Hey Hey We're the Monkees (again)

Never mind that someone had a baby in England; we saw the Monkees again.

Their Philly stop was at the Mann Center, a great venue in a bad neighborhood.  It is also proof positive that Philly is a screaming cesspool.  Some genius scheduled some sort of run at the same time, so traffic was a complete nightmare.  It must have taken an hour to get down the street and into the venue.  This was burning up valuable Monkees Time, turning what was left of my mood to black.

We managed to get seated seconds before the boys hit the stage, missing the entire pre-show video montage.  These fellows make very good use of video and traditionally have.  It ran during the entire show and was almost interactive in spots.  Not bad for the Pre-Fab Four.

The show wasn't seriously different from last year's mini tour; just expanded a bit.  The weather must've been quite a shock for the guys.  It was just short of ninety degrees with disgusting humidity (welcome to Philthy!).  They joked repeatedly about how cold they were, all the while toweling themselves off.

I had my Galaxy S3 and my buddy took his iPhone.  My pictures were craptastic, barely in focus at best.  I remember looking over the phone then looking at the phone to compare the scene.  We had tremendous seats but the pictures look like we were really far away.  This might be a physics thing - I have no idea.  I did manage to get a video of Daydream Believer, where they brought a guy and his son up to sing.  This turned out decently in terms of audio, as everything else I recorded was way overloaded.  The video was crappy.

My friend's iPhone exhibited the same crappy picture effects, albeit a litte closer and more clear.  The videos were much better.  Much as I hate to do it, I have to give the video advantage to the iDevice.

My poor wife suffered from the humidity.  On the way out, it started raining and we got quite a display of lightning.  Then we started our Sherman tank and began the exit routine, dutifully plowing our way through the completely unmarked parking lot onto the completely unmarked streets.  As part of their Neighborhood Beautification Project, they removed all the street signs.  The traffic was not only unbearable, it was quite dangerous, as people were simply driving anywhere they felt like.

All of this beauty was brought to us care of a fifteen dollar fee to park.  It's not enough we paid the userous price for the concert tickets - we had to pay a further amount to sit our car there for two hours.

Below are a few pictures but they're pretty bad.  I would post the video but it's huge.  Maybe later on YouTube.

It's early in the tour - you should really get tickets and see the show.  It's very entertaining for fans and newbies alike.

It's About Physics

Apparently a member of British royalty is about to have a baby.  I'm going to get in trouble for this from my singular British reader but I completely fail to get the fuss.  It's like no one in England has ever had a baby before.  They're lined up outside the palace and Twitter is on alert.

Of course, some of these are female people who would wear entire horses on their heads, given half a chance.  That probably explains a lot of this.

I watched people at work congratulating a coworker on his wife being pregnant.  Now to the best of my knowledge, it was a fairly common, straighforward process.  People were essentially congratulating the good fellow for inseminating his wife.

Maybe it's because I'm not a parent (unless you count Marshall and Ren, to whom we did not give birth).

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Speaking of work, the Twilight Zone<tm>, where the law of gravity is merely a suggestion, is back to its former glory.  Since it's summer, the Philly area is dealing with its fourth heat wave, full of ninety degree plus days with outrageous humidity.  Historically, my office does not cool well (aside from all of us being full of hot air).

Finally we got the building manager to make a rare stop and evaluate the situation.  We figured he might be somewhat alarmed by the eighty degree temperatures oppressing the staff and perhaps he could come up with somewhat of a solution.

This is precisely why I hate optimists.

Our little Miracle Man jumped up with a solution: he was going to put in a few more fans.  You know, fans, to blow the hot air around a bit.  He swore that was the correct solution to our problem.

Undaunted, my boss suggested perhaps some air conditioners were in order.  We used to have some of those huge room air conditioners that looked like the robot from Lost in Space ("DANGER, Will Robinson").

Alas, no.  Building Man swore up and down that he was going to put some thermostats in the room to prove to us that air conditioners weren't going to cool the place down.  Thermostats.

Had my department told people they were wrong, we are right and let us do what's best for you, we'd all be out, in near one hundred degree weather, looking for jobs.


Oddly enough, this morning I arrived to air conditioners.  And no thermostats.

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But wait... not only do you get British Babies and Tales of Distant Air Conditioners, you also get The Great Coffee Cup Dance!

We have some decent coffee machines at work.  They grind the beans before serving you, which is pretty neat.   This week we got new coffee cups too.

The cups are a strange form of paper.  Most importantly, the cups are too small.  When you push the BREW button, it fills up the cup, then overfills it.  When you go to pick it up, you get the strong feel of incredibly hot, fresh-brewed coffee, burning your hand.

I let out a few choice obscenities.

I suspect our next corporate purchase will be water-soluble drinking cups (which dissolve when you put liquid in them).

The Joes Are Sloppy with This One

My wife has a problem with Sloppy Joes.

It's not so much eating them as making them.  The past two times have turned out really ugly and last night was no exception.

A very important point here is that my wife is a very wise, well-educated woman, capable of anything.  Well, almost anything.

Last year we were scheduled for Sloppy Joes so my wife went ahead and made them.  When I went to eat one, I noticed a certain lack of texture.  As it turned out, she had forgotten to put the actual beef in the sloppy joe mix.  We got sauce, onions and spice but no beef.

Boy was she red.

Last night I personally fetched the beef and left it out to defrost at her request, so I knew we were not going to be in for vegan sloppy joes again.

When I went to get some of the sloppy delicacy, I immediately noticed something missing.  No, the meat was there, as was the sauce.   This time there were no onions or additional spices.  And we spice everything.

I asked about the onions politely, so as not to seem ungrateful.  She allowed as to how she hadn't put any onion in and why hadn't I asked for it.

Well, she had something of a point there; I hadn't asked for it.  I had only taken out the onion and left it next to the pan.

Next up was the missing spice.  I asked even more gingerly, so as to avoid flying cookwear (and possibly pets).  Nope, no extra spice.

One of the kids took a bite, immediately pronounced the Joes SUCKY and stated that mine were better.

I suggested my wife take this up with one of her doctors, as this is obviously an issue.  Maybe she was attacked with a can of Sloppy Joe sauce when she was little or something.

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I like to think of myself as entertaining (hence this blog).   Making people laugh is one of life's highest callings, at least for me.

My dear wife informs me that, entertaining as I am, I am much more entertaining asleep.  Apparently I put on quite the show: laughing, crying, dancing and telling jokes.  Unfortunately she had never been able to understand any of what I was saying other than the gist of what was going on.

Until the other night.

She worries endlessly about me, apparently making my sleep antics sometimes quite upsetting.  The other night I was upset about something and she finally managed to make it out:

Honey....

Honey...

BOOBIES!

I am told she didn't know whether to hit me with furniture or laugh hysterically.  Fortunately for me, she chose the latter.

I can't imagine for the life of me why she should be surprised that I, or for that matter, any male, uttered those words.  Seems perfectly normal to me, awake or asleep.

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Meanwhile I am faced with a dilemma: I need shorts.  The PA summer weather is in full force, meaning that the temperatures are in the nineties, the humidity in the eighties and every day we're treated to thunderstorms.

While I am still not over the Great Sock Crisis, today we must unfortunately examine shorts.   As you might guess, the issues with both are the same: length.

Rest assured I do not want to be one of those creepy guys in Speedos.  You will never see that (thankfully).  But I have certain standards for shorts, largely that they do not come to or over my knees.  Unfortunately one cannot purchase shorts that do not come to or cover the knees, so I'm kinda screwed.  To make matters worse, shorts are so wide I refer to them as Multi-Person Pants.

Until recently I have gotten through this crisis by purchasing swim trunks, which, of course, do not come to my knees or cover them.  Unfortunately I have started to get grief and funny looks (moreso) from friends and total strangers.  My wife assures me this has to do with the lack of length of my swim trunks, plus it's apparently wrong to wear swim trunks instead of shorts.

Don't ask me - I'm still in the dark over the apparent silly height of my socks.

My wife plans to go shopping but I dread the outcome.  It's not like I don't want to go with her; it's just that I fully expect to be upset at what we find.  Plus the summer is here, which I am informed means one cannot purchase summer clothes.  If I had wanted shorts, I should have procured them when it was cold, when no one needed them.

I stopped questioning this a long time ago.  If I required things to make sense, I would have shot myself years back.