The Cure at the E-Center

Warning: this might be considered an extremelly geeky entry.


Last Friday we went to see The Cure with Megan, Matias, and Emily. It was pretty good. I didn't like it as much as the Curiosa festival they did a couple years ago at Usana, but it was pretty good. The concert lasted three hours, and by the end Robert Smith said something like "Sorry, my voice is gone." It's hard to tell. I've never been able to understand him...

I haven't followed the band for a while, and the first thing I noticed when the concert started was that there was a different guitar player, that he was bald and that he was wearing shiny leather pants, high heels boots, and a fish net shirt. There was no keyboard, just bass, drums, guitar (the bald guy), and the second guitar by Robert Smith. The instrumentation made it so the songs sounded pretty similar to each other, and the songs from the techno era, such as "The Walk," sounded kind of weird. It was also somewhat disappointing that Robert was changing the older songs' melody, and in some of them he didn't even seem to be trying to get them right.

Overall the concert was really good. Not too many new songs, which was good. It was a pleasant surprise that they played songs from the first and second album (Boys Don't Cry, 10:15 Saturday Night, Killing an Arab, Jumping Someone Else's Train, etc.).

After I got home, I did some research, and I figured out that the bald guy was the old guitar player, Porl Thompson. I always thought that the good Cure albums (Disintegration, Wish, etc.) were good thanks to him, but now he's back, and their new songs still suck. I'm confused now.

I tried to record the concert, but it was so loud that the recording was ruined, even when I was holding my thumb to the microphone. But I did a quick search on YouTube and found a bunch of videos of the concert. This is my favorite. It isn't the complete song, but you can see the bald guy with the high heels pretty clearly:

Home Owners Protection

A couple of weeks ago I received a call from a guy trying to sell me some home owners protection. Apparently we had that for free when we bought the house, but, after a year, you need to renew it and start paying for it.
I knew I wouldn’t get along with this guy when he opened with “well, we sent you a renewal letter a while ago, and we still haven’t received an answer. What’s up with that?” I asked him what was he talking about, and he briefly explained it, which still left me with a lot of questions. “So, is this like insurance?” I asked, to what he answered, very, very slowly, and with a very exaggerated intonation “Well, this is called hoooome-ooow-nerrrss-proo-teeeeeec-tion.” After a few more questions, and once I realized that the guy wasn’t going to give me any really useful information, I asked “so, how much is this?” At the time of my question, the guy was explaining me for the fifth time that the protection wasn’t an insurance, and that if you have a car you need to have insurance anyway (I still can’t connect that to his overall speech), and he didn’t like the interruption, so he told me “if you don’t let me finish, sir, I will hang up on you” (!!!!). No need to explain that right after that I had to hang up on him.

After that, I called my loan guy to ask him if that protection was really necessary and/or important, but he was out of town, so I left a message and a week later he called back and left a message on my phone that went something like this “Hello Manuel, this is *so and so* returning your call. I just came back to town. We were in Disneyland. We had a wonderful time, by the way. Please call me back to …”

After thinking it through, I don’t think I’m getting the home owners protection.

Half Marathon + Living Traditions

Last Saturday was pretty interesting. Megan ran her half marathon, and she did it within her goal time of two hours (her time was 1:59!).

Later that day we went to the Living Traditions festival in Salt Lake. We didn’t see much, because we got there at 7:00 pm, but we got to see “Son de Madera,” a cool Mexican band that played some kind of traditional music (I don’t know what’s called, but it sounds just like the music from the movie Frida). They were really good.


At 8:00, once they were done, we wanted to go to see the mariachi band playing in the other stage, but nobody else wanted to go, and we didn’t want to separate, so we just stayed and saw the Irish band that was playing there. I wanted to post a video of them, just to make Geoffrey jealous (the band consisted of two guys, one playing the guitar, and one playing the concertina, and he was really good), but I didn't bring my camera, and couldn't find it on you tube. Dang it.

Why We Like Ogden

Well, people may know O-Town for the crime (our own Ogden Trece Gang made it to a National Geographic show. Yeeeh!), for our crazy people, because the police here are actually busy, etc. But all is not bad in Ogden. Things are clearing up. We have indoor sky diving and surfing now. How many other towns can claim that, huh??

But besides that, Ogden is a town with a lot of history, and the Union Station is an example of the cool architecture that can be found here.

And if you go to downtown, east of Washington Boulevard, you'll see the coolest houses and buildings. I tell you, one day we'll end up there!
What I like the most about these houses is that they have a lot of personality. They are not those cookie-cutter new houses that you see popping everywhere now. A few blocks from our house there is a whole neighborhood of new mansions, they are huge, but they all look pretty much the same. I probably wouldn't pass the opportunity to live in one of those, though :), but if I had to choose, that Russian looking house up there looks pretty awesome to me...

Hulu: Pure Awesomeness

A while ago in The Business they did a brief report on new video websites, and one of the sites mentioned was Hulu, a site with complete TV shows series. They have tons of them, from new ones, such as "My Name Is Earl" and "30 Rock," to old classics, such as "A-Team," and "Airwolf."

They also have some weird stuff, such as something called "Tostitos Fiesta Bowl" (my ignorance might give away my profound foreignness here) and "Victoria Beckham: Coming to America." Pure randomness right there.

But they not only have TV shows, they also have a really cool selection of movies. You are not going to find any "Citizen Kane" there though. I noted that they seem to specialize in the old horror B-Movie genre, and you can find really cool titles such as "Attack of the Puppet People," "PumpkinHead," and "The Comedy of Terrors;" but they also have some newer stuff, such as the always beloved (mostly by people who are not like you and me) "Ms. Sunshine," "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry," and such.

The site has tons of ads. Not pop-ups, though, but lots of commercials in the shows themselves, which you can't skip. The Business, on a new news update on the website, said that all the commercial spots on the website were filled, and they might be opening even more, which means more interruptions during the viewing. And that may get annoying, but hey, it's free, and I'm all about free junk! All I need now is more time to watch this stuff...