Hot Sauce, Blossom, and 3-D Sex Comedies.

Wanna know what I was up to this weekend? Sure you do. I put together a blog post containing Ian Miller's fantastic interview with the stars of 90s sitcom Blossom. I know you wanna hear it. So go here and do just that. It's way more fun than it ever should have been. Kudos to you, Evil Ian.

I also went to the Fed Ex depot (which is situated besides a crazy creepy massive old Jewish cemetery in the southern part of Queens) and picked up some packages. I got Being There with Peter Sellers on Blu-ray and the Shout! Factory release of the awesome The Stewardesses In 3-D. Hard to believe this classic drive-in sex comedy is celebrating its 40th anniversary but it is. It's older than I am. That said, it's a fun movei that proves to be even more enjoyable in 3-D for reasons of a primarily anatomical nature. Zoom!

I cooked dinner for Alison and I tonight. Nothing fancy, just some corn, some fries, and some grilled ham steaks. A friend of ours, Mr. Chuck Hell, makes his own hot sauce and when he was in NYC last year visiting he gave us some. I cautiously put some on my ham tonight, figuring it would burn like the Dickens but was relieved to find out that it was time to slather it on there. Yeah, it makes you sweat, but the sauce complimented the smokey grilled ham perfectly - so much so in fact that I was tempted to go get more ham to cook up. Yum. I'm hungry just thinking about it.

Aside from that, it was a nice mellow weekend of movie watching and Strongbow. I took in Super Soul Brother, Death Promise and rewatched both Singapore Sling and Juon because Alison had never seen them. They both hold up well for different reasons. King Kong on Blu-ray is a nice treat as well. Stunning transfer.

Take this job and shove it!

That's what I said last week. Well, not in so many words, but I resigned from my current position. It wasn't working out and while they wanted me to stay on and tried to talk me out of it, I'd made up my mind. The pros were not outweighing the cons by any stretch at all and I simply couldn't travel like they wanted me to.

So soon, I'll possibly be unemployed during the nastiest recession to hit the country in half a century or more. A scary prospect. That said, I've had two phone interviews with a company that said they want to bring me in for a third interview. That could shape into something and is promising, at least. I can't put all my eggs in that one basket though, so until something is firm, I keep applying.

We'll see how it goes.

Wanted Man In Oregon...

So despite the fact that I have proof that I paid the state of Oregon the $71 I owed them for the 2007 tax year in Feb. of 2008, long before it was due, they've served me with a warrant. Over $71. And they've sent me paperwork saying they're going to garnish my US Bank checking account - which has been closed for over a year.

You know, I miss my friends back there dearly, and I miss the delicious beer and the record stores and all that rad stuff, I can't help feeling that the state, on a governmental level at least, has really got its head up its own ass.

At least I can tell people that I'm on the run from the law now. If nothing else, it makes for a good story.

Lamenting The Demise Of The Local Record Store

So a few recent trips back to Canada really hammered home for me the fact that, at least in the Niagara region, virtually all of the local record stores that I shopped at as a kid are gone. Not moved, but gone. Not just the independant stores like the late, great Poptones on Queen St. in Niagara Falls or the awesome, if snobby, Station To Station which was just off of St. Paul St. in St. Catharines but even most of the 'chain' stores like Sunrise and Sam The Record Man are gone. Sam's hurt a lot, as when Alison and I went to Toronto, the big building with the neon spinning records was still there but it was empty, gutted, and the neon had long since stopped brightening up the Young St. strip.

NYC's still got some indy stores in the East Village and the two Virgin Megastores, but rumors abound that the Virgin locations will be closing up shop this year and who knows how long the indy joints will last, what with the Village becoming a playground for the rich much like the rest of Manhattan.

While hanging out with my friend Mark in Canada, I'd hoped to find the new Hanson Brothers. In fact, I took Alison all over Toronto looking for it prior. Neither trip did the trick, I wound up having to get it online. And that's fine, I got it for half of what I would have paid for it at a brick and mortar store, but it really does take a lot of the fun out of it.

Music junkies know that half the enjoyment comes from the thrill of the hunt or from finding who-knows-what in a used bin in some dingy, stinky dirty store. Online is too easy. I held off on buying that record online until I was sure I wasn't going to find it locally. I had fun looking for it and picked up some other odd titles while zipping around Southwestern Ontario, Toronto, Hamilton, and NYC in search of the disc. But it's sad that I never actually found it, and instead, found that so many record stores were just gone. Living in Portland, I was sheltered from that. That city was, at least when I moved away last year, a veritble MECCA for record shopping - but that city is the exception and not the rule.