I should start all of this by saying that the lead singer of Four Finger Five is my cousin Joe, which is the entire reason that I was sitting in the Fauenthal Theater at 11:30 PM on July Fourth. That isn’t to say that Four Finger Five doesn’t have a good local following, I just don’t normally run with the local music crowd. I had been wanting to see the band live for a couple years, but I only spend at max about a week every year in Muskegon and the scheduling never worked out. This year with a concert happening downtown after the Muskegon Fireworks and me actually knowing about it before hand my sister, Amber, and I went down to the theater to get tickets after the fireworks wrapped up.
The Frauenthal is an awesome old theater with a beautiful old movie house styling and a rich history, a great place to see a performance of any kind. The show started very abruptly with a small crowd in the theater and a large crowd in the lobby getting the first of what I assume were many drinks (after whatever they had had before the fireworks). The point is most of the crowd was in some sort of altered state which made the show that much better for me, or at least made the dancing much more entertaining. The opening act was Ultraviolet Hippopotamus who played a short half hour set. The instrumentals weren’t too bad, but the singing was horribly out of tune (my guess is they couldn’t hear each other to harmonize) .
Luckily, the crowd built to a few hundred people (eyeball estimate) before Four Finger Five took the stage, introduced by my old band director Jack Adams. Keeping in mind my family connection to the band, my unbiased review is that they were awesome. They have a unique sound for a modern band, a sound more at home in the 70’s then today. Which is exactly what makes them different and unique. It also gives them freedom to incorporate more instruments into their sound including at this performance, trumpet, trombone, sax, keyboards, and a fuller percussion set. Compared to more popular sounds of today, with minimal instruments and a heavier reliance on the lead singer, the music was refreshing.
By the time they got to their last number at 2 AM (which consisted of a 15 minute jam session, including a couple of rappers from Grand Rapids who did some good but under-miked freestyling and an female R&B singer who did some uninspired and way over-miked freestyling) I was a Four Finger Five Fan.
The band’s next performance is at Summer Celebration as the opening act for INXS this Saturday. They have just finished recording their first CD under the Terrestrial Records Label which I hear is possibly due out in November. You can listen to some of their music on their website and myspace page and see the rest of my (er Beth’s) pictures here.
I am not sure how long this has been around, but I found a neat program off of the Simpsons Movie Page that allows you to create a Simpson Character modeled after yourself. These are the characters I made for Amber and I, they may be a bit idealized but you get the essence. Give it a try for yourself.
We here in Minnesota are in the midst of a freak snowstorm. This isn’t unheard of, and in fact Rochester usually registers a few inches of snow in April. Getting an April snowstorm is, however, big news. So big that we made the national news Check out the link below to see our humble little city on msnbc.
I saw a small article that linked to a company website for WonderPizza. The idea behind this vending machine is that it stores frozen pizzas and runs them through a fancy toaster oven before delivering the customer a hot personal pizza. I think the idea behind this machine is very promising and I imagine that it is the start of a trend towards automated prepared food delivery.
I can think of no reason why most fast food chains (and even some national “sit-down” chains) could not be completely automated. Sound far fetched? At one of our local McDonald’s the are already using a robotic beverage system to fill drive-thru drink orders. According to this article and this article (randomly chosen from google) this is part of a larger project done by McDonald’s to go towards completely automating their franchises. This makes perfect sense, if you take a look back in the kitchen of a fast food restaurant (but not too close of a look) you will see that the “cooks” function very much like machines already. In order to maintain quality, speed, and consistency everything is timed, pre-measured, and repetitive. It would not seem too difficult to replace that human with a machine that does the exact same work, in essence turning the restaurant into a giant vending machine.
Point is, I think this pizza machine is just the tip of something that will be very commonplace in the next 10-20 years and could change the way we eat. For me, as long it would improve my lunch options I would be happy.
I am a big fan of Jonathan Coulton’s folkish version of Baby Got Back (originally by Sir Mix-a-lot) it is kind of like The Gourds cover of Gin ‘n Juice. I just saw this video mashup someone did with the original Baby Got Back video and Coulton’s song. It obviously took someone a lot of time and the result is pretty cool. At the same time there are some parts of this video that just were not meant to be played in slow motion. Still worth a watch for all you children of the 80’s.
Amber wanted some Garlic Mashed Potatoes to go with dinner last night and came across a recipe to make Buca di Beppo Garlic Mashed Potatoes. For those of you not familiar with Buca’s it is a chain of Italian Restaurants started in Minneapolis, MN. They have a great atmosphere and awesome food. Which brings me back to the potatoes, one thing I learned from repeated visits to Buca’s is the importance of garlic mashed potatoes to Italian cooking.
The recipe we found comes from “Into the Sauce: From Our Cucina to Your Kitchen” a cookbook put out by Buca’s back in 2000-2001 (we will come back to the book in a moment), more specifically I got the recipe from this site. For those of you too lazy to check that site here is the recipe:
2 pounds red-skinned potatoes, with skins on
1/4 cup finely chopped garlic
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup grated Pecorino Roman cheese
1/2 cup butter, semisoft and cut into pieces
Wash the potatoes and place in a large pot. Cover with cold water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and cook until the potatoes are tender (about 20-25 minutes). While the potatoes are cooking, saute the chopped garlic in olive oil (just enough to take away the crunch). Drain potatoes and transfer to large bowl of electric mixer. Add rest of ingredients and mix, using a metal whisk attachment, until all of the ingredients are incorporated. Add more butter to reach desired consistency.
The italicized portions of the recipe are my additions.
The recipe turned out great, very true to the potatoes served at Buca’s. This got me very interested in the book that this recipe came from, so I went to good old Amazon and found to my surprise that not only is the book out of print but the copies that do exist sell for around $200. I am a big fan a Buca’s, but I am not sure what makes a cookbook worth $200+. Seeing how the book retailed for $24.95 at Buca’s the lesson I learned here is if Buca’s puts out a new book I will buy one for myself and a few hundred to pay for my retirement.
Continuing on yesterday’s theme of well thought out toys, something a little more current. So let’s say you are a toy company that produces a robot made for kids and you want to sell more robots without putting much work into R&D, what do you do? Easy, you take your current product and paint it to look like a popular character (or two), slap a doll head on top, throw it in a special edition box, and release it around a movie. In that spirit I am proud to present to you Homersapien, a slightly slimmed down (in features) version of Wowwee’s Robosapien. This has got to be the freakiest looking toy I have ever seen, I may have nightmares now about thousands of these things trying to take over the world. That being said I would love one for Christmas 2007 if anyone is looking, these things are just the sort of toys that will be worth a bundle one day.
I am by nature a lazy person. I do try very hard to fight that and stay active but when I see something like this it makes me think about the possibilities. The rig above is an actual product called the Ergopod 500 and the only thing that would keep me from buying it and installing a bed in my cube at work is the price tag. I understand this product is really meant for people with disabilities, but if they were only going for that market, why would they have included this pic?
My Dad is really into genealogy, he has a pretty decent family tree put together of our family. He did it all the old fashioned way; starting with paper, pen, official records, and memories. While I admire the amount of work he put into it, I know that I could never spend so much time putting something like that together. That is the beauty of the Internet, it allows people to easily collect distributed knowledge in one place for the benefit of everyone. It is in that spirit I introduce you to Geni, a genealogy website setup like a social network. You define your own profile and tree, you invite family members to your tree and they can add in details about themselves as well as more people into the tree. It is secured so that only people in your tree can see information about you (or even that you are on the site at all) which is a benefit over just posting your family tree online for the world to see.
I have played with the website some (creating a family tree, more like a family stump at this point) and the interface is very clean, simple, and intuitive (all things I like in a website). It is a free service that is currently in beta (sounds like it will be an ad-supported site). I suggest giving it a try, at least build the tree out far enough to reach that ambitious person who will fill in the rest for you. That is what I did, it is just me and Dad
You can find more info about it on the Geni Blog (I think it is cool to see a blog on a site that is starting out like this, if I ever make a commercially viable web product I would do this).
I came across this blog article about a mechanical robot built in 1772 by Pierre Jacquet-Droz, a Swiss Clockmaker. The “automata” in the article is called “The Writer”, it can be programmed to write any 40 character phrase. That’s right you can program this machine built in 1772, long before the first computer, to do something I can’t even do very well today.
After doing a little Wikipedia research I found a couple of other automata built by Jacquet-Droz. I am particularly impressed by “The Drawer” which can draw four different images (see the examples below).
I can’t imagine how a person in the 1770’s would react to seeing something like this, keep in mind that the 1770’s is American Revolution and Marie Antoinette time frame so something like this would be fairly, well, revolutionary. It is amazing to me that with today’s complex technology, we can still be floored by what someone could do in 1770, I think that it shows that if you have an idea you will use any technology available to you to realize that vision. It makes me wonder what other inventions could be revisited with modern technology.
Amber, and I went down to the theater to get tickets after the fireworks wrapped up.
but you get the essence. Give it a try for yourself.
