Monthly Archives: April 2009

Neko Case

We saw Neko Case last night.

Short review: I like her, but I don't consider myself a huge fan. Her voice is as good live as it is on the record. I'd never noticed before, but many of her songs are surprisingly short. Her voice is better than most of her material, which, because she re-uses the same vocal licks and patterns over and over, tends to run together. I enjoyed it nonetheless - the songs are still pretty good (her voice is, of course, great). She should buy a rubber band and quit trying to twist her hair into a knot after every song.

I tried to get some pictures, but the theater staff scolded me for it during the opening band. "I need to see you delete that picture, now!" "Err, ok..." [*click* *click* *click* , shows her a blank screen] "How's that?" Later, when Case was on, I surreptitiously tried to take a picture, but forget to turn off the flash, and scared the hell out of myself - "oh shit, they're gonna kick me out for sure!" But they didn't even come around. Still, I put the camera away, after that.

Here is a low-quality MP3 of her opening song, Maybe Sparrow.

Assertion: the probability that the sound at any concert will suck is 80% or higher.

Robyn Hitchcock, tonight.

Hates

Know what I hate?

Pop-up menus that appear when you simply move your mouse over something. For example, msnbc.com has a bunch of them down the left side of their main page; whenever I go there, my mouse inevitably triggers one of the menus, which jumps into the middle of the page and nearly fills it (in my default browser size) from top to bottom. The way to get rid of it is to move off the menu. So, having nowhere to go up or down, I move my mouse to the right, which inevitably causes a sub-menu to pop up since I've moved over one of the little sub-menu icons on the side of the first menu. Then I get all aggravated and frustrated and I end up wiggling my mouse around like I'm trying to shake off a booger, trying to get the friggin menus to go away. All I really have to do is patiently move it off the menu and sit for a second, but the thing has already pissed-me off and I just want it to GO AWAY!!!

I'm tempted to write myself a GreaseMonkey script to rewrite their HTML to kill that popup stuff.

Maybe I should just give up this computer stuff altogether... Too much aggravation.

The Thieves! They Almost Took It!

Eagle-eyed Mrs Cleek was looking at our on-line credit card records the other day and spotted a strange $500 charge on our card. It was charged to "Yahoo Search Marketing", but neither she nor I had ever made any purchases through Yahoo. After a day of calling around, she learned that someone had swiped our CC info and was waiting for $10,000 worth of charges, in $500 increments, to clear. But, luckily, CitiBank stopped them after the first.

I wish ill on the thief.