ATL Noise: Volume 6, Issue 3

Some fun shows Labor Day weekend...a bunch of 80's bands on Friday night and a show full of tribute bands on Sunday!

As always, what is listed below are concerts I am possibly interested in attending. So if somethings missing...it's probably because that band sucks :)

Fri 8/29/2008 "The Regeneration Tour" - Chastain Park Amphitheatre
Fri 8/29/2008 A Flock Of Seagulls - Chastain Park Amphitheatre
Fri 8/29/2008 ABC - Chastain Park Amphitheatre
Fri 8/29/2008 Belinda Carlisle - Chastain Park Amphitheatre
Fri 8/29/2008 Naked Eyes - Chastain Park Amphitheatre
Fri 8/29/2008 The Human League - Chastain Park Amphitheatre

Sun 8/31/2008 "Beer & Whiskey Festival" - Park Tavern
Sun 8/31/2008 Desire - Trib. To U2 - Park Tavern
Sun 8/31/2008 M.E.R.M.E.R. - Trib. To R.E.M. - Park Tavern
Sun 8/31/2008 Talk Journey To Me - Trib. To Poison & Journey - Park Tavern
Sun 8/31/2008 Van Heineken - Trib. To Van Halen - Park Tavern

Thu 9/11/2008 1997 - The Masquerade
Thu 9/11/2008 Finch - The Masquerade (you guys have probably never heard of Finch, but I like em A LOT!)
Thu 9/11/2008 From First To Last - The Masquerade
Thu 9/11/2008 National Product - The Masquerade
Thu 9/11/2008 Scary Kids Scaring Kids - The Masquerade
Thu 9/11/2008 Tickle Me Pink - The Masquerade

Sat 9/20/2008 Jim Gaffigan - Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre (2nd show added...very tempted, but it's over $50)

Wed 9/24/2008 The Mars Volta - The Tabernacle $35

Fri 9/26/2008 3 Doors Down - Lakewood Amphitheatre $25 and up
Fri 9/26/2008 American Bang - Lakewood Amphitheatre
Fri 9/26/2008 Finger Eleven - Lakewood Amphitheatre (Finger Eleven is on my short lists of bands I REALLY wanna see! Yay Canada! Boo Lakewood!)
Fri 9/26/2008 Hinder - Lakewood Amphitheatre

Sat 9/27/2008 O.A.R. - Verizon Wireless Amph. At Encore Park

Wed 10/1/2008 The Kills - The Tabernacle $38.50
Wed 10/1/2008 The Raconteurs - The Tabernacle

Thu 10/2/2008 Lewis Black - Fox Theatre $42.50 and up (anyone????)

Mon 10/20/2008 Alkaline Trio - The Tabernacle $33
Mon 10/20/2008 Rise Against - The Tabernacle
Mon 10/20/2008 The Gaslight Anthem - The Tabernacle
Mon 10/20/2008 Thrice - The Tabernacle

Sat 10/25/2008 Weezer - The Arena At Gwinnett Center My Tickets have already been boughted!!!!!
Sat 10/25/2008 Angels & Airwaves - The Arena At Gwinnett Center

Tue 11/4/2008 Dashboard Confessional - The Arena At Gwinnett Center $29.50 and up
Tue 11/4/2008 Panic At The Disco - The Arena At Gwinnett Center
Tue 11/4/2008 Plain White T's - The Arena At Gwinnett Center
Tue 11/4/2008 The Cab - The Arena At Gwinnett Center

Tue 11/18/2008 Kings Of Leon - The Tabernacle $37.50
Tue 11/18/2008 The Whigs - The Tabernacle
Tue 11/18/2008 We Are Scientists - The Tabernacle

Everything's HOTTER in Texas

I don't know about everything being bigger, but everything's definitely hotter! (I'm talking actual temperature to be clear). I went and visited my former college roommate and original FSU garnet guy, Kevin in Houston this weekend. The thing I most took from this weekend was that I would never want to live in Houston. Not because I didn't have a good time, but because you can't go outside without feeling absolutely disgusting! Even walking around town after midnight, you just can't get away from it! It's not even temperature hot necessarily, but the humidity! Maybe I've been away from Tallahassee long enough to forget, but I can't imagine humidity worse than Houston this weekend.

Kevin managed to score himself the opportunity to rent out a penthouse in downtown Houston for the summer. It's so big that pretty impossible to keep the place cool during this heat wave (I think there's some kind of record number of consecutive days over 100 degrees or something). Our other friends Bailey & Luis (sorry Luis, but I still call her Bailey) came to Houston also with their 16? month old girl - Julia. Usually I don't like being around kids, but Julia's an exception...but it's obviously because they call her J.

I flew into Houston Friday afternoon and Luis and Bailey got me from the airport and we drove and met Kevin at his fancy pad. The parking garage wasn't so fancy, it was a normal garage, cars are packed in so much that to get into Kevin's assigned spot, we had to back in through the garage about 50 yards or so. Very strange setup. So anyways, we head upstairs and it was true...this place was ridiculously HUGE. Maybe it helped that there wasn't much furniture, just the same old futons I remembered from college! (Which reminded me of a Demitri Martin joke, "There's a store in my neighborhood called "Futon World", love that name..."Futon World". Makes me think of a magical place...that becomes less comfortable over time"). Although since then I think he's gotten a new roommate, complete with furniture, and more importantly...a TV! Kevin currently has NO television. How do people live??? Anyways, I'll get some pictures of his place together below...

So after getting the tour, hunger kicked in and one of the perks of living downtown, we were able to walk a couple of blocks to a Mexican restaurant. I ordered a frozen margarita, but only for scientific experiments of course. By the time the waitress got it to us (which wasn't that long of a wait) it was barely even frozen! It was THAT hot out (I guess I was supposed to mention we sat on the balcony). As we were finishing up dinner, it got a little cloudy and it cooled off a bit. We had to hurry back home because it was about to storm. Which I was pretty excited about. Recently, when I've been around storms...they're big ones! And we had a hell of a view! So, of course the storm (or lack-there-of) passes by without a drop of rain. After all that passed, we went up to the roof of Kevin's place and enjoyed the view. Actually the view was better from the balcony, you could see all kinds of people walking and driving around downtown. I've never seen so many people block intersections and run red lights as I saw there. At some intersections, when the light is red they have these cool blinking red lights right on the streets alerting people to stop. Never seen that before. After a bunch of people watching from up there, Kevin convinced me to go down to where the action is and take a tour of the club scene. We had no plans to actually go in anywhere, but walking around and looking around is just as fun. There were a lot of lines to get into places, with a lot of way too overdressed to have any kind of fun people. Not my thing I guess. If you can't go in with shorts and a t-shirt, I don't want in anyways! Besides, it's midnight, and by the time we did our lap around a few blocks, my back was soaking wet. Gross!!!! How are these people waiting in line all dressed up feeling? Sucks for them!

Saturday we woke up and grabbed some breakfast, then headed out to a nearby park for some kind of outdoor activities (nothing good happens when I go outdoors!). This was no exception of course. Things started out well, we kicked a soccer ball around for a bit, threw a football around, then came trouble. Kevin has these contraptions that are plastic, but I can only describe them as a combo of lacrosse sticks and jai-alai. You have a hard plastic ball and you use these sticks to throw the ball back and forth. I thought sitting this out would keep me safe. But no...while I was just laying around on a blanket...I got hit right in the face with the ball. Thanks Luis!!!!! But the injuries didn't end there. Bailey took a turn and had the ball go off her stick, up in there air, hit a tree (maybe) and right back to her nose. D'oh! Then, to top things off, Luis (I think?) pegged Jenny in the ear before everyone finally gave up on whatever that game was called.

We then went back to Kevin's place to rest up for dinner and our next event, which I was MOST looking forward to. Kevin managed to get awesome tickets for a preseason Denver Broncos-Houston Texans game. We were pretty much RIGHT on the 50-yard line, about 30 rows up. Which are about as good a seat as there were within the stadium. Obviously I'd never been to Reliant Stadium in Houston. I came away VERY impressed. It is right next door to the Astrodome, which I didn't know still existed. And I'm not really sure WHY it still exists! Next to the new Reliant Stadium, the Astrodome looks like a dump! But the very best part of this stadium... the AIR CONDITIONING! It is a retractable roof stadium, and thankfully the roof was CLOSED! It was probably 70 degrees in there. It was awesome! I don't really like or dislike either team, and the fact that it was preseason made it hard to root for anyone or anything, but it was a good game. It came down to a Texans field goal as time expired to win the game 19-16. At least there was no overtime!

After the game we took Houston's train thing, called "METRORail". It is pretty neat. It is a train, I guess...but it's more like a trolley really. It runs in the middle of the street, in it's own lane (although I frequently saw cars "accidentally" drive in their lane) it has to stop for red lights, just like all other vehicles. Hard to explain, but I've always been a fan of trains, so it was cool. It runs along Main Street, right in front of Kevin's place, and there was a stop about 2 blocks away, so that was good. From Kevin's balcony you can frequently see cars (accidentally?) driving in the middle lane, reserved for the METRORail. I wonder how many times they've hit cars? After we got back was another night of hanging out on the balcony...I'm pretty sure I'd do that every night if I lived there, pretty good people-watching spot! I was told that at 2am when all the clubs closed, well, of course I stayed up to see for myself. Nothing too exciting...I was disappointed and from there I had to wake up in a few hours. D'oh!!!!

Sunday morning we woke up early and got breakfast. Bailey, Luis and Julia headed back to Austin afterwards. Kevin was switching from the master bedroom to the other bedroom so that his new roommate could move in as soon as Sunday, so Kevin had a lot of cleaning to do. Which made for perfect nap time for me :) In between about 4 naps throughout the day, I did have to help him move his bed. What kind of vacation is this????

After all the manual labor was done, we were able to go walk over to Minute Maid Park (Home of baseball's Houston Astros). Literally, we walked there...it was like 3 blocks away. Even I'm cool with walking that, although it was about 125 degrees out!!! For whatever reason, they weren't offering tours of the park this weekend, so we did our own tour of the outside of the stadium on Sunday. Outside the stadium were statues of Craig Biggio (future hall of famer, 2nd baseman) (left) and Jeff Bagwell (possible future hall of a famer? first baseman) on a replica baseball diamond, with the statues posed as if they were in the process of turning a double play. So i felt the need to pose as if I was "taking out" Biggio with a good hard slide. It doesn't really help that the statue is about 9 feet tall, but I did my best to break up the double play! We tried some other pictures around the bases but this was the best of the group. We walked all the way around the stadium before realizing it was still 125 degrees and left. Tried to find a place to grab some ice cream on the way back but it wasn't to be. So instead we went back to Kevin's place and I took another nap! I've never taken THIS many naps, I swear! But the heat just wore me OUT!

We took another turn of people-watching from Kevin's balcony when we spotted some people filming a commercial of some sort on the next block. It looked like it was for some haircut place. It was funny watching the reactions of people walking by and driving by as they were filming.

We then went out to China Town for some, uhhhhh, Chinese food! I hadn't had chinese food in a long time, so that definitely hit the spot! There were some very strange "creatures" in their water tanks. Hurray for General Tso and his chicken! (or at least they call it chicken) Then for the first time in my life, went into a Chinese Grocery store. Me and Kevin were the ONLY non-chinese people in there. Definitely an odd feeling. And personally, I thought it smelled REALLY bad in there. No clue why. Then we tried to go to Dairy Queen for some ice cream but for some reason it was closed! Why is it so hard to find ice cream in Houston? Maybe they have trouble keeping it frozen??

That pretty much did it for my weekend in Houston. I flew back to ATL first thing in the morning, had to wake up at 5am to catch my flight! Now for some pictures...and a big thanks to Bailey for making this blog TAKE SO LONG :)

Here's the ridiculously large kitchen...

A view from the outside, couldn't really get the camera to cooperate to make this a good picture

Nice view of downtown!

View from the patio...sporting my new douchebag sunglasses! Glad I got a haircut before being subject to this kinda heat at least, whew!

I was waiting on some more pictures from Bailey but this will have to do...for now!

Olympics

At first I had a hard time getting into the Olympics, but Michael Phelps probably single-handedly got me interested. I'm sure a couple thousand other people feel the same way. I've mostly watched the swimming stuff, but the reason for this post is a shocking, disturbing argument I'm having with some work people. All my life I've never had any interest in watching gymnastics in the Olympics. To me, as far as I knew, it was very popular amongst women viewers, but not so much amongst the guys. I've been DVRing the Olympics the last few days and happily fast forward through the gymnastics. But last week I guess everyone said how awesome it was and even the guys at work were talking about it. I just don't get it. To me, it's just watching teenage girls jump and dance around.

So...here's what I'm doing. I posted a poll at the top-left of this page. I want ONLY MEN to vote on this. Just give me a simple yes or no...do you watch gymnastics?

BTW, did anyone watch me play volleyball last week? Too bad the equipment manager couldn't spell my name right! But seriously, it was very strange to hear my last name during a sporting event...apparently "Zhekov" and "Zaikov" are pronounced the same.

An Atlanta Kosher BBQ Cook Off???

I have no idea if this is real, but the picture is too funny not to post. The best part is the sad look on the pigs' face. Which, shouldn't he be happy? Since he's not getting cooked!?!?!? Think Chic-Fil-A people!

I found this - of all places - on a blog about Thrashers prospects! Thanks Holly!!! It's probably legit. And to make it funnier, Congregation Beth Jacob is orthodox, she says.

A Rainout Rant

Sometimes I just need to vent. Last night I was going to the Cubs-Braves game at Turner Field. Just as we got there they decided to post-pone the game, because it had been drizzling pretty steadily for a few hours. A friend from out of town, we'll call him Jeff, since that may or may not be his name, had been planning on going to this specific game for months now. He's a huge Cubs fan if that matters. He spent over $100 on 4 tickets. Now he's got nothing and the Braves pretty much stole $100 from him. They rescheduled the game for a doubleheader today. Usually when that happens, they schedule a "twi-night doubleheader" where they start a game at 5pm and another one 30 minutes after the end of the first game. In that situation, the team will give you the option to exchange your tickets for any other game the rest of the season. But the greedy a-holes that run the Braves decided to schedule a "day-night doubleheader". Which means today there is a game at 1pm and another game at 7pm tonight. Any tickets from last night can only be used for today's 1pm game. What bullshit!!!! MLB should NOT let this happen on weekdays in my opinion. Do they really expect 40,000 people to call in sick the next day to watch a crappy Braves team? I know in Chicago, the Cubs have day games all the time, but you can plan for that ahead of time! They've GOT to know they're screwing over TONS of baseball fans and it's just not right! I'm sure there's something in tiny print on tickets that make it legal for them to do this, but it's complete horse-shit if you ask me! People paid money to watch a boring baseball game...let em!!!!!

On a less angry subject, yesterday at 5:01pm I got my 5,000th! visitor to this blog. Some dude from Madison, Wisconsin looking at the NHL Network Commercials I posted back in March. (You're damn right I keep track of this stuff, I gotta use my statstics degree for SOMETHING!)Pretty unbelievable to me, when I first started this blog, I figured only my parents and grandmother would read it. The power of the internet!!!! Pretty amazing! Thanks to everyone for stopping by!

I am SOOOOOOOOO Not an Outdoors Person

I've already used the title "Why I Could Never be a Pierson" and it would apply here too. As a refresher, the Pierson's are a branch of my family, namely a bunch of cousins - Jon, Dan, Rob, Liz who are all VERY outdoors-types. I'll never understand. I pay my hard earned money towards a mortgage each month so that I can sleep in a BED, with a perfectly good ROOF over my head.

I can only remember one other time that I tried camping, it was probably around 1994 or so with my Kenny Rogers Roasters crew, I will now see how many names I remember in case they ever google themselves (say hi!), this will be fun - Nicole Bradley, Dawn Bradley, Amy Swisher, Michele England, Poppy Bilbra-Jacobs...somewhere I've got a picture of all of us (holy crap I found it!!!! Wow, you probably know how it is, when you see a picture of yourself from about 15 years ago? All I can say is wow) Anyways, it was in the middle of nowhere in Southwest Virginia, we rolled in in my yet-to-be-named FSU-Jew-Mobile (my dinky garnet Plymouth Horizon). We got there, setup a tent, took a picture and that's all I remember before it started DOWN POURING. So we threw everything we could in my trunk and everyone came back to my parents house and we used the basement as our campsite...complete with a functioning ROOF! Not to mention air-conditioning. I haven't had any desire to try camping again since.

My friend Rory recently graduated from, well, some kind of advanced schooling to get her PhD, sorry for not knowing all the details, I don't get paid to write this crap! For her graduation party she invited a bunch of people to go camping at Lake Allatoona (which is only about 30 miles from my perfectly good bed). But, as a good friend I agreed to come...for the day. There was an evite and everything where I made my intentions clear that I'm only going for the day and that anyone else who wasn't a camper was welcome to stay at my place. Apparently that decision was overturned and I was going camping overnight. I soon realized I wasn't getting out of this. So I sucked it up and would give it a try. Tracy came into town from Jacksonville, Kim - and her boyfriend Michael and his boat - came in from Birmingham. Tara and Jason were going (but Tara used the 7-month's pregnant excuse to get out of camping...I was jealous). So it would be fun, a lot of my friends were going.

The first mistake I made (besides agreeing to go) was to drive Tracy to the campsite. Something bad ALWAYS happens when we go places together. Off the top of my head, a few incidents - She blew out a tire on I-20 driving back from a weekend in Tuscaloosa; driving back to Jacksonville last summer, a truck spilled oil ALL OVER poor little Vickie. Tracy will happily help me name some more incidents I'm forgetting. As we're driving up to the camp-site, on (the) 75 (why are interstate's only preceded with "the" in California?), we heard a noise at one point. Looked back in my rear-view and didn't notice anything, kept driving, assuming it was nothing. A few miles later we got off the interstate and onto some windy roads when driving got a little tougher. I just figured it was because there was a ton of stuff in the trunk maybe. We pulled into the camp site visitors center to check in, then when pulling out of the spot, guess what!!!!

Of course! A flat tire! Not just a flat tire, the tire was barely even on the rim even. Now, we're on a mountain, I was parked in a spot that was on a bit of a hill, so I had some trouble getting the jack to do it's thing. It slipped off about 3-4 times and about a half hour before I finally gave up. Rory's sisters' boyfriend (did I get that right?) managed to get the car jacked up (sounds funny) and he changed the tire in less than 5 minutes. Not the first time I've been bailed out in a tire-changing situation!!!!

So after installing a poor little donut on Vickie, I let her chew on that for a while and threw all our crap into Jason & Tara's car (nice timing by the way! They showed up just as we were done!) and headed to the camp site. Things calmed down for a bit...settled in, grabbed a beer and setup a chair and just sat there. I guess thats what you do? It was cool though just sitting around...at least it wasn't too hot out, there were plenty of trees and we were right by the lake. So all was going well, I did pass on the opportunity to go on a ride on Michael's boat, especially knowing Tracy was going...something bad was bound to happen :)

The most fun was probably watching Rory's friend (and my soon to be kickball teammate) Joel's dog swimming. (To clarify Joel's dog is not eligible for kickball I believe) That dog probably swam more in the few hours we were there than I may have in the last 10 years. It was also fun watching him and Rory's dog Piper go after a frisbee in the water. Especially when they finally gave up fetching it and we got to watch the frisbee slowly but surely float away. Eventually I did get in the water for a bit, then decided I'd even go on the next boat ride. It soon became evident that someone didn't want me on that boat. Almost immediately...in came the clouds. Dark clouds. Even though the radar was clear (OH! Tracy brought her laptop, you know...like a true camper!) We all know that the weather-peoples are never right, so it became obvious that the sky was about to explode all over us. First came the clouds, then came the wind, the thunder, the lightning, the rain...and just for the hell of it...let's throw in some HAIL for good measure. Luckily we were able to make our way to a bathroom facility in the middle of the campground site. The power was out, so it was pitch black inside the bathroom. I will admit this was a better situation than 2 weekends before when I was stuck on Pensacola Beach in a lightning storm with just an umbrella protecting (or, NOT-protecting) me! But the combination of those two weekends got the best of me...I had enough, I did NOT want to be there anymore. After the storm finally passed, they managed to get a fire going and I got a hot dog out of the deal before I got the hell out of there. If I had stayed, I know I would've been miserable and probably ruined it for other people, so I took one for the team and left with Tara and Jason, who took me back to poor little donut-wearing Vickie and then followed me back, going about 45MPH on "the 75". Ughhhhhhh! So I'm officially 0 for 2 in attempts to camp. Which reminds me of my favorite Bush-ism..."There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." Well, I got fooled twice now...shame on you Rory!!!!!!

Here's all of us...I still don't understand why everyone's so happy? If you look carefully you can see some hail on the bottom left...I think

Did I pick the perfect shirt to wear or WHAT? Goes good with the Twister towel :)

The Next To Last Comic Standing?

So I just finished watching the season finale of Last Comic Standing. I've never watched the show before this season, but I figured, there's nothing else on this time of year and it's a bunch of people trying to do stand up comedy. Bill Bellamy is an absolutely awful host of the show and for the finale they had 5 finalists which "America Voted" on a week ago. WTF? Why not let the 5 finalists go up against each other to get to 4, then 3, then 2 FINALISTS! Isn't that what the word FINALIST means? The show can definitely be a lot better, ditching Bellamy would be a good start. He laughs at anything, maybe they pay him to. They had their "talent scouts" as Richard Belzer - a non-funny actor from Law & Order - and a guy from the Sopranos I think. Maybe someone can explain to me why NBC couldn't actually get COMEDIANS to judge this thing???

Anyways, when it got down to the final 5 it eventually wound up coming down to Iliza Shlesinger (the only female in the top 5) and a Dane Cook look-a-like-but-funnier in "Marcus". Marcus is actually hilarious. If he had a comedy CD out, I'd buy it. To me he was clearly the winner. But "America" votes. Is that really fair? Maybe I'm being naive here, but don't you think more women than men watch these shows and take the time to call in to vote? Now, Iliza was funny, but not nearly as talented as Marcus...in my opinion. Of course...Iliza won...LAME! Not that the winner of this show (this was season 5 I think) ever goes on to do anything, but I hope to see Marcus doing his thing sometime soon!

I'm pretty sure it was Marcus who had my favorite joke on there, and I know I'll screw it up because it was a couple weeks ago...he was talking about airport security and what you can and cannot bring on a plane with you. He said how it's clear as to why you can't bring a chainsaw, a gun, a knife...you know the obvious weapons on a plane. But a wrench is ok. I don't know about you guys, but...I've played the game "Clue" before...and Col. Mustard would disagree that a wrench is not a weapon!

(I'm sure it was much funnier to hear him do it than for me to type it!!!! But you get the idea)