Mike met me at my house around 5:00, we picked up Whit around 5:30 and we were on our way to New York City to see Jonathan Coulton and John Roderick at the City Winery for their “One Christmas as a Time” show.  Jon Coulton lives on the internet and is an engineer turned professional musician and John Roderick is a guitarist in the The Long Winters who has lived more than almost any six people I know. I was excited to see them, but first, we had to make it to NYC.

We had left ourselves two and a half hours to make what is normally a 75 to 90 minute trip, but with the glory of traffic, that doubled. Approaching the Holland Tunnel, we traded positions repeatedly with a jet black Smart Car blasting die Deutsch Techno-Musik. This was the real cost of entering New York City.

Here they are.
One Christmas at a Time Headliners

We walked in a little late to the two having witty banter after a bit they started playing. I was surprised at the quality of the sound. John Roderick came to me through the Roderick on the Line podcast where he mostly tells stories. I had forgotten that he was a skilled musician.
The first few pieces were simply well done off-beat Christmas tunes that involved changing instruments and at one point a comb.
Set List and Comb

I was taking pictures this whole time when a women looked at me with my camera and said “follow me”. I did and she positioned me in front of a pillar saying “you take photos here. They will be great. You will love me”. Later, I was taking photos there and she looked me up and down saying “you like my spot. I tell you.”

Midway through the main set, John Hodgman was introduced as a special guest which proved to be delightful. He did but one song and made ribald comments as is his wont then left again.
Secret Guest

There was a second musical guest who barely registered to me played a somewhat sad song on an accordion. After her sub-set, John and Jon returned where Roderick announced “our audience largely consists of athiests and non-observant Jews. We have a lot of songs for the first group, but none for the non-observant Jews.” They then performed a song where John Roderick read the Wikipedia article for Hanukkah while Jon Coulton played bits and loops from a sampler. It was a dozen ways amazing.
Wikipedia Hanukkah

The show wrapped up and all six players played. Took their bowsCurtain Call

After the show, I took some pictures of the performers, did a free-form scat duet with Whit, got to lend John Hodgman my Sharpie and learned that Supertrain may be coming to Philadelphia. I asked John Roderick if he still sold hugs for five dollars. He said yes, and in exchange for a 10 spot, I think I gave Mike a unique Christmas gift.
Shaking

Tonight was pretty bad ass.

Few people were in on the Friday before Christmas.  The only person besides myself in my area was my CAD boss who took this chance to play music through his computer speakers, loudly.  I can normally deal with music in a work area as I’ll either play my own or deal with it but the combination of bad sythesizer and the tinny sound of computer speakers cut through the sound coming out of my own headphones.  His play list seemed to be bad Emerson, Lake & Palmer covers and movie soundtrack pieces.  I didn’t know that people actually owned CDs with “Chariots of Fire” encoded on their smooth silver surfaces.

Later, my boss passed my desk.

Him *visibly bopping his head*: Hey, Terry.
Me: Hello.  Happy Friday.
Him: It’s nice to be here when the place is empty.  You have privacy and can crank the tunes.
Me: Yeah, that you can do.  How late are you staying?
Him: Me?  Probably late, I love this stuff *points back at cubicle*

After a quarter hour of what sounded like Italian technotronica being blasted through a victrola I snapped and went to the lab to do legit work.  The price I pay for my mid-week holidays.

My day was dedicated to cleaning out the rec room of our house which hadn’t received a really thorough cleaning in at least five years and hadn’t had the carpets cleaned in over a decade.  Armed with the Bissell CarpetViolator 2000, this room would know fear.  I thought my plans were ruined when I got a call from my brother to pick up his wife from a local brewfest and bring her home, but this turned into an unexpected opportunity.

BRA HA HA HA.  Under the logic that she was my brother’s wife thus everything he owned was hers too, I felt no compunction about using her permission to throw out things my brother hadn’t gotten around to moving out.

Me: Think he wants slightly mess up Clapton tapes?
Her: Nah, he listens to bad music now.
Me: Does that mean we keep the Kris Kross tape?
Her: I think it’s just better we throw out everything that has mouse poop on it.

And knowing my house, with one pen stroke I got all the permission I needed to help my brother finally move out.

Coworker: Terry, I saw this Jazz reggae fusion group this weekend and the lead was playing this crazy instrument that looked like a really short saxophone but it was straight and had keys on the side like a flute and a harmonica had a baby.
Me: That sounds like a soprano sax, did it have the mouthpiece on the side or at the end?
Coworker: It wasn’t a sax, the mouthpiece was at the end.
Me: I’ll ask around.

*call music nerd friend*

Music Nerd Friend #1:  Sounds like a soprano sax.

*call music nerd friend*

Music Nerd Friend #2: Sounds like a soprano sax.

*hours later*

Coworker: Terry, I did some checking.  Have you ever heard of a soprano sax?

Watching the staff play the champions of the camp volleyball tournament is my reward to myself for volunteering.  I get to make color commentary against people who are vastly better at the game than I am and get to practice the pre-requisites of Snarkyjerkmanship merit badge.  Normally there is a good clutch of people to bask in the glory of my commentary but the crowd of spectators dispersed quickly and I was one of only three spectators.  The music normally piped over the loudspeakers provided by a YouTube queue had ended and someone said “play some jams”.  I took the mantle of DJ and found a channel I like that does rather good Bach fugues.  This  was booed even though I consider a good horn fugue to be good pick me up so I put together a Glenn Miller list (everyone loves 6-5000) but that was booed too.  I consigned myself that anyone who shouts down “In The Mood” has no taste and put on Alanis Morrisette’s cover of “My Humps” before walking away.

Joe and I have been carpooling which costs about 30 minutes but saves gas and I get to carpool with my BFF Joe!  He drove this week and furnished his own iPod and with blinding speed I mocked him for his choice of playlist names:

Me: Play It Loud! really?  Did someone break into your iPod and rename your lists such that upon discovery by another you’d be mistaken for a homosexual?
Him: No, that’s music I like to play loudly.
Me: Descriptive I suppose, why didn’t you pick something even better like Pump Up the Jams or Workout Tunez?  I like how you took the time to add the exclamation mark so everyone knows your intended play volume.

–Next Day–

Me: Wow, you renamed all your playlists to “Generic Playlist #”?
Him: Yes.  Yes, I did.
Me: Well, I’d like to listen to 25 or 6 to 4, it’s on Play It Loud!
Him: Umm… I think you mean Generic Playlist #3

Touche, Mr. Naylor.  I wonder if there’s a group I can insult so mercilessly that he’ll have a vast expanse of “Track by Artist from Album”.

I walked by the R&D Lab and saw someone standing in the lab without wearing goggles and ducked in to correct them.

It was a coworker who’d should have known better, but more damning than failing to wear goggles in an empty R&D lab was that he was rocking out to Super Tramp, head bobbing, singing a long and staring out the window longingly to “Take the Long Way Home”.  His taste wouldn’t have been a problem, if he weren’t otherwise a rock snob, chiding me for not properly identifying Klaatu’s “Attention Occupants of Interplanetary Craft” whom I thought was Paul McCartney many moons ago.

He turned his head around to the door closing, and stopped singing when he saw my grin.
Him: How much did you see?
Me: Enough, an incident like could ruin a man’s reputation.
Him: Name your terms.
Me: For now, nothing.  Next time I won’t be so generous.

Kyle, Joe and I decided to visit Bill Schilling in his camp oubliette and we arrived early at Giant to meet up with him so we hit Wawa for superfluous energy drinks.  Joe and I seem completely unaffected by  them but we enjoy the trainwreck-like pull of their flavors ranging from something akin to burnt Mountain Dew to fermented bull urine.  Needing to kill more time we pick an appropriate mix to go with our Rockstar drinks, which I think is made largely of caffeine and drummer sweat.  So what line and so is blairing on the radio when I roll down my window to talk to Bill? “I’m all out of love, I’m so lost without you…“  from All Out of Love by Air Supply.  Timing, I has it.  To regain our lost masculinity we watched Prescilla, Queen of the Desert and debated proper appletini technique.

I’ve started moving my stuff from camp to home and after 2 hours of lugging I settled in to enter 2 months worth of Pepsi Stuff points I’d picked up off the ground.  I purchased a song that’d be stuck in my head and as I listened to it I realized I’d downloaded previously after it’d gotten stuck in my head about a year prior, one was 128 kbps while the other was 256 kbps.  I’d always assumed the two were identical until the 2nd movement when I noted the tell-tale gurgle of a cluster-fuck of algorithms trying to make sense of 15 instruments in small groups playing across a four octave dynamic range.

This changes everything.  I’ve spent years borrowing albums from the library copying them at 128 kbps and returning them and compared to the clarity of a slightly better sampling rate everytime I listen to the string part of “Cantus In Memory of Benjamin Britte” I may as well be listening to an infant gurgling peas while playing with a blender full of carbonated AstroGlide.  Gha…. There goes my vacation.