Bruce Springsteen: The Closest You'll Get to Tom Waits on Tour

Bruce Springsteen just released a new album, "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions," a collection of covers of songs that are somehow associated with Pete Seeger (he wrote them, he performed them, he was involved somehow). I've been listening to it all morning and it has a lot of good stuff. People that are fans of "The River" and "Born to Run" may not appreciate it as much as people who are fans of folk/swing/jazzy music, but it's nice mix of different styles, with the classic Bruce voice. However, in listening to it, I momentarily thought that Winamp somehow messed up and started playing Tom Waits. The song "Eyes on the Prize" (click here for 30 second preview in Realplayer...[sigh] for those people still stuck under Microsoft's clutches, here's the WMA file) is a dead ringer for a Waits song, right down to the prevalent stand-up bass that Tom tends to use in a lot of his music. But it's more than that, Bruce really roughs up his voice for this song; mixed with the banjo and fiddles in the background, it could be mistaken for a Waits song (true connoisseurs won't be tricked, but should see the link). Funny thing, Rolling Stone associated Bruce's interpretation of "O Mary Don't You Weep" (Real, windows media) as having a Waits-esque twang to it, but makes no mention of "Eyes on the Prize." Let me know down in the comments section who you think is right, me or Rolling Stone!!

My favorite song is "Mrs. Mcgrath," (real, windows media) an Irish-twinged song that has also been called "Mrs. Mcgraw" throughout the ages. If you're interested in other versions, I found this a capella (sort of, there's a bit of drum) version in my web searching.

As you can tell, this is not a full review; that's better left to the "professionals" who get paid big bucks by Rolling Stone, Amazon.com, et. al., to tell you and me what to like. I'm telling you what I like and hoping to key you guys into some music that I find enjoyable.

WOW!!! The Antas GT

I like cars...a lot. But it is very rare that I find a car where I drop everything and just say, "Wow, that is beautiful." That just happened as I stumbled upon the Autoblog posting for the Antas. Other people are bound to have different opinions on this car (and I must confess, I'm not a big fan of the fin), but I love the looooooooong hood and the flowing lines. Unfortunately, no one I know is going to be buying this car anytime soon, it's a one-off by Italian designers/coachbuilders Walter Faralli and Luca Mazzanti.

Just for you classicists out there: It's carburated (and no, for everyone born after 1980, this has nothing to do with bubbles in your Coke or the Atkins diet), but still gets to 100 km/h (~62 mph) in about 5 seconds!

You can find a bunch of additional photos at the official site of the car.

Lord Stanley's Cup

The NHL hockey playoffs start tonight when the Tamba Bay Lightning travel up to the capital to meet the best team in the east and the Oilers from Edmonton (is there any oil in Edmonton?) travel to Motor City to play the best team in the league. I, of course, won't be watching any of this. However, those lucky Europeans with access to the North American Sports Network (NASN) will have a whole range of playoff hockey this week! Jeff was just complaining the other day about the difficulty watching sports in the Metro NY region...At least he has hockey to watch, I've been waiting for months (and shall be waiting for many more) for Free to get their act together and get the NASN onto my TV (it may be coming in August!). Of course I can't really complain too much, I did voluntarily expatriate myself, and with that I lose my hockey watching ability. Oh well.

League jackass and all-around scumbag, Pat Quinn was fired by the Leafs (isn't the plural form of "leaf" "leaves"?) yesterday. The respectibility of the entire NHL immediately went up by a couple points when Toronto made the announcement. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

I'm not one for making blognostications (scroll down to the "BBB" section), but I'm going to make one here: "Real Definition" is going to become the next big term. With the proliferation of high-definition TV (HD) certain people have started to refer to regular programming as standard definition (SD) TV. Therefore, the logic goes that sooner or later someone is going to coin the term real-def (RD) to indicate the live viewing of something. "I caught U2 in RD last night at the Garden and man, I'm telling you, there's nothing like it" or "Yeah, I saw the game in HD last night in a bar; I really wanted to see it in RD but couldn't get out of the city in time to catch it."

Lastly, a little bit of home team cheering: Lindy Ruff for Coach of the Year!! Arguably this man has done the most with the least in the NHL this year. The Sabres are a bunch of 2nd and 3rd line players who managed to have the 3rd best record in the Eastern Conference and 5th in the League. They have one of the best away records, the number 3 powerplay and the number 2 penalty-kill in the League. This team owes it's [very] solid regular season finish to Lindy. Quick, name one star on the Sabres team this year. Name the leading scorer...Unless you follow hockey really close (or you're a Sabres fan) these questions will remain unanswered!
Even Karl agrees:

From: karl-2.wagner@_____.com
To: Kris Salo
Thu, Apr 20, 2006 at 11:33 PM

Yeah, how about a little Ruff Love!!!

This Blog Should be in Spanish

Thanks to Jeff, I've been keyed into Statcounter which basically tells me how many readers I get per day (average around 3), where those people are located (at least where their [proxy] server is located), what browser they are using (IE is winning, much to my disappointment, by a stunning 71% - hey people get Mozilla Firefox, it's much better), the time they spend on my blog (averaging around 20 seconds) and the key words they used if they came from a search engine (very few people use search engines - most come directly to my site).

Anyway, after the frisbee tournament on the Costa Brava, I sent links to my posts to my entire pickup team, and the Spanairds have starting reading my blog en masse. France is still number 1 as the location of origin (41%), but most of these page loads are from me checking to make sure my posts are appearing correctly, etc. Spain is a close number 2 with 39% (with almost half of those people checking in from lovely Barcelona - hey Barcelona, qué pasa?). The US is a shameful #4 on the list (after Belgium!!!!!).

Unfortunately, 8 years of middle and high school and college level Spanish have done nothing for my ability to write, speak, read or otherwise "know" Spanish in anyway. So, a big "lo siento" to all the Spaniards, this blog isn't going to be changing languages anytime soon (and even then it will be much more likely that French becomes the language of choice because je me débrouille en français).

As you may be able to tell, I'm a little low on ideas right now. No one is rioting in France for the moment, I still have no job, and I have no [big] reason to be pissed off at the world...except for a couple of minor things that I'll probably post in the next few days.

Have a good weekend!

The Pickup Team (the best damn 1-8 team of the tournament)

(l to r) Claire, Freek, Fabien, Eric, Olivier, Alizé, Kris)

The Pickup team at the Costa Brava Frisbee Tournament was the most fun to play with, in my opinion. As a pickup team, it took us a while to work out how the others would play, but by the end of the tournament, we started to have the foundations of a true team. With one dedicated female (thanks Claire) in a tournament that was supposed to have 2 girls playing all the time, we were always in the hunt for more females to join our team, even for one game. The core group consisted of three French, two Spaniards, two Colombians, one American and one Belge. On top of this we had all kinds of nationalities join us for various games. Thanks to all who joined us for one game, two games, many games (special thanks to Alizé who played with us whenever her team wasn't playing!)

(Eric and Olive playing solid D)

The offense took a bit of time to warm up. Who can throw? how do those throws act in the air? all kinds of questions that took a few games to figure out. The funny thing was, we started nearly every game quite strong (except those bloody Irish, they killed us from the get-go). But once teams got to know how we played - after 15 or 20 minutes, they tended to out play us. Nearly every team commented on our strong D though. Between Olivier who measures in at 1.98 meters (nearly 6'6") and has arms that must be about 5 meters long, Eric who would dive at every pass that came near him and Freek who never stopped running, we were definitely a defensive force to be reckoned with! I really think that with a bit more practice and a bit fewer changes in the team (every game we had new players and lost old players) we would have been quite a strong team (for example we could've beat those silly Bordelais and they know it!).

We were also possibly the most relaxed team at the tournament. I am not 100% sure, but this picture of Fabien may have been taken during a game!! In any case, the beer flowed freely on the beach, the discs flew well and good times were had by all.





Thanks to everyone who played for us, and special thanks to David, Oscar, Eric, Freek, Olivier, Fabien and Claire for helping to form a team that was truly memorable to play for!

The Aftermath

Lloret de Mar (see it with Google Earth download the .kmz file here): the Myrtle Beach of the Southern Costa Brava (apparently). Speaking with Americans from NC, I was told that Myrtle Beach was like this. Thousands of shops selling t-shirts, plastic real-look guns, alcohol, and other touristy stuff. I can not imagine going there at the height of tourism season. April was bad enough!

Anyway, I'm throwing a couple of photos up here for your viewing pleasure. The first one is the view from the hotel. When viewing this, I think you have to realize that I had been going on about 4 hours sleep (for 3 days) and playing up-to one hour games on the sand all day long. I just got out of the shower so my hair is a mess and apparently I just wanted to get the picture over!

Here's a pic of the main drag in Lloret. "The Boulevard" as it's called is all about drinking and drinking and drinking. There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 or 60 nightclubs on a 1 mile stretch of road. The worst is there are these guys out in front of every club telling you "exceptional offer for you, free entry" but after three nights of this my friend Olivier (bottom photo) remarked, yeah, but every club has free entry!
We learned that you just have to ignore them. If you engage in conversation, you are stuck for a couple of minutes because they keep doing things to try to make you stay.

Since this tournament was technically about Frisbee, I will include this picture of my buddy, Olivier on the beach. It was really a beautiful area (I should have some more photos soon that show more scenery) and frisbee tournaments are usually a ton of fun. Everyone is there to have fun and relax and there is a very convivial atmosphere where everyone tends to chat after the games, during the games, at dinner, in the bars. Plus it gives you a reason to go to the beach. I'm already looking for more tournaments on the beach; there's one on the island of Mallorca (Google Earth .kmz file here) in October that I'm truly going to try to go to.

I'll try to post some more photos once I have them - I'm waiting for people to send me some pics because I didn't take a ton of photos.

PS: Congratulations to France for their brilliantly foresighted move in cancelling the CPE: Precarité forever!

Spanish Bombs (and Militants for the Status Quo)

Sorry for the title...I've been listening to the Clash of late and it's the first phrase that I thought of with "Spanish" in it...although, I guess since I'm going to a frisbee tournament, there may be some long throws that could be referred as "bombs."

Anyway, I'm off to Lloret de Mar in a few hours to spend 3 days eating, drinking, socializing, and I guess playing a bit of frisbee - possibly on the beach shown at left!

The weather is supposed to be nice - Check out the picture-forecast for Saturday (below). I'll be at that sun symbol in the lower-central part of the picture.

I was thinking about bringing my computer down to try to do some real-time blogging, but it's just too much of a pain in the neck, so you'll have to wait until Tuesday to get my full report. I promise to take as many pictures as necessary to make you all completely jealous of my life as a "chomeur" (unemployed french resident).

Changing subjects completely here, Newsweek has an article with an excellent title: "France's Militants for the Status Quo" by Christopher Dickey. It's [another] piece from an American standpoint about all the stuff that's happening over here, but it has some good analysis about what's going on.