Saturday Night's All Right For Nothin'

I have a bizarre urge to go to the Gladstone tonight, but I think I'll resist.

Despite its rep as Toronto's signature kararoke venue (and yes, that's where I t'iefed the title of this blog from) I've always found the 'Stone to be emphatically meh. The book sucks and Styles is neither a good host nor a good sound guy.

The crowd, however, is almost always hot, and love you if you sing something they recognize (and you will, because like I said the book sucks). In short it's exactly what the stereotypical karaoke night should be like: drunk cougars and bacherorette party-goers singing along to the fifth different rendition of Living On a Prayer that they've heard in the last three hours.

For us karaoke snobs, of course, it's, everything that makes us embarrassed to admit we like to sing karaoke. But that's why I occasionally go. It's kind of a voluntary fall off my high horse thing.

Plus, the cat's in heat again, which is always incentive to be anywhere else.

Damn, I've almost talked myself into it now.

Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Charm and Strange

If there's a common element to the political blogs I link to on the sidebar, it's that their authors (at least in my estimation) try to make a conscious effort to get past the ridiculous left/right, either/or paralysis that infects just about everything down in the Motherland.

This post by Al Giordano is a perfect example of what I mean.

If you happen to see any other political blogs you think might fit into the Legion, let me know.

BP Gets Pwned

In their preseason, PECOTA-driven predictions, Baseball Prospectus projected the Washington Nationals to finish in fourth place in the NL East at 77-85, six games ahead of the Florida Marlins at 71-91.

Now, those two teams are my beat for Rotowire, so I know them fairly well. I looked at those projections and thought to myself, "No chance." The Nats are a mess of misplaced assets still trying to dig out from under the incompetence of Jim Bowden, while the Fish feature a bunch of young kids with crazy upside that PECOTA pegged low because of their scanty track records. Plus, everyone knows fish eat gnats.

Well, those two teams also opened the season playing each other.

The Marlins swept all three games, outscoring the Nationals 26-13.

(Author's note: yes, I follow sports. A well-rounded blogger is an entertaining blogger, so nyah nyah.)

(Author's additional note: Subscriptions required for both links, so you'll just have to take my word for it.)

(Author's final note: yes, the preceding post was in English. Philistines.)

Surrender Monkeys FTW

Via Boing Boing, I notice that France has finally had enough of the American right wing's abuse and is showing those weeny little corporate authoritarian wannabes how it's done.

You want true, jackbooted, hard core fascism, you should always look to Old Europe first.

Somewhere, in an undisclosed location, Dick Cheney is slapping himself on his giant forehead, wondering why he didn't think of this first.

UPDATE: Mere seconds after I post, French MPs (those that had the guts to show up, anyway) vote down the measure. Witness my awesome power!

Oh Noes!

So I left my karaoke deck at Neu+ral Tuesday night.

For those of you who don't know the true depth of my karaoke depravity (which at this point should be none of you, since I doubt any strangers have stumbled across the Chronicles yet) I have a rather large group of songs I can sing and/or shouldn't sing but do anyway. This can make it difficult to choose what to sing. So, many moons ago, I took a deck of cards and wrote 'Artist A' through 'Artist Z' on the red suits with a sharpie, and 'Song Title A' through 'Song Title Z' on the black suits. Then, when I want to pick a song, I shuffle the deck and draw a card. If I get, let's say, the six of hearts (Artist F) I flip through the venue's book of available songs and pick a song by an artist whose name begins with the letter F (perhaps Take Me Out by Franz Ferdinand.) If instead I drew the queen of clubs (Song Title Y) I'll pick a song whose title begins with a Y (maybe You'll Never Find by Lou Rawls).

The card of death in the deck is the jack of clubs though, Song Title X. There are only two choices I've ever seen: Xanadu by Olivia Newton-John, and Xanadu by ELO. I always declare a mulligan when I draw the jack of clubs.

Having now lost a karaoke deck for a second time, I'm thinking it might be time to up the stakes and create a karaoke tarot deck, where the major arcana have themes for the evening written on them.

Once More With Feeling

Will most likely be hitting Reilly's tonight. After singing along while someone else sang it last night, I have a crazy urge to try Mr. Roboto. It's probably a terrible idea.

And/or I'll finally do the Moonlighting theme.

Back in the Motherland...

It seems as though Those People are now allowed to get married in Vermont. And Iowa. And DC.

I've never been entirely clear on the reasons why, but I have it on good authority that Those People getting married makes the Baby Jesus cry.

Why do Those People hate the Baby Jesus?

Neu+ral recap

Busted out I Don't Like Mondays for the first time in forever. Also sang Midlife Crisis again, but it suffered the usual new material sophomore jinx.

I also committed to doing the One Night in Bangkok chess match next week. Gulp.

Tonight's Festivities

Will be heading over to Neu+ral tonight... may try Take Me I'm Yours again, and/or the Faith No More, as they went pretty well.

Still trying to wrap my head around the logistics of the proposed One Night in Bangkok on-stage chess match. I suspect it will be a total train wreck, but it could be an entertaining train wreck, and that's all you can really ask for.

What You Missed

Since I live in a city where there is, at worst, merely decent bar karaoke available somewhere every night of the week, I tend to get around. This past Sunday's venue of choice was the Rivoli.

My eventual set list, pieced together from memory:

Stage Fright - The Band
Take Me I'm Yours - Squeeze
Rich Girl - Gwen Stefani
Midlife Crisis - Faith No More
The Love Boat Theme

The Gwen was a special birthday request from one of the Gamine sisters. Trust me, it won't happen again. I can make no such promise about the Love Boat though... old timey Monday night Dance Cavers would understand.

Highlight of the night might have been a slightly drunken compliment from Someone Who Should Know, telling me I had a great voice and that he'd love to give me vocal lessons some time. If it were anybody else I'd have thought he was hitting on me.