So I was looking through some weblogs on my lunchbreak and stumbled over a fansite for a Canadian band I always loved back in the day, one my buddy Pat turned me on to our freshman year of college: The Pursuit Of Happiness. There’s a ton of info on there about Moe and the gals; even better, there’s an MP3 archive of live shows from the mid-90’s. Interesting trivia: right after producing the beautiful Skylarking with XTC, Todd Rundgren was paired up with TPOH to produce Love Junk—two of my favorite albums.

Salon has an article on the new Matrix sequels and the change in atmosphere since the first movie was released, back in 1999. Yeah, I’d have to say things are much different now.

Cleansing, Part Two: One of the drawbacks to owning a house in the city is the hassle of parking your car two blocks away from your house. Growing up in the ‘burbs, we were always blessed with houses where the driveways were long and wide, and you could leave your car wide open with the radio on for the afternoon while you emptied the back seat of all the fast-food wrappers, gym socks, and soda cans you had been lugging around. Nowadays, by the time I get home, the last thing I want to do is pull up out in front of the house and clean out the Tortoise. Therefore, the trunk of my car has resembled the floor of a crack den. Today I backed up to the Dumpster behind my office and took ten minutes to sort through the debris:

• Fifteen bungie cords, in various conditions
• Two teal bath towels inherited from my Mom, used to clean car parts
• Two homemade speaker cabinets with 6×9 Infinity drivers pinched from a repo car in ’88 (dumped)
• Various cans of car-resuscitation fluid (starter, brake, oil, etc.)
• Several sheets of paper from the MVA warning me that my car is suspended for a broken taillight (gotta get that worked out.)
• One fire extinguisher reading “empty”; it lied, ’cause that white stuff shot about twenty feet
• One rusty, broken umbrella (dumped)
• Two Slim Jims—not the food-product kind, the Grand Theft Auto kind (hidden)
• One plastic go-cup (dumped)
• A fleece blanket from Mom, for the day when the car plunges off a snowy cliff and I am pinned in the wreckage; nevermind that it will be locked in the trunk
• The plastic safety panel from the top of my radiator
• Two ancient highway flares, dangerous and waiting to burst into flame directly over my gas tank
• A $12 set of standard Popular Mechanics ratchets (like I’m gonna leave the Snap-Ons in the trunk, are you kidding?)