derekl_1963

Farting around on iTunes this morning, and found that they've been updating their catalog again.... And they had The Allies - Emma Peel! (One of my all time favorite songs.) I have some old tapes I recorded off of KYYX and KJET back in the day, so I'm going to have to dig through iTunes and see what (if any) other old/obscure New Wave and Seattle scene music they've added. (iTunes is very dangerous - clicking from song to song and buying them, you can run up quite a bill pretty quickly...)

Here's the original video, but with crappy audio:



A version with much better audio can be found here, linked because they've disabled embedding...

OK, time to go... have to get ready for A&S Daycamp, and I think Brenda is tired of hearing this song blaring... I've played it something like five or six times in a row now. :)

This Brief History of Buffalo Wings popped up in my feed this morning...

I still remember the first time I heard of them... January 1982, and I'd just reported to Groton for Submarine School. The guy bunking beneath me (Skip) was from Buffalo and had (like me) just graduated from boot camp, since it was a Friday he intended to go home and get some wings. I found the whole idea faintly odd. (I don't think I actually had any for years and years....) He ended up getting snowed in, and when he got back was transferred to a different barracks because he was being moved to a class that started two weeks later because he'd missed the start of the one I was in.

Oddly enough, our careers would continue to intertwine... He was a couple of classes behind me in SWSEA at GMS Dam Deck (and we were briefly room mates), and then he and I ended up in the same class in FTB 'C' school here at Bangor. After that, he went east to a boat under construction and I stayed here for a brief spell of shore duty before going east when I was ordered to the 'hog. We ran into each other again in PCAN, when both of our boats were there for post construction (him) and post overhaul (me) workups. The last time I saw him, he'd just reported to TTF just a couple of days before I got out.

Though I thought the idea odd then, I *love* Buffalo wings now...

I keep meaning to post these... and I've already missed two much more interesting weekends...

Saturday

Up and off to the Bremerton Elks Car Show. Brenda didn't go, which was probably a good thing because she'd have been bored to tears pretty quickly. It's not that she doesn't appreciate cars, but I went through them at what ended up being a pretty slow pace. Lots of photography (and hoping a few come out), and lots of chatter/reminiscing with folks about muscle cars back in the 70's and early 80's.

Being gas guzzlers post the Oil Crisis, and with the original owners were morphing into Responsible Adults, they were common among teenagers when I was in high school because they could be had pretty cheaply. Tools and parts were common and easy to come by, so they could maintained in the front yard. And oh boy, did we spend a lot of time on that - many had been driven into the ground. (Back then, a car with 50k miles on it was generally pretty much clapped out.)

Back home for a few chores and a nap.. and then off to the Bremerton Brewfest.

We had a blast at the Brewfest... the organizers really took the lessons from last year (which was the first year) to heart. They cordoned off more of the streets without increasing the number of breweries much, which made things much more comfortable as there was more room to hang out and less crowding around the booths. The brewers also brought a wider variety of beers, last year was dominated by light summer ales which became pretty boring after a bit.

Of course, being Bremerton, which is a pretty small town, we ran into bucket loads of friends and acquaintances. At one point we spent about half an hour standing in one spot and chatting with friends as they happened by.

Dinner afterwards at the Curry Lounge, which replaced the New Delhi - new owners, same fantastic Indian food, much better service.

Sunday

Not so busy a day... :) Mostly hanging about the house doing chores and napping. We went up to Silver City for dinner because Brenda had a birthday coupon which was only good Sun-Thurs, and which expired in a week.

Now it's Monday and a semi-busy week... two meetings, and time to start sweating getting ready to cook for Summer Madness.

I'm installing a trial version of some photo-editing software. It was interesting to watch the last five years go by (nothing older on this machine) as it crawled my catalog and created thumbnails.

On the other hand, it was very disconcerting considering the cultural connotations of "having your life flash in front of your eyes". (Especially when it came across the folders of pictures of Caramel and of Dad...)

Always mean to post these weekend updates, almost never remember to.

Saturday...

Saturday, at least during the day, was a pretty ordinary day.  Housework, housework, housework...  But, in the evening:

LLLiiiiiIIIPPS!!

Off we went to see the Rocky Horror Show at CSTOCK.



As we headed out of the house, I realized that by some vast oversight we didn't actually own a copy of the soundtrack on CD, only on tape. So, it was off to f.y.e. (formerly Wherehouse) to pick it up. (They seem make their living mostly selling DVD's and various merchandise nowadays. How much longer before they follow the video rental chains into oblivion?) After dinner, we ended up getting to the theater early (not on purpose, I swear), so it was just like old times - standing out in the parking lot with the soundtrack blaring. (Of course way back when, we were listening to it on 8-track car stereos and boom boxes.)

The play turned out pretty dang good. Parts of the cast were a bit weak, but the gentleman playing Frank-N-Furter absolutely stole the show (which is actually As It Should Be), and Brad was extremely well played. There was a decent level of audience participation (and I got in a few myself), but nobody did the Time Warp. Chatting with some other folks during intermission, it turned out that we'd all been waiting for someone else to bell the cat and stand up and start the dance...



We wanted to go out for something after the play... but there really isn't much of a place left that's decent and open that late unless you want to hit Silver City for a drink. Starbucks and a crappy pastry is no replacement for a coffee and big slab o' pie over at Elsie's. I miss Elsie's.

Sunday...

Sunday was up early and off to Seattle to do some shopping. The 'up early' part was very annoying... I knew Brenda had set her alarm forty five minutes before mine, so when hers went off and woke me I snuggled back under the covers expecting a nice little nap, when mine went off all the sudden. She'd been hitting snooze for forty five minutes...

The ferry ride over was excellent, and I took many shots... hopefully a few will turn out.

The first stop was Dick Blick (where I was bored to tears), then over to Elliot Bay Books which is just around the corner where I snagged a manga on Japanese cuisine. Then it was off to Glazer's where Brenda took her turn being bored to tears and I was pissed because I'd gotten the dates of their tripod trade in/sale back asswards. (It was Fri/Sat where I had actually written down Sat/Sun.) Last stop was Daiso and Uwajimaya down in the International District for lunch and stocking up on a few things we can't get over here. (Kitsap County is a nice place to live, and has all the shopping and services you need for day-to-day... but in some ways it really is a small place out in the sticks.)

A mini-debate then ensued over how to get back home. I favored the ferry, but Brenda was more in favor of the (less expensive) route of driving around. I pointed out that the ferry was cheap for the photographic opportunities, and since she was going to nap the whole way - what did it really matter? Which is pretty much how it turned out - we were getting excellent light, so I spend the whole trip on deck taking photographs and she stayed in the van and napped.

By the time we got home, we were pretty wrung out from a busy weekend, so it was delivery pizza for dinner and then early to bed.

I rarely do the fanboy sqeee!! thing... but oh Lord if they do this right, the motion picture industry is forgiven for all it's past sins in raking through the past for franchises to resurrect: UFO - The Movie

The intro for the original series:



This was one of my all-time favorites as a kid - eclipsing Star Wars and even briefly doing so to Star Trek (TOS of course... the movies and TNG were far off in the future back then.)

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Not really... Though I used to have one.

Back when I made my first deployment, I got two sodas out of the machines in the barrack and ended up only drinking one on the bus ride from Charleston to King's Bay. The other spent the whole patrol in my locker - and I drank it on the way back from King's Bay.

So I did that every patrol thereafter.

(And the soda's were Pepsi. I hate Pepsi. But I did it anyhow.)

Quiet day running errands. Went to the jewelers to replace the diamond in Brenda's engagement ring (which had fallen out and gotten lost). When I slipped the repaired ring onto her finger (coincidentally, almost 21 years to the day after the first time) it felt just as a good as the first time.

Ah, the ways my wandering mind travels - the video that gwen_the_potter  posted reminded me first of one thing and then of another and eventually my train of thought delivered this classic piece of 70's cheese...

Presenting (drum roll):The Star Wars Theme - the Disco version



I think I even owned this album at one point... Even sadder, the song was #1 in the US for two weeks.

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Only if their music changes as well... But back when I was following obscure bands, I don't recall that happening as only a handful of them ever became anything even remotely resembling 'mainstream'.

Of course way back then, following obscure bands meant hearing them on obscure radio stations or (rarely) getting a cassette tape (showing my age here) from a friend. If they were getting airplay, even on low power AM college stations, they were already 'mainstream' of a sort. Nowadays with digital distribution things are a lot different.

Speaking of showing my age and once obscure bands... I first heard Devo on an 8 track in a friends car.