I went to the Jason Webley show last night with rimrunner, loopback, and 11^3 other people. It was the best time I've had in a long time and I'm feeling better about the world and life generally. Jason's big seattle shows are beautiful things, and keep you uplifted for several days.

I've gone to a number of these shows over the years, they're always a different spectacle / narrative / vision. The show tonight combined elements of three or four different of the big narrative shows that I recall from the past. It was epic.

There was Jason Webley, Amanda Palmer, Artis the Spoonman, Rev. Peyton, Andru Bemis, Orkestrar Zirkonium, and Jay Thompson.

There was singing along, and balloons, and running around, and then eventually an afters with tomato cake freeway park. It was a magical time.

Celiaq.com is slowly lurching to life; the project was about 75% bigger than I thought it would be, and we're just wrapping up the final changes to source this week. The second week of July is the current targeted launch date. This post mentions this, and also is a test of the integration with livejournal.

Things are still blowing up in a somewhat location-dependent way, but the bug list is steadily decreasing now. I'm fairly confident that the remaining issues are well-characterized.

Celiaq -- The G-Free Diet: A Gluten-Free Survival Guide -- Gluten Free Book Info

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On my way back from Portland this Sunday, I took the forest service road route rather than the interstate back. It took a couple of extra hours but didn't add too much distance to the journey. I was inspired in this by a road that I'd wanted to take last fall but didn't get to because it was closed due to snow and a washout. This is a photograph of Mt. St. Helens from the road.

Even though its summer, there's still snow lingering on the sides of some of these roads. I didn't photograph the snow although I probably should have. I was at a relative high point here, probably near a geographical feature called windy ridge. Disturbingly, there are condo developments in this area right on the border of the park. I'm assuming that they're vacation rentals, as it would be a long commute to basically anywhere from here.

I had a lot of fun at SOAK, but ti was a fairly stressful time, so I figured I'd take the slow, fun route home and take the road that I'd been wanting to for a while.

Skipped the David Byrne concert because I'm trying to conserve cash at the moment. However, I went to the Extra Action Marching Band's afterparty at the Comet, and it was basically a great time. The XAMB is a great band. They've wrapped more cheerleading and dancers into their act than the other similar bands I've seen, and they have a different feel in an enclosed space because of it.

This is the first time I've ever seen them off the playa, and then versus the usual comet crowd versus the david byrne fans versus the other folks who got drawn in versus the bachelorette party was an interesting environment. The enthusiasm of the show let alone the cheerers and marshalls on top of all the tables and bars pretty much devastated the Comet, and I can't tell you how great a time I had despite currently being in the process of doing exactly that.

Also, David Byrne can *really* dance. You get that feeling watching him on stage or in videos, but being a couple of feet from him and watching him just bip along to the music is *inspiring.*

As prefigured in an earlier post, I went to see Lullaby Moon last night. It was a wonderful time, very silly with a lot of dancing. I went on the long clockwise procession around the site with the clock children and the horses, and as a result didn't end up running into anyone but madcap_allie whom I watched the show with.

I didn't realize this ahead of time, but a couple of the people involved in the show are people that I know from around Seattle. It made interacting with them in the leadup to the show funny because they kept slipping in and out of character. Time to take off our masks and put on our hats, or vice versa.

But anyway, quite a silly revel, really extraordinarily beautiful, and a great time. I highly recommend attending the last several of these, which are held on each new moon.

The highlight of the parade for me was when the road was clearing at the end of the parade and the police were driving down the road slowly[1], when some drunkish woman walked onut on the street and flashed them.

The cop deadpanned "yeah, get on a bike" at her through the megaphone, and she just turned and walked away.


[1] for those who don't do parades locally -- the police drive down the road at the end of the it mark the transition between 'parade' and 'normal road operations. It's a safety measure as well as useful as a social demarcation between space functions.

Lullaby Moon IX is tonight at Seward Park starting at about 8:30 PM and going until about 10pm. Lullaby Moon is an art performance centered around all the new moons for a year, this is the 9th (obviously.)

All of these have been really special performances, and I recommend going if you can: http://www.lucianeare.org/lullabymoon.htm

Lucia Neare's Theatrical Wonders presents site-specific work throughout Seattle, Washington. The 'Lullaby Moon' series is a year long project devoted to the exploration of dreams. On each new moon, for an entire lunar year, the city of Seattle is invited to become enraptured in a whimsical display of dream-like enchantment.

Anyway, I should be there by 8:30 for the start, it should be a great time. The picture is by divide (Peter) and it's from lullaby moon VIII.

A friend and I watched Underworld: Rise of the Lycans Saturday night. It's a surprisingly good movie, with relatively strong performances from a number of actors. Significantly, most of these characters were the good actors from the first movie who mostly died tragically or nobly or whatever. They weren't in the second movie, which was basically suck.

So, basically, you take all the good actors in a franchise, you put them in an earlier version of the story, and let fly. It was pretty good, and more than made up for the second. They could make a fourth movie following the third and I'd watch it, but it appears that the fourth will probably follow on from the second -- Kate Beckinsale is a good actress as such things go, but she's left without a significant supporting cast.

The weird thing that kept distracting us while watching this movie was the lead actress, Rhona Mitra. She used to play Lara Croft live (and actually somewhat resembles laragoth, but with a bigger nose), but Mitra had had collagen implants in her lips just prior to screening this film and it made her somewhat odd looking.

Odd looking to the extent that we had to keep rewinding closeup scenes to watch the weird biomechanics of her cheek muscles moving with the collagen. It was causing strange deformations in her cheeks not usually seen in nature. It looked like a special effect at first, but then we realized (thanks to imdb) that it was done before the movie was filmed and has been slowly receding since.

So, yeah, that was distracting in what was otherwise a great B-movie. It was really bizarre to have to stop and replay face deformations over and over again like we were detecting replicants, but that's apparently how we roll around here after a couple of shots of bourbon.

Aside from that, it's been a pretty relaxed weekend. Lots of randomly running into friends and hanging out, but also lots of resting and random nonsense. The redwings losing on friday made me pretty unhappy, but largely because they made it all the way to the end only to fall prey to injury and exhaustion. I fear that next year might be a rebuilding year, but certainly this current lot has had a pretty good run and the upcoming noobs have kicked ass.

anyone have a sense for how bad the financial issues are at reed college? the times article was a little light on that, as its focus was on the students.