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Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me

Ooh! New Accordion! / Ooh! Newly Married!

It’s a Silvetta 60-bass piano accordion, which is much smaller and lighter than my other ones. It’s perfect for schlepping to conferences, like the one I’m attending right now, as it’s easier to carry and fits very well within just about every plane’s overhead compartment:

Joey deVilla in his "steampunk" outfit with his new accordion

Oh, the “Phileas Fogg” outfit is from Cory Doctorow’s wedding, which took place yesterday. It was a little bit magic show, a little bit Alice in Wonderland, a little bit steampunk and a whole lot of fun. Mazel tov, Alice and Cory!

Here’s a photo of Danny O’Brien and me flanking the happy groom:

Danny O'Brien, Cory Doctorow and Joey deVilla at Cory's wedding

I’ll post more photos from the wedding later.

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It Happened to Me

Leaving for L.A.

Old comic panel: "Now the fun begins!"
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

I leave for L.A. at a reasonable time this morning and land at 11:00 Pacific, after which I shall check into my hotel and scurry down to the Los Angeles Convention Center to catch the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2008. It won’t be all geeky stuff, and I’m bringin’ the new travel sized red accordion with me.

The geeky stuff will get posted on my tech blog, Global Nerdy, while the more slice-of-life stuff will get posted here on Accordion Guy.

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It Happened to Me

Warming Up for PDC2008

PDC Bingo card and gang signs

I leave for Los Angeles tomorrow to attend Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference (a.k.a. PDC2008). It’s typically the conference where Microsoft makes major tech announcements. I’ll be posting a slice-of-life travel diary here on the Accordion Guy blog, while the geekier stuff will end up in my tech blog, Global Nerdy, where they’re tagged PDC2008.

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Uncategorized

From my Misspent Youth: “Since Yesterday” by Strawberry Switchblade

This song, which I’d forgotten about, just popped up on my speakers thanks to “random shuffle” and I thought I’d share it with you. It’s a cute little synthpop track from 1985 called Since Yesterday by Strawberry Switchblade, who had the “Gothic Lolita” look at least a full decade before the Japanese invented the subculture.

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In the News

If You’re Throwing a Hallowe’en Party…

…you might want to include this with your invitations. The U.S. election campaign is giving hallowe’en-ers a lazy costume option; use this notice to head them off at the pass:

Sarah Palin costumes are strictly forbidden on these premises
Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

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Uncategorized

They Know Their Market

The folks at the Las Vegas tourism site Vegas.com have done their homework. They understand that a large number of people who come to visit fall into a very special demographic:

"Are you a douchebag?" promo at Vegas.com

Yup, it’s real. If you go to vegas.com/douchebag, you’ll hit their page catering to the douchebag demographic — those guys who “love clubbing in Vegas, sleeping 8 guys to 1 room, and spray-on tans” and constantly refer to each other as “bro”. They’ve set up a Twitter account you can follow, as well as a “Vegas Douchebag” page on MySpace.

[Found via The Triumph of Bullshit.]

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Uncategorized

Oddball Book on Drinking Your Own Pee

Front cover of the book "Auto-Urine Therapy"
Original photo taken by “counterclockwise”.
Click the image to see it on its Flickr page.

“Auto-urine therapy” is just a nicer way of saying “drinking your own pee”, which some people believe has healthful effects. There are a number of famous people who tried auto-urine therapy for health reasons: Gandhi did it, as did Idi Amin, Steve McQueen, Keith Richards and Jim Morrison. You know what they have in common? They’re all dead!

(Some of you might say “Wait a minute — Keith Richards isn’t dead! I suggest that you take a look at the photo of Mr. Richards below:

Keith Richards

Whatever that is, that ain’t what I’d call “alive”.)

The front cover of the book Auto-Urine Therapy (shown at the top of this article), while amusing, is nowhere near as entertaining as the back cover:

Back cover of the book "Auto-Urine Therapy"
Original photo taken by “counterclockwise”.
Click the image to see it on its Flickr page.

The text on the back cover is filled with unintentional hilarity, such as refering to urine as “salubrious water”, but the best line of all is:

If we can drink the urine of cows, why can’t we drink our own urine?

I said the same thing at age 8 to freak out any gullible classmate who was drinking milk in the lunchroom. Clearly the book’s author (or perhaps the publisher) is missing the whole idea of what it means to be a mammal.

Recommended Reading

The Urine Cure and Other Curious Medical Treatments is a brief history of urine as a curative. It includes excerpts from the pamphlet Urine-Therapy: It May Save Your Life.