Zombie Dinosaurs

I see that they’re putting sharks in management roles at the Parks & Rec office nowadays.

I’m very excited to announce my second house concert, a follow-up to last year’s show with Kristin Hersh.

Downpilot’s Paul Hiraga will be performing at my home on Friday, February 5. Downpilot is one of Seattle’s true musical gems, and is my reward for having moved to the Seattle area (I discovered Downpilot by accident at The Tractor a few weeks after I arrived in town several years ago). I think this show will be a rare and special event – I highly encourage you to check it out.

If you don’t know Downpilot, you probably should. Paul’s music is difficult to categorize; frequently soulful, subtle and quiet, ethereal, with hints of the psychedelic. It’s a bit reminiscent, I suppose, of early R.E.M, Brendan Perry, Wilco, and a teeny bit of Velvet Underground. You can hear some Downpilot tracks:

True

My Sunshine [My band has been covering this song for years now!]

Overground

You can also check out the Downpilot Web site.

This is a small house concert, intimately set before our living room fireplace, and I will be limiting attendance to 30 people. As you might expect, 100 percent of the ticket sales go to Paul. Here are the details:

Paul Hiraga at Cheddarwood

When :

Friday, February 5, 2010
Performance 8:00 pm (doors 7:30)
Cost: $25

Where:

The Johnson home (aka Cheddarwood)

Purchasing tickets:

Send me an e-mail and let me know the number of tickets you’d like to purchase. PayPal is the preferred method of payment, but I’ll also take check and cash. No credit cards – I’m not Ticketmaster, folks.

If you have any additional questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me at dave@davejoh.com.

I look forward to seeing you on February 5!

A few weeks ago, I said, “Hey Marin, you know what would be funny? A version of Lonely Island’s I’m on a Boat, only ours would be about a Christmas tree. We could call it, “I’ve Got a Tree.”

As usual, I considered my contribution to the project complete; I had the brilliant, million-dollar idea, and now it was up to Marin to write and sing the song. Well, that’s exactly what she did – she gave me a piece of paper for Christmas with the lyrics to I’ve Got a Tree on it – and she sang it for me on Christmas morning. Isn’t she awesome?

So this week, we created the video for I’ve Got a Tree, which you can see here. Now that it’s on YouTube, I suppose there’s nothing left to do but wait for the money to roll in. Andy Samberg: Call me. 

Last night, I decided to end my relationship with Radio Shack. Over a $10 item.

Radio Shack has always been on the periphery of my tech life. When I need an audio cable, oddball adapter, or remote control toy at Christmas, I’d head to Radio Shack. Not anymore, though. And I guess I’m posting this to ask: Did I overreact? It was such a small thing. But so telling and, in an important way, a meaningful peek into the soul of the store.

When I stepped into the store, a salesperson asked me what I wanted. I explained I was looking for a splitter to connect 2 headphones to an iPod. He pulled one off the rack: $10. We rang it up, but on the way out of the door, I noticed that the exact same items was hanging from a hook marked $5. The label on the bar was accurate: it said something like “dual headphone jack for iPod.” Which was exactly what the item actually was. I showed it to the salesperson, who was perplexed, but said, “sure, I can match that price,” and started the process to give me the difference. But the manager apparently intervened, said it was a different item, and refused to refund me the difference. 

When pressed, he found a slightly less expensive product than the one I paid for (about $8) and offered that to me instead.

I politely told the salesperson I would not shop at Radio Shack again. I took a complete refund and bought a similar item at Target, which is right around the corner.

I think that there are a couple of salient points here. After all, you can learn a lot about the character of a store in the way it handles little customer issues like this.

The manager claims the hook was for a different product that he didn’t have in stock, and apparently a customer must have placed this more expensive item on the hook for this less expensive product.

But through my eyes – the eyes of a customer – I saw the description on the hook EXACTLY matched the product, and the price was reasonable – it wasn’t like the price marked was clearly an order of magnitude off. The right thing to do would have been to honor the price marked on the hook. 

To add insult to injury, the manager managed to find a less expensive product to try to placate me. Why did the salesperson apparently give me the most expensive item in the store when I walked in and asked for what’s obviously a commodity item – an audio adapter – and then only found a cheaper item when he refused to do the right thing to match the marked price of the item I was trying to buy?

Bottom line: I felt like the store did not respect me and clearly tried to take advantage of me. 

And really, was the manager willing to permanently lose me as a customer over $5? Apparently he was.

And to reiterate, yes, it was just a $10 item. The dollar amount in question was only a couple of bucks. So, am I overreacting? I feel silly standing on principle over a couple of bucks. But a big part of me feels it’s the right thing to do – it was a slime move by the store on two different levels. 

Despite the fact that I’m sick and tired of the fact that every little startup from here to New Yrk thinks it’s cool to remove a vowel from their name, I’m giving Closr a try. It lets you upload full resolution photos and then zoom in to see the photo in minute detail. Interesting.

It’s easy to poke fun at the naivety of our pre-Information Age perspective. That’s why folks love to trot out historical quotes like “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers” [IBM Chairman Thomas Watson, 1943] and “640K is more memory than anyone will ever need” [Microsoft founder Bill Gates in the early 70s]. (It never seems to dampen anyone’s spirits that the second quote, at least, never actually happened.)

It was in this spirit, though, that I recently watched a fascinating news story from 1981 about how someday, we might all get our news via computer instead of by newspaper. The video is notable for being reasonably accurate, level-headed, and smart. It wasn’t alarmist, nor did it make ludicrous predictions – a rarity for tech stories in any decade. Here’s the video:

One thing jumped out at me the first time I watched it, though. Note that the guy the interview is not identified as Richard Halloran, technology expert or Richard Halloran, computer consultant or Richard Halloran, businessman. Nosiree, he’s credited with a status far more amazing, awesome, and rare. Richard Halloran actually owns a computer! And that’s so freaking amazing that it is the label they use to identify him on television:

It makes me imagine that if he had cured cancer in 1980, they still would have gone with the “owns home computer” caption for this particular interview.

Like much of the US, we got hit with a massive winter storm here in the Pacific Northwest. It put our plans to visit Portland “on ice,” as it were, and made the whole Christmas vacation somewhat unusual. Keep in mind that in the five years we’ve lived here, we’ve gotten a total accumulation of perhaps 3 inches of snow, in total. Here are some stats that describe our storm experience this year:

• 9 continuous days of snow
• 2 feet of total accumulation
• 5 hours without power on Christmas day
• 9 days without Internet access
• 1 broken snow shovel

I posted a few photos of the snowpocalypse on my Flickr page.

Evan and Marin made good use of the snow. Just a few days into the storm, when we only had a few inches of snow, they piled the snow from shoveling the driveway into a makeshift sledding hill. The pile got about 4 feet high, which they carefully contoured and buttressed. They even created snow steps to climb up to the top.

…that Muff probably regrets peeing all over our floor.

As an aside, I’m pretty sure this is the most snow I’ve ever seen here in the five years we’ve lived near Seattle. Reminds me of Colorado, almost.

My musical bucket list just got one shorter:

3. Have Kristin Hersh, chief architect of Throwing Muses, the greatest alternative rock band on earth, perform Pearl in my living room.

2. Have lunch with Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters to chat about his views on the 60s and socialism.

1. Play a round of miniature golf with any member of The Monkees, though preferably Peter Tork.

That’s right, we can finally check off #3:

Our home (which Kris affectionately calls Cheddarwood for a rather convoluted set of reasons) was host to one of Kristin’s Shady Circle house concerts this week. On Saturday, Nov 15,  Kristin played in front of our living room’s fireplace to about 35 folks. The audience included my writing buddy Rick (who flew in from Michigan for the occasion), friend of the family Christine, and a varied slew of people from work.

Also among the audience was another special treat – Bernard Georges, bassist extraordinaire from Throwing Muses, who hung around in a non-musical way that reminded me of Tom Petty’s nonchalant appearance on the old It’s Garry Shandling’s Show. (That’s Bodhi, decked out in full cat-hunting gear, with Kristin and Bernard.) For more photos of the evening, check out my Flickr page.

Back in the 90s, I interviewed Kristin and Billy for my book How to Do Everything with MP3s and Digital Music. And then a few years later, they graciously donated a few songs from Murder, Misery, and then Goodnight to my interactive children’s book, The Wild Cookie. And perhaps most surprising, Billy can pick me out of a crowd from 100 yards. Surely, he has a photographic memory for faces. It’s uncanny.

Anyway, I doubt the evening could have gone any better. It was a treat from start to finish. Billy had told me the week before the show that Kristin wanted the show to be more like a book club than a rock show; a musical séance in which everyone hung around and chatted and music would spontaneously occur. And that’s kind of what we got. Billy, Kristin, and Bernard were predictably gracious and friendly and approachable, and everyone mixed together in a pretty natural way. When Kristin started playing, it was intimate and warm and, well, it almost felt like we were all family gathered around the hearth for some music. How cool is that?

The set list was an almost perfect mix of Appalachian folk songs and Kristin’s own material. And I got the whole thing on video. Woo hoo! Here’s the set list:

1. Jesus Called Me
2. Down in the Willow Garden
3. City of the Dead
4. One Train
5. Banks of the Ohio
6. Teeth
7. Dusty Road
8. Little House
9. Moan
10. If
11. Stone in this Pond
12. Sno Cat
13. Lemon Tree
14. Willie Moore
15. The Cuckoo
16. Tuesday Night
17. Pearl

And Pearl was one of the real, err, gems, of the evening – at least for me. One of my favorite songs of all time, I love both the original Muses version and Kristin’s acoustic interpretation. Billy thought he had discussed a request with me to close the show, but in reality we had never talked about it. So when the last song rolled around, Billy and Kristin assumed I wanted Your Ghost. And while that would have been fine, I asked for Pearl instead. The next three minutes? Watching Kristin trying to remember the chords, with various suggestions flying in from Billy and Bernard. Now that was fun. Ahhh, thank you, Kristin. 

Oh, and the next day, a friend of mine sent me a note that Kristin twittered about us: