Ryan's Currently Unnamed Blog

Ok, So I Made two trips up to Milwaukee for Summerfest the self proclaimed “World’s Largest Music Festival”. It’s a short 45 minute drive without traffic, but ended up taking us a little over an hour.. yay for traffic!.

First band I was there to see was Sid Maudlin. Missed a little bit of her show due to leaving later then we wanted to and traffic, but still was good to see her. A little disappointed in the sound and the size of the crowd, but playing earlier in the day at Summerfest, you can’t really expect much. Its actually a huge thing for her to get that kind of exposure and I’m hoping that things pan out for her. I picked a CD she was selling because it had a handful of new tracks on it that weren’t on her website or on the other CD I bought. That, and I always try to support the artists I like, especially the smaller ones that don’t get the respect that they deserve.

After Sid wrapped up, we had a few hours to waste before the Main Event for the night, Cowboy Mouth. We ran into Luis (thanks for the spoons!) and chatted for a while, and other then that… we just wandered around… listened to some mediocre cover bands, drank lots of Miller Products, looked at the crap they were trying to get people to buy, and even played some Quake 4 on some Dell Machines and entered their contest where they are giving away a laptop. I’d certainly take the laptop if i were to win… but I’m really looking forward to getting an email (SPAM) from them to ‘dellsucksass@rkware.com’ or whatever address I made up when filling out the form.

The did have one promotion that got me thinking… It was a golf thing… Pay $6, get 3 balls. There was a little island 135 feet off the shore, and they put a hole out there. First Hole-in-One got a brand new car, next 3 got a free round trip on Midwest Airline in the continental US. I’m sure that the airline tix were donated, and maybe even the car, but even so… judging from the drunken idiots who think they could golf… I imagine that little booth was quite profitable. Not sure what their expenses are, but there was a long line of people wanting to try. They even had some poor idiot sitting in a tent out on the island watching the hole for a winner… Yeah.. I’d be loving THAT job!

That day happened to be the first game of the second Cubs/Sox series. My office encouraged people to wear jerseys to show support for their team, and i didn’t change clothes before going up to Summerfest. Was REALLY funny to me that i had about 20 people make some kind of White Sox comment. About 90% of them were white sox fans also (where the hell were THEY 2 years ago?) and wanted to have conversations of some sort about the team, and if they beat the cubs that day (they did, of course!). I’ve worn similar stuff other places before we won last year, and I barely got ANY comments, and when I did, they were from Cub Fans that wanted to mock me for some reason. The best comment by far was from some guy from Milwaukee… a Brewer fan… He wanted to make fun of me for being a White Sox fan, because his girlfriend was a Chicago Fan (White Sox, i think, but I don’t remember now) and he somehow tried to put us down. I just laughed at him and told him that I LIKED the Brewers because we got Scott Posednik and Luis Vizcaino for Carlos Lee… a trade that helped BOTH teams a lot… and the fact that the Brewers took 3 our of 4 from the Cubs also helped bolster my opinion of them. he was a bit too drunk I think to follow the logic… so I left him with a well, maybe my Sox will play your Brewers this year in the World Series… to which he laughed… mainly because there’s no way in hell the Brewers are making the World Series.

Anyway, 10PM rolled around, and we waited for some ‘World Beat’ band that had a surprisingly large following to wrap up, so that the crowd could clear out a bit and we could get a spot somewhere near the stage. Well, I guess most of the people there were Cowboy Mouth fans… as they didn’t budge at all. I guess that explains why they were so into their music. lol

Fred and the gang played for almost 2 hours, and they could have gone on much longer. I was kinda concerned about the bleachers that were bolted to the ground, but it actually worked out quite well, even though we were standing on the ground between the second and third row with everyone standing on the bleachers, we actually had a really good view of the stage.

That is, until some fuckwad decided to stand right in front of us… Right during “Everybody Loves Jill” too… grah… pissed me off for a bit, but we managed to find a spot all the way at the other end, standing on the bleachers… was a challenge to not fall off with 20 people bouncing on a 40 year old piece of metal. Didn’t get any pics with my camera since I instituted my “No Camera” policy during CM shows since my last one was nearly destroyed.

Made a return trip for Nine Inch Nails on Sunday… I’m going through pics for that and will be posting about that soon!

Ok, I finally found some time to write up my Fourth of July activities. Well, some of them... Still going to post about Summerfest... need to go through some pics and figure that out....

I spent my Fourth of July with my parents, leaving to catch my local fireworks display. We ended up walking there, and even though its a two minute drive, srcwe discovered that there are no sidewalks for most of the way and we were walking through constuction zones! Oh, and it was about a 2 mile walk, and it took us about 45 minutes... haha.. oh well, we DID get to see the neighboring towns fireworks, and ours started about 5 minutes before we got there. Was kinda surreal walking towards the fireworks, with a few other people also wandering towards them. Then afterward, there was a HUGE exodus which made me wonder what percentage of people came out for them, and how many homes were empty at that moment. Anyway.. holy tangent! My local fireworks display was really kinda cool, since there's a good sized lake with an island in the middle where they launch the fireworks from. So, there's a lot of places that make for great viewing angles. There's a large festival area that was far too crowded. I can't stand being stuck in a crowd, so we walked to the other side of the lake, plenty of room for us to lay down, watch the fireworks and see them reflected in the water. Definately cool and gave me a chance to use the 'fireworks' setting on my camera which worked far better then I expected.

Anyway, at my parents, we dug into our supply of old fireworks. Its been a few years since we've done anything destructive, and we could have planned it out better, but we had some fun and, of course, we caught it all on video! All the standard disclaimers apply... we know what we are doing and you shouldn't try to do this unless you too know what you are doing and I'm not responsible if by reading or watching this you get some crazy ideas yourself and get in trouble or hurt someone.

With that out of the way, picked out a Silver Salute and a Cherry Bomb... and decided to pit these two forces against some household items. A roll of toilet paper, and a feeble Coke Can. I wish we had put the roll of TP on something hard and had a more sturdy 'lid' then the flimsy aluminum pan. Not to save the grass from getting a hole burned into it, but rather to allow less of the explosive force to escape from the side of the roll. Anyway, thanks to my new membership with YouTube, you can watch the video here if you have flash, or you can download it too (5.29MB, 1:25, Windows Media).

Wheeee! Make sure you watch to the end to see the slow motion part!

Next up was the Cherry Bomb. We got a little smarter and used a brick to put the can on. After enlarging the mouth of the can to get the cherry bomb into it, we were able to set it off. Again with slow motion and zoom and the end, and you can download this one too (4.32MB 1:09, Windows Media).

Not much left at all of the can! haha... well... We had our fun! On a completely different note.. i need to see if Sony Vegas 6 can produce video in some more open format.