Here's a picture from my Harry Potter and the Book 7 Party Adventure tale, where I played the role of Captain Karikas the out-of-place Pirate. Click the image for a full Flickr stream!



Man, this was a fun weekend. One of those weekends where you're happy to be in Seattle if you've lived here for a significant portion of your life.

Friday was the 100th anniversary of Pike Place Market, the well-known fish-and-et-cetera market downtown on the waterfront. Love the place. Anyway, they had all sorts of local acts playing at laid-back concert there, people from Pearl Jam and Presidents of the USA, amongst many others. But, the moment came later.

The lead singer for Visqueen, accompanied by Artis the Spoonman, performed the song "Spoonman" by local 90s great Soundgarden (actually written about this particular Spoonman). That was oozing with Seattleness. As Alice and I kept watching from our cement vendor booth in the market (the real vendor had left) we noticed down below that Circus Contraption, my über favorite local circus group, was unloading their stuff from their performance that night back into their Budget rental truck (that's how you roll when you're low on funds in Seattle).

Finally, an SPD horse policeman was riding upon his steed, which seeming began to rock out (although later we realized it was out of control) and ran around in circles in the middle of the street to the music. That whole description may sound lackluster if you're not intimately connected with all those things, but it was a real local connection lightning bolt for me. Quite nice.

Of course, since my ill-advised camera dropping back in May, I did not have a camera to record such event. But the description will live on here in this Balrog for an unspecified length of time.

A couple other things - anybody regularly online is aware of the lolcats meme. It's good stuff. Invisible sandwich is my favorite. I was looking around for apartments lately and found that the Seattle PI actually had a banner ad that is in the style of lolcats:

Only in Seattle?

Speaking of apartments, my apartment building is for sale, but I don't know about it yet. You can tell for sure because this MLS listing says Tenants are unaware of the sale, please be discreet. =P

Couple other things - I signed up for Vonage recently at Neutrino in the aftermath of Sunrocket's recent demise (that's real delightful when your business phone line just vanishes). Searching through their support files for something an error got triggered:

Warning: array_merge() [function.array-merge]: Argument #1 is not an array in /prod/www/vonage/searchEngine/parser.php on line 41

That does not make me feel particularly safe about Vonage, that they are spewing their php errors out into the wild. error_reporing(0) that beeotch and log them errors instead!

Last story - I went to the KEXP BBQ this weekend and ended up talking to Craig, the lead singer for Cloud Cult. Of course, I didn't know this because he was working the merch table and I never know what musicians actually look like. I only realized it when I saw him singing on stage! Now I know why he was so interested in how many albums I had, etc. I've also been reading his homie Steve's blog The Sneeze a lot recently, although that's a separate matter. Cloud Cult totally rocked my world, btw. Such a good show. So real. So rockin'! The KEXP BBQ was also fantastic as a whole, so... Seattle... ok, I'll end my theme here.