Boston » That Not So Fresh Feeling

Earthquake, Hurricanes, and Castles. Oh My!

Aug 282011

Monday: Arrive in Edinburgh. Forget that the city is built on bridges. Spend 45 minutes walking around (actually, over) our hotel until I realize I’m a moron. Also, didn’t realize ahead of time that the reason it was so expensive to stay in the city is that there’s a massive festival going on.

Tuesday: Go off to explore the city. Check Twitter at the hotel and realize that the East Coast got hit with an earthquake. Wonder if anything fell down at our place? (Nope.) Taste a bunch of different scotch whiskys. Awesome. I’m particular to the Islays and Speysides.

From the castle

Wednesday: Climb Arthur’s Seat, wearing neither the right shoes nor the proper clothing. Still pretty awesome. Eat a very very good lamb burger.

Steps to Arthur's Seat

Thursday: More random city exploring, including a visit to the very cool Camera Obscura and the National Museum of Scotland.

From the top of the Camera Obscura Building

Friday: We grab a tour across Scotland to Stirling Castle and Loch Katrine. It rains (first time on the whole trip it really rained). When we get home, we realize that Hurricane Irene is going to make our lives miserable (i.e. our flight was already canceled). Make a billion dollar phone call to Delta and get our flights switched to Saturday, rather than Sunday.

Cool

Saturday: Get to the airport very very early. Which turns out to be a blessing, as they can’t find our reservation. An hour or so of phone calls and computer wizardry gets us on our flight to Paris, but rather than a 1 hour layover, we’ve now got a 7 hour layover. And what is probably the last flight to Boston.

Sunday: Slept in my own bed. Turns out Hurricane Irene is all bluster. Some leaves down, some rain, but a pretty quiet day of photo uploading, laundry, and detox. And this blather.

Why I Laughed at the Phantom Gourmet Dude Working the Mall Kiosk

Boston, Food No Responses »

Feb 212011

Around Christmas time, I was shopping in the Burlington Mall and saw one of the Andelman brothers working their little Phantom Gourmet booth shilling coupon books. And I laughed. Mostly because I imagined the internal thought process being something like “I’m a TV star, why do I have to work in a mall with these…plebians,”, but also a little bit “Ha. What a racket. Sell coupons to the restaurants you review on TV.”

Well, here’s another reason to laugh at them.

Mike Andelman: We walk in and the hostess who’s the typical hot woman, rude, cold- as-ice, never would talk to me in high school-type girl…So she goes, “Two?”, and I said yes, and she looks at us and says, “I’m sorry, we’re not open until 5:30, so there’s nothing I can do.”

Dan Andelman: And what time was this at?

Mike: 5:05.

Eddie Andelman: It was about 5:10.

<snip>

Mike: And it’s not like this was 8pm on a Saturday night. It’s 5 o’clock, and guess what, if the owner of Grill 23 was standing next to this dumb hostess, this moronic hostess who was just getting her, uh, jollies off by sticking to the rules of her little brochure in a little binder, this little monkey, her only job is to look at this binder and say don’t let people in ‘till 5:30…

Dan: Although in her defense she was good-looking apparently. I’d like to see a picture. Was she wearing yoga pants? These are things I want to know. I have a thing for hostesses.

Mike: There’s not a hostess who’s not good-looking, because they’re incompetent and can’t do anything else in life. If you can’t model, when you’re good-looking enough and not tall enough to model, you stand behind a little box and say, How many?

Jesus. What enormous tools.

(Via Server Not Servant.)

I’m out of words …

Boston No Responses »

Jan 312011

So here are some pictures:

(from WHDH)

(from Boston.com)

(from me)

6 Weeks of Concerts, 8 Minutes of Video

Boston, Music No Responses »

Aug 152010

Apologies in advance for the pedestrian entry. It’s about 2 weeks late and I would have had more to say if I had written this more real-time. Instead, you get a video. So, that’s cool.

Over the past few weeks (about 6, to be exact), we’ve been had a nice run of concerts. First, we had a bill of We Were Promised Jetpacks (best name in music) and Tokyo Police Club (one of the best names in music) at Royale in Boston.

I’d been a bit turned off over the past couple of months at shows, as the crowds had gotten decidedly disinterested in the music and interested in chatting it up and being seen (which is why a place like TT the Bear’s is nice — no one goes there to “be seen”). This was show was better — it was a random Thursday night, school was over, so it wasn’t a scene. It was just a few hundred people who liked the bands there to check them out. Both were spot on.

Then, a few weeks later, we hit up Bank of America Pavilion (probably my second least favorite place to see a show) to see Arcade Fire. Arcade Fire, at the time, were probably the only band I really love that I’d never seen live. They didn’t disappoint. Just a spectacle from beginning to end, only tempered by the fact that BoA Pavilion is such a craptastic venue.

Finally, a few days after that, we checked out Interpol at House of Blues. They played a nice mix of older stuff and stuff off the new album (which sounded pretty good). Interpol isn’t a hugely dynamic band (especially compared to Arcade Fire), but it was a good crowd and Interpol seemed to feed off it and really ripped into things.

Anyway, after all that, I decided I wanted to screw around and learn iMovie a bit. So, for your pleasure, here’s four bands and probably 5.5 hours of music cut down to 8 minutes.