soylent train is people! it's people!

A week ago I learned that a literal passenger train called Frontrunner was opening up for riding between Salt Lake City and Ogden. After spending a little bit of time in New York City, it's nice to see us westerners getting into a commuter rail system. I knew it wouldn't fly though since we all, to quote The Closer in Singles, "love our car." The Closer was a total environmentalist in that show too. This is when that guy who was dying in that one Julia Roberts movie tried to sell her on his "Supertrain" idea with great music and coffee.

I also figured that since I wasn't aware of it, then nobody would be.

So on Monday we decided to take advantage of Frontrunner's free rides before the pricey rides would begin later in the week. Our goal: the 7:25 train. Here's how the night went down:

6:49 - I arrive by foot at the 7:00 meeting place; once again, vastly overestimating the time it would take to walk two blocks.

7:09 - Group breaks into carpool groups and heads to the UTA train hub.

7:17 - Group arrives at hub and parks near Bricks (or whatever it's called). A big line is forming for the group Minus the Bear. Based on their fans, Minus the Bear appears to be an early 80s British punk band.

7:18 - I snap this picture of Jane and Chelsea. Notice that there's actually a huge throng of people at the platform.
7:25 - Nothing in particular happens

7:48 - Our 7:25 train arrives. Passengers packed like sardines begin filing out.

7:50 - I snap this picture of Shanna and Maxim in front of our train arguing about how many stops we should ride.


7:52 - We make our way to the door. Random passenger inexplicably halts her physical efforts to get off the train in order to pose for stranger's photo.

7:59 - After taking a right past the door, we attempt to climb the stairs to Frontrunner's second level. We get stuck in the stairwell because of the sheer amount of bodies packed in. With the lack of space, I'm only able to get this shot.

8:05 - A natural settling of bodies occurs and a nicer picture of some of us in the middle of the stairwell happens.

8:07 - Another Frontrunner arrives on the adjacent track. People begin filing aboard the new train. We realize that the other platform was an option the entire time.

8:20 - The other Frontrunner train departs.

8:25 - In extreme panic, we attempt to open the doors of our train to escape. The doors don't respond.

8:31 - Yet another Frontrunner arrives on the adjacent track.

8:33 - A broadcast comes over the speaker system informing us that there was a problem with our train and to exit out the west doors to enter the other train.

8:34 - We begin wading through the throng of people attempting to board the other train.

8:39 - We finish wading through the throng of people attempting to board the other train.

8:45 - We arrive at Arctic Circle. I order the halibut sandwich combo and a pastrami and swiss burger.

10:41 - After arriving home I hear a UTA commercial that seriously says, "UTA Frontrunner! Catch it... if you can!"

To sum up, I'm glad people are into the train, but the excess of people taking advantage of the free ride was just post-apocalyptic in scale. Also, it would be really nice if the train actually worked.

do you hear what i hear?

While on iTunes today, looking up the name of a certain Yazoo song ("In My Room"), I came across this enlightening image:


Over the past five years, I've had a love-hate relationship with iTunes. Maybe I should call it hate-love. I started hating in the early days when iTunes would attempt to take over my PC and I didn't know how to use it. I started loving when I was forced to. I became a Mac person and soon realized that even my mp3 player allegiances would need to be switched. My old iRiver player did not (and still doesn't) work with my current Apple technology. I immediately drove to the Apple Store and bought an iPod. I splurged and bought the biggest (at the time) model at 80 GB (a bigger hard drive than my PC).

Entrenched in iTechnology I went back to iTunes, and indulged in it, trying to fill 80 gigabytes. Browsing iTunes is very fun, but can be very very expensive. I quickly learned that these things called "podcasts" not only filled space on iPods very quickly, but they were free too! And sometimes, sometimes they were enjoyable to listen to.

Now I listen to A LOT of podcasts, mostly while driving. I tend to commute a lot anyway. Looking through my playlists, I have 42 different podcasts in possession. That's not 42 podcasts total, it's 42 different shows, each with their own count. Some of them I've only listened to a couple of times and some of them are actually video podcasts. Of the 42, I subscribe to 30. That means I get about 30 new podcasts to listen to every week.

Anyway, as a guy who listens to a lot of stuff, I figured I'd course over some of my essentials (btw, click on the images to be taken directly to that particular show in iTunes).

1. Extralife Radio
This baby really started it all. Back when I had an "oldschool" radio show, my co-host Abel got the host of this geek-centered podcast onto our show. So I downloaded this particular podcast way back before I got back into iTunes. Scott Johnson really got me excited about the whole podcasting thing. He even allowed me to do a segment on old video games on one of his sister podcasts called The Final Score. Anyway, his Extralife podcast deals with all things geek: video games, movies, tv, comic books, etc. Scott's a webcomic artist and two other webcomic guys join him on the show (one actually drew that picture of Maria and me for Valentine's Day). These guys are geeks, but very un-serious.

2. Movies You Should See
This is a very popular movies podcast in the UK. It lacks the traditional "British Reserve," though. Pretty much the average show is five people in a room going on about one single movie of their choice. Drunkenness and swearing are allowed and encouraged. Despite the light atmosphere, they usually get pretty involved in whatever movie's depth between jokes. Examples of some movies they've done include Top Gun, Pan's Labyrinth, L.A. Confidential, The Burbs, Last of the Mohicans, Some Like It Hot, Sunshine, Galaxy Quest, Se7en, Office Space, American History X, Wayne's World, Big Trouble In Little China, Full Metal Jacket, and Brief Encounter just to name a few. It's pretty much all over the map. Personally, since they go into such detail about the movies they do I usually only listen to the show if they're discussing a movie I've already seen. That's just me, though. Whenever I have listened to them talk about all the awesomeness of a movie I haven't seen, I've still had a dang good time. From the success of this podcast, the same group of people started a "nouns you should verb" system of podcasting. They're fun network of podcasts also includes Albums You Should Hear, Games You Should Play and Books You Should Read (which is perhaps the most original of them all, since it's run by listeners sending in their own voiced book reviews).

3. Filmspotting
Here's another film podcast, which I believe I've mentioned before. This one is far more "produced" as a show than Movies You Should See, but it has plenty of spontaneity as well. It's two intelligent guys (Adam and Matty (I actually met both of them at Sundance and they're really cool)) talking like Ebert and Roeper about film. Not only do they cover current releases, but they also do great stuff like focusing on a particular filmmaker or genre and have an ongoing marathon of that particular body of work over several shows' time. Also included is a contest where they "massacre" dialogue in a particular movie and listeners get to email in with their guesses of which movie the lines are from. Extremely informative with their information and extremely engrossing with their opinions. Very essential.
4. Make It So
From Simply Syndicated, the people who brought us Movies You Should See, comes this absurd Star Trek podcast. These guys are obviously very into Star Trek, but some die-hards accuse them of not being fans since they tend to hate on Trek so much. Even if you're not a Star Trek fan yourself, it is fun to hear from a sort of skewed perspective on the show. They don't have a ridiculous, encyclopedic knowledge of Trek, but they give us such discussions as the benefits of dating a shape-changing alien, awarding "The Cast of Voyager" as "The Worst Character in Star Trek," and how the crew would obviously use the giant screen on the bridge to play video games between long voyages. This podcast, is obviously a big influence on J.R. Watches Star Trek for the First Time.

5. The Uncanny X-Cast
Here's the other big influence on J.R. Watches Star Trek. Here are two guys who grew up together. Both read X-Men as kids. One stopped reading entirely, and one still read after growing up. Now they come together and discuss X-Men with one of them an expert and one of them picking it up again for the first time. It's a pretty interesting dynamic and it works well for me because growing up I was a huge fan, but have been an on-again off-again fan in the years since. These guys go on about current issues, but the main attraction for me is that they also have started the comic book from the very beginning of the chronology and are slowly progressing through the entire X-Men universe. The biggest drawback to this one is that they don't make the separate shows for the new stuff and old stuff. A single podcast can be well over two hours long.

6. Grammar Girl
Okay. Pretty much all my other essentials are way geeky, but here's one that's way nerdy. Each week Grammar Girl tackles a specific grammar lesson and gives us interesting and funny methods for remembering it. It's quick. Usually about five minutes. After geeking out so much, this podcast of very useful information is very welcome. Plus, it helps me be snobby about having a better command of the English language than most commoners have.

Anyway, those are some of my essentials. I've got a bunch more that may be more interesting to others including The Official LOST Podcast, The B.S. Report with Bill Simmons, The Classic Tales Podcast, Indiefeed: Alternative / Modern Music, etc. What am I missing? Are there others that need my attention? I'd really love to know if there are and why I should be listening.

Anyway, go ahead and subscribe to the following. They're totally free.


The Jon Madsen Movie Commentary Podcast

J.R. Watches Star Trek For the First Time

guitar heroine

So babe and tried out the Wii's online capabilities with Guitar Hero III for the first time earlier.

She rocked "My Name Is Jonas" perfectly. The perfect 100% Guitar Hero game has eluded her for several months. Perhaps the move to NYC enabled her inner demon child to do the necessary shredding. The perfect game is something that has even eluded me.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to grab the camera in time before the screen change. So I've sorta re-represented the spectacle here:

i'm just a caveman

So talking about Kyle Korver during tonight's Jazz game yielded this friendly memory:

graffiti party

Just about every Friday afternoon I have absolutely no plans for the evening. Invariably, wherever I find myself that night, I tend to wonder how I came to get there.

My friends simply have connections. They're not always my kind of connections, but they can be plenty interesting.

Take last night's graffiti party for example. I have no idea on the details, but apparently some house invited everyone over to spray paint the walls with whatever artistic flair they wanted. Vast amounts of spray paint were even provided. I don't think the occupants anticipated the lovable juvenile attitude of Joe, who used the situation to showcase some colorful (read: blue) imagery.

We arrived fashionably late; around 11. It was a little too late. Things were settling down and we had a hard time finding good wall space for our work. They also wouldn't let Rhett pull out his paintball gun. Shortly after arriving we were sort of ushered out.

Someone had a pretty strong opinion about the Omaha music scene (someone else had an opinion against it).

beautiful weather moot

Man, it was such a beautiful day today!

Too bad that was tarnished by owing 10 bucks on my taxes.

Too bad that was further tarnished by paying even more to file online.

you don't have to look if you don't want to...

... but it will be the first thing you see.


Some of you may have noticed my limping and Facebook complaining about my foot. Last year when I went to have my footy warts frozen, they bubbled up a bit, faded and the menaces simply returned a few weeks later. I resolved to get rid of them again a couple of weeks ago. I told Chrissy, my derm, what had happened and asked if there was another avenue we could try. She said the laser machine was down, so she froze my foot again and made sure I made a follow-up appointment to check on the progress (and by then the laserer would surely be fixed). Well, within a day the rotten foot leprechauns were back to normal. When I went back I complained to her and asked if it was time to get the laser out. Somehow she talked me out of it and suggested a re-freeze. I was like, you know, c'mon. So then she said we could freeze them and if I wanted to she'd write a prescription and I could drop acid on them myself at home.

Anyway, I haven't tried the acid yet, because SHE FROZE THE HELL out of these little buggers this time. I think they're dying and it sort of hurts, but knowing those guys are hurting makes it hurt so good.

falling back into the last century

Our house, as nice as it is, really only has one cable out in the whole place. It's in the front room, which means it's the only place at my house to watch tv. It's just on the other side of the wall to my room, so I could drill a hole through the wall and run cable into my room that way. A more plausible option for a renter like me would be to skip the whole hole drilling thing and simply run cable around the living room, into the eating nook, past the computer area, into the kitchen and then into my room. In either case, I'd have to split the cable from the source, which I don't really care to do. There are enough wires and gizmos sticking out from the back of the tv.

A couple of days ago I purchased an archaic antenna to attach to my room tv.

It's pretty old. It even has those forky connectors that we used to use to set up the 'ol Atari 2600. Works wonderfully though. With it, I became re-acquainted with an old friend -- flipping through channels.

See, for the past several years we've had digital cable and TiVo™. Both have changed my life for the better and I'd sacrifice two of my limbs for them, but they do come at a cost (besides the monthly fee (which Rhett actually pays for (the TiVo™ part anyway))). There is a huge delay (about seven seconds) when the channel is changed. I think the delay is increased because of the combination of both technologies. Is seven seconds worth the ultimate convenience, control and selection of these technologies? Well, yes.

I wouldn't say that being able to casually flip through channels is a more important friend than digital cable and TiVo™, but it is like a friend who may have been my friend long ago, but was abandoned by me when I got cooler, more popular friends. Thanks for still being my friend, Ability to Casually Flip Through Channels! And thanks for not going anywhere!

The biggest problem with my particular ability to casually flip through channels is that I only get broadcast channels, not the hundreds of quality cable channels the living room gets. That means a couple of average channels and like 17 Spanish channels. Why do Spanish-speakers get so many more channels? I'm pretty sure they're not even a majority in this part of the world yet. It seems like the marketplace would demand that there actually be more English local channels. Oh well. I'm considering learning Spanish by flipping through all the channels above 20.

wiigin' out!

Leave it up to Kristen Wiig to take an unfunny concept and make me laugh 'till I choke.

in memoriam: 1924-2008

So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the Lord. And he buried him in a valley in the land of Moab, over against Beth-peor: but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day. And Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated... And there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face, In all the signs and the wonders, which the Lord sent him to do in the land of Egypt to Pharaoh, and to all his servants, and to all his land, And in all that mighty hand, and in all the great terror which Moses shewed in the sight of all Israel.
-Deuteronomy 34: 5-12

"If this god is God, he would live on every mountain, in every valley. He would not be the god of Ishmael or Israel alone, but of all men. It is said he created all men in his image. He would dwell in every heart, every mind, every soul."

"All who thirst for freedom may come with us. The shadow of death will pass over us tonight, and tomorrow we will see the light of freedom."

"Almost at the moment He died, I heard Him say, 'Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.' Even then. And I felt His voice take the sword out of my hand."

"I tried not to come. I tried, I told my love it had no right to live. But my love won't die..."

"I have orders to bring you to God... heathen."

"I'm a seeker too. But my dreams aren't like yours. I can't help thinking that somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man. Has to be."

"Imagine me needing someone. Back on Earth I never did. Oh, there were women. Lots of women. Lots of love-making but no love. You see, that was the kind of world we'd made. So I left, because there was no one to hold me there."

"You who are reading me now are a different breed - I hope a better one. I leave the 20th century with no regrets. But one more thing - if anybody's listening, that is. Nothing scientific. It's purely personal. But seen from out here everything seems different. Time bends. Space is boundless. It squashes a man's ego. I feel lonely. That's about it. Tell me, though. Does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars, still make war against his brother? Keep his neighbor's children starving?"

"Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!"

*sigh* I'm gonna miss you so hard, Chuck!

live podcast #6

if you happen to be on your computer RIGHT NOW (Sunday the 6th of April, 2008), then head over to jrwatchesstartrek.blogspot.com for a live geekfest.

bob ross must be spinning in his grave

I got back from my first oil painting class a few hours ago.

Yeah.

I'm doing it through the local community education program for adults. When I think of adult education I think of that Simpsons where Homer teaches the class on successful marriage and there's a sign out front of the education program center that says "We take the 'dolt' out of a-dolt education."

A long while back we got this awesome class catalog in the mail that had tons of sweet classes in it. Most classes were between 50 and 60 bucks so I figured that even if the classes were a little lame, they would still be cheap enough to try guilt-free. One of the classes was break dancing. Totally. I also considered yoga, photography, Photoshop and drawing (for the dozenth time). The guy on the phone said people complained that the drawing class was too hard, so I avoided it; although maybe it's a different kind of "too hard" than the "too hard" in college.

So for 50 bucks I settled on oil painting. Then, two days ago I went to pick up my supplies. That's where they get ya. After getting oil tubes, brushes, tape, a palette and other miscellaneous debris my tab at the art store was about 100 bucks. I did pick up some watercolor stuff that I may not need (the suggested materials list included oil and watercolor equipment, but it turns out we can sort of pick whether we focus on one paint type or the other), so I'll probably be returning some stuff, but I still need to go back and pick up some mineral spirits, many more canvases and even more brushes.

Our teacher is a lovely hippie soul named Tera. Her motto seems to be a very friendly "figure it out." I always wanted to break myself into art class, but the same thing happens every time I do. Everyone in the room already knows exactly what they signed up to learn. They just use it as a place to do it. After Tera turned us loose to art ourselves silly, I sort of put out a needy vibe by subtley stating how I've never really painted before, I've only taken a couple of drawing classes and I'm also very colorblind. Halfway through my masterpiece of the night I contracted some kind of anxiety associated with an inability to determine what set of procedures I needed to enlist to actually make something of a picture.

Tera said we'll be doing more technique next week. I'll report on that.

In the meantime, here's how we turned out today:


I think it actually looks pretty good if you take a few steps back from the computer.

overusing photobooth

Maria bought me this sweet sweet shirt before she left.

It pretty much means that I'm better than you. It also means that I now have an added amount of pressure to accomplish something that is logically impossible.

We haven't decided when I'm going to go over there to visit. I think it mostly depends on her work travel schedule. She might come next month for the Swell Season concert, so probably after that. I really ought to see what events are in New York over the next few months.

My debit card expired yesterday. I think it's pretty momentous, because this might be the first debit card I've ever had that has expired before I've lost it. Look at me crush it with my gigantic left hand!


Yeah, It got pretty hammered. It didn't work in lots of places because it was crooked, or damaged or both.

I really liked it because it had the easiest "security code" ever: "444."


Here's my new debit card. I'm a little peeved that I get the same old "horses and stagecoach" visual routine. Look how shiny the letters are! Also, look how jealous Dre will get when she sees my new card's expiration date.