Robots Will Be Our Superiors

Being a musician isn’t always lucrative, monetarily speaking.  Unless you hit it big (David Hasselhoff big), money doesn’t just throw itself at you.  Or does it…?

There I was – breaking hearts and causing women both young and old to swoon – at Club Anything, an interesting venue/bar at about 5th & National,  when it started to rain money.  Reaching Scarlet was kicking ass and taking names, despite the fact that I was still dying of pneumonia (or the flu, whatever) and our singer had just flown in mere hours earlier.  We were rocking so hard that we created dollar bills.

I don’t recall if we were playing or if we were between songs, but in a burst of confusion and possibly wind, money literally started falling from the ceiling.  Real money.  Not just a few stray dollars, either; there was somewhere between $75 and $100 falling from the ceiling.  You can see in the picture below, in which I am holding a dollar and looking confused, that there is a small ledge above the stage upon which are many Tim Burton-esque skeletons.  To the right of them, and out of frame, is some more miscellaneous crap.  That is the section from which the currency precipitation originated from.

It was an interesting chain of events to watch.  I think that at first people thought it was fake money.  I thought it was fake money.  After a moment, a few people noticed it was real money.  Some people went right for it (Casey), while others were reluctant, wondering what in the hell was going on.  We certainly didn’t know.

It dawned on me a few moments later that most people probably thought that we were responsible for literally dumping money from the ceiling.  It seems reasonable enough, as we were the band playing at the time.  To be completely honest, however, we have no flippin’ idea where the money came from, why it was up there, or what made it fall.

I have a theory, though – Club Anything has a large fan that they use to blow on the crowd when things get crazy during Deviant Sex Night, or whatever they host there when ska bands aren’t playing.  (Look at their website sometime.)  I think that they turned on the fan sometime during our set, and a bunch of singles from some previous promotion in which money gets dumped from the ceiling were blown free from their hiding place.  Chaos ensued, and the rest you already know.

Reaching Scarlet rolls hard, but we don’t roll hard enough to dump free money away.  Someday we’ll have a runaway budget, but not today.  We’re all incredibly confused by that particular chain of events, but maybe it will work in our favor and we’ll have more people at our next show, hoping against hope that we start making it rain with singles, just like Jack Nicholson in the first Batman movie.

I would just like to point out that I made it all the way through that post without making a joke regarding making it rain with singles and strip clubs.  Until now, that is.

PS – I’ve been playing Secret of Mana and it rocks.  I also downloaded Super Mario RPG, another great SNES game.  Ah, retrogaming.  It’s hip to dismiss retro games as foolish quests of nostalgia (he said so on Zero Punctuation so it has to be true, right?), but good games are good games and these, my friends, are great games.

I have a WordPress plugin that tracks various statistics about the traffic that visits my site.  It’s interesting to see how much it’s dropped off since I stopped posting.  That’s the thing about the internet – gotta keep coming out with new content or people will stop caring.

I am very excited to say that one of my favorite video games of all time, Secret of Mana (SNES), is being released on the Wii virtual console.  Much like the game Chrono Trigger that I like to go on and on and on about, Secret of Mana has a fantastic soundtrack.  It’s generally considered to be one of the best RPGs ever made, and is one of a handful of games that represents the pinnacle of the SNES as a system.  I’m very excited.  Once I get the Wii set up, I’m downloading it fo sho.

Speaking of which, we just got our internet at the new house hooked up today.  For nearly a week I was stuck with Work Internet, which has all of the good stuff filtered out of it.  Now that I have my wireless network back up and running, life is almost back to normal.  I’ll be posting more often for the handful of people that actually read what I write.  (Congratulations, Kevin and Jen!)

One of the few rooms yet to be done is what will eventually be our office and music room.  Once that’s complete, I can go back to practicing in earnest and recording new music.  Hooray for music rooms!

My ever-vigilant wife was kind enough to point out that I forgot to include the link to the Bent Objects site with my previous post.  So here it is:

http://bentobjects.blogspot.com/

The Cubs have broken my heart for yet another year.  97 wins and then they blew it in three games.  It’s last year all over again, though this year I think that we had a much more solid team.

It’s tough being a Cubs fan.  You’re automatically made out to be the bad guy because everyone has a story of a friend who got yelled at by a Cubs fan at a ballgame – thus all Cubs fans are jackasses.  Not only that, but you get to watch your team lose year after year.  This year was still great, though – it was a wonderful season all around, and I got to see some good baseball.  It’s a shame that they couldn’t bring their A game during the postseason, but, as we’re taught to say from birth in Chicago…

…there’s always next year.

Go Cubs!

As I mentioned in a previous post, we have been super busy dealing with the house.  My stuff is scattered between two houses and I really haven’t had time to sit down and get much of anything done.   As such, tonight’s rehearsal with Reaching Scarlet is the first time I’ve taken my bass out of its case since last Friday.  Last Friday was the first time I had played since more than a week prior to THAT.

It’s a terrible feeling.  I can’t wait to get the floors done, move in, and set up my office space so I can A) get back to practicing and B) get back to recording the songs that I would like to record.  November’s going to rock.  Once the floors are done and we’ve moved we’re not going to take on any more big house projects, so I’m hoping for all sorts of productivity.

I don’t recall how I stumbled upon Bent Objects (though I know I didn’t Stumble Upon it), but I’m glad I did.  Terry Border is a very, very clever man.  If I were you (and I wish I was), I would take some time to go back and look at a few of his scenes.  This has always been one of my personal favorites: