Dean Christakos

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February 15, 2007

The Mooney Suzuki Plays at the 9:30 Club

Wednesday night, The Mooney Suzuki played a Valentine's Day show at The 9:30 Club. I first became acquainted with the band when they played at MIT's Steer Roast back in 2001. Now, like many college parties, a bunch of loud, low-quality bands show up, but The Mooney Suzuki was distinctive in that they were pretty good, leading me to turn to the partygoer next to me and ask, "Who are these guys?" It wasn't until last night that I finally got a chance to see them live again.

The audience was small, owing in part to the bad weather, but the band was enthusiastic, nevertheless, and the lead singer made sure to keep the audience excited. And then there was the bald guy standing in back jumping up and down in time to the music and screaming.

They played a lot of familiar songs and then announced that they had a new album which would be released as soon as they found a new label to take over from their now-defunct label that they had been previously signed to. By the time they played their encore to a group of cheering fans, it was easy to forget that they were playing to a sparse house and that the streets outside were cold and deserted.

Also, I ended up running into Chris Kamsch again, lead singer of Dingleberry Dynasty who I first encountered back in October at the Beatallica show at the Rock and Roll Hotel.

Posted by Dean at 11:17 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

February 13, 2007

On Watches

The finest watch that $50 can buy in Chinatown, New York City

I have never been impressed with pricey watches. I mean, I appreciate the idea of them as basically the only piece of jewelry that a man will typically wear. Also, as an engineer, I find the mechanical intricacies of timekeeping to be pretty fascinating. I'm sure in a pre-computer age, I would be excited about the prospect of being a watchmaker. At the same time, it's almost always hard for me to be impressed by something that just tells the time and just has a rolling 31-day numerical display to indicate the day of the month. Part of the issue is that I've grown up in the age of computers. Writing my own calendar program that can calculate the correct date for the next 400 years by getting the leap-year calculations correct is fairly easy (leap year every four years, except on years divisible by 100 but not by 400). I mean, I figure if I'm going to spend big money on a watch, it at least needs to be able to tell me something that I could calculate with a few lines of code, right?

When I was in high school, my father bought me Citizen watch (similar to this one, but less expensive, as I remember). It had no problem being in the water, dealing with sports activities, or just about anything else that a teenager puts it through, and I never took it off (ever-- I showered with it until I realized that the soap was corroding the plastic strap, forcing me to replace it fairly often). It told the day of the week and the month, and I figured when I was older, I would get one with more advanced timekeeping abilities. I ended up losing it, unfortunately, during the move from California to Cambridge back in 1998. Really, was it too much to expect that if I were going to spend more than $100 on a watch, it should be able to do more than a watch I owned as a teenager and cost half as much was able to do? This watch looks almost exactly the same, but doesn't even tell the day of the week-- and costs almost $5000.

I found out, however, that trying to get a (non-digital) watch that tells the month as well as the day and the date is almost impossible. Well, it is possible, but it will cost thousands and thousands of dollars. I'm not impressed. Ok, I'm a little impressed, but not tens of thousands of dollars impressed.

Posted by Dean at 12:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 7, 2007

Reasons to hate DC #27593463

Apparently the pipes of DC-area apartment buildings are unable to handle the cold combined with a couple inches of snow, and when they burst at 3:45 AM, it sets off the fire alarm, sending hundreds of residents evacuating into the cold before the fire department assures us that nothing serious is amiss.

Also, even though the weather really isn't that cold, lame jokes about "Well just how cold is it?" are being made in the Washington Post.

Posted by Dean at 3:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack