unbuckled is next thursday, june 30th. black cat backstage, 9pm. we've put a lot of work into prepping this show, so it would mean a lot to me if you came out. tickets are only $7, there'll be giveaways, and good live music. plus drunk catherine. frankly, i should charge for drunk catherine alone. so come on out, or i'll stay sober for the rest of my life.

Am I the only person who hasn't heard of Blank of the Day? Well, if not, go check it out. I think you'll agree it's pretty funny. Well, if you're the kind of person who thinks facetious articles about videogame hardware specifications are funny. Which I pretty clearly am.

But this is the real reason I want to link to them. They're holding a contest to engineer a new bad joke for use in Slashdot threads. This is such an pointless, overthought, juvenile, and impossibly geeky project that I'm starting to worry that the idea was somehow stolen from me without my ever having thought of it.

And the winner gets a pink Nintendo DS! Score.

just in case you have a few thousand extra dollars to spend and are itching to go hiking in exotic locales, the new york times travel section points you towards a few destinations that should fit the bill. i enjoyed this article because we hiked one of of the spots that they recommend - the gran paradiso park in northeast italy, and it truly was one of the more magnificent trips i've been on. the article ain't shitting you when it says the landscape is about as sound of music-ish as one can get.

the times recommends you do this with a group that'll run you $1,500, but i suggest following our model:

1. take train, bus, and walk your ass off for several hours to get to random italian alpine town.
2. kind of start off without any idea of where you're going; pick up trail off street behind dumpster.
3. walk for several hours amongst the most beautiful scenery you've ever scene; nearly die because you are hauling ass behind your eagle-scout-boyfriend and rabidly determined psycho hiker friend.
4. reach a crest that looks exactly like the photo from the nytimes article:

5. check in at the awesome rifugio tuckett that looks like part of the mountain; eat best alpine meal of your life (think huge glasses of beer, massive bowls of stew, delicious grilled austrian sausages, all while adorable random kittens, apparently owned by the dude who takes care of the rifugio, come visit you); look out over beautiful scenery; think this is best day of life, etc.
6. go to sleep with half a dozen of your closest friends in cute little bunkbed-ed room. could this day have been any better?
7. realize one of your half a dozen closest friends is n., who is the loveliest person alive, but who is also NOISIEST SNORER IN THE WORLD
8. two hours later, throw wadded up socks at n.'s face. no response.
9. consider killing n. and throwing her body over the mountain crest. whisper this to other people in room. all agree.
10. do not kill n. due to weak human nature. spend rest of night sleepless in semi-psychotic state. hate mountains. hate nature. hate hiking. worst idea ever. consider finding previously mentioned cute kitten and stuffing it up n.'s nose.
11. watch sunlight start streaming in room; realize there IS NO SHOWER AT RIFUGIO TUCKETT; realize you have four more hours of hiking, a three hour bus ride and two hour train ride home; consider rolling around in alpine snow outside to get semi-clean and get out of sleepless zombie mindframe.
12. leave rifugio tuckett in thorougly rabid state.
13. hike home different way than you came; see most beautiful series of waterfalls in the entire world, many more alpine fields dotted with flowers, snowcapped mountains, etc; fall on butt while crossing stream and don't even care because everything around you in so lovely and you want to go leaping through the fields singing "the hills are alive" at the top of your voice.
14. take 17 million hours to get back home to milan. airconditionless train gets stuck right outside of stazione centrale while you wilt and die and sweat and stink for 45 minutes.
15. can't wait to do it again.

don't forget to come out to bluestate tonight at saint-ex! it's kyle's birthday (well, technically yesterday it was) and we can expect to hear several hours of OASIS. joy! (just kidding. happy birthday dj leafblower!)

things i've been enjoying/not enjoying over the past couple of weeks, squeezed down into bite-sized assessments for your reading pleasure:

-brendan benson's the alternative to love. fun, retro-sounding, shiny good power pop. at least the first half of the album. the second half, for some unfortunate reason, comes to a grinding halt and enters the realm of total premeditated crap that sounds like pete yorn but somehow even more formulaic. but the first five songs - pure pop goodness. you can download "the alternative to love" here and you can watch the video for "spit it out" here. my favorite is really "pledge of allegiance," and i've got an mp3 for it at home, but can't find it on the internets right now.

-"mr. and mrs. smith." this movie wasn't half bad, but i thought it could have used a) more rocket launchers and b) more sex. and c) more assassin scenes, because the two scenes where jolie and pitt go off to kill their respective bad guys are pretty kickass. there's a good amount of humor laced through the film, but otherwise i found it kind of clunky. and weirdly slow-paced. definitely not as good as "the bourne identity."

-"batman begins." i really liked this movie. i don't have any comic book baggage, and i barely remember the tim burton movies, so i had no basis for comparison, which might have affected how i saw it. but i thought it was great. the first 1/3 moved slowly for me - the part where christian bale is off at that ridiculous asian boot training camp - but i thought it picked up as soon as michael caine and morgan freeman came into the picture, and as soon as bale was allowed to inject bits of humor into his delivery. cillian murphy as the scarecrow was weirdly fascinating, and i didn't want to rip katie holme's always-twisted mouth off, though she was certainly the weakest actor in the whole thing. my main beef was the fight and chase scenes - i thought they were shot too dark, too close and too fast for anybody to get a good sense of what was going on.
UPDATE: it is with much glee that i discovered that katie holmes has been dropped from the "batman begins" sequel while everybody else has been signed. suck it, scientology.

-the irving penn exhibit at the national gallery. totally fantastic! i just wished they'd had more posters for sale. the only one they had was this one, which i like, but was so straightfoward compared to most of the other stuff.