Slow day. Spent most of this evening researching guitar tuners. I need a new one, so, uh, I did some research. About what was out there and how much they cost. Y’know. Yeah, told you it was a slow day.

Cold day, too, but that doesn’t really merit further exposition.

New music find – Rilo Kiley got a writeup in the new Magnet. A couple sample tracks on their website and I am hooked.

New Rainer Maria came out today – Long Knives Drawn. Caitlin is all glammed up in their new promo photos. Their label has put together a promotional website for the album, with it’s own URL and everything. Fancy. www.longknivesdrawn.com.

np – Unrest / Perfect Teeth

This is juvenile, offensive, cliched and quite possibly the funniest thing I’ve found online in a long long time.

The Get-Up Kids have been kidnapped by Steven Tyler and made his sex slaves, and you must lead a rag-tag band of emo boys to rescue them, battling Creed, Weezer and Courtney Love along the way.

The Emo Game

(link from the latest issue of Magnet)

The lineup for the Wavelength 3rd Anniversary show is looking pretty interesting. Do Make Say Think at Lee’s on Thursday February 13 and + / – on the 14th, among many others. I think I should try and make some of these shows.

The Big Takeover is reporting that Idlewild will finally be releasing The Remote Part in North America in March, and that will coincide with a tour. Hooray!

Gads. Getting back into the rock is both tiring and tough on the fingertips. Any callouses I had have apparently gotten soft and ineffective, cause my digits is sore. But it’s good to suffer for your art, or so I’m told. Rehearsals go well, I think we’ve shaken the rust of inactivity off and are ready to move forward. We’re getting more adventurous with our arrangements, and in a sonically pleasing way, I think and I hope. Putting together the core of a set and then we’ll keep adding to our repetioire – before you know it, we’ll actually be able to add and remove songs from the set at our leisure, and without needing four weeks of practice time beforehand! I’m now pestering Brad and Seventeen to start beating the bushes to get us some shows. I figure we won’t get anything before late March or April anyway, which is lots of time to get this beast fighting fit. Yessir.

Got the new issue of Magnet today, it’s the 2002 in review issue with Mr. Tom Petty on the cover. I love this magazine but it’s such a quick read, I’m usually done within a day or two. I wish they’d go monthly.

Cool site – The Covers Project is a database of cover songs, noting both songs that bands have covered as well as other bands which have covered a given band’s songs. Brilliant, especially for covers fans like myself. The only problem is that tracking down most of these songs is probably nigh impossible. Thanks to Catbirdseat for the link.

Homestar Runner has been down all day due to excessive bandwidth consumption. What’s especially distressing is the message I’m getting, which is a Yahoo placeholder page stating that the URL is no longer valid! It’s been confirmed that this is only temporary, and I will get to see this week’s Strong Bad email soon enough, but gaaaaaah. Gaaaaaah, I say.

np – Death Cab For Cutie / Something About Airplanes

Okay.

I have watched more television this weekend than I usually do in a fortnight. My eyes are a little, uh, messed up. I think. But I’m done.

Yeah.

Thoughts? Well the fact that I watched an entire season of television in less than 48 hours is evidence I was pretty into it. As a caveat, I should point out that it doesn’t take much to get me hooked into a show or storyline. Hell, I ended up watching two and a half seasons of Beverly Hills 90210 in university for no reason besides I watched it last week and felt obliged to watch it this week. And so on. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there.

The first five or six hours of 24 were riveting stuff. Beyond the real-time storytelling device, the multiple seemingly unrelated plot threads were all engaging. Anticipation really is the best part. By hour nine or ten, when what was essentially the first act was wrapping up, my main thoughts were “what the hell are they going to do for the next fourteen hours?”. Obviously, my answer as “escalation”. From hour fifteen or so on, I was still very much addicted but the “oh give me a break” mentality was beginning to creep around the edges. The amount of misfortunes that constantly piled up on Jack Bauer and kin was getting unbelievable. Granted, this probably wouldn’t have seemed quite so evident if taken in weekly episodic form – Instead of seeing Kim kidnapped for the fourth time in five hours, it would have over the course of, oh, a month and a half? Easier to digest.

That minor quibble aside, I was along for the ride all the way. While I had never seen an episode before, I had made the mistake of reading some press, particularly around the time of the season finale. So unfortunately I knew about special guest baddie Dennis Hopper (though Lou Diamond Philips was a pleasant surprise… “CHAVEZ!!!!” heh.), about turncoat Nina and about dead Teri. But what’re you gonna do, right? I was particularly satisfied with the resolution of the David Palmer and his wife thread. Seems silly to root for a fictional politician to do the right thing, but I was.

So I guess that brings us to season two. Not sure if I want to borrow the season to this point from Kyle or Five Seventeen, or wait till the summer and watch them all at once. I also don’t know if I want to watch this much television in one sitting again anytime soon. Good television, to be certain, maybe some of the best in a long time, but gawd. My eyes.

I have hardly left the apartment this weekend. But at least I’ve bathed.

Other non-television related news. I announced my intention to get my own place to the relations yesterday, and am going to start working out specifically what I want, what it’s going to cost me and what I can afford. I want to live solo, though I’m not dead set against the roommate sitch. Not going to move into an existing situation though… For lack of a better way to put it, I don’t like the power structure that would result from moving in somewhere that someone else has already peed on and left their mark on. A place of my own would probably run me around a grand a month, plus stuff like cable internet, phone, etc etc. Then there’s the start-up costs like some furniture, household implements, kitchen stuff, blah blah blah. It’s exciting and daunting at the same time. I’m honestly not sure how to go about this – I figure it’s too early to go look at places because I don’t think I’ll be ready to move till at least late summer. Need to pad the bank account a little longer. But I guess I do need to get a feel for what’s out there.

Phoo. I think I need to NOT stare at a CRT for a little while.

np – Sleater-Kinney / One Beat