Zepp

I recently made a friend's jaw drop by admitting to him that I was pretty unfamiliar with Led Zeppelin's music, apart from the standards that get played to death on the radio.
I realized that I had to fix this, so I scraped together every album of theirs I could find, and committed myself to listening to it all. And ho-ly SMOKES... can I say I get it now? Luke, are you reading this? I'm thinking of you as I write it, bud.
I mean, I grew up hearing this music - my folks listened to it; I'd hear it at work; it was the crap the older guys listened to. I came of age in the 80's, so "my kind of music" was anything (I now understand) more or less directly derived from punk. I remember Robert Plant playing on the radio, and I'm sorry, but it was awful -- or at least I thought so at the time (maybe I'll change my mind on that at some point).
Anyway, so back to Led Zeppelin: I'm not going to try to talk them up to anyone who hasn't heard them. Either you've heard them and don't like them (I'm not going to convince you otherwise); you've heard them and do like them (again: I'm NOT going to convince you otherwise); or you've heard the few of their songs that get flogged to death on the radio. If you're one of the last group, and you don't get what all the fuss is about, grab their first album, carve out some time, and listen to the album at least once through uninterrupted.

Something similar to this has happened to me with Eric Clapton (and Cream and Derek and the Dominoes), The Allman Brothers, The Who, David Bowie, in roughly that order.
I've never really gotten the hype around the Rolling Stones. Maybe I'll see the light on them someday ;-)

Supergreg

It just hit me that Supergreg (#1), one of the first "Internet memes" to catch my attention, was played by none other than Sacha Baron Cohen. That's the last nail in the coffin of my secret hope that there really was such a dumbass. Damn you Lee Jeans, for taunting me so!

a great article illustrating perfectly why I decided to use Blogger

...and I promise: this is the last time I'll talk about my choice of blogging platform:

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/commentary/alttext/2007/04/alttext_0418

Ugh. Sigck.

It's Saturday, and I'm sick. What's really unfortunate: Holly and Logan are sick too. So we're all just lazing around, staring glassy-eyed at daytime cooking shows, trying not to get on each others' nerves too much.
But enough of that; it's off to do my taxes -- there's nothing like waiting until the last minute and getting sick to spice up a weekend.

We'll be filing this under "whiny blogs"... no doubt about it.

Opening statements

So I've been wanting to blog now for at least the past year, but a couple things have held me back:

1. What blogging platform should I use? I mean, I'm technically inclined, so the hacker in me wants to just go for the most customizable, hacky, fun-to-play-with tool available. On the other hand, if I'm going to blog -- and I mean, just get motivated and write -- it has to be easy, or I just won't do it. Either that, or I'll write one line, start playing with features/layout/etc... and before I know it, I'll have wasted an hour with 8 words to show for it. "Easy" is a factor here, so after confirming that I could indeed post via email, I went with Blogger. It looks good, it's simple, and I can setup an account and JUST GO.
   
2. For some reason which I didn't fully understand myself, I realized recently that I felt that I couldn't start blogging at a time in my life when something really big was happening . Maybe it's because I would thenceforth doubt the foundation upon which I'd built my blogging. Some wind of general boredom would gust into my life, and my breathless blog would just dry up and wither; or I'd start looking for crises to post about, just to keep things interesting. Or, I'd just whine -- that's always entertaining... for the writer, anyway.

But what finally tipped the scales for me was hearing that my friend and blogging-veteran Angel decided to move to another state. So now, apart from email, this is the best way to keep in touch. I've gotten motivated. And besides, nothing really big was happening.