We've got music! For real this time. A year or so ago I tried to add a music player to the site, but I could only get it to load one song so it was kind of worthless. If you look over to the left, under the Twitters, you'll see our brand spankin' new playlist.com player. It looks a little funny since I had to squeeze it down to fit, but whatever. It plays music and it's free!

I threw in some stuff I've been listening to a lot lately. Bat for Lashes is a recent favorite who sings the song "What's a Girl To Do". The cover of R.E.M.'s Everybody Hurts is done by a band I caught waiting for Lykke Li during SXSW called Bodies of Water that I thought were pretty good.

ENJOY.

Tom raised money for St.Baldrick's again this year to fight kid's cancer. He was in Brazil during the official head shaving so he held his own private head shaving event for his supporters. Everyone agreed on giving Tom the Ben Franklin look, except for Blondie who wouldn't give up on the mullet. She even drew a picture instructing how to cut it.

Blondie: "Did you see...you have not adhered...to my..."
Jonathan: "I'm illiterate so I couldn't read your diagram"

Blondie: "Oh you're the guy with the forehead"

Blondie: "You're cutting too much!"
Matt: "Everything's gotta go, I don't think you understand."

Tom: "OWWWWW!" (5 seconds after blondie takes over)

Blondie: "Wait, I have to even you out" (Tom's missing half his hair at this point"
Me: "Right, because otherwise you'd look ridiculous"

Gabe: "The thing on the front has to stay. It's kind of the anchor. You pass him in the street, and look back and say that's even more awesome. Is that guy that awesome? And then you're like YES HE IS"

More pics on Flickr if you haven't had enough already. And if you want to watch the shaving, here goes. The video is really dark, but some of the audio is pretty funny.

My bro sent this to me:

Woman Goes for Leg Operation, Gets New Anus Instead

A German retiree is taking a hospital to court after she went in for a leg operation and got a new anus instead, the Daily Telegraph is reporting.

The woman woke up to find she had been mixed up with another patient suffering from incontinence who was to have surgery on her sphincter.

The clinic in Hochfranken, Bavaria, has since suspended the surgical team.

Now the woman is planning to sue the hospital. She still needs the leg operation and is searching for another hospital to do it.

The headline was a little misleading though since I first thought this woman somehow ended up with 1 leg and two anuses. Wow. It's not too often that I get to pluralize "anus."

Ok time to finish my taxes.

I haven't been posting lately. I have some ideas and some videos and pictures to make posts out of, but I just haven't gotten around to getting it done. I've been stagnent. I need a change. Something to shuffle everything up.

Good-bye beard of two straight years!

Good-bye mohawk of a year and a half!

Time for a fresh start.

peace&love,
lazyJ

p.s. While shaving the beard last night, I did it in several steps. First giving me some "friendly mutton chops" then a nice horseshoe mustache and ending w/ a toothbrush mustache. But alas, I didn't take any picture cause I was shaving in the shower while naked and it felt weird taking pictures of myself while naked. Even though it was only of my head. The idea still felt dirty.

SXSW 2008 is over! It was fun and I'm surprised it's taken me this long to join in the festivities. Last year I went to one free show and saw Northern State which was a blast. This year I expanded my involvement and took two half days Thursday and Friday to catch some free day shows. Highlights were seeing Fastball, Wheatus, Presidents of the United States of America, and Lykke Li (3 times!!)

If you haven't figured it out by now, I'm a huge fan. You might have seen my Twitter about making an ass of myself in front of Lykke Li. Here's the full story - it's Thursday about 1pm and I'm waiting for Lykke's first show to start. I'm drinking a free beer, and I'm about a quarter done with it and starting to feel pretty intoxicated. (I know, my tolerance is ridiculous). I figure I better get some food and get in line to buy a taco. It's taking forever, but some other band is playing which keeps me entertained. I turn around to see what they look like, and BAM! Lykke Li is standing two people behind me along with her band. I get that "holy shit!" feeling in my chest and turn back around before she sees how far my jaw has dropped.

I order my taco and debate whether or not I should approach her for a picture. See I'm generally a shy kind of guy, and not exactly smooth under pressure. (I do OK in emergencies though since I did put out a fire on Tom once.) I figure why the hell not, and approach her and ask if I can get a picture with her. She's hesitantly says ok, so I hand my camera to the only other asian person there (natural photographer), and get this beauty that I posted earlier:

We share a few words, and she says she's shocked that anyone recognized her in Texas. I tell her I think her music is great, and ask how to pronounce her name. She says it's "LEE-ka LEE," spoken really fast. Then I do something stupid, and ask her if she's going to play the spoons. See she has this one video where the entire thing is shot in a bathroom, and she taps spoons on the sink and in the water as part of the instrumentals. It's pretty cool, but a moronic question to ask of a live performance. There's a moment of silence, which I imagine is her translating English into Swedish in her head, realizing what I said was not funny, and then figuring out how to respond nicely. "Um...no," she says. I can't remember exactly how that conversation ended, but it could've been right there. The only thing worse I could've said was "Oh, so you're from Sweden. I love IKEA!"

Want to see something funny? See how happy she is to be next to me in the above photo? Compare that to this picture taken at the third show I went to where I'm standing about 30 feet away. Hmm, I'm going to have to talk to her about this. It's doesn't bode well for our relationship if she's happier the farther away I am.

Her best performance of the three I saw was the third one at Club de Ville, but I was standing with my right ear against a speaker so the audio is uber crap. Her song "Let It Fall" is a great one live. You get to see her drummer totally spaz out, plus at about 1:20 you see how much she loves me when she walks over and acknowledges me, or maybe just the entire side of the stage I was standing on. Either way, I'll take it.

Here's the complete set of videos I have of Lykke Li at SXSW 2008. You can check out her songs on her myspace page, but it's unfortunate the audio in the vids I put up on youtube is so bad because there's this raw passion in her live shows that just puts her over the top.

There's also some extra pics on my flickr.

Man I really don't want to go back to work Monday.

So tired...I stayed for Presidents of the United States of America but lazyJ bailed after Wheatus. They were both great. Lykke Li hasn't fallen in love with me yet, not even just a little bit. Maybe I need to go to more of her shows?

quick post. I bailed on work at noon today to go see my new favorite female musician Lykke Li play. she's in town for SXSW, and I caught two of her shows so far. she's pretty awesome, I recorded the whole first show and parts of the second. lazyJ showed up for the second, and he agreed that she's awesome. awesome awesome awesome.

I know, there's 1500 bands here, why would I see one more than once? did u not read the part about her being awesome?

youtube vids coming as soon as I get a chance. lazyJ and I are waiting now to see wheatus, and maybe presidents of the USA and bowling for soup. we're old, not sure how long we'll make it.

Saw this somewhere and saved it, don't remember form where now. So credit for this goes out to someone from somewhere. Thanks whoever you are! Google Trends let's you view the historical popularity of various search terms, and compare them to each other.

It looks like the internet lost a bit of innocence in early 2006. I didn't check the validity of the graphic since there are certain search terms I don't want to do from work.

On an unrelated note for the Austin people, are any of you doing any SXSW music stuff?

Any of you ever use Spokeo? Spokeo sent me an email the other day saying someone had found me there, and listed all social networking sites Spokeo had found me on. Myspace, friendster, flickr, picassa, facebook, and linkedin. Oh, and pandora, the personalized radio station site. Apparently you give Spokeo someone's email address, and it finds all their public accounts. It's interesting to see who of your peeps has accounts that you didn't even know they had. For instance I found out Tom has an account on pandora, so I got curious and checked out what he was listening to.

Tom's music stations on Pandora

You see that over on the left? The last station he listened to of all the music stations he's made? That's right, Hannah Montana.

To be fair here are my music stations. The first 3 aren't my stations, they're other people's stations I checked out. As in Tom's. Sometimes you find out things that can't be undone, kind of like when you were a kid and stumbled upon your dad's porn collection. Except that this is worse.

Tom's in Brazilfor a while so I'm not even sure if he's going to be able to defend himself on this one