How Does It Know?

Got a strange fortune cookie this weekend at a place in Ann Arbor.

Sorry ladies, I’m yi jin jeh huan! Why is this a useful Chinese phrase? If I go to China, am I going to be bombarded with marriage proposals so numerous that knowing this phrase will be vital?

This one is strangely relevant to my week. Our fridge died and we lost all our food, but I did identify the issue (when the first serviceman was lousy and didn’t do anything), and brought the attention of a second serviceman (who was awesome) to it.

This was the part that got fried. It’s a starter relay.

Kids in the Hall do shows of new material, article from New York TimesÂ

The Kids in the Hall are back! The Kids had a profound effect on the way I enjoyed comedy. I discovered them in 7th grade, I think, first on CBC and then on Comedy Central (which may have been called the Comedy Channel then, not sure…). Prior to that, I had watched Saturday Night Live (which was pretty good most of the time to my 6th-7th grade level sense of humor), and before that, In Living Color (which, in retrospect, wasn’t very good, but I do believe I enjoyed some of it, when the heck was that, 4th-5th grade?). And some Monty Python in there too, which I did enjoy quite a bit when I caught it. I knew I liked sketch comedy, but I never knew how much I could like it till I found KITH.

My friends and I would make stupid movies a lot in those middle school days, and a lot of the “writing” we did was influenced by Kids in the Hall. At least I know I was. We always wanted to do a public access sketch comedy show, but never got our shit together enough to actually do it. I had written some sketches in my early high school days that we never did anything with. I also tried to write for Comedy Company, the University of Michigan student sketch/improv group. I even got two sketches (that I CO-wrote) performed, which was pretty cool. (It did however, prove to be very difficult to continue to be funny on a regular basis, and therefore, I ended up quitting.) The entire point of this paragraph was: “Yeah, I like sketch comedy a lot”.
But I digress. The real point of this entire post is: “I would be totally geeked to go see the Kids perform a bunch of new material like this article in the New York Times mentions”.

These days, I still love me some KITH… Mr. Show gives it a run for its money, though (and despite what all my friends say, Season 4 IS in fact like 50% worse than the previous 3 seasons. But upon repeated watching, I do enjoy it more). And of course, my current favorite is Human Giant, but I’m not sure that their sketches have the lasting power of KITH or Mr. Show. But what do I know. I still laugh at inside jokes from 6th grade. In fact, it is my primary method of communication.

Last Monday, a couple friends and I went to see Morrissey at the Michigan Theatre in Ann Arbor. F lives in Ann Arbor as it is, so we met up at his house. The show was fairly good, but not as good as when I saw him in 1997 after Maladjusted came out. This time, since I’ve fallen out of touch with any new Morrissey albums since Maladjusted, I didn’t recognize a lot songs. It was still fun to hear the hits he did play, though, and the old Smiths songs. One complaint I had was that the drums seemed to be really overpowering a lot of the other players and Morrissey’s singing on the more rock-type songs. I’m not sure if that’s due to the acoustics of the theatre or the drum mics, but they tended to be really bassy and thud-y.

In Ann Arbor, we walked around and had dinner at a food co-op. And it kind of made me want to live in Ann Arbor. I did live there as a student, but it’d be a great place to live as a homeowner and professional, I gather. I love that everything is walkable (for the most part), though it could get rough in the winters. And there’s just so much good stuff going on all the time. I used to LOVE living in Ann Arbor in the summers, when campus was kind of empty and I had an easy job at the Space Physics Research Lab. Ahh, memories.

Anyway… Last night the Low Hello played a pretty successful show at Mac’s Bar in Lansing. After some initial song tuning difficulties (my tuner was telling me my G string was in tune, but for some reason, it was tuned like a half step lower than G. So we ended up playing the entirety of I Got Carpet that way, but no one seemed to care. Once again, the crowd was great and appreciative and seemed to enjoy themselves), everything went nicely. We actually made a little money this time, too, which is nice to offset the cost of giving away free CDs.

Today I pretty much chilled. We have these parts for the dryer that got mailed to us (so that the repair guy can just use them when he comes), and I attempted to see if I could just do the work myself and save the trouble and cost of having him come out. Turns out the job is a bit more than I envisioned and would involve taking too many things apart to make it worth our while.

Oh, has anyone been watching Human Giant on MTV? I have and have been really really liking it. Damn that’s some good sketch comedy. And it’s nice to see a brown bearded man be so awesome on TV.

I inserted this Flash mp3 player/streamer into the sidebar of The Low Hello site last night.

I liked it over others because you don’t need to provide it a podcast or RSS feed or anything, just the URL of an HTML page that contains links to MP3s. Which is great, since I already had that with the Media page.

It seems to work pretty well so far. I am thinking of putting one on this site too, to stream all the music on the Music and MP3 page, but that might be too many MP3s to have to click through to hear what you want. If you’re really dedicated to hearing them, I supposed you’d just download them. Maybe. If anyone at all is dedicated to hearing them, that is.

BTW, I would’ve just embedded the actual Flash player here in this post, but Wordpress doesn’t allow you to embed Flash things in posts. Or at least, it didn’t like this particular one. I’ve seen folks with the YouTube embeds where you can view the video right on the page, but that didn’t work for me on thelowhello.com either. Oh well.

I’m going to see Andrew Bird on Thursday night, and I’ve been meaning to write about how me and my wife saw Zach Galifianakis two weekends ago, but I didn’t get around to it.

The Zach show was great, and the opening comedian was really good too, and made references to Skeletor (I loved He-Man and his associated toys and TV shows as a kid). He was Pakistani, and his first name was Kamel. I don’t remember his last name, and can’t find anything referencing him on the web other than some folks saying they saw him open for Zach too and that they couldn’t remember his last name. Thanks World Wide Web. Thanks for nothing!

I was pretty skeptical about the Sarah Silverman Program when I heard about it; I’m not really a fan of her standup comedy, and really hadn’t seen much by her that I enjoyed. She had a really short stint of under-use on Saturday Night Live, if I recall correctly. But after watching a few episodes of her Program, I’ve really grown to like it. I think it is really well written, and even though sometimes I’m not really wanting a silly song in the middle of nowhere, they tend to be kept short and actually fairly funny. (For some reason, comedy in the form of a song has never struck me as that funny. It seems too contrived and thought about. I like comedy that seems like the person delivering it didn’t think about it too much, off-the-cuff, if you will. I realize most comedy I like is scripted/written, but it’s all in the packaging for me, I suppose). The bearded gay couple is great, the cop guy who was in Mr. Show is great, her sister is pretty cool. Check it out, even if you’re not a Silverman fan.