The new trailer for X-Men 2 is online at Yahoo! Movies. It’s essentially the same footage from the San Diego ComicCon that has been kicking around online for months, but there’s some footage of Nightcrawler in there now.

The Two Towers on Tuesday, X-Men 2 in five months… Hollywood knows how to keep my inner geek satiated.

NME is reporting that Mogwai’s new long-player, provisionally called Bag Of Agony, will be out early next summer. They’ve also got new t-shirts available in their store… I don’t know how well this Chairman Mao design would go over with the parentals, though…

Had a different sort of band practice tonight, packed up the acoustic and hauled it over to casa del Seventeen. Ostensibly to learn some songs but it ended up a picking songs session. Since Seventeen has all the demos, final mixes and live tracks on his computer, we went through essentially our entire ‘catalog’ and picked out what we wanted to keep in the set, what we wanted to excise from memory. Came up with a good list of old and new stuff and burned some new CDs of demos. Also on the CD are the final (sort-of) mixes of “Awake Too Long” and our cover of The Magnetic Fields’ “Born On A Train”. They’re final mixes, but not – I will explain when I get the mp3s put up this weekend.

I also got a copy of Joe Pernice’s book of poetry Two Blind Pigeons from Seventeen, who had multiple copies sent to him for review in his Tape-Gun zine, which I don’t think he’s actually published in months if not years. What a great scam – set up a zine and people will send you all kinds of free shit. You won’t want most of it, but still.

Seventeen’s cat Jean took a shine to my lap tonight which would have been fine if she hadn’t just been found to have fleas. She had to settle for sleeping on the guitar case.

Lost out on that ebay auction for the first Longwave album so I had to buy it from Lunasea, which is fine since it’s about the same price as the ebay one and is new.

np – Low / Trust

There’s a lovely eulogy for Mary Hansen of Stereolab from David Pajo of Slint and Tortoise here.

np – Television / Marquee Moon

I had thought about going to see the free screening of the Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back at the Bloor, but considering the linuep was almost to Bathurst at 6:30 and the show wasn’t till 9:30, I decided my evening would be better served doing almost anything else. Some other time, perhaps.

And that time actually was better served rewiring my pedalboard. Yeah, that is my idea of a fun night. Surrounded by tools and wire and solder. Whee! Quite satisfied with the results, though. Every cable is cut to length and tidy, and the sound quality from using much better cables is really audible. Happy happy. The choice to use soldered plugs instead of the $7-a-piece solderless plugs also turned out to not be a big deal, I figured out a system for building the cables lickety-split, it was actually really easy. I also bought a couple of 250K pots for the Telecaster but as Derek at Ring correctly speculated, the control knobs on my import Tele don’t fit the dimensions of the American-made pots. Which means I have to go back to the guitar shop for even more parts. It never ends.

I went to pick up some food for the food bank at the supermarket this evening, I’d been told that baby formula is always in short supply so I figured I’d get some of that. It was only when I got to the store that I realized I have no idea what baby formula is. Solid? Liquid? Gelatinous? Hoping there’s be big boxes marked ‘Baby Formula’ in large block letters was probably too much to hope for. Can anyone tell me exactly what I should be looking for? I never thought charity could be so confusing.

np – Television / The Blow-Up

Taken from Exploding Dog. Cause on days like today, it’s so true.

np – Longwave / Day Sleeper