Due to Stephen’s bitching, I decided to rehash this one. I was doing the blog a disservice by simply posting the results, so I’ll give it a once over, since I watched the all the fights twice.

The night started with Jardine vs Gouveia, the latter being an unknown to me. All I can say is that Gouveia was quick. Anything that Jardine would throw, Gouveia would counter and then dance away from repercussions. He could leg kick and retreat at lightning speed, leaving Jardine fumbling forward as he attempted to land counter-blows. If you enjoyed the Bonnar vs Jardine match and were ok with the decision, then you would have liked this one as well. It was almost a reinactment, with Jardine playing the role of Bonnar, and Gouveia playing Jardine. It was fast, it was bloody, and it was damn close for a unanimous decision in Jardine’s favor.

The next fight was Herman vs. Groves. This was more of a grappling contest, with multiple submissions thrown up and blocked, one after another. Triangles, arm bars, and chokes were the weapons of choice in this bout, with none of them being enough to finish their target. Maybe not as exciting as some of the other matches, it certainly painted Groves out to be the better versed fighter, as Ed’s strength was on the ground, and Kendall managed to all but utterly control him there, and made Ed pay for trying to go toe to toe in stand up with some crushing knees and kicks. The match ended with Ed fighting a rear naked choke for the last 30 seconds of the match, perhaps being saved by the bell. While not a Griffin/Bonnar war (I’m partial to non-stop striking), a war nonetheless. Two contracts awarded, and I think justly so.

Bisping vs Haynes was decided in my head long before the match had begun, as Bisping had displayed hints of horrible power but never seemed to have a chance to display them until fighting Pointon in the Semis. Haynes may have had heart, but Bisping beat it out of him. Haynes’ wild flurries were overcome by Bisping’s precision strikes, and halfway into the 2nd, Haynes was burger. It was a non-stop slugfest with a submission attempt whenever things would fall to the ground, and even then Bisping dominated. Exciting match, and I see big things in Bisping’s future.

The main event for the night was classic Florian, in my opinion. A guy claimed he was going to beat the hell out of him, and Florian got away with nary a scratch. In this particular match, I don’t believe Stout landed a single punch. In fact I’m not sure that he had a chance to throw any. Florian took it to the ground almost immediately and worked his way to a solid rear naked choke in the first.

And since that one went so quickly we were privvy to one of the night’s earlier matches, Matt Hammill vs Jesse whatever the hell his last name is. I don’t much care because Jesse, like Pointon, was given 3 chances and failed miserably each time. Matt was the superior wrestler and striker, although a bit sloppy with his stand up. Considering that he can’t have help from his corner due to that whole deafness thing, I think he performed fantastically. The strikes were fast, dirty and brutal, and there was never a slow moment on the ground. It was groundwork that can only be seen when two wrestlers are doing what they know best. Matt just knew it a little better.

The results for the rest of the unaired fights can be found on mmafighting.com

Since the 10th I’ve seen Roger Clyne again, gave a party send off to Steven for his trip to South Africa land, spent a few hours staring at the ceiling, partied with the good people down in Lawrence town, had a movie night with fair lady Stacy and that ugly Heath fella, and hung out at the brick for open mic night with aspiring comedian Gabriel. The near future holds a plane trip back to my humble beginnings as a cracker hood rat, a union between 2 people I don’t know nearly as well as I should for the amount of fuss that’s being kicked about, and most importantly getting sloshed around the family.

Although I did enjoy the Roger Clyne concert and the strange coincidences that happened during and in the not so distant after, the typical light-hearted good feeling vibe that usually hangs around for a week or so after seeing one of his performances seemed to ram straight into the ground. As I noted to Pasty, I’ve been waking up and having to do my hulk smash routine just to get the days started. My body feels much heavier than it normally does and I’m having little luck keeping on task with an overall air of uncoordinatedness.

Those who like music should check out Ad Astra Per Aspera, as I’ve mentioned them several times before. You should then go to The Pitch Music Awards, fill out the required information, and then skip all the way to the last page and give them your vote for Best Punk Band. They aren’t so much punk but then again neither are any of the other bands in that category. The term ‘punk’ really has become the lint trap for music that exists on the fringes of the established genres, or it works counterintuitively as a catch-all for shitty pop rock emo and nu-mo bands. That being said I’d rather see the award go to the people who fall into the former of those two possibilities, people who I know and like, than to see it bestowed upon some other douchebags who fall into the latter of my descriptions. I’d never steer you wrong, my beautiful little puppets.

I had a chance to chat it up with my awesome friend Jenny for a while earlier this evening. It was on AIM rather than on the phone, but I still managed to put her to sleep as always. Adorable I say.

Art or die

So yesterday after work I was blessed with an opportunity to try out my BYTECC USB to IDE adapter kit. I’ll let you know how that went after I explain the underlying problem.

I had just rearranged some MP3s on my system, trying to consolidate and cull duplicate copies of songs, and had generated an all-new winamp library. I had listened to a few songs without issue, and then decided that I wanted to hear Tobacco Island by Flogging Molly. I had listened to the song a few days prior to this listening but something was very different this time around as there were several seconds of silence, and then it was playing the middle of the song. After a few seconds of normal play it would stop and pick up in an entirely different place in the song. It still seemed to be the proper length but was jumbled all to hell and back. I wondered if this affliction had stricken any of my other mp3s retarded, and found that a few other Flogging Molly songs had the same problem.

Luckily I kept a hard drive backup, the result of my recent HDD crash scare. I haven’t made a backup since I had initially cloned my drive but I still had most of my music so replacement wasn’t a problem. This is where the BYTECC kit comes into play, as I simply had to hook in the IDE/USB adapter, and then plug in a power supply. I thought that the device flat out didn’t work at first as I expected a plug and play usb installation to occur, which didn’t happen. I glance through the manual at the spotty Engrish and a feel of the paper’s texture told me that it wasn’t even worth wiping my ass with. I did however take a look at the jumpers on my drive and noted that it was still set to master. I turned the device off and unplugged the USB cable, switched the jumper to cable select, plugged it all back in and it was immediately recognized as a removable drive. A simple drag and drop and I was back to Flogging Molly. I had compared the ‘broken’ files to the new ones, and each track seemed to have an extra second tacked onto the play time. The jury is still out on what the core issue could have been, but for the time being I’m content with having my music intact.

One of the main reasons I bring this up at all was because in checking my page stats I noticed that someone had found my site looking for an answer to a BYTECC installation problem. Perhaps this will serve as a solution to anyone else who happens across my site looking for answers to questions like “why’s my BYTECC not BYTECCing?”

The other purpose of this post would be to propose our new conglomertation website to the folks we currently have staked out for it. I’m going to write a more detailed description with url proposals in a password protected post as my safe sense of paranoia warns me to not post such things publicly as good urls can be whisked away in an instant. Kjeldor.com, I’m looking at you. I’ll post an update when I have my ducks in a row.

So I went to see Gil Mantera’s Party Dream last night.

The Party Dream may have damaged me on a profound level, and in a magnitude not dissimilar to a gargantuan green lizard demolishing tokyo. In the words of Ultimate Donny, it was like “the devil taking a shit on my balls”. Between the pantslessness, the rants about snails, spiderman and mustard, and Gil’s burning pubic hair, I had a hard time dealing with the onslaught of absurdity. I enjoyed the show enough to purchase their newest album, Bloodsongs, and am listening to it as I type this. Good stuff, and a very welcome addition to my music collection which hasn’t had a new cd added to it since I purchased the last new M. Doughty album over a year ago.

There were seemingly endless things to be fascinated with at the show since they seemed to have an audience that dressed for the occasion. I’m still having a rather difficult time defining exactly what they were going for. I described them to my co-worker, Mike, who is probably more knowledgeable about the music scene as he’s the singer/guitarist for Ad Astra Per Aspera, and he said they sounded like the new ‘new wave’ crowd. They also seemed to be rather akin to a hipster spin off, where everyone wears athletic gear from the 80s. Most of them had on short shorts, which is much nicer to look at on the ladies than the gentlemen. Some of them sported head and wrist bands. There was even a guy in a singlet who looked like some crazy circus strongman. It was beyond my scope to really understand.

But it was all WAY more enjoyable than the opening bands, nomathmatics and weights & measures. I don’t even know if we were there for both bands. It was really hard to tell since there was nothing but horrible bass that droned on and on for the first two hours. It seemed likely that they were affiliated with some terrorist organization in search of the natural frequency of American skulls with malicious intent to rattle our brains out of our heads, rather than being at the RecordBar with the purpose of musical entertainment in mind. Everyone looked bored during the cacophonous shit storm that seemed relentless in its pursuit of drowning out any attempt at conversation, conversation that needed to happen to alleviate the boredom caused by the disinterest in the performance. Nomathmatics and weights & measures: you’ve been blacklisted.

The only redeeming quality of the openers is that they set the bar so low for Gil Mantera’s Party Dream. The Party Dream would have been enjoyable if coupled with other good bands, but they seemed absolutely awesome after I had been subjected to crap for such a long period of time. What do I like more? Getting punched in the nuts, or not getting punched in the nuts? Of course I like not getting punched in the nuts better, and I like it even more after I’ve just been punched in the nuts for 2 straight hours. Hooray for crude analogies.

I started work on a new graphic for the site. I’ve sort of alluded to the contents of it somewhere in this post. Might I suggest that your comment blitz can be guesses as to what it might be. And no guesses from Sven, as he’s probably already seen it.

Long live the Party Dream.

It has been a harrowing 13 days since my last post. If this blog were a child I could be tried for neglect. It makes me a little teary eyed for the old blogging days.

I can’t remember exactly everything that has happened since my last post in the few hazy days before the Pope arrived, but I’m certain that it involved trying to get in touch with a professor from UMKC who doesn’t check her email. Kati, why have you forsaken me?

I had started a rather lengthy rambling of all of the things Pope and I had done over the course of the week and found that it would take far longer than was necessary to describe the fun times that we had. We played lots of Resident Evil 4, went to see Red Line Chemistry (tracks available for download on myspace.com/redlinechemistry) got a little culture visiting Neal Rock’s Grand Arts Gallery display, took a visit to Union Station and the Plaza, had a memorial day cookout, watched a lot of movies – we even dedicated the day after memorial day to Karnov, everyone’s favorite bald, fat, moustachioed, fire-breathing Russian. In honor of him we ate piles of ham sandwiches and drank a lot of whiskey. I haven’t decided if the day after memorial day or if May 30th should always be the date of observation yet, but with a holiday like that it might be flexible enough to have whenever one should find themselves struck with an appetite for the exotic.

A few things of note that should be thrown out to my readership:

Wed June 7th: Eagles of Death Metal didn’t work out, so let’s go to the Record Bar to see Gil Mantera’s Party Dream straight out of my hometown of Youngstown, OH. Even if you don’t enjoy the music, we’re guaranteed to at least be overwhelmed by the fact that these guys are willing to play in their underwear. It will probably be cheap too.

I’m going to a wedding in Ohio on the 24th. Anyone who wants to be my date, state your case.

I’ve been singing an altered version of a fall out boy song lately. My version includes fun visuals of a luleelurah, a mystical square wheeled vehicle sporting one or more cocks, and other amenities. The flash movie can be found here. Emo Sucks.

Now I have to go get my new identity.