Welcome to my little corner of the world. Since you found your way here, I'll give you my thoughts, once a week or whenever I get around to it, on the WWF, Metallica, music in general, and just random thoughts off the top of my head. Enjoy!
Dave
Pictures from the Deloitte holiday party are available
here. One of these days I may get around to getting the pictures
from Randy's wedding online... maybe.
Yes, once again it has been a while. Pictures from Randy and Melissa's wedding will be
online shortly. In the mean time, check out how you can help free the
West Memphis 3.
Pictures from Brian and Karen's wedding are online now. You can find them here.
Wow, it got kinda wet here today. Check this out.
I've finally gotten pictures posted from my backstage experience with Metallica two
years ago. That page is here.
It has been a while since I've updated here. Largely that's because I usually only update here when I have downtime at work, and I'm bored enough and/or motivated enough to spend that time writing here, rather than wasting time on fantasy baseball and football, or whatever else comes to mind. But I felt like writing some things down before I forget about them.
PIECES ARE FALLING, I CAN'T SEEM TO MAKE THEM STAY
First, I read yesturday that Drowning Pool singer Dave Williams was found dead on the
band's tour bus yesturday. No cause of death was announced the last time I looked, but
honestly, what do 30 year old rock stars tend to drop dead from? Drug overdoses, or else
heart failure related to years of drug abuse. It's such a sad, cliched way to go. I saw
Drowning Pool play two songs at WrestleMania in Toronto a few months ago, but never saw
them in concert. I really like their song "Tear Away." I listened to it a few minutes ago,
and wrote down my best take on the lyrics. I might have a few wrong, but the gist of it is
there. That link is HERE.
A lot has happened in the past couple months. One thing I really meant to write about at least a month ago, but never got around to, was my Fourth of July weekend. I drove up to Milwaukee that Wednesday, the 3rd, and met up with some friends up there. On Thursday, the 4th, I spend some quality time out in the sun, and then went to Summerfest to see Nickelback. Jerry Cantrel opened, and played a pretty decent set. He played a mix of his new songs, which few people knew, and older Alice In Chains songs, which a lot of people remembered. To close out his set, he brought out Tommy Lee, who was playing later that night on one of the smaller stages, to play drums on the AIC classic "Man in the Box."
Nickelback was really good. But a Canadian band playing on the 4th of July? Whatsupwitdat??? Their show was really good. The crowd was really into them. Some people, including at least one of the people I was with, didn't realize that their current CD isn't their debut album, and didn't understand how'd they'd be able to play a set longer than about 40 minutes. As it was, they played well over an hour. I guess "Never Again" is the new single of the cd, which is great, because it's a great song with a good message. Since it's track 1 on the cd, most people knew it, and people sang along really loud. That was pretty cool.
What might have been even cooler, though, was the crowd singing along to "How You Remind Me." I mean, the band was playing full out, amplified hard rock, and the crowd was drowning them out. I guess that's how you know you've really got a monster song on your hands. The band teased playing the song twice before that, first playing the "original" version of the first verse, with the same lyrics but a different guitar riff, and a different sound. Chad Kroeger, the singer, joked that they had apparently changed the song for the better, but it was cool to hear the old version played. A bit later, after playing an acoustic rendition of Chad and Josey Scott's (of Saliva) song "Hero" from the Spiderman soundtrack, the band again teased the big hit by playing the first verse acoustic. Then they finally gave the crowd the song. The band seemed to legitimately enjoy being on stage and playing, and that made the whole show a lot of fun.
A day later, on Friday the 5th, I drove back to Chicago, and went to the Korn show at the Allstate Arena. That show was also a lot of fun, but a lot different, as one would probably imagine. Deadsy was the first opening band, and I'd have to give them a big thumbs down. We couldn't really hear them very well, and we were standing on the floor, not far from the stage. The way their sound was mixed, you could hear the singer's voice, but you couldn't make out any of his lyrics.
Puddle of Mudd was on next. I enjoyed their set, but quite a few of the hardcore Korn fans did not. Several people up front stood with their middle fingers raised at the band for the majority of their set. Again, whatsupwitdat? Chill out... if you don't like it, don't listen to it. Take a freakin break, go up to the concourse and get a beer, whatever.
By the time Korn came on, I had a pretty good buzz going. There's no place quite like the floor at a Korn show. It was a lot of fun, though. It's just kind of hard to watch the stage and pay full attention to the show when you've got to watch out for people flying into you. That, plus the good buzz I had, I guess... But like I said, it was a lot of fun. This was the 4th time I've seen Korn live, the only band I've seen more is Metallica at 5 times. I've also been to 4 Kid Rock shows, each time opening to Metallica, but I completely missed the first one while I was up on the concourse at the NYE show, and missed most of the second one in line for concessions at the Summer Sanitarium tour. So we'll say Korn is 2nd, and Kid Rock is #3 on that list. I've seen Puddle of Mudd twice, and several country bands twice, but none recently.
But to sum up the weekend, two rock concerts in two days makes Dave a pretty happy camper. Plus, I made some new friends during the weekend, which is always a good thing.
What else is new? Well, yesturday I officially became in Illinois resident. Driver's License, license plates, even registered to vote. I had to take my written driver's test for Illinois, and without studying, I missed only one, and it was a tricky question about car seats. The bad thing, though, is that Illinois, unlike some other states, requires you to have an in-state title for you car in order to register it. So I had to pay $65 extra to trade in my perfectly good Indiana title for an Illinois title. So right now, the only proof I have that I own my car is a photocopy of my original title. I don't think I even got a freakin' receipt from Illinois yet. I'd better hope they don't lose my new title in the mail. So instead of paying about $50 to get a new Indiana plate, I spent a total of $218 on an Illinois title, plates, and a city of Chicago sticker. What a ripoff... but at least I'm legit now.
Of course, since Illinois requires both front and rear plates, I need to take off my Metallica Scary Guy front plate that I've had for about two years. That sucks. So now it's sitting on a shelf in the garage. The club goofed up, in my favor, two years ago when I bought the thing, and send me one, then sent me a postcard saying it was out of stock, and then sending me a second one for free. So I've already got one on my wall.
Speaking of my car, I had to pay over $300 on a new water pump and a couple other minor repairs last week. My car was leaking coolent pretty badly, so it definately needed it. Hopefully I've got everything fixed now, because I would hate to run into problems either this weekend on my trip to Detroit for my friend's wedding, or on one of my many trips down to Purdue for football this fall.
Well, I've probably rambled on long enough for now. Maybe I'll get around to updating
again... eventually... someday...
It's been a while... since I could say I updated this site. Ah, well.
A lot of stuff's been going on the past few weeks. Job security is non-existant, which is always nice. I've seen a few people I know be laid off, which is never fun.
I saw the band Puddle of Mudd a couple weeks back, that was a fun show. The show was at the Riviera here in Chicago, and was probably the smallest venue in which I've seen a band that popular. I was already a fan, after hearing their show, now I'm even a bigger fan of their music.
I get to go see Jason Newsted's new band EchoBrain at the Double Door in a couple weeks, and to make that even better, FOO will be here for that show. I've only seen him two or three times since last may, so that will be great.
It's Grand Prix week down at Purdue... quick, run away from those Excise cops! Hopefully overblown law enforcement doesn't ruin a GREAT weekend. It's not like I go to parties when I'm in town, and it's not like the bars get hasseled too much. However, I'm not sure how much VIP type treatment I can get at Where Else, due to both Tony no longer working there, plus their having to be carefull of actually trying to come close to being in 100% compliance with the law. Waiting in line sucks, but I guess you just gotta deal with it. I am looking forward to breakfast club, thought. Oh, boy, this should be a fun one. I got the clothes ready to go, I'm going to be able to sleep in a bit friday morning, so I shouldn't be TOO exhausted, plus I can grab some sleep in the afternoon if I really want to. Should be one hell of a time.
How about the weather the past couple days? I can live with 80+ degree days, thank you very much. Too bad it's supposed to cool off and rain a lot this weekend. Ah, well.
I think I'm going to get everything together tonight, so I can drive to work tomorrow morning, and leave town directly from here around 5. My little circle around the midwest will take me first to South Bend, then to Sidney, Ohio, to see the Grandma, then to Lafayette, and finally back to Chicago Sunday night. Should be a good way to spend what I'm making into a 4 day weekend.
I saw the single funniest commercial for a wrestling PPV I can remember. Keep an eye out for the Easter Bunny WWF Backlash commercial. "Silly Rabbit..."
Yup, yup, yup, looks like quitting time. My, what a productive week it's been so far.
See ya on the other side.
It's early in the week, but here's just a couple quick tidbits.
Did you ever want to know exactly what I thought about the Rock and the ambulance attack? Well, then, here you go.
I got a fun little email from the geocities admin the other day. Check this out:
"Dear GeoCities Member, Your web site, http://www.geocities.com/djp519 seems to have been receiving a large amount of traffic. Our records indicate that you're using more than the allotted amount of data transfer we provide for a free web site, which is 3 gigabytes per month (measured on an hourly basis). That means that during the past few days we had to temporarily turn your site off to keep the bandwidth within this limit."
That means that so many people viewed so many of my vacation pictures that they actually had to temporarily pull the plug on this site because I was using too much bandwidth. I'm impressed that I had that many visitors, so that's pretty cool. So if you ever find this site to be inaccessable, that's probably why. I'm working on a couple different ideas to help solve this problem, too.
That's all for now, more later... maybe.
Want to see some pictures for this weekend? This is sort of a temporary dumping ground for them, I'll make a nicer page when I get around to it. Enjoy!
So WrestleMania has come and gone. It was a pretty fun weekend though. Let's start from the top.
Saturday afternoon I flew to Buffalo and met up with Brian. I had no hassles at all at the airport, which is a good thing, and my flight even landed a bit early. Traffic was a little backed up crossing the border, but not too bad. We headed straight to downtown, and found the Axxess site. I've got to tell you, I was a bit disapointed with Axxess. The place was too crowded, and the lines were too long. You could either stand in a line waiting to do something, sit down at the mini-arena to watch the undercarders work a few matches, or wander around aimlessly looking at all the same stuff over and over. We got there too late to get a seat at the arena, and I didn't feel like waiting in such long lines just for an autograph from whoever might happen to be at the table when I got to the front, so we got in line to do fanstasy play-by-play. Now, this is something I really wanted to do. You sit down, put on the big, professional style headset, and do commentary to a "classic" match on the big tv in front of you, and the other fans in line might get to hear you, depending on which station you end up at. Kevin Kelly was doing commentary with fans at one station for a while, but he left before he made it to the front of the line. Too bad, I would have liked to call him "Hermie" on air and see how he reacted. Oh, well. Now, after waiting in this line for over TWO HOURS, we finally get up, and decide to do the 2002 Royal Rumble. The match picks up with the Final Four men, Angle, Austin, HHH, and Perfect. It was a lot of fun, and I was really looking forward to watching my tape back when I got home yesturday. Only one problem: My tape is f'n BLANK. So is Brian's copy. They screwed up, and didn't actually record our commentary. I am not exactly pleased about this. So basically, long story short, Axxess worked out to be a huge waste of time and money.
A side note on Axxess, we did get to see Will Sasso and someone who I think was Jason Sensation of D-X fame impersonating a bunch of wrestlers, and then Tazz come out and get on Sasso's case about it, and then letting Ivory and a couple of the Tough Enough girls beat him down. That much was pretty cool.
And then, we go find our hotel, which has managed to cancel my reservation. So we ended up in the last available room at the hotel next door. And that's about all I got to say about that.
On Sunday, we decided to head to Niagria to see the Falls and the casino. The casino took a little bit of my money, no big deal. But I was really glad we drove down there. The view is incredible. I took a bunch of cool pictures. They'll be up shortly.
And then... WrestleMania. We got to the Skydome just a little after 6. Parking was $40 Canadian, that's like $25. Outrageous!!! But we found our way over to our gate, and waited. And waited... and waited. The PPV went live at 8, Heat started at 7, tickets said showtime at 7:30 and doors at 5:30. I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think the doors opened at my gate until about 7. We didn't get in until about 7:45, and just barely made it to our seats by the time the Heat match started. It was freakin cold out there, too. But at least we didn't miss anything major.
Let me say that Hulkamania never died, apparently, it's just been hiding in Toronto all these years. And Montreal too, judging from last night's Raw. Why, I don't know, and cannot understand, but Hogan was the most over person in the whole building. More than Austin, WAY more than Rock, more than Taker, more than Flair, more than anyone. Must have something to do with fond memories of WrestleMania VI, I guess.
The show was pretty good. The sound for Saliva was not very good, and a lot of the crowd didn't care too much for the music, but I had no problem with it. There was a bit of a stir during the Maven/Goldust match (WHY did Goldust have a match at 'Mania???) as a very good Austin impersonaitor walked into our section. He looked just about exactly like Austin, lots of people took pictures with him. But anyway...
Edge got mad props from the hometown crowd, and his spineroonie was hillarious. It looked like he and Booker really botched a huricanrana spot. Van Dam took one really wicked bump during his match with Regal. Angle and Kane botched the finish to their match, and it showed. But their match was really good up to that point. Flair-Taker was really good, considering the two have a combined age of around 95, I think. I'm pretty sure Flair is 51 or 52, and I'm pretty sure Taker is over 40. Good match. Lots of trademark, classic spots. The hardcore match spots in the back all show were all good. Hardcore Molly, I could have lived with that. Al Snow driving the golf cart with the referee was HILLARIOUS. Great to see a little nod to last year's fun hardcore match with Kane, Raven, and Big Show. I think there were two golf carts in that one. This year, no Raven, but instead Maven. Maybe they'll end up the same roster and fued over the letters "AVEN," but I'm not holding my breath.
Quite a few people left after the Hogan match ended. The wwf built that up as the main event, so I guess I'm not too surprised. The Jericho/HHH match was quite good, though. Spanish Announce Table spot, Steph gets pedigreed, and HHH sends the crowd home happy.
I took a ton of pictures, some came out kinda blurry, but a lot of them are really, really good.
I'll try to get those posted later tonight. See ya on the flip side.
WrestleMania weekend is HERE. I'm flying out of here in about 12 hours, meeting my very good friend
Brian in Buffalo, and driving on to Toronto, probably straight to Axxess. Then, WrestleMania itself is
Sunday. Should be a blast. I'm looking forward to seeing RVD hopefully win the IC title, the Tag Team
Elimination match, the Jericho-HHH match, the Austin-Hall match, and seeing a little live music from Saliva
and Drowning Pool in the process. I'll be taking lots of pictures, and you'll be able to see them from here
some time next week. And I'll have a nice rant about UPS and Sony's online store too, as soon as I get around
to writing it. Short version: Don't buy anything from sonystyle.com if you expect to get it in under a week,
even if you pay extra for 2nd day shipping. Bastards...
So I went to Best Buy Tuesday night to track down the new Echobrain cd... as advertised in their damn ad... and guess what? No CD to be found... bastards. And yet... I'll keep shopping there... damnit. Need a better place to shop, and no, the POS Circuit City that's like two miles from here doesn't count, that place is even worse!!! And what do I do? I can't find the cd in the store so I order it online... and bestbuy.com. D'oh. Way to reward their good work, eh?
I found a guy who's selling all sorts of Metallica bootleg concerts online... has all four of the shows I went to this summer... I think I'm doing some business with this guy. I've actaully been having an email conversation with him tonight... good deal. I'm happy. Too bad Best Buy didn't make me happy, too... grrr.
Ok, enough of that for now... see ya when I get around to posting again. Like after
WrestleMania when I brag about my trip... yeah.
By request, believe it or not, I'm taking time out of my busy day to actually update this little corner of the world. Or something to that effect... I haven't talked about the past couple weeks of wrestling, but that's mostly because there hasn't been too much good to say. I will say that tonight's Raw was pretty good. Especially when you consider that half the roster wasn't there. I don't really understand why they didn't acknowlege that everyone was on the way home from the Japan/Asia tour, you would think they would want people to know that they actually ran shows there... but who knows. Instead, JR gives us the cover story of Flair taking care of his family emergency, Steph tells us Jericho is off fetching her lotion, and Rock is still nursing his injuries... Whatever.
But the HHH-Angle cage match was good. If I'm Angle though, I think I step out of the cage, win the match, and then go back in to beat up H some more... but that's me, I guess. Also, since the Ref was knocked out for so long who told the time timekeeper to ring the bell? He can't make that decision himself, can he? Whoops, there I go thinking too much again...
The RVD-Storm match was good, too. RVD did a real good job selling the leg, I was impressed. I'm looking forward to seeing him at WrestleMania... hopefully his match with Regal flows well.
Did you notice that the original "NWO Referee" Nick Patrick was the Ref for Scott Hall's little match with Spike? I wonder if that was actually by design, or just dumb luck on their part. Speaking of refs, it was weird not seeing Hebner in the main event... I'm gonna guess he must've been on the Japan tour, too... actually, I think I read he was, now that I think about it.
On a completely unrelated note, I was trying to burn a CD, but something is being finicky, so that's not going to happen right now. Either my drive is acting up, my software is acting up, or else I manged to get ahold of some damn copy-protected mp3s... damn record companies...
ECHOBRAIN, Jason Newsted's new project, comes out TODAY, TUESDAY MARCH 5th. Check it out. Bestbuy has it for $7.99, or at least the website does. I've listened to the MP3s, they're pretty decent. Some better than others. It's definately not like Metallica, but it's ok. Definately worth listening to if you're a fan of Jason's work.
I've downloaded a lot of really good music lately. A lot of the new Kid Rock songs are really good, and a lot of the WWF Forceable Entry songs are good, too. Worth downloading. Of course, the coolest thing by far I've found are the bootleg MP3s of the band Dream Theater doing Metallica's entire Master of Puppets album live, from February 19th, in Barcelona. OUTSTANDING work there. If you're a 'Tallica fan, and like collecting rarities and covers, you have got to track these down. I can tell you where to look if you ask, or you should be able to dig it up on Audiogalaxy if you look around.
Hmm, turning the random thoughts back to wrestling for a moment, I'll be brief and say I think last week's Smackdown sucked, last week's Raw I'm indifferent on... actually can't remember it well enough to judge it. The Smackdown before that I missed, but I did see a recap of the Austin-Hall kidnapping type skits, seemed pretty funny. The Raw before that, two weeks ago, was terrible. I HATE the overly serious life-and-death attitute JR, Lawler, and most everyone else put on after they did the Rock-Ambulance bit. Terrible. I wrote a bit of a rant on it, but I never posted it... maybe I'll do that someday. Bottom line: I don't like it. Plus, it took up WAY too much time...
Fantasy Baseball season is here... this is my first year playing. I've got a league going with 9 of my co-workers, and we're doing a live draft next sunday. So, to familerize myself with the live draft process, I've joined a public league that's doing a draft on wednesday... a league I won't really care about, but just doing to practice for my serious league... how f'd up is that? Should be fun though.
It's also Fantasy NASCAR season, and I'm doing pretty damn good. On Yahoo, I'm in the 95th percentile overall, I'm quite pleased. Good times...
And yes, I know this main page is getting too long... next time I update, I'll clean it up and link to some of the older stuff. One of these days...
Hey, I've got a new background, ain't it groovy? Or sumthin.
Raw was, well, it was there. Edge-Jericho wasn't bad, even though it made no sense. Christian-RVD wasn't bad either, but I'm not sold on the temper tantrum deal. And as for the wedding vows angle, well, at least they killed the pregnacy angle quickly. And solidified HHH as a strong face, without Steph's heelness dragging him back. Could have been a lot worse. Too bad they rest of the show wasn't stronger. That crowd was red hot at the open, as Taker pointed out, too bad they didn't do much to keep them cheering. And why, why, why did we have to listen to that "Together" song for so long? Did you hear how loud the boo's were at the end of that? It's not that they didn't do a decent job singing, I suppose, it's just that no one wants to go to a wrestling show to watch garbage like that. They want to see some story line progression, and, you know, WRESTLING. Too much to ask somedays, I guess. And one other thought... What on Earth was Stephanie thinking when she got such huge implants? My God, those things are SO out of proportion on her... and did you catch Vince taking a couple peeks down his daughter's dress? Ewwww...
On a completely unrelated note... in my PS2 universe Purdue is 11-0, and number one in both polls and the BCS, and will be playing in the Rose Bowl for the National Title... probably tonight! Go Boilers... Then I get to figure out Recruiting, should be fun.
Until next time...
Have I mentioned that I code this entire site myself, by hand, in html, in notepad? No fancy-dancey
html editors for me... which means it takes a bit of time... but on the bright side, the code is SO
much easier to read!
Take me Home!
Geocities is weird: This is supposed to show you the time this document was last updated on the server, but instead shows the last time you reloaded the page. Nothing I can do about it, gotta live with it.
