Wave What's Left of the Flag For Me

Lately, I haven't been able to stop listening to Flogging Molly. I honestly think that they're one of the greatest bands I've ever heard, and it just seems like a perfect musical fit for me - punk rock married with traditional Irish music - two styles I can't get enough of. The occasional Offspring/Millencolin/Coheed and Cambria diversions aside, FM is an incredible band. I kick myself for missing the 2004 Warped Tour with them on it. I won't miss their next trip to my neck of the woods. Oh, and I'm insanely jealous of all Europeans for that Millencolin/Flogging Molly tour going on now. Lucky bastards.

I had to perform minor surgery on my car's CD player the other day. I put a disc in, listened to a couple songs before deciding that I'd rather change albums. I hit eject...and nothing ejected. The unit sounded like it ejected the disc, but no disc came out. After mashing buttons for a few minutes, I figured it was time for some more direct intervention. I took out a Swiss army knife I keep in my car and pulled out the pliers tool. I couldn't see in the drive (it's slot loading, like pretty much all car stereos) but I could prod around a little bit, and when I found the device's release mechanism I started playing around. Eventually I was able to find the right amount of pressure to put down to get the eject mechanism to continually run. I then managed to bump the disc to a point where it stuck out of the slot about 1/8" at which point I used the pliers to extract the disc. Tried the unit with other CDRs, worked fine. For a minute there I was terrified that I would be stuck listening to FM radio for the unforseable future. That's a terrible thing. FM radio in Tallahassee isn't nearly as good as it is in Atlanta or Detroit. Oh, all of this happened while I was driving around town. I fixed a CD player with one hand on the wheel and one hand in the drive. Good stuff, eh?

Known mainly for his work on KMFDM album covers, artist Adrian Hughes has a pretty slick website called Brute! Propaganda. Neat stuff, go check it out.

Something Awful has created an internet TV station called GBStv (short for Goon Brodcasting System) that's made completely up of user-submitted material. Old cartoons, public domain clips, commercials, etc. This is pretty good stuff, to tell the truth. I personally have put up some old Weezer videos as well as old Superman cartoons from the 1940s. I have a terrible addiction to buying $1 old cartoon DVDs. I'm probably in the thirties of those by now.

I finally saw the movie Swingers. I thought it was decent, but don't really get what all the hubbub was about this movie. The other recent flick I've seen was Zathura, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Not as good as Jumanji (only because no Robin Williams or David Allen Grier) but a very enjoyable, fun movie.

As far as video games I haven't played a whole lot of new ones, but Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks is a heck of a lot of fun, especially multiplayer. Zack and I trudged through a fair portion of the game in "Ko-Op" mode and had fun with it.