Where’s the peanut butter?!

It went like this:

• I announce: “Speak Slow” by Tegan and Sara is the best pop song of eleven eleven, two thousand and seven.
• Erin Dean says: “Killer Queen is way better - that’s what I’m learning on Guitar Hero”
• me: “Nuts to that - either of Tegan or Sara could have totally out arm-wrestled Freddie Mercury. Is ‘Speak Slow’ even in Guitar Hero?”
• Erin: “I have no idea but if it is, we duel.”
• I: go to Erin’s profile page, find some fruit ripe for the picking in the form of a movie quiz she scored 74% on, I score a crushing 93%

And just like that, I like Facebook. I’m so fickle with my internet fads but unlike all the other busted social networking sites, facebook is actually fun.

Last month I was in Fremont for a race and the Oktoberfest and stopped by Sonic Boom - one of the few good record stores left in the city (part of a dying breed around the country, really) and picked up a couple new discs. I love shopping at Sonic Boom because it reminds me of growing up in Minnesota and going into the city to shop at Northern Lights, Oarfolk, Garage D’Or and the other independent record stores that have all since shuttered up.  But that Sunday I picked up Bayani by the Blue Scholars and oh my god, I’ve finally listened to it and it is awesome.  Hip hop, did I stray from thee? I’m going to take my whiteness to the next level by saying these are the freshest beats I’ve heard in years.

If I still lived in Minnesota, I know where I’d be on November 18.

Go get this album and fall in love with hip hop again.

50,000 Deep

November 30th, 1999
No sunshine

The body rock stopped, probably got caught by the cops
Nearby, somebody got shot
But parties don’t stop and the parties don’t care
It’s a stick-up, it’s why we got our hands in the air

Still demanding a share, refrigerators bare
‘Cause they wanna see trade get free and not fair
But we are not blind, we are not there
We don’t got time left to spare to not care

On the last day of November, swellin’ in ranks
Went to chant down the mighty IMF and World Bank
A gathering of people in peaceful assembly
Onward to Westlake to disrupt the entry

Walk along steady, riot squad ready
To protect every last dignitary’s ass
But this started when they herded us like cattle in a fence
Protesters gettin’ restless without an exit

They threatened to arrest us, we pushed back and then
A hail of rubber bullets hit teens and old men
I admit, had to split when the first gas canisters hit
Felt it burn in my eyes, nose, and lips

They tried to blame it on the anarchists, garbage
I was there, I’ll tell you right now the pigs started it
But they distort it in the news
Talkin’ bout stompin’ down Niketown wearing their shoes

But the body rock stopped, probably got caught by the cops
Nearby, somebody got shot
But the parties don’t stop and the parties don’t care
It’s a stick-up, it’s why we got our hands in the air

50,000 deep, and it sound like thunder when our feet pound streets
50,000 deep, and it sound like thunder when our feet pound streets
50,000 deep, and it sound like thunder when our feet pound streets
50,000 deep, 50,000 deep

Yeah, now, the body rock stopped, probably got caught by the cops
Nearby, somebody got shot
But parties don’t stop in the south
So take your shoes off when you come into my house

I had to duck out ’cause I knew I stuck out in the crowd
After many years growin’ up brown in this town
Now this is what democracy looks like
Not what you all had in mind for tonight

Mr. Mayor, shell-shocked for 5 days straight
Press conference, lookin’ constipated and pale
Tossed a homie in jail, wasn’t even protesting
Wrong place, wrong time, learned a quick lesson

But this is not a question what we did to deserve this
Rich kids went and got arrested on purpose
But was it worth it? My first inclination
Globalization is the root of the pain

Made the reason that they left and the reason that we came
Catch my breath, blood pulsates my brain
And they called it a riot?
Huh, I call it an uprising

And they call this a riot?
But nah, I call it a uprising
And they call this a riot? Nah man, fuck that
I’m a call it a uprising

50,000 deep, and it sound like thunder when our feet pound streets, yo
50,000 deep, and it sound like thunder when our feet pound streets, come on y’all
50,000 deep, and it sound like thunder when our feet pound streets, yeah
50,000 deep, and it sound like thunder when our feet pound streets

The Pogues played a totally brilliant show last night at the Showbox SoDo. They started with “Streams of Whisky” and played a main set of well over an hour inlcuding “The Boys from County Hell,” “Rainy Night in Soho,” “If I Should Fall From Grace with God,” “Pair of Brown Eyes,” “Dirty Old Town,” and more before wrapping up with “Sick Bed of Cuchulainn.” They played two encores - the first including “Sally MacLenane” and then “The Irish Rover,” which Shane dedicated to someone who was “dead at the moment.”

Shane’s not the handsome man he once was…

…but they were still awesome.

I’ve been stranded on a musical island with only Feist on my ipod for probably the past two months. I’m finally getting it updated so I can go for a run in this awesome windstorm that’s kicking up (and hoping to go on a fun beach run) but it takes about as long to put the music on my ipod as I think it would take for me to just listen to it. I’d skip the gapless playback information for the ability to go out right now!

Update: That didn’t go as planned.  I’ll have to remember next time to check the tide tables because I got to Golden Gardens and there was definitely no way to go north.  Instead, I took an alternate route that I knew wasn’t going to be quite what I wanted.  Going down to the Locks and along the Burke-Gilman trail is a nice route but it’s way longer and involved running along the shore into the wind instead of with it at my back.  It was still awesome to be out in the windstorm anyway.  The descent toward Golden Gardens with the lit up northern skies and completely apocalyptic skies to the south over the city was what I was hoping to experience. Nature delivered.

Sigur Ros might be over-hyped and super stylized and everything but they’re also totally incredible.

Since my friend Paul started working for them, I’ve gone to the U District Food Bank’s annual fund raising dinner, which has a silent and live auction. By the way, if you’re in Seattle and reading this and not already at my table, you should totally go! It’s in a week, it’s a ton of fun, and for a good cause. Anyway, a year ago they auctioned off a pub crawl and last night I finally cashed it in. It was fun, but we didn’t get back till after 1 and the auction item should have included someone coming to turn off my alarm so that I would skip this morning’s long run.

I’ll post occasional favorite running songs in this music series.  Today features Even at our Worst We’re Still Better than Most (The Roller) by Against Me! off their incredible double-LP Searching For A Former Clarity.  The whole album is really an awesome soundtrack to movement and it’s hard to pick just one song but there are two moment that stand out for me - during the guitar roars on The Energizer and when the main section of The Roller kicks in just after the first verse. It took me a while to really “get” Against Me! since the country vibe really defies the standard punk formula but it’s well worth while.

Even at our Worst We’re Still Better than Most (The Roller) - Against Me!

You can have it all, I ain’t got the heart to fight, no.
Total exhaustion, complete breakdown. For the asshole I am,
apologies in full, please leave me alone.
Pull over the van, let me out.

And we’ll give the money back, to the record label.
Fire the agent, fire the manager.
We ain’t got what it takes, to make it.
We got indifference, got no respect for them.
Feels like you already said so much,
feels like you can never say enough.
Let someone else take our place,
let them be your entertainment.

You know they’re waiting,
(you know they’re waiting)
You know they’re waiting,
(you know they’re waiting)
You know they’re waiting,
(they’re just waiting)
To tear us apart

You know they’re waiting,
(you know they’re waiting)
You know they’re waiting,
(you know they’re waiting)
You know they’re waiting,
(they’re just waiting.)
To tear us apar

I Feist.

The past couple days have been busy with a mix of interesting and just busy.

I felt great heading out to Saturday’s long run and asked Chuck what I should do.  He suggested 13 miles so that’s what I did.  Finally. I haven’t done a straightforward easy pace 13 miler on a Saturday in over a month and that time it was the longest run I’d ever done in my life.  And it felt hard a month ago. But Saturday it really didn’t feel like enough. We did the Shilshole route and back up Stone Way and I had to cruise up Stone Way to feel like I was getting my work in for the day. So I asked Chuck if I could run again Sunday, which is kind of dumb. I think I’m starting to finally get that the answer to “Hey, I’m feeling pretty good and want to work more, is that OK with you?” is always “Yes.”  So Sunday I went around the lake and did a 20 minute tempo run. And that’s totally, totally different now than it was a month ago, which was the last time I had a tempo run in my schedule and when I had way different expectations of my abilities. I’d done the Firecracker at about 6:50 minute miles so I was doing tempo runs at 7:10 minute miles. Now I don’t know what my 5K time should be but I know it’s way faster than I did the Firecracker so I aimed for 6:30 minute miles in the tempo and wound up doing it at 6:24. And THAT felt good.

Tegan and Sara came with me on the run - The Con is awesome.

I spent the rest of the weekend priming, painting, and hanging doors on the new shed on the back of our house.  It’s coming along nicely and almost done!  I just need to decide - blueish like the house, or yellow? My samples should be dry by the afternoon. Sunday was cookout and frisbee golf in the H-district.

Yesterday I started work again!  Very exciting and fun. The environment seems great and I’ve had a totally good vibe about all the guys each time I’ve been in. However I came home and found Io not adjusting to being left home that well. He left a monumental turd next to the computer and, I later discovered, wet the floor at the bottom of the stairs.  Thanks, buddy! But more importantly, I’ll say again that the Bissell SpotBot should come standard with every puppy.

This morning I took Io on a jog for the first time in well over a month, since I upped the mileage.  A short run in the park in the morning isn’t too much to add on to my schedule and it’s just right for him so I figured I’d go for it even though I’ve got track work later tonight. It was awesome. I really miss running with him and he totally loves it, too.

The rest of the morning I’ve spent consolidating my google accounts.  This is just a bunch of stupidness but basically I had my “home” account as a google account, but then I started using google domain hosting for psoul.com and re-created the “home” account there. This resulted in google knowing about two home’s at psoul.com, which confused it. It seems like it *should* be easy to say “take all the mojo from the old account and consolidate it into the new one” but it’s not. So I had to modify the old account so it looked distinct from the new account. Then from the old account change all of its sharing settings (calendar, documents, etc.) so that nothing was shared with “home” and then re-share with “home”.  Now I think it’s all basically moved over and I’m close to being able to retire the old account.

During this time, the new Weakerthans album and some Feist have accompanied me. I’m totally on a Canadian kick.

Good times!