Deafness Is Imminent

I’m leaving work early to catch Nine Inch Nails in Greenville. I’ve listened to this band since my senior year of high school 16 years ago. I’m one of the diehards buying every CD, including the remixes and live concert recordings. Whereas most folks I knew back then leaned toward Nirvana, Guns N Roses, and Pearl Jam, I went for NIN. Your Sister is going too. I corrupted her with NIN CDs about two years ago. Turns out, she originally liked NIN’s first song, “Head Like A Hole,” without knowing who sung it. This will be the first concert we’ve seen since Sting and Annie Lennox played Charlotte in 2004. It will also be the first hard rock show I think she’s ever been to. Loverboy doesn’t count, I don’t care who says otherwise. I picked up hunter-quality earplugs at Wal-Mart this weekend. I don’t expect to have a voice when I go back to work Friday.

Gas prices are going whacky again. Since the beginning of March, prices have gone up 33 cents including a 12-cent jump overnight.

The alt-weekly website came back, which makes me think it was an administrative foul-up.

I again stunned Your Sister with a "Jeopardy" answer. The last question asked us to name a native Hawaiian mammal of the order Chiroptera. Once again, comic books told me the answer: bats. Thank you, Batman, Batgirl, Man-Bat, Bat-Mite, and Ace the Bathound.

Picture of the Day
In order to garner a larger audience, the Weinstein Company is packaging their Transamerca DVD with a lenticular cover photo. It changes as you turn the case in your hands. But the original photo of Oscar-nominee Felicity Huffman shows her all dolled up to the nines. She never looks this way in the film. She always appears as she does on the right of the photo, in character as a transsexual. At best, this polarizes the audience into two camps: 1) the gang that says “wow, look at her hag it up for the role;” and 2) the gang that says “wait, where’s the hot blonde? REFUND!”

In the news
Iraq has a new parliament. They were all sworn in, and then they promptly went back home.

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Bush reaffirmed his first-strike policy against enemy nations, and one has to think this was meant for Iran’s ears.

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Star Wars producer Rick McCallum says the upcoming “Star Wars” TV series would run at least 100 episodes. Given modern network scheduling, that would take about five years. The series would allegedly cover the years between Sith and New Hope.

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The University of Alaska-Fairbanks won the NCAA rifle championship. This is their seventh win in eight years. But the real story is that the Army and Navy teams came in third and fourth. The armed forces are getting trounced by hunters.

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An Ozarks family lost a home to a tornado on Sunday night. One hundred Amish neighbors rebuilt the whole thing within 15 hours.