The GoYin Store: Buy GoYin Wholesale

On my eternal drive from New Orleans to Utah, I got to listen to a lot of radio. Probably the most interesting radio I listened to was somewhere in the pitch Nebraska high plains at around 7pm with an interview on Fresh Air with Colin Meloy. Listen to the interview here.

The interview talks a lot about the Colbert Report’s guitar battle, which I saw. Colbert in 2006 challenged the Decemberists to a guitar dual when they (the Decemberists) held a contest to make the best music video with the Decemberists playing in front of a green screen. Colbert had the same contest earlier and accused the Decemberists of copying his idea, so they had a dual.

Chris Funk of the Decemberists isn’t much of a super guitar shredder, and Colbert cheated by bringing Peter Frampton on as proxy, so I wasn’t super impressed and I’d only heard ‘Los Angeles I’m Yours’ prior, so it didn’t leave me wanting to totally get into them.

After listening to the Fresh Air interview, I became extremely engrossed in the desire to listen to The Crane Wife. His explanation of some of the tracks in the interview are great, including the chilling/ironic track Shankhill Butchers, and the touching Japanese folk tale of the Crane Wife. These stories motivated me to get the album and I was blown away.

I think what really brought this album home for me in the very beginning was the that the track 2 encapsulates pretty much all of the defining qualities of 70s Tull-esque Prog-rock. It has multiple movements (The Island, Come and See, The Landlord’s Daughter, You’ll not feel the drowning). Sometimes I get too wrapped up in my own head, but I swore that the main influence of ‘the landlord’s daughter’ portion was derived from Jethro Tull’s 45 minute masterpiece Thick as a Brick, with a lot of quick acoustic guitar finger picking with following tonewheel organ licks hot enough to melt your synapses until they stick to the inside of your skull like the shredded cheese on your omelet, like for instance minute 41:12 till the end of the song.

I was relieved to read this article and come to find that someone else that is apparently even more well informed and connected agreed with me.

Get this album, and find some quick explanations of the stories behind the songs to enrich your listening pleasure.

Be looking for the next Powerless release, because they debuted one of their new songs, and it was splifferific. The song’s name is still up in the air I guess (Sam, the bassist is right here and I just asked him what its name was and he said he doesn’t know). Anyway, the song’s time signature changed like three times and there were all these really creative wandering melodies. It was almost like if Tool did the Beatles song Happiness is a Warm Gun, but then changed it a lot.

Anyway, be careful the next time you go to The Big Red Barn. Not that its a very trafficked venue or anything (its just this big red barn…in Mapleton) but I got stung 3 times by a huge wasp. I think the Powerless summoned it by playing the secret yellow note, which was designed by the Top Secret Weapons Division of the US Military to summon the Japanese out of their pill boxes, but ended up summoning wasps. So they just sprayed LSD all over them and let them back loose over St. George, UT.

Powerless plays next at the Velour (which is on University Ave. near Center Street in Provo) on Feb 22nd at 8:30.

Today was the second Sewell Direct summer day. Summer day is when we all come in shorts and a t-shirt in the dead of winter and turn the heat up really high. We also all pitch in some money to have a bar-b-que, and we bust out the hacky-sack so all of the stoners that work in the warehouses adjacent and accross from us and the ones that go to the alternative school accross the way start to salivate.

Summer day number two had a much better turn out than summer day one (which was last week), mainly because we actually told the other departments about it this time.

Check out these super awesome action shots of food and hacking. Warning: don’t view these pictures if you’ve spliffed it up.

Here’s Dan with the Half-Jester

Here I am with the combo outside-kick/counter-culture-t-shirt-wear:

Here are some bovine pies:

I’m quite a bit behind on posts, so this one is a little late.

For those of you that don’t live in Utah, there is the Macy’s that is a department store and one that is a grocery store that possesses the guise of having the lowest prices in town. They achieve this guise by not updating their look (which is good for those of us nostalgic of trickle-down economics and The Clash) and by displaying prices as 5 for $10 even though there isn’t really any quantity discount (in other words you can still buy 1 or $2). Anyway, at least the place is clean enough and they employ a lot of college students.

This last year’s Christmas decorations were a little more under budget than usual however. Back in December I was walking down the isle that has the mexican food (the one my friend calls the catholic isle) and saw the above decorations. I thought that it was thoughtful of Macy’s to make all of our Latino friends feel more at home by recreating their natural habitat. But then I realized that the entire store had a similar theme in decor.

So I guess Macy’s was cutting corners, breaking open the unsold Cinco de Mayo decorations that had some red and green on them (yes, Mexico’s colors are red, white, and green). The good news is, they pass the savings onto us! Here are a couple more pictures of Macy’s Holiday decorations:

Suddenly, a chalupa sounds really good right now for some reason.

And then I was really shocked when I guy approached me from the frozen pizza/novelty ice cream isle wanting to haggle for replica rolexes and cocaine! Anyway, nice try Macy’s.

As all my reader know, I don’t blog very often. Its not for lack of content; I have tons of articles that have been written and unfinished. The method of blogging in a browser is inconvenient, having to log on with a username and password, using different tabs for uploading images and writing the article, etc. (I use wordpress).

Lewis tipped me off to BlogDesk, an application you can download for free and that allows you to blog without openning a single browser. It was easy to set up my blog. It just asked for simple pieces of information that I could remember off the top of my head (like username, password, blog address, etc). It even automatically uploaded my categories.

BlogDesk also comes with a spellcheck. I found it humorous that the words ‘blog’ and ‘blogdesk’ are not in the dictionary.

Annoyingly, the ‘insert link’ function doesn’t allow you to write your own anchor text. If I’m missing the boat on this, someone let me know.

Also annoying was my first attempt at using BlogDesk to post. I inserted some HTML (so I could choose my own anchor text for the above links) and when I went to post, it said something about invalid HTML, and then it automatically shut down asking if I wanted to send an error report. I was pleased to find, however, that BlogDesk had automatically saved my unfinished post. Not bad.