ATL Noise: Volume 7, Issue 3

It's been a while...as usual, here's just a minor list of upcoming concerts in the ATL, I

Tue 09/22/09 - Cold, Taproot, Killer and the Star, Datarock, Esser - The Masquerade

Sat 09/26/09 - Chevelle, HaleStorm, After Midnight Project - The Tabernacle

Sat 10/03/09 - Snow Patrol, Plain White T's - The Tabernacle (I'd definitely be at this one if it wasn't for it being the same time as the Thrashers home opener!!!! Priorities!!!!!)

Tue 10/06/09 - U2, Muse - Georgia Dome (I'd go just to see Muse and leave)

Wed 10/07/09 - The Airborne Toxic Event, Henry Clay People, Red Cortez - Variety Playhouse

Wed 10/07/09 - Blink-182, All-American Rejects, Fall Out Boy, Asher Roth - #####'s Amphitheatre At Lakewood

Fri 10/09/09 - Kings Of Leon, White Lies - Philips Arena

Sat 10/10/09 - Lisa Lampanelli - Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre (Comedian)

Tue 10/13/09 - Blues Traveler - Center Stage

Sat 10/17/09 - David Cross - The Tabernacle (Comedian)

Tue 10/20/09 - The Bravery - Center Stage

Sat 10/24/09 - Atreyu, Hollywood Undead - The Tabernacle

Tue 10/27/09 - Paramore, Paper Route, The Swellers - The Tabernacle

Sun 11/01/09 - The Used, The Almost, Drive A - The Tabernacle

Tue 11/03/09 - Brand New, Thrice - The Tabernacle

Fri 11/06/09 - Mute Math, As Tall As Lions - The Tabernacle

Thu 11/12/09 - Jimmie's Chicken Shack - Smith's Olde Bar (I swear I've heard of these guys???)

Mon 11/16/09 - AFI - The Tabernacle

Sun 11/22/09 - All-American Rejects, Taking Back Sunday, Anberlin - The Tabernacle

Sun 11/29/09 - Miley Cyrus - Philips Arena (It's a Felony!!!!!)

Fri 12/18/09 - Dashboard Confessional, New Found Glory, Meg & Dia, Never Shout Never - The Tabernacle

Brookhaven Parking SUCKS!!!!!

So I took a few days to cool down a bit, but am still pissed about the situation. And I'm not even gonna mention my flat tire from Wednesday!!!!

The Brookhaven area I'm talking about is home to 3 bar/restaurant places - Pub 71, The Hudson Grille and Mellow Mushroom (which is the official kickball bar).

These three places all have pretty large capacities, any ONE of them would probably come close to filling up the parking lot. It's gotten to the point where I refuse to even try to park in there after kickball, not only is there hardly any available parking, but the lanes to drive through are small and people drive like a bunch of ruhTARDS.

So far the last few weeks, I've been parking about a block away at a shopping center where NOTHING is open at night. There's anywhere from 20-30 cars doing the same, otherwise this HUGE parking lot is a ghost town. Well, this past Thursday, every single car got booted. Two people from my kickball team who left before I did texted me to tell me about their cars, and of course I'm thinking it probably was just them in a random act of booting. Nope. Everyone. But it gets worse.

The guy who came out to remove everyone's boot was a complete a-hole. By the time I got to my car there were 2 other groups of people waiting for the guy to show up. One of the groups had 2 fairly large black guys, who said amongst themselves while laughing but we were all pissed off, "man I'm gunna fuck this guy up" (or something like that). To which, the boot a-hole said, with a straight face, "I believe I've just been threatened, last night a group of about 6 guys threatened me and one of them left with a bullet in his chest." Wow!!!! What a winner, he really needs to brag about some guy getting shot?

So we finally convince him that no one's trying to fight anyone or shoot everyone, we just all wanted to go home. So, everyone's car had these lovely stickers on the window letting us know that we can call this phone number to get our cars released, and it said on there it is a $50 charge. Now, the first guys who he de-booted, their sticker had the $50 crossed out and $75 written in its place. I found that curious but didn't feel the need to question it from my side, because mine just said $50 with nothing crossed out. So he finally gets to me, I give him my credit card and he asks for my signature and I notice he charged me $75. So I fight him on it,

Me: "my sticker clearly says its a $50 charge."

A-Hole: "sorry I forgot to correct it on yours"

Me: "Correct it? This is an official sticker, what gives you the right to change it at all?"

A-Hole: "I ran out of our new stickers"

Me: "Well, I'm not signing this"

A-Hole: "Ok, I'll leave the boot on your car and the tow-truck can be here in a minute"

Me: "Wow, thats some bull shit, is there someone I can call to complain about this? Whats to stop you from charging me whatever the hell you want?"

A-Hole: "The number is on your receipt and Dekalb County has a minimum fee of $75"

Me: "Whatever, I need to get out of here"

Ughhhhh, I was FURIOUS, there was no winning an argument with this guy, and I certainly wasn't gonna let him tow my car for $25, but I'm still pissed about it. I mean, there's NO WHERE to park! So for now all I will do is boycott the area for the foreseeable future.

Dane Cook - ISolated INcident - I hope

So Dane Cook has a new CD out called "ISolated INcident" (I have no idea why the "S" and "N" are capitalized). He's been on tour for a few months and his last show was Saturday at Philips Arena. I was looking forward to the show, but I really didn't like his new CD. Its 90% over-the-top sexual humor. I really like his older stuff, but definitely not so much the new stuff.

So Saturday comes, I'm functioning on about 4 1/2 hours of sleep and spending 10 minutes (also 10 minutes too many) at some friends house with cats. So now I'm tired and my nose won't stop running. Awesome!

We get to the show, I was excited because we had seats in the front row of the upper level. Not necessarily close, but front row means not worrying about being too short or having to sit behind King Kong. So we head up to our seats and there's a bunch of Philips ushers sitting at a table blocking the concourse. They ask for our tickets and this guy takes them and says, we're gonna give you slightly better seats. They wound up sitting us dead-center of the arena, about 15-20 rows up!!!! Sweet!!!!!

The show starts (about 45 minutes late), two guys open up for him, and were definitely funnier than Dane Cook on this night. Finally, Dane Cook comes out and basically reads his CD to the crowd. Maybe not necessarily in the same order as the CD, but just by listening to the CD one time on the way to Jacksonville for Memorial Day Weekend...I already knew all the punchlines. I actually dozed off a couple of times during the show. I don't know, maybe I'm getting old, but like I said 90% of his material was pretty much graphic sex jokes. His old stuff was never like this, he hardly had any sex jokes, and he was actually funny. I was very disappointed in the show. He could've at least done some older material, ya know, back when he was actually pretty funny????

Why in the world would a comedian come out with a CD BEFORE he goes on tour????? I've definitely learned my lesson!!!!

Dane Cook, I give you two thumbs...down.

First NonAnnual Movie Review - Valkyrie

So now that pretty much all TV shows are off for the summer, I'm focusing on no longer wasting my Netflix account. I'm pretty sure I've held on to movies for a good 2 months before. Netflix loves me!

So last night I watched the movie, Valkyrie (where Tom Cruise tries to kill Hitler).

I have 2 beef's about this flick...

Now, I'm no history buff, but I'm pretty sure I picked up on one major flaw. Why would all these German soldiers be speaking ENGLISH? Pretty much all the time. Not only that, but some of those guys had various European accents while speaking English, so it was still hard to understand them most of the time, may as well speak German!

Beef #2 is more personal. As a pretty big Hitler and Nazi hater, and, with this being a MOVIE and all, why not, I don't know, give it a happy ending and KILL Hitler????? At the end of the movie (spoiler alert) Tom Cruise gets executed, THE END. After that there are some boring words on the screen, and then oh by the way, "Hitler committed suicide nine months later". Oh, C'mon!!!!! THAT'S what I wanted to see, show me the suicide! Make it gruesome!!! Is that so wrong?

Incredibly Useful Health Tips of the Day

I've been trying to spread the word on two very important topics for a while now and finally realized that this may be a good place to really get the word out.

First topic...hiccups.

We all get em (I think?) Ok, so I assume we all get em? Maybe there are some people out there without a diaphragm? I don't know. Apparently some dude - Charles Osborne - had the hiccups for 68 years. How do you sleep? Why didn't anyone try and scare him? Or drink a glass of water upside down? Or hold his breath? Why?????

So, here's my trick to ridding yourself of the hiccups. Ready? PEANUT BUTTER. It's never failed. Next time you get the hiccups, go get a spoonful of peanut butter (I've found that creamy works better than crunchy - sorry Lauren, I've stolen a spoonful every once in a while, now you know why!). Although not as much fun as watching a dog eat peanut butter, curing the hiccups may be the 2nd best reason peanut butter was invented.

Now for health tip of the day #2.

Flossing.

That's right, I'm gonna try and talk you into flossing. I was never a flosser, this is how a typical conversation went:

Dentist - "do you floss regularly"

J - "yes...once every 6 months"

For some reason they never find that as funny as I do. But one time I had a dentist determined to talk me into flossing. And it worked. He flossed my teeth, then here's how it went down:

Dentist - "I know how to make you floss"

J - "Really?"

Dentist - "I'm gonna floss your teeth and then I'll show
you"

J - "ok"

Dentist - after flossing..."smell this"

J - "OMG! Gross! That smells like ASS!"

Dentist - "so you're gonna floss now?"

J - "Yes!!!!"

So next time you're brushing your teeth, go floss real quick and give it a sniff. That's a part of what your breath smells like!!!!

I was reminded of this today at lunch, I had corn on the cob. It was all stuck up in my teeth, so I did some quick flossing at lunch just at my desk. A few minutes later, I got a sniff of my flossing finger and there it was. ASS!!!!!

FLOSS!!!!!!!

My Eyeball Update

For anyone that needs to read the prequel, go here

The cliff notes version - January 2007 I had a week of radiation on my eye to fight off a small tumor in the iris of my right eye. (And as my reward I brought Mitsa into my life, my 57" beauty of a TV)

Anyways, Tuesday I had my regular 6 month check-up, with parents in tow for support, as always. I was kinda nervous because after getting poked in the eye on the Sunday before by my favorite six-month old my eye had been kinda blurry since.

I'll go ahead and give the full play by play of these miserable appointments I have to go through every six months...

We got there at about 9:15. Emory has one of the worst parking garages I've ever tried to park in. The spots are way too small and everyone ignores the "compact cars only" signs. This makes for quite the lengthy drive up to the top level where I almost always wind up parking. I think it took over 15 minutes just to park.

So we get into the office, sign in, and they actually called me back pretty quickly. A good sign, usually they're about 30 minutes to an hour or three behind.

They give me this device to cover my good eye and to read the eye chart on the wall. Wow. I'm blind, I could barely make out the biggest row of letters, usually I can see those just fine, something is definitely wrong. Then the pull out this thing that also covers my bad eye, but it's got tiny little holes to see out of. I could actually see pretty decently. Apparently with that thing, I had 20-25?I think? vision. Until recently, I'd kept my 20-20. Not cool.

The technician then puts numbing drops in my eyes and I lean my head into this contraption so that she can look at my eye and check the pressure. She says everything looks fine, pressure is good, she doesn't even see a scratch from where Riley got me. So, ummmm, why am I going blind? Who knows!

From there, I go back to another waiting room before they take actual PHOTO's of my eye. They got me in there pretty quickly. This is a contraption where I put my head into this thing and the photographer holds my eyelids wide open and takes a picture (complete with a bright flash) of my eye from just about an inch away. Fun! This process is repeated probably about 25 times. The last 5-7 pictures includes the putting some kind of lens on my actual eye, with some weird gooey stuff between my eye and the lens. At least with this thing on its easier to keep my eye open since I CAN'T close it! Not fun at all. Luckily my eye gets to shower in saline when this part is done. They do all this so that my doc can compare each picture from 6 months ago, and 6 months before then and so on - to make sure the radiated tumor is lifeless. It'll likely never go away, but hopefully it's all just dead tissue now.

Head back into the waiting room, next up is an ultrasound. But first, why not just wait here for...I don't know, an HOUR. This is the worst part of these appointments, the waiting. And of course, to us, it looks like the doctors are just sitting around twiddling their thumbs. So anyways, I finally go in for the ultrasound. I can't say I'm too familiar with the OTHER kind of ultrasound that most people are probably familiar with. Actually, maybe I am, I had one for my liver once, it was weird. But imagine having one on your eyeball! It's actually not too bad, the pour a bunch of (what I think is) saline in your eye followed by this glass contraption thing. From there, my job should be simple, just stare at the ceiling where they've got this picture of a small dog you're supposed to stare at. The only problem...it wasn't in the right place. Every time I looked at this dog, she told me to look slightly to the right. It's hard to stare at something for a reasonably long period of time without there being anything to actually stare at. Move the dog! Oh well, I survived. The ultrasound somehow completely measures the tumor, not only length and width, but how deep it is. I'll probably never understand how that works, but I guess I'm glad it does.

Finally up next is the meeting with my actual doctor after he takes a look at everything. But first...another hour-long wait in the waiting room. I think it was almost 12:00 before we got called in there. I should mention that I forgot to grab a granola bar for breakfast, so I've had nothing to eat or drink yet. So combining that with the anxiousness of not knowing what the hell was wrong with my eye got to be a little much for me.

I finally get called in, where a doctor I'd never seen before takes a look. She does her thing, sticking the magnifying contraption in my face and looks into my eye and then says, ok, everything looks good, your doctor will be in shortly. Great!

So after a little more waiting, finally my doctor comes in, it's probably about 1:00 by now, we'd been there for about FOUR HOURS. He does his thing, looks at my eye, and also says everything looks good. WTF? So I finally ask him...if everything looks fine why is my eye blurry? He says, well, lets dilate the eye and I'll take a look then. Great! Another 30-40 minutes for my eye to dilate! Yay! Finally after waiting out the next 30-40 minutes in there, he comes back, takes a look..."you've got a cataract".

Great, so now I've got something that usually only 80 year olds deal with. Awesome! But they warned me about it. Cataracts have several causes, obviously old age, but in my case...the week of radiation is what did it. The bad part is, he told me I have to wait til the cataract "ripens" before they typically take care of it. So, basically, what that means to me, is that my vision is gonna have to get worse before they'll do the surgery. The surgery itself is actually the most common surgery in the US. It's outpatient (what isn't these days?) and I'll just have to take it easy for a few days (obviously I will have to eventually plan this surgery during the kickball offseason!). After some research it seems like "waiting" isn't always necessary, so I'm hopefully I can get this overwith sooner, rather than later. Supposedly not only would things get blurrier for my right eye, but it could get sensitive to light. Which would make driving at night a problem. Right now its just slightly blurry, so it's not too bad, just annoying. Let's hope I can get this taken of before all that fun starts!

I go see another one of my doctors on June 1, this is the guy who probably will actually do the surgery. I'll be dragging my roommate (sorry Lauren!) with me to take notes. So, until then...wish me luck!!!!

Team Canada: WFC Update

After an 0-8 campaign to finish the 2008 kickball year, the revamped Team Canada - we're no longer Mounties, we're Flip Cuppers - is off to an amazing 4-1 start to the season.

Tonight's game by the numbers:
Team Canada - World Flip Cupper runs: 4
Non-functional CD Players: 1 (On songs NOT to have sex to night! Not cool!)
Songs able to be played in the first inning before it crapped out: 2
Runs allowed by Team Canada: 0!
Actual rounds of Flip Cup played this season: 0!
Terrible calls by the umpire: it would take too long to count.
Missing teeth by the umpire: see above.
Trying to come up with more of these so that I can say "priceless": Priceless!

Quote of the year - after the game, someone on the other team said, "There's a reason they're 4-1". :)

The one bad call I'm complaining about was on a pop up to the 2nd baseman, there were 2 outs, I was on first. He was just inside the base line, I was running towards second. He was well enough in front of me that I just went straight towards 2nd. At the last second he backs up right into my path and barely bumps me and drops the ball. I get called out for interference! WTF? Am I wrong? I can understand that if he's in my path I should go around him, but he's the one backed into my path at the last second! How am I supposed to account for that?