Say What You Mean - Comment Punctuation

No one is understanding the hilarious comments I'm leaving on their blogs - and it's not just my 8th grade spelling and grammar (ok, this is what you are thinking)... I need bold and italic. I need hyperlinks. The Blogger comment form says I "can use some HTML tags, such as <i>,<b> ,<a> " - but how do I do that? This is how.

Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML tags, surround the words you want to modify, like this: <i>these words will be in italics</i>. Notice the forward slash just before the second "i"? - it's not optional, it defines where to end the formatting. Likewise, bold: <b>these words will be bold</b>.

The <a>, or attribute tag, is used for hyperlinks - like the comments spammers feigning interest post on your blog, linking back to their own websites - cough, cough, Heath, cough... That code looks like this:<a href="http://www.google.com/">Click here to go to Google</a>. More complicated but still very simple; the opening tag <a href=" "> with the website location between the quotes, and the closing tag </a> with the link words before it. You see only "Click here to go to Google", and when you do, you'll be sent to http://www.google.com/. Got it?

Remember, with code, syntax must be exact, <i>close</i> doesn't count! There you go; a joke, a tip and an example all-in-one. Yes thank you, applause. applause.

Merry Christmas Eve!

Christmas Eve...

I spent the evening outside burning a big fire and listening to Trans-Siberian Orchestra, - now that's Christmas music! I heard my neighbors pausing on their late nite dog-peeing and snow-shoveling duties to briefly cock an ear to the blues-and-metalized arrangements of Christmas standards and tasty originals.

Two years ago Christmas, I built that doll house from plywood and pine in the Longfellow garage - check out the two stairways and attic door details. It was super-fucking cold those last December weeks - like arctic. I remember being dressed up like a spaceman, spray-painting it up on sawhorses, under blazing shop lights, just nights before the big morning, most of the paint atomizing into the air, little making it on to the wood. I was burning a blazing fire in the driveway and cranking Dead Can Dance, the neighborhood was otherwise silent and still.

I remember pausing, removing my filter mask, and turning to the open air and blazing fire to - to my surprise, acknowledge the unspoken greeting of an under-dressed woman with semi-hollow eyes silently heading down the alley to our then drug-dealer neighbors. Seeing what I was doing, she burst into a huge smile that defied the frigid air and her sad mission, and lasted all the way past my garage edge.

The contrasts make me want to cry to think about it now.

UFO

Unexpect

PaRappa!

I'm in love with my car.

I Will.

Rack is Done.

Came out pretty good - looks sharp - super functional.

Feel like having a song stuck in your head?

Oh go ahead, you know you want to play it again...

Saturday night update.

Mounts on front fender -slash- brake mount bolt for universal adaptability. Horizontal arms should be a little wider to meet the vertical arms where they meet the top rack, and going to make that mount-plate as small as possible and round it's edges. Sweet.

Prototype rack - Easy as pie.

Strong as hell.

Lutsen 2001 - Good shots Sean

Got my shock back from the Shockspital, and on the bike, but summer is gone now for sure, It's gonna be snow any day.

Erik Quackenbush Dot Blogspot Dot Com

I've been wanting to get Erik's art onto a website for years. He brought five recent paintings to Thanksgiving dinner to show and so finally, off we go. I called him tonight to make sure he saw my email with his new site location, he said: "ya, I saw it, it's blue with yellow dots or something, I'm eating dinner right now..." ok, I said, I'll talk to you later this weekend. - I guess I was more excited than he was at this point ;).

It won't be updated much until Christmas, but we are planning a mass photo-session for then.

The pictures don't do justice to seeing the, rather large-scale paintings in person. I've found which ones I like better and worse tend to change around the more I look at them.

Como Zoo

Fort Snelling State Park, Minneapolis.

Blog Confession

Sometimes I edit older posts. For grammar, sometimes for clarity. Lately sometimes to add a short enhancing sentence. I've added new pictures. I never delete anything (past next morning) but, Where will it end?

Open letter to Jared Andersson

Jared - You did some wood carving as I recall - the "couch block" - remember? Idea! You should carve a roughly bottle shaped object, that has an actual bottle cap attached to the top. - as a bottle opener - to do the opening one beer with another technique. It would always be sitting there on the bench. Ding! Do it! - Make me one too!

Make it the perfect "finger brace height", to pop it effortlessly. -or make it exactly like another beer...

That sound good... another beer.

Capricorn Handmade Steel Bicycles

That comment I left on Heath's blog about my neighbor with the cool custom bike and rack?... Looks like he made it himself, I stumbled across his blog tonight - It's definitely him. He lives on the next block - no wonder he didn't seem very impressed with my tall bike antics.

Coincidentally, I went to Discount Steel this morning and bought 40 feet of hollow, 16 and 18 gauge tubing (for $12!) - going to see about building my own racks.



Late nite update. I really need a drill press to do this right. Both gauges are too heavy, but the 18 will do for prototype. I've got the bender too, so the (90 degree) options are open really - send me pictures of your drawings. My new Harbor freight portable bandsaw ($60) blows-doors on my abrasive-wheel chop saw, hello Craigslist?

Golden Lake Michigan - 1984-ish

I bought my first AC/DC album at Target - Dirty Deeds, not long after we moved to Duluth, first Target I had ever seen. Must have been 79, 80. Over the next years I bought every AC/DC album that had ever been released, and nothing else. In '82 I heard Number of the Beast and switched to Iron Maiden. From there I started discovering all of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal albums, pretty much entirely on my own - with Sean and Randy - but for all practical purposes... this was long before the Intrenets. We seemed to have a knack for choosing new artists from the pictures and social clues available on the outside of their plastic-sealed album covers. As the dust settles twenty-five years later, we found many hidden gems , and didn't really get hung up on crazy crap.

The Metal world is a place that I always figured out for myself, in the combinations that made sense to me, and it still is. I pay as little attention as possible to style, and genre, and personality, I like guitar-riffs, I like music. (now- I mean, back in the day style was of course, extremely important ;))

There were however, two people who greatly helped open my eyes in my transition from Metal to everything. The first was my 1985 Augsburg college dorm-mate Doug Moen, a twitchy, thinning blond hair, bean-pole from White Bear Lake who had a nervous habit of loudly snapping the fingers of one hand when excited or nervous. I came with my enlightened set of NWOBHM discs. He came with a mix of Hendrix and obscure classic rock, and a full load of the cutting-edgiest alternative rock available in 1985. Some bands I can completely acknowledge my introduction to from him include: Husker Du - Zen Arcade (which had come out the year before - local boys even), Jesus and Mary Chain - Psychocandy and The Cult - Love - both of which had come out just that year. We didn't listen to my albums much. Somehow, he had the inside knowledge. We walked downtown a couple times, connected some, but were both lost in our own deals at that point. Never talked to him since. The music has lasted forever though.

He had half their back-catalogs too. He loved Hendrix, who I didn't love at the time, and one of his few other "classic rock" albums was Robin Trower (known as an exceptionally huge Hendrix fan) - Bridge of Sighs album. That title track was covered as a bonus song on the 2008 album by a band that you know that I know: Opeth. Full circle.

The other influence... I met soon after returning to dull-hut, after that first year away - through Randy in fact, happened to live in an apartment on the next block...

another time.

Summer is gone.

Mayday 2008

Dowling Elementary Minneapolis

There are things that I'd like to say
But I'm never talking to you again
There's things I'd like to phrase some way
But I'm never talking to you again

I'm never talking to you again
I'm never talking to you
I'm tired of wasting all my time
Trying to talk to you

I'd put you down where you belong
But I'm never talking to you again
I'd show you everywhere you're wrong
But I'm never talking to you again

Shall We... Saturday?

Hologeek Speaks!

Coffin Daggers at the Hex

You guys missed something good tonight - The Coffin Daggers from NY - they were original. "Surf mixed with punk"- according to the guitarist (who looked much older in person), in his thick New York accent. What I heard was pulsing instrumental surf mixed with Psychocandy feedback, Unforgettable Fire delay and White Stripes attitude. They were great. Steve and I were convinced that the guitarist and keyboardist were on heroin - literally, I'm not kidding they looked like they were falling asleep during the show but they seemed normal after. The guy had a theremin and he could play it - viva Jimmy Page! -and also a vintage tape echo - you could see him reach back and hit the button and everything would start to swirl.

In over four years of frequently going to surf night it was the best band I've seen play with them yet.

Happy Halloween!

Band Review: Thin Lizzy (1969 - 1983)

I love music. I listen to as much as I can. And new music too. I push myself to listen to new stuff I haven't heard before, mostly current, some old. You know how there's bands that, when they're current and big, you never listen to them, you avoid them, almost on purpose. Knowing that someday you'll get into them, and listen to their whole catalog - and probably like them a lot? I love that.

Then some bands, you've heard their name for years but 've never heard their music. Back in the earliest days of the NWBOHM, I'd always heard the name "Thin Lizzy" (mostly next to UFO) but never heard their music - except the few radio songs (for example "Jailbreak" you know: dun don - du-dut) . They seemed to be on the "lighter" -slash- classic-hard-rock-ish side of the spectrum and I was mostly on the heavier side then. UFO of course being one of my favorite bands pretty much of all time though, I had to give TL a try sooner or later. About a year ago I grabbed most of their catalog and started checking them out.

They totally rock - Phil Lynott is a great singer. You see why they were compared to UFO: total story-songs about the pain and ecstacy of love and life on the street. Great catchy songs - cool themes. I think my favorite album is Black Rose. I remember when Lynott died back in 1986 (at 37), reading Kerrang magazine some people saying "fuck him he was a herion addict" and others saying he was a genius. Twenty years later It seems they were both right. There's an outdoor statue of him in his home-town Dublin Ireland, like our Mary Tyler Moore downtown.

What do you mean you don't know UFO? - "lights out, lights out in London, hold on tight til' the end, better now you know we'll never, wait until tomorrow..."

Steve-inator tomorrow night.

Junior High