Thursday, July 27, 2006, 15:28
Section: Virginia Tech
The ’50s B-movie style invasion of black widows around our house has made me nostalgiac for parts of the country not beset by spiders that can send you to the hospital, especially Blacksburg, and this blog was pointed out to me when I was trying to remember the name of an Italian restaurant owned by a fraternity brother.
The restaurant appears to be gone now (and replaced by Mike’s Grill), but while a lot of Blacksburg has clearly changed, a lot of it is still the same as when I went to Virginia Tech and then later lived in town and worked for the News Messenger.
I remember mooching food money to eat the bargain-but-awesome homemade macaroni and cheese at Macado’s with my pledge brothers, hanging out with the artsy crowd at the Cellar, mumblemumblemumble in Radford, eating very generic Mexican food at El Rodeo, howling at the moon outside PK’s (and every other bar in town) with Kris, eating at Souvlaki’s regularly with Kathy and ordering Backstreets a million times over, from my first week in West Eggleston through right before I left town for my second newspaper job (I miss their strombolis something fierce). There’s also a lot of new restaurants there I don’t recognize, but which look good. (Most notably, Cajun food!)
And damn, Blacksburg now has even more places to play NTN! I can’t find any place like that around Hesperia.
And, notably, no black widow spiders in any of the pictures.
Thursday, July 27, 2006, 13:39
Section: Miscellany
To cut back on the spam, the blog is now set to hold for moderation any posts that don’t include a name and e-mail address. (E-mail addresses are not visible to anyone other than me, once the post is approved.) After that, you should only be held for moderation the first time you post here (and are moderated and approved) or if you use any spam key words (you can make a good guess at what these are).
If you’ve been hitting lots of moderation, this should fix it. If it still doesn’t, try registering with the site and log in before posting (this is obviously only for regular posters) and that should let you automatically post after the first time approval.
I apologize for any inconvenience caused and love getting feedback here.
I grew up overseas for much of my formative years — five years of middle school and high school, returning for 11th and 12th grade in the foreign country of America — and it’s rare that I encounter anyone who seems to understand the life.
This week, NPR is doing a series by a former Foreign Service wife talking in detail about what it means to be in the diplomatic corps. While her experience doesn’t directly mirror my family’s — she and her subjects tended to be in more Third World locations than we were — it’s otherwise very much in synch with my memories:
Wednesday, July 26, 2006, 17:08
Section: Miscellany
I suppose it should have been no surprise after we found our cats, Lucky and Hanna, through a pet search engine, but I just stumbled across one for tattoo designs. Neat.
While it’s always interesting watching Zayra Alvarez insist that, no, she really is good in the face of absolute bafflement on the part of the audience and open disdain on the part of Supernova (in a car wreck sort of way), and while her costumes are increasingly interesting — where the heck do you even get an astronaut/stripper Spandex costume? — her off-key singing has gone from amusingly messy to just irritating.
Likewise, Jill’s groupie-with-a-good-voice thing is getting kind of embarassing.
Four weeks in, Rock Star: Supernova is pretty clearly four-to-five finalists and a bunch of mediocre people whom cutting is really just a formality. Lukas, Storm, Dilana (great to see her do a great ballad like that this week) and Toby really have almost nothing to worry about.
And I could so clearly be the biggest rock star in Iceland.
A low-bandwidth Storm Large fansite (apparently 10 or so fansites were crashed when she told Navarro to Google her and she became the #12-most-searched for thing on Google) that includes MP3s of her live shows over the years. I particularly recommend the Live at the Sweetwater Saloon concert, which is 90 minutes of good music and potty mouthed attitude.
