I'm with the band

I've just added an excellent blog to my links below. "Back of the Cereal Box," also on Blogger, is written by one Mr. Drew Mackie. I don't know Mr. Mackie at all, and I'm unsure how I originally came across his blog, but I suspect it had something to do with Kill Bill. Anyway, his interests overlap significantly with my own, and his writing is entertaining. Do check his stuff out.

This week he posted a current internet meme that tickled my fancy:

1. Click on this link. The title of the page is the name of your band.
2. Click on this link. The last four words of the final quotation on the page are the title of your album.
3. Click on this link this link. The third picture is your album cover.
4. Take the pic, add your band name and album title.

Here are my first results, which filled me with delight:

I'd listen to that album. I'm thinking that Propriá (that wouldn't actually be him in the photo, of course) is a second-generation descendant of Brazilian immigrants, and worked his way up to prominence in Manhattan around 2002. He does wry, confessional acoustic guitar songs with samba flourishes, as if lifted from Seu Jorge. Self-deprecation plus cuíca equals frequent play on 89.3 The Current!

Spiders... Why did it have to be... spiders?

Well, I haven't been blogging for a couple weeks now, given how busy the tandem moves have been, job and house. I started work at the new firm on Wednesday, and so far, so good. I'm excited about the downtown environment and the types of work I'll be doing.

The big move into the house is tomorrow, and we're very excited for that as well, although my excitement was tonight suddenly tempered. Melissa and friends Alison and Lacey went to take a load of stuff over, and discovered we have a spider problem in the new house. As in, there are a lot of spiders in the house, and it's a problem. We had seen one in the kitchen the other day, but that was just one, and no biggie. But they saw a bunch tonight, and they're roughly the same pale tan color as the carpet and the walls; peachy. Also, egg sacs in the basement; gross.

Spiders are my thing, my problem. For some people, like my dad and Indiana Jones, it's snakes. For others it might be rats or ants or cockroaches or worms or some combination thereof. I knew a girl in college who was terrified of birds, especially chickens (she had never seen the Hitchcock movie, so don't go blaming the problem on that). Spiders have kept me up nights in the past with the mere suggestion that they're there, they've made me fast forward through part of one of my favorite movies, and they've stopped me from playing through awesome video games.

So this spider business is a mental setback. It means we're going to have to keep some stuff and the cats out of the basement for a time, and that hiring an exterminator is in order, ASAP.

In the meantime, I plan to do what I did when I found egg sacs in my summer storage space at Grinnell in 2000: liberally administer a dose of great power and great responsibility.

This brings me to a question. I've noticed that all the products you can buy to kill things like insects, spiders, and so on, have pictures of the creatures in question on them. The can of Spider Killer I bought tonight has a particularly nasty customer on it. Anyway, my question is this: I want to kill these things because they frighten me; why put a big scary picture of the thing on the product? The product should ideally exhibit an absence of spiders, that being the desired effect.