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Lunch break weekend update. Yesterday I worked at another [DELETED]. Alissa joined me to help out. I have a lot of respect for the kids in the corps, spending every day of the summer working hard in the hot sun for 8 hours every day and ending their day with a performance under the lights. (Unless it’s an afternoon show, like yesterday’s.)

I arrived on the scene at 8:00 in the morning, the same time The Cadets took the field to begin rehearsal. After a few minutes, it was determined that rehearsal would not be possible. The field was covered in goose droppings. The staff picked up shovels as they told the corps to leave the field for a little while. Is there something ironic about seeing some of the biggest names in the marching music activity shoveling and picking up goose droppings?

A little while later, the corps came back on the field, but the field was still not clear of the stuff. So the corps members lined up with shovels along the 50-yard line from one sideline to the other and traveled down the field like a giant piece of farm machinery. All in all, the day went extremely well.

After the show, Alissa and I stopped for dinner at The Big Fish restaurant in Princeton. Wow. It was really good. Go there. Now.

So I took the Belief-O-Matic test that Alissa linked to. Apparently I am 100% Unitarian Universalist and slightly less of a Liberal Quaker, Liberal Protestant, Secular Humanist and Neo-Pagan. Interestingly, Taoism was number 12 on the list at 57% and Conservative Judaism didn’t even make the list (though Reform (49%) and Orthodox (25%) did).

This page has turned into a Not Weblog (which I had been saying all along) since I don’t really link much. Instead I write mostly about myself, as one would in a journal. Due to the lack of linkage (well, except for this entry), I have set up a new weblog (using the ever-popular and hopefully more reliable Blogger) called Leftover Bits of the Web. It also uses Dan‘s dotcomments for feedback. Please go there. I don’t have lots of time during the day to “blog,” but every once in a while (more frequently than here) I’ll get to throw something up there.

There are very few things more fun for me than seeing live music. Last night, I caught Barenaked Ladies at the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, New Jersey. I have wanted to see this band for years, and I finally got around to it, thank to Randi. Our seats were pretty far away on the lawn in the back but we still had a pretty good view of the stage over everybody’s heads, and there were large video screens to give us close-ups and silly videos. They played a good mix of their older and newer songs, and had a lot of fun bantering on stage. Apparently Bon Jovi was playing the same night at Giants Stadium. Steven from BNL told the audience that they were originally booked for Giants Stadium, but since Jon Bon Jovi is from New Jersey and BNL is from Canada, the Ladies were given the boot.

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Things I learned this weekend from my trip through the Mid-Atlantic States:

• When pulling you over for speeding, Virginia cops will try to frighten you with their mysterious ways and silly hats, but if there’s a cute girl in the car, they’ll only give you a warning.
• Not only is Econolodge cheap, it is also ugly, uncomfortable, noisy, leaky, and the remote controls for the television don’t work.
• The Jersey Shore doesn’t quite stack up to Virgina Beach’s beach, but at least you won’t see Norfolk’s own Eric the Half-a-Turtle on Atlantic City sands. (On the beach in Norfolk we saw a rock with strange patterns. On further inspection, that is, by looking at the other side of the “rock,” we realized we were now looking at the front half of a turtle or tortoise that seemed to be missing its back half.)
• The Abbey Road Pub and Restaurant has a Beatles imitation band that performs occasionally. According to our waitress, “they’re awful.” The food was good however, so if you’re in town, make sure you go, but avoid 9:30 on Friday nights.
• From what I am told, you should not sit in the sand if you are wearing a women’s bathingsuit. The suits are designed in such a way that a pocket is formed around the crotch. This pocket will collect sand and when you stand up it will spill all over you. No, I do not know this from first-hand experience. Only from word of mouth. And if you’re trying to read into the fact that I used the words “crotch,” “hand” and “mouth” within close proximity, stop. You have a dirty mind. An’ Mama don’ allow that ‘roun’ here.

This past weekend I drove to Norfolk, Virginia for work. I visited Harbor Park, home of the Norfolk Tides, a minor-leage basbeball team that feeds to the Mets. The stadium was nice. I wouldn’t say the same about the rest of Norfolk. The town was pretty much run-down. It seemed to be fairly religious place—there were churches on just about every corner. On almost every corner that did not house a church, there was a fast food place called Church’s Chicken or something similar. (“Our customers love us because we offer them BIG PIECES of juicy chicken at LITTLE PRICES.”)

During the evening, Alissa and I went to Virginia Beach. They don’t have a boardwalk like Atlantic City or even Seaside Heights. All the beachfront property seems to be owened by hotels, so all of the boardwalk-type shops are actually on the street. There was some sort of city festival going on while we were there, and there were numerous musical performing groups. On one corner there was a polka band with clarinet and accordion players, in front of one store there was a trio consisting of two marimbas or xylophones and a drum set, and on one blocked-off street we saw the “Beachstreet USA All-Stars.” This was a group of 12 or so Virginia Beach musicians, most high school or early-college aged, on sousaphones, trombones, trumpets, a snare and two marching bass drums. They played and marched (well, wandered) an entertaining show with audience participation. [DELETED].

On the way home, we stopped to see Gwen, Heather, and other friends. We ended up having Sunday morning (well, afternoon) brunch with them and I met a few more nice people.

It’s Monday evening at this point, and I have not been “home” since Thursday morning. I wonder what new suprises await me.

Strange lights were in the sky this past weekend. And you thought this kind of stuff only happened in fields and farms “down south.” I can almost hear Orson Welles delivering the newscast from his grave.

MTV turns 20 years old this year, saying goodbye to its awkward teens. Since grunge fizzled out, for the most part MTV shaped pop music into what it is currently. The experts are forecasting a huge, imminent shift in the popular taste of 12- to 19-year-olds who make up the network’s audience: “It?s gonna be a bucket of ice water in the face, and to those kids, Eminem and Britney are not gonna be enough. I think they?re gonna be biting the hand that?s been feeding them all this crap.”

Creature comfort goals, they only numb my soul,
And make it hard for me to see,
Ahhh, thoughts all seem to stray to places far away,
I need a change of scenery.

That’s the Monkees, though probably not since they didn’t write most of their songs then. Anyway, our web host for work is giving me major headaches. Not only can they not explain the outages our web server has during the day, they refuse to admit there are outages. And I know I’m not crazy, or else all the people e-mailing and calling me to let me know the site is down are crazy, too. On top of that, their support site was hacked today. Yes, someone replaced the information on support.media3.net with a little message saying the site was hacked. Beautiful. My plan is to get rid of these jokers by the end of the week and have a new host up and running the site.

The Best and Worst (but mostly the worst) of New Jersey. I came across this while looking for drive-in movie theaters in the Great Garden State.

How a child realizes he is destined to be a percussionist: My parents said when I was really little, I would sit on the couch and listen to music on the stereo and bang my head against the back of the couch in time to the music.

Here’s an email I got today:

Also, it looks like we’re talking about a college football team and a drum corps with mostly high school students.