cryptique

Happy Birthday! Sorry we lost track of you after the show last night -- I hope you and Leo and everyone else found some place for post-show coffee and discussion. We were pretty beat and headed back home.

I was down front so I can't say for sure, but it looked like the main floor was pretty full. The balcony looked a bit sparse, though. Not a bad showing for the Fox, I think.

It was an amazing show ... my second time seeing this lineup, and they've grown so much as a live band in 2

We didn't trade her. We released her and the UK picked her up off waivers.

Well, yeah. But I don't, personally. I'm not sure what difference it really makes.

Who cares?

Yeah, OGGs are a bit better than MP3s too. The problem is finding a decent player that will play them. Back when I chose OGG as my format, a friend who (usually) knows about such things insisted that OGG would be the format of the future.

Henry Rollins once said something along these lines to an appreciative audience in Dublin: "They've been milking the same bass line and the same guitar trick for like five albums, and the world just kisses their ass ... and it's the biggest pile of shite I've ever heard." I like U2, but I love that Rollins bit (he talks a bit about people making pilgrimages to Windmill Studios too -- that's the funnier part).

No, you're right, but you're also hardly the first to make that observation. Exactly. ESPN and the networks don't often broadcast games nationally that don't involve either the Red Sox or the Yankees. I get pretty sick of that. Whenever I see "MLB Baseball" on the cable program guide on TV, I think "will it be the Red Sox, Yankees, or both?" Then I click the Info button and see who the teams are. A large majority of the time it's one or both.

Because this is a class assignment, I think I'd avoid songs that are about (or explicitly reference) Romeo and Juliet ... too obvious. For some reason "Leader of the Pack" crosses my mind (the Shangri-Las), but I think any teen love song where one or both of the principal characters wind up dead would work.

I do much of my listening through a great set of headphones, so bitrate matters to me. I'm not as snobbish as some, but I like MP3s to be in the 256 kbps range when possible (variable bitrate or constant bitrate, I don't really care). I rip my own files in .OGG format, variable bitrate, averaging somewhere in the 200s. 128 and 160 kbps MP3s just don't sound good to me -- I can hear the compression on most tracks. Files at 192 kbps can be fine, though I tend to avoid them unless there's no other option.

Nice one, Nostradamus.

That was one of the first things that made me think that maybe Cubs fans aren't as bright as other fans.

...who's Canadian. So what are you saying?

Yeah, that's when I saw Browne ... Chicago Theatre.

Probably. I don't really remember -- it was definitely mid-'90s. I think he had a Mexican band with him or something, though I may be confusing that with a Jackson Browne show I once saw.

I've been a fan since Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

One thing that's very wrong about this country is that we still can't seem to support a top-flight professional soccer league, nor field a men's World Cup team with more than a long-shot chance at winning. That, and Wal-Mart.

Yeah, it was very cool. The seating was odd for a Riviera show -- they had little round cocktail tables and we were all seated around them like it was some kind of nightclub. The Residents themselves were clad in all black (or maybe grey), backlit so you couldn't see their faces, and wearing tiny little lights on the sides of their heads, so they looked kind of like Jawas from Star Wars without the robes. I don't remember a whole lot from the show, except that I was awestruck and riveted throughout. This was the Cube E tour in November 1990.

Why, exactly? Paul's managed to build a pretty large cult following, but I don't understand it. I think if a lot of the people on his bandwagon took a good hard look at his actual positions on the issues, they'd have second thoughts. Seems to me that his only real appeal is that he's some kind of maverick or outsider. Yeah, that's exactly how John McCain operated a few years back, and look how he turned out.

Big Star in Chicago (Metro), around '99 or so. At the time I was as big a Posies fan as I was a Big Star fan, so that night was pure bliss for me. Billy Bragg and Robyn Hitchcock (with Deni Bonet) at the Majestic Theatre in Detroit, circa 1996. It was a benefit for striking Detroit newspaper workers. The atmosphere in the crowd was electric. Bragg and Hitchcock both played fantastic shows. Afterwards I got backstage and was able to stand around and talk to both of them for a while. Billy Bragg at The Ark in Ann Arbor last year. Among other things, he played his version of "The Lonesome Dea

Yeah, they've used that song for quite a while now. Always makes me smile. I can't remember, though, what show is it on? Weekend Edition?

If you can find parking on the street back behind the Fox, it's free. Just make sure it's legal. I often get lucky down there when we come in for shows or Tigers games. Sometimes the guys running the lots back there try to tell you that it's not safe to park on the street, but I've never had any problem (they're just trying to get you to pay them to park in their lots). Another thing I've done is to park in the Greektown Casino structure. That's expensive UNLESS you get your ticket validated in the casino. Last time I was there, I had to go upstairs in the casino to find a desk where they va

The best team in the nation doesn't lose to Colorado under any circumstances. Or to Kentucky, either -- though that loss is more understandable, and if no other teams were undefeated, I could see voting for LSU as # 1. But that's not the case. Oklahoma -- certainly not. You want to be # 1, you've gotta get it done.

You're kidding, right? Of course it's possible that they'll run the table, but any one of their remaining opponents (Michigan State, Penn State, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan) could rise up and beat them. If their remaining games were against the likes of Minnesota, Northwestern, and Iowa, I might agree with you, but they've got five tough conference games remaining, and the way upsets have happened this year, I frankly don't expect them to walk onto the field undefeated when they face Michigan. By the way, who are the lunatics who submitted first-place votes for Oklahoma and LSU in th