BrockLi Soup

Saturday night, I wandered over to the Field House for the Dane Cook show. I wasn’t working it, but tickets were sold out so I got me a Tech Access pass. Jym and Derek got three seats in the front row and offered me the third one, so I even got to sit right up front.

The opener was Jay Davis, a friend of Dane’s. He had a lot of funny material, but his delivery kind of sucked. It just wasn’t funny the way he said it, I guess.

Dane was a lot funnier than I expected him to be. I had only seen his Comedy Central Presents show and heard one of his CDs, and they were pretty funny but it seemed like he was trying too hard to be over the top. This show was toned down significantly and I think a lot of the jokes were better-developed. He didn’t stand there going on and on about the dish he was washing when he heard the accident. He still did a lot of jumping around and yelling, but I think it contributed to his act a lot better this time around.

Of course, I may be biased towards this show because I was close enough to spit on him (thanks again, Jym).

Saturday afternoon, Brie, Kidder, and I took out all the trash that had been accumulating in our pantry for the past couple months. Housing had asked everyone to park elsewhere that day so that the lot could be completely plowed. As we tried to work our way to the dumpster, one big earth mover, a couple little John Deere tractors, and at least 4 pickup trucks were flying around the lot, plowing snow into the grass. It took be a couple minutes to work my way across the lot without being hit. Trucks were flying all over the place, just narrowly missing me, each other, and the cars that hadn’t been moved.

Kidder was standing there by our building, just watching. “Ya know,” I said, “this reminds me of our hockey games. Everybody’s doing the same thing and trying not to run into each other.”

Kidder replies, “It’s all fun and games until someone loses a Subaru.”

I haven’t done that much damage to my hearing since I decided that shooting a .44 Magnum without ear muffs would be fine.

The Dropkick Murphys show was incredible. A few weeks ago, Sharon told me they were doing a 21-gun salute before the show (seven people, three Irish Car Bombs each). We wound up pre-gaming at my place. I was figuring on eight or nine people, but there were around 25 people here, including my younger brother Eric. We drank for about an hour before heading for the gym.

Three Days Grace wasn’t that bad, but I wasn’t paying much attention to them. We spent most of their set flipping them off, but it didn’t work.

After the changeover between sets, the Rochester Scottish Pipes & Drums came on and played for five or ten minutes, which was pretty cool. I didn’t even know Rochester HAD a pipes & drums crew, but they were fun to watch.

When Dropkick came on, I was about three rows back from the barricade with Eric. The entire crowd started swaying around us - if people weren’t packed in so tight, everyone would have gone down. That kind of sucked, so I turned around and hopped into the pit behind us that was doing all the pushing. This was the first show I’ve actually been in the pit for, and I tell ya, you get thirsty in there. And sweaty. It was a sweaty, stinky show, but it was incredible.

At some point I got punched in the neck, and something happened to my right thigh and left wrist, but I’m not sure what - I just know they hurt. I must have caught an elbow in the chest at some point too, because my solar plexus hurts when I touch it. I boosted Heise at one point, and he managed to work his way to the front and high-five the singer. For the last song of the encore (Skinhead on the MBTA), he jumped off stage and sang from the bleachers. I didn’t see him do it, so when everyone rushed to the right at the beginning of the song, I just figured it was some kind of punk concert thing I didn’t understand, like circle pits.

After limping my way back here with Eric, BP, and Lisa, we went to Mark’s for plates. This morning I woke up with no voice, a sore body, and a huge mess of a kitchen. I cleaned up 24 bottles and 14 cans of Guinness, around three 6-packs of other beer, about 8 bottles of Fonny’s Ukrainian beer, and two bottles each of Jameson and Bailey’s (but I don’t know how much was in those when we started). I just found another four pack of Guinness cans in the fridge that wouldn’t have survived the storm if they hadn’t been tucked behind some juice and stuff, so I’ve got lunch for the week.

It was an incredible night. I just found out that there are still tickets for the Wednesday night show before St. Patty’s Day in Boston. I’d like to go, but we’ll have to see what happens.

I’ve been meaning to start writing here for a couple weeks now, but I keep putting it off, saying that I’d like to design the site and get it running the way I want to first. Anyone who knows me can attest to the fact that it will be at least another month before I have a chance to do that, so I don’t know how I convinced myself that I was going to do it any time soon.

Chances are good that you know me, at least through LiveJournal, if you’re reading this within weeks of my writing it. I intend to continue writing in my LJ about more personal things - the boring day-to-day crap. It will continue to be a journal.

This will be a blog. Here, I will be writing about projects I’m working on, academics, and the occasional interesting story or social commentary. I’d like this to be more than a boring, overly-technical blog that will only be interesting to the handful of people that are interested in the same things I am. I’d like to think that this will become something everyone can enjoy reading, but we’ll start small.

As I’ve said there many times, I write in my LiveJournal for myself - it’s a journal, and that’s what I use it for. Here, I’d like to write for other people just as much as myself.

I’ll be working out the kinks in the next week or two, changing MT’s templates considerably, and hopefully giving you something interesting to read. I hope you’ll stop by once in a while and see what I’m up to.