Green Day, not the band, but the expo, plus bands

I'm pleased with this week's Isthmus Rollout segment. It indeed was a beautiful day.

How to get caught

If the dashboard is full of pot, why speed?

Can't stop the music

Recently Ereck's been having a phase appreciating early 1980s hardcore punk. This is thanks especially to a documentary he watched on cable, Punk: Attitude. I watched some of it and was fascinated by what I saw, especially Henry Rollins' very funny and very true analysis of how every song by Limp Bizkit works.

The film and Ereck's explorations bring back pleasant memories, especially of early-1980s hardcore punk. But it wasn't really my scene. I had good friends who were deeply into hardcore bands -- Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, etc. -- and I respected them and their tastes and tried to appreciate the music. But I was put off by the shortage of good melodies, by the lack of forceful singing (as opposed to forceful yelling), by the lyrics that -- when decipherable -- tended to be polemical (as opposed to memorable).

I recognize that what I didn't like about hardcore was precisely what made it important. The music, and the movement, were triumphantly reacting to objectionable mainstream values of all kinds, especially the ones peddled by corporations.

But no matter how hard I tried to like MDC (or Minor Threat, or the Circle Jerks), I inevitably found myself once again throwing on some XTC, or Elvis Costello, or Beatles, or Patsy Cline.

I guess there's no accounting for taste.

Man and machine

I just built a computer. First time I ever did that. Now I'm installing Windows Vista. First time I ever did that, too. So far so good.

The tricky bit came when I was installing Windows XP -- I have an upgrade version of Vista, so I had to install XP first. Turned out the new hard drive wasn't properly recognized by old-school XP (it's a newfangled SATA drive, don'tcha know), and the only way to load drivers for it was from a floppy disk. So I had to take a floppy drive out of an old computer -- this is why I never get rid of anything -- install it in the new one and cross my fingers.

Oh yeah, and change a BIOS setting. Then, at the proper moment, change it back.

Hyde Parkers unite

I'm sad no one picked up this conversational thread I joined on the web forum for "This Week With George Stephanopoulos." On the topic of Hyde Park chain stores, I was a big fan of the H.P. Benetton till it closed.

Good word

"I am frightened
You are frightened
Should we get our trousers tightened?"

-- Pete Townshend, "Uniforms"

Good word

"People move from L.A. and New York to Nashville, thinking it's going to be easier to protect their kids from Baptists than from gangs, and they may be wrong."

-- Steve Earle

Take me out

So when the pope leads a mass for 60,000 at a baseball stadium, do the host and the wine get passed down rows like hot dogs and beer? I'm serious.