These two look awful chummy, having a swell time bellying up to the bar ...
Write your thoughts on what is happening.
Still don’t know what to do for the biggest party night of the year? Here are a few more ideas:
The Green Iguana – Veteran’s
Where: 9202 Anderson Road, Tampa; (813) 288-9076 or www.greeniguana.com
What: Party with DJs Santana and Structure, with free champagne at midnight.
Cost: Free to get in.
Whiskey Park (both locations)Where: 11921 N. Dale Mabry Highway, (North) Tampa or 720 Howard Ave., (SoHo) Tampa; (813) 968-1515 (North) or (813) 259-9669 (SoHo) or www.whiskeyparksoho.com
What: Party favors and live footage from New York
Cost: $10 in advance.
Cap’s Tiki Hut
Where: 28107 Wesley Chapel Blvd., Wesley Chapel; (813) 929-7440 or www.capstikihut.net
What: Dinner Buffet with live entertainment.
Cost: $34.95.
The L.A. Hangout
Where: 16411 N. Florida Ave., Lutz; (813) 964-5631 or www.thehangoutbar.com
What: New Year’s Party with cover band Cold Shot.
Cost: None.
Santoro’s Amphitheater
Where: 1609 E. Seventh Ave., Ybor City; (813) 248-2331 or www.ampitheaterybor.com
What: DJs Icey and Baby Anne tearing up the tables, with a free champagne toast at midnight.
Cost: $25 in advance.
Prana
Where: 1619 E. Seventh Ave. Ybor City; (813) 241-4139 or www.clubprana.com
What: Five levels of parties, champagne toast, complimentary breakfast and a chance to win $1000.
Cost: $30 in advance.
The day after my 18th birthday was the first time I ever went to a club in Ybor City. I’d been to concerts in that area of town before, but this was the first time I ever went to a dance club. I was at The Orpheum that night, where I watched a friend’s jam band play for a few hours before someone, a girl I barely knew, asked me if I wanted to go to Masquerade with her. It was a Thursday night, back when the place used to have all-you-can-drink wells for $8. I went with her, and I was only in the club for a few minutes before I had to help her track down her car keys, which she’d left with a friend who couldn’t be located. Still, those few minutes introduced me to a Tampa I’d never known. From then on, I went to Masquerade on Thursdays religiously, and this pattern lasted until the club quit having an ’80s dance party. That’s why I’m glad to know that there will be an ’80s night reunion party this Thursday, Dec. 29, at Masquerade. I hope to see all of the old crew there, considering that it will be $8 for all the well drinks your body can hold. Visit the Web site for more information.
Ho-ho-how many times can a sane person be expected to hear “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer” without ripping the knobs off the radio and trying to use them as earplugs? Seriously.
Let’s face it, people. If you plan to rely on local radio for your holiday music, you’re going to be hearing an inordinate amount of crap over the next few days. And then you’re going to hear it again. And again. And again. Ad nauseam.
Isn’t this one of the reasons you bought an iPod or MP3 player in the first place? Of course it is.
Lucky for you, Found Sounds is here to help. We’ve scoured the Web (as far as you know, anyway) and come up with a handful of holiday treats for our loyal reader. (Hi, mom!)
For starters, there’s Bright Eyes. I know, I know. Conor Oberst can be a little narcissistic and everything, but once you get used to his cracked warble, his take on “Blue Christmas” actually sounds warm and genuine.
A Bright Eyes song courtesy of Saddle Creek:
Bright Eyes: “Blue Christmas” [mp3]
Next we have Clem Snide. That’s not a guy’s name, it’s an indie-pop trio from New Jersey and they’ve done a nice, slightly melancholy version of “Joy To The World.” You know, for those poignant holiday moments.
A Clem Snide song courtesy of SpinART:
Clem Snide: “Joy To The World” [mp3]
Finally, we have “The 8bits of Christmas” by the 8bitpeoples collective. The album, available for free download in its entirety, features holiday classics programmed on old 8-bit video game machines and computers. If you downloaded Beck‘s “GameBoy Variations EP” from iTunes earlier this year, you have some idea what to expect. Our favorites are:
Two tracks from 8bitpeoples:
Bit Shifer: “Let It Snow” [mp3]
Goto80: “Last Christmas (Hot Digi Rmx)” [mp3]
Bit Shifter did “Let It Snow” on a GameBoy. Goto80 (ahh, don’t you miss BASIC?) did “Last Christmas” (yes, the Wham! song) on a Commodore 64. Too cool.
If you know of any other free, legal holiday music downloads out there, link us up.
A nut lovers convention or WHAT?
Let us know.
At work today, I learned something new. Goat meat is called chevon. This, after a lunchtime conversation about mutton.
We were pondering whether or not to buy goat cheese, and then turned to what it was called. I insisted goat meat was called mutton, but my co-worker, Janine, was adamant it was a grown sheep’s meat that was called mutton.
We looked it up in the dictionary and, yes, she was right – sheep meat is called mutton and goat meat is called chevon. But Wikipedia did mention that goat meat was called mutton in India. Given Wikipedia’s woes lately, no one was ready to concede a point to me.
So now I know that goat meat is called chevon, and veal is calf, and venison is deer, and pork is pig, and beef is cow.
For me, it was humble pie.
The new Belle and Sebastian disc is due out in February. Kevin Walker‘s as close to giddy as the man is capable of getting. If you haven’t already downloaded the handful of tracks that leaked onto the Internet in recent weeks, you can check out the first single courtesy of Matador Records. It’s legal, even!
If you haven’t heard these guys before, yeah, they’re a bit precious on the surface. But don’t let that fool you. Stuart Murdoch’s sweet melodies and lush arrangements invariably hide some of music’s sharpest—and often most vicious—lyrics. It’s probably a safe bet for fans of the Smiths or Nick Drake.
A new Belle and Sebastian song from our friends at Matador:
Belle and Sebastian: “Another Sunny Day” from “The Life Pursuit” [mp3]
When it was raining last week, and roads were slippery and visibility not too good, there was a man jogging along Bruce B. Downs Boulevard. It was almost dark, like it gets these days, even though peak rush hour was not over yet.
He was jogging in the bicycle lane of the road, wearing dark clothing and almost invisible through the droplets of rain and the fleeting moment of clarity that the windshield wipers provide.
I wondered why he was jogging at that time, when he couldn’t be seen though the glaring headlights of other cars blinding one’s vision, and the red tail lights reflecting off the road making it more difficult to see. And did I mention he was wearing dark clothes? On BBD?
Anyone who has driven that road knows how much traffic there is, and how many police cars to catch people who speed even a little bit. But that particular evening, no one was speeding. Couldn’t speed, because there was a long, slow traffic jam.
The jogger was not visible until you almost came upon him. It was a dangerous situation for him, anyone who might have gotten a little impatient and turned a little into the bicycle lane, could have hit him. And we all know what makes a bicycle lane - a sliver of white paint.
Why was he jogging in the bicycle lane when there is a perfectly good sidewalk on the opposite side of the boulevard? Why was he not wearing light or fluorescent clothing? What was his responsibility as a pedestrian on a busy roadway?
I heaved a sigh of relief as I passed him. I was glad that the traffic was slow, and thankfully no driver was impatient, and almost all seemed alert. I was glad that he wouldn’t be a part of a news brief about a jogger hit on the side of the road, at least not that day.
What was this driver thinking when they parked under that tree? Probably just “Cool, I scored a shady spot!” If you have any other thoughts, write ‘em down!
What was this driver thinking when they parked under that tree? Probably just “Cool, I scored a shady spot!” If you have any other thoughts, write ‘em down!
There has been a lot of coverage regarding the Xbox 360 in the past couple of months. Now that the hype has died down a little. Some shoppers, especially the ones who haven’t been able to find an Xbox 360 on store shelves, have to be asking themselves whether it has been worth the wait.
Well, the simple truth is that it’s just a video game system. There will be another and another and another. The next one will be a little better, and so on, and so on.
A couple things bother me about the PlayStation 3. The price is first and foremost. Some rumors have that sucker upwards of $500. That’s just not accessible to the masses. Parents aren’t willing to pony up that type of dough. With 360’s launch, it’s clear that the magic number is right around $400.
Second is the lack of a central Internet multiplayer setup like Microsoft’s Xbox Live. Sony is going to rely on the publishers to run their own servers, meaning you’ll have a different profile and password for every game. That’s just not the best way to do it in this era of broadband.
But it’s not like PlayStation 3s will be gathering dust on shelves next year. If you are smart and you want one, you’ll go out yesterday and put down a preorder.
I haven’t written anything in a while, mainly because I’ve been preoccupied with planning a holiday party that went down in my books as one of the best ever, getting ready to graduate and looking for a full-time job. I still plan to finish the New Year’s Eve list sometime soon.
In the meantime, I have to get back to work.
In a way, as a writer, I sort of hate Lauren Willig. After all, she’s young (still getting her PhD at Harvard), ambitious, goal-oriented and a finisher. That’s like everything most writers aren’t. At any rate, there’s also respect for this student/author, who has just released her second novel, The Masque of the Black Tulip, in which a young woman researching her dissertion comes across information that the Pink Carnation (the spy from Willig’s first book) is being pursued by The Black Tulip, a nasty French spy. The first novel got rave reviews for combining page-turning reading with historically accurate tidbits, expect more of the same here.
In The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact, author Colin McGinn, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, delves into why the movies hold such a grip on people around the world. He posits that our connection and perception of movies alows us to better understand our own nature. Does this mean I probably shouldn’t watch Pulp Fiction again?
If you consider yourself a fan of the Spanish Colonial revival in architecture (I do), then Gibbs Smith books has released the perfect book for you (I know, I know. That sounds like a commercial. But this book is very cool). In George Washington Smith, author Patricia Gebhard explores the life and work of Smith, an architect who, in the early part of the 20th Century, sparked the Spanish Colonial revival in California. Of course the knock off versions of the style are depressingly bad (I can think of a few strip malls in our area, for example), but the real deal is wonderful. The book is full of the sort of photos that, if you like this style of architecture, will dazzle you. Actually one of the worst photos it the cover, but here it is:
So, here we go again. The first time was in the 1930s, when the special effects for the film “King Kong” blew away audiences. Then came the 1976 version, in which audiences wanted to blow away the filmmakers. (Brief confession: I actually sort of have a soft spot for that 1970s version, because I was just a pre-teen and sort of fell in love with Jessica Lang as Dwan. I’m not proud, but there it is).
Now we have director Peter Jackson, who could have done pretty much anything he wanted after the success of his Lord of the Rings films, giving us another version of King Kong. And the books are hitting the shelves as well. There’s the official novelization of the movie by Christopher Golden, and a re-release of the novel made for the original film back in the 1930s by Delos W. Lovelace (read that one as a kid, not bad). For the movie buffs, there’s
The Making of King Kong: The Official Guide To The Motion Picture, which might be a nice stocking stuffer for the King Kongiac in your life (I bet he’s somewhere between the ages of 6 and 12).
Ballantine has released yet another book on Star Wars, this time picking up the story where the last movie left off. Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader describes the reign of terror started by Mr. Vader after he got that big helmet on his head.
On the non-fiction front, there are two recently released books on happiness. As in, finding it. In Happiness: A History, author Darrin M. McMahon searches for the source in history that led to “our current obsession with happiness.” In The Happiness Hypothesis, author Jonathan Haidt explores “10 great ideas” taken from ancient philosophy that can make you happy in the modern world.
System: Microsoft Xbox 360
Also available for: Sony PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube, Microsoft Xbox, Sony PSP, Nintendo DS, Windows
Publisher: Ubi Soft
Reviewer’s rating: B
ESRB rating: Teen
Game type: Action/adventure
Kind of like: “Tomb Raider” crossed with “Rampage”
Best feature: The part where you play as Kong rules ...
Worst feature: ... but it doesn’t last long enough.
The bottom line: Only five more days until “King Kong” rocks the big screen, but you just can’t wait, can you? If you don’t mind spoilers, you’re in luck: The video game is already out.
After all, every blockbuster movie comes with a video game tie-in and this one is no different — unless you consider the fact that it’s one of the rare movie-based titles that’s actually worth playing.
Without giving away too much of the story, you play mostly first-person as a member of the crew that stumbles into a dangerous adventure on Skull Island. Yes, this adventure includes incidents that involve an oversized ape.
What’s better than a game with monkeys? (Answer: a game with giant monkeys.) The levels in which you play in third-person as Kong are highlights here: swinging, climbing and pounding your chest is more fun than a barrel of ... well, you know.
Elsewhere, the mildly challenging gameplay (a mix of combat and puzzle solving) can get a tad redundant, but top-notch voice acting (Jack Black, Adrien Brody, Naomi Watts) and a moody, cinematic atmosphere keep things interesting.
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