Coraline was very good, and it’s been adapted by the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas, which is among my favorite movies…and what I’ve seen of the film suggests that they get it. It’s hard to believe it’s only two weeks away!

Other movies: Oddly enough, I’m only mildly interested in Terminator: Salvation, Transformers 2: Can’t Remember the Subtitle, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (the films have been steadily deteriorating after peaking with #3, IMHO), Star Trek, and Watchmen. I’ll probably see all of them, but none of them have me nearly as excited.

Comics, books, music, etc. after the cut: Read the rest of this entry »

Line Items for 2009-01-05

• Finally mailed gifts to people we missed over xmas. Except for one that still hasn’t shown up. I may be slow, but UPS is slower… #
• Google Translate on a misdirected tech support request in Korean: “the product did not change down on the wind.” Wonder what that’s about? #
• Woohoo! New Butterfly Boucher album coming this year! #