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I've thought about it a little ... ... my favorite Travis chorus is the one to "Follow the Light."

Are you in England?

Hangover? I wonder if those pills they're advertising on TV work.

My home connection came back up last night, but it could go out at any time. The gig was really fun. I'm glad I decided to go. Travis definitely confirmed their high status in the anals of my music preferences.

Gay guys are always cute. It's part of the culture.

NFL Countdown on ESPN

Grammy award nominations aren't a real good critical review, in my opinion. They're far too populous. I would rather look at some of the music magazines (most of which rated Kelis's album favorably).

Que onda?!?!?! There's nothing like that moment when the music playing between acts stops, the stage goes dark, and you can see the outline of the band walking on stage. Having never seen Travis before, this was probably the highlight: The first moment of their live performance. There was a point were Fran let somebody from the audience drink from the cup he had on stage. Later he said the contents were a lemon/ginger mixture (again, the throat). I thought I would have been great if the girl who drank from the cup did a spit-take :)

I'm happy today. I got a lot done at work. I watched a movie. Seems like I'm forgetting something. What? Oh, yes. Now I remember. My internet connection came back up. Oh, I saw Travis, too. :)

I guess it isn't PMB as much as it's just a receding hairline.

You know, y'all ... Withi his new hair cut, you can really see Franny's MPB.

Post Your Favorite Travis Lyrics!!! I don't wanna go first! So many better and more devoted Travis fans then me! You guys should have the honours! I'm just happy to Happy to Hang Around.

OMG ... I just realized: I saw Travis. You know, the night I joined this board was after a Radiohead concert, when Iw as so psyched from the show that I didn't want to stop listening to music ... it was 2am and I drove to my office so I could listen to my AROBTTH CD ... and I just started posting. And then rest is periodically-absent-from-the-board history.

I would be a good movie to go to and laugh at its stupidity. It would be laugh-out-loud funny if approached from that point of view.

and i'll never give into your heart

Yes. I wasn't just writing for effect. I keep a noteboook of thoughts during movies. The notebook is 5" x 8". For the best movies, I write almost no notes because I don't need to (and I don't want to take my eyes off the screen). I started a new book this year. Girl With a Pearl Earring, which I say today, got a page and a half of notes, and I thoguht that was about a 5 (review later). Tad Hamilton got seven pages of notes. Here are some fo the highlights: "Already the music, 80s tech, is setting a teen beat tone. Is this movie just cute? The opening credit sequence is campy." This turned out to be some foreshadowing that I didn't pick up on. The director was tell me something: Run! I'm giving you a big hint here! "A Piggly Wiggly? Bordering on small town cliche between this and their reactions to the Hamilton movie." Little did I know that there was no border. There was a thoughway straight to insultly cliched. "How naive all these small towners (from Rosalee's hometown) are ... I'm not getting good vibes." Far from excitations. "And a dog?" Yes, Topher Grace's character had a Frasier-esque dog for no apparent reason. "And they're not being subtle about this Grace/Bosworth thing." They never spent any time developing why Grace's character likes Bosworth's. It just is ... but since they didn't explain it, how do they expect me to empathize with Bosworth while she makes her decision? "8 minutes in and [Duhamel] has his shirt off." They have him standing outside his house with his shirt off ... at about 10pm at night. Yes, don't we all do that. There are three scenes in the movie were Duhamel has his shirt off but there are no love scenes. "Grace lip-syncing to a Barry White song." The song was "Love to Love You, Baby." It reminded me of Adaptation[/u[ when the Donald Kaufman annouces to Charlie he's going to put a song into his thriller to ease the tension. As if from a rubric. "15-20 women. That's not physically possible." This was Bosworth answering a question (from Grace) as to Hamilton's possible sexual history. Apparently small-towners are socially inept morons. That's not patronizing. "FUCKING PATRONIZING MONTAGE!!!!!" Yes, the movie has a cool montage. From what I can tell, this was written about 30 minutes into the movie ... after all of the above was already written. I omitteed most of the stuff I wrote in between. I think you get the point.

Well, I didn't take picks or memorize the set list, although I'm sure I can recall it if I had to. Spreckels theatre is eight blocks from my house, no the previously reported six or "few". But it's an easy walk. It's a theatre house: about 100' from the stage to the back of the theatre but three decks high, seating about 2,000. I bought my ticket late, but me and somebody I met ended up sneaking into some low second level seats. We had a perfect view of everything. They opened the show with Happy to Hang Around and then went into Re-Offender. Early on Fran's voice we cracking on high notes, and it became clear as the night went on that he wasn't going to try and really stretch it. That's OK: the quality of the live performance usurped any possible disappointment I might have had that Fran's voice wasn't 100%. Every song they played was great. I don't say that just because. Each song really was well performed. I started thinking how far Travis has come into their career, that they can put on a 16 song main set where you immediately recognize each song, half of them being big hits. And then I realized how much of a Travis fan I was: I knew the words to every song. How could that be? I'd only bought my tickets three weeks before. For personal reasions, I didn't stick around for the encores (I don't believe in encores), so the may have played other songs. But in addition to the two songs mention, stand out songs (to me) were Mid-Life Krysis, Beautiful Occupation, Side and Sing, Writing to Reach You, and As You Are. They closed the show with Turn, preceded by The Humpty Dumpty Love Song. I'll always remember the performance of first verse of The Humpty Dumpty Love Song ... when the lyric "You got the glue" came through for the first time my appreciation for the song went through the roof. Listening to the song on the CD I never realized the tightrope Fran walks lyrically through the first verse: balancing quaintness and a potential disaster of triteness to the chorus where "You got the glue" makes the song (when I could have just broken it in half). There were a couple of disappointing parts to the night. Beautiful Occupation made me sad not only because it made me think of young people dying, but I was disappointed that an American audience treated it like any other song. That leads into the next point: There were a lot of people there treating the show like an N'SYNC concert. Screaming at a couple of points would have been OK. Screaming the whole night? I don't know. I didn't realize that Travis crowds were like that. But on the whole, this was one of the better shows I've ever been to. I can count the shows I would consider "clearly better" on one hand (maybe a couple of fingers of the second). Travis is safely in that group right below what I consider the spectacular shows I've been to (stuff like Radiohead, or White Stripes/Yeah Yeah Yeahs on the same bill). The best part: The band was cool. They interacted a ton with the crowd, and I could tell all of the personal stories people have told about them are true. Their tour bus was parked right outside, and I could see that, for the post-show celebration, the band prefers Foster's, Diet Coke and Sprite :)

OK ... I'm off! I can see the line outside the theater. Just enough time to grab a couple of beer pre-show. Peace the fack out.

NO SPOILERS BELOW Win a Date With Tad Hamilton! A Pretentious Review Let's not avoid the obvious: How does this movie compare to The Butterfly Effect (TBE)? Even though Grace shows us the same on-screen charm that made him one of the unsung stars of Traffic as well as the anchor of their TV show (That 70's Show), this movie is nothing compared to Kutcher's. But TBE, though very good, is "just" an above-average movie - what a movie experience should be. How bad is a movie if it's "nothing" compared to that? It has to be bad. Really bad. It has to be painfully bad in a way that makes you question how it could have possibly looked any better as a screenplay. That's how bad Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! (Tad) is. It's painful. You wonder why the movie was made, why the actors accepted their roles, and why the production company didn't just cut their losses at some point. Overstating the case? Possibly. Maybe in a few months I'll be able to make a better evaluation. Where TBE was humble in its production and performance, confident that the story was enough to carry the viewer though, the insecurities of Tad are evident from the beginning. The opening credit sequence features glamourized eighties tech-pop music over animated shots of Tad Hamilton. Though it tries to establish Tad's celebrity, it becomes redundant when the opening scene features an audience viewing one of his movies. Wouldn't that have been enough to establish his star? The sequence ends up being trite, a quality that's pervasive throughout the movie. Two minutes after the sequence ends, Kate Bosworth's character is sighing wantingly during the credit sequence of a Hamilton movie. Nevermind that her character is about 8-10 years too old to be your cookie cutter New Kids fan-derivative: It fits in perfectly with her Piggly Wiggly, living with her loving father in West Virginia world. All of these cliches are etablished over the first three minutes, a relatively slow pace compared to the rest of the movie. What is the movie about? Rosalee Futch (Bosworth) wins a date with Tad Hamilton (Josh Duhamel), a hunky, young Hollywood actor whose management team organizes a online blind-date contest to clean up his party-boy imagine. Flown out to Los Angeles from West Virgina, Rosalee finds that despite living in a fast-paced, glamourous world, Hamilton is wholesome enough to appeal to her small town values. Oh yeah: He's really good looking. After a date which includes vomiting in a limosuine and taking out a retainer at the table, Hamilton sees something in Rosalee's values that brings clarity to his confusing world. He flies back to West Virginia to get away from his big city troubles. Soon he's fallen in love with Rosalee. It doesn't hurt that she's also really good looking. But back in West Virginia there's Pete (Topher Grace), Rosalee's superior at the Piggly Wiggly (yes, the Piggly Wiggly), her after hours drinking buddy, and an unrequited love. Rosalee's trip to Los Angeles, along with Pete's impending departure for college, motivates Pete to seize the relationship he's always wanted. Obstensibly inferior to Hollywood Tad, his passive courting of Rosalee sets up the movie's love triangle. No, really. What is the movie about? It is about an old Hollywood formula given another spin. This movie is Sabrina: Grace plays Linus; Duhamel plays David; Bosworth plays Sabrina. Just as in this formula's other incarnations, there's a flimsy ediface that creates the love triangle, but in the end it's the same question: Packaging or content. The main problem with this incarnation is there's little to no effort the develop the ediface. A great supporting cast is put to waste with pedestrain dialogue and undeveloped (or non-existent) secondary storylines. Why you would like this movie: Grace, Nathan Lane, Sean Hayes, and Ginnifer Goodwin all give charming performances. Each time one of them would come on scene my hope for the movie would suddenly regain a faint pulse. But these four don't carry much screen time, and although Duhamel is fine as Tad Hamilton, the rest of the cast isn't strong enough to carry the film through it's short comings. Why you wouldn't like this movie: You have a pulse. Bosworth is out of her element. At this point in her career she's not a lead performer. True, she was the lead in Blue Crush, but that movie did not require anybody to carry the film. The surfing was the lead performer. Here, Bosworth doesn't do enough to portray the conflict of her situation or the awkwardness of Pete suddenly playing for her affections. This movie lacked imagination in every element except some of the acting. The direction is trite. The shots are canned. The writing is cliched. The idea is wrong. Overall On my 1 to 9, this movie gets a 3-, and I am having a difficult time justifying rating it so high. This was the worst movie I've seen in eight months. I felt patronized walking out of the theater. It is as if the producers said "Let's get a bunch of young, good looking stars and put them in a love-triangle movie. "That should sell." If this movie continues to tank, we should all be better off for it. Feel free to give me feedback on what you've read above. I post because I want to talk about the movie as well as improve my writing skills. Feel free to send me a PM.

Two and a half hours until doors open! I'm starting to get excited. I've listen to 12 Memories at least 8 times today.

That's where the pocket/purse sized Jagermeister comes in handy. Yes, sir. There's nothing like that jolt of Jagermeister on a Monday morning.

Yeah ... I think the song is fun. Clearly she's not trying to make high art.

I'm getting psyched up. I'm listening to 12 Memories right now. "Mid-Life Krysis" might be my favorite song on the album because I love the harmony of the chorus.