travel

there is a flight from NY to paris for $158, and i feel like going just because it’s so damn cheap. and dublin for $250.

(i wrote that a few days ago and didn’t post it, and now u2 are back in the studio in dublin so i’ve convinced myself that i really want to take advantage and go…)

visitors

so…cassie came into buffalo on thursday with the intent of seeing the u23d movie, which because of stupid hannah montana, got pushed back another week. arg. so we had to find other things to do hahaha. so her visit involved the terminal, the falls, driving around, the mall, food, wii, botanical gardens, the basillica (father bakers/our lady of victory) and a u2 dvd watching party with leighanne which was fun. but then saturday she couldn’t get a flight out of buffalo back home so i had to drive her to the pittsburgh airport haha. turns out the airport is right near where dan and i stayed back in august, and where the summer nin show was. i knew the directions sounded familiar for some reason. anyway good few days, good to see her again finally.

now back to work and boring old life, and hopefully the movie will finally be released here next week and we’ll get to see it saturday or something (i can’t take another day off, work is not letting us give days to part time dealers anymore, jerks).

hockey

entertainment tonight/the insider is doing a helicopter flyover of michael jackson’s neverland ranch, 3 years after he moved out. urbex paradise hahahahah

hockey tonight, vs toronto. we had leaf fans next to us. good thing they were shut out, because i hate dealing with leaf fans haha. and given that 25% of the arena is leaf fans for toronto games, it gets pretty loud. the game was actually pretty boring, but we realized tonight that there are 2 women who share seasons behind us, who are the most annoying people on earth. they insist on “calling” the entire game (but not always correctly), and calling all the players by their nicknames like “Soupy” and “Roysie”…and they are so loud. like shrieking, loud. they have a new nickname for a player… Hector. o.m.g. she drove me nuts calling Hecht, Hector. it doesn’t even make sense!!! we bonded with the leafs fans next to us over these annoying women, because they kept complaining that they were so loud. phill referred to them as Fran Dresher, and the leafs kids called them Roseanne. haha then they started squaking at the women LOL. so every time the women shrieked or called Hecht Hector they’d get squaked at, and I’d go HIS NAME IS NOT HECTOR! i seriously had a headache just from these women. thankfully we don’t seem to go to the same games as they do, i think this is only the 2nd time we’ve noticed annoying nicknames being shrieked throughout the game. but yay. still in 8th.

and it turns out…whoever we sold our tickets to for last sunday’s Zednik injury game…brought their knitting with them and knitted through the whole game. wtf LOL the guys with the tickets next to us actually took a picture of the knitter cuz they were just so flabbergasted hahahah.

books

i’ve read alot of books since christmas, and now i don’t remember what they were haha. i did finally read “u2 by u2”. it was pretty good. i can’t say i really learned anything new about the band, and alot of what they said came from interviews i had already read so it felt a bit like de ja vu. I did put down a a few quotes from the book…
Bono – “one thing I really liked on the reel-to-reel was a folky duo called Hunky Dory. I loved that duo. It was years later I discovered it was David Bowie and Hunky Dory was the name of the album.”
Edge- ” I discovered that being a loner and having a superiority complex works quite well, as your distorted self image is never challenged by engaging in any way with the rest of humanity”
Edge – ” I once said to Bob Dylan, “people are going to be playing your songs for thousands of years.” He said, “Man they’re going to be listening to your songs too. It’s just no one’s going to know how to play them.” Sometimes, I might add, that includes us.”
Bono – ” One of my definitions of art is the discovery of beauty in unexpected places.”

In the meantime I’ve still been plodding through “A fiction of the past, the 60s in American History.” I got through the music in culture section and it made me want to read more about bands from that time…so I have bob dylan’s autobio on the pile to read, and i borrowed “the doors by the doors” from a friend at work. it was pretty interesting as i really knew nothing about the history of the doors or jim morrison. it was just like the u2 book, exerpts from jim morrison interviews, and seemingly new interviews with the other band members specifically for the book, plus tons of photos.

I read “A Canticle for Lebowitz” a post apocolyptic book my mom gave me when she finished it, which was pretty good but not mind blowing or anything.

And now I’m reading “Take A Walk on the Dark Side: Rock and Roll Myths, Legends and Curses” by R Gary Patterson. I’ve heard him on Coast to Coast AM a few times and he is full of interesting stories of rock bands (mostly brit invasion 60s/70s era), so I picked up this book. Well…the stories are interesting, but boy does it need another edit. Things just seem very out of order. You read one paragraph and then he switches subjects to something that seems very irrelevant, but then pages later there will be a random sentence that really REALLY should have gone with the paragraph ages earlier. It also seems that sometimes he is grasping at straws to make a connection between artists, or themes or events. Like The Buddy Holly Curse…just because someone dies in the same month, years later, doesn’t mean anything. It’s a 1 in 12 chance haha. In a chapter about Alestair Crowley he mentions Daryl Hall (from Hall and Oats? I dunno…) and the things he has said about studying Crowley…and at the end follows up with “Ironically, Hall’s birthday is October 11th, Crowley’s is October 12th”….like that has any relevance at all. He also over uses the word “ironic” and may be misusing it as well (or maybe I’m just missing the irony). There have also been a few things mentioned that relate to The Tea Party…lyrics to a Robert Johnson blues song that are also in Sun Going Down, and a reference to the book Master and Marguerita. So…it’s amusing but could have been put together better, and it really doesn’t need so many “ironic” grasps at straws to connect things. These stories are interesting on their own.

ugh

arg wtf. now the u23d movie is not “opening” in rochester or buffalo until jan 22nd. don’t they know we’ve planned plane travel around seeing this movie on friday?!?!?! it appears that it is STILL going to be playing friday in toronto…but that means passports and traffic and borders…arg. carolyn, would you possibly be able to call the theatre and see if they’re still going to be playing it on friday…i can’t call canada. 416-223-9586…nevermind, i can call, and all i get is a stupid fucking recording. ARGGGGGGGGGGGGGG

uugggghhh

there was another throat cutting by skate at a buffalo game tonight…richard zednik had his neck cut by his teammates skate in the 3rd period. scary scary shit. of course it’s on youtube. http://youtube.com/watch?v=0H59I_sJ43A (it happening) and http://youtube.com/watch?v=nzhuviXi3hc (on air after) crazy. he is apparently ok, was stabilized and taken to a hospital, had surgery, and is “resting comfortably”. thank god.
yahoo

With minds still occupied by teammate Richard Zednik’s gruesome neck injury, the Florida Panthers returned to practice Tuesday seeking to regain a needed sense of normalcy.

Zednik remained hospitalized 1,350 miles away in Buffalo, where his condition was upgraded to good on Tuesday and doctors planned to take him out of an intensive-care unit.

Zednik isn’t believed to have suffered any long-term brain or nerve damage, and one surgeon described him as “very lucky.”

“It’s a sign of how good medicine can be and how good medical people can be,” Panthers coach Jacques Martin said Tuesday as the team skated for the first time since the accident, which became the NHL’s dominant topic.

Zednik was critically injured Sunday night in the third period of the game at Buffalo. Teammate Olli Jokinen was upended and his razor-sharp skate blade pierced Zednik’s neck, opening a deep gash that stopped just shy of the 32-year-old’s jugular vein.

A significant amount of blood immediately began pouring from the 1 1/2 -inch wound, leaving a wide, ghastly red trail on the ice as Zednik skated to the Panthers’ bench, desperate for help. His carotid artery — which pumps blood to the brain — was cut, and emergency surgery that night at Buffalo General Hospital probably saved his life.

“It’s hard to say what would have happened under other circumstances, but clearly, the care he got initially by the staff at the arena, I think, saved his life,” said Robert McCormack, the hospital’s clinical chief of emergency medicine.

The Panthers agreed.

“Shows how tough the guy is,” Jokinen said. “He was able to skate to the bench, with the cut in his throat, losing blood like that. It was pretty amazing, you know?”

Zednik never lost consciousness. He actually complained that Sabres’ orthopedic surgeon Dr. Les Bisson was applying too much pressure to his neck in an effort to stop the bleeding.

“We have to set it aside now and play hockey,” said Florida defenseman Jassen Cullimore, who helped Zednik off the ice. “That’s what we do.”

By the time he reached the hospital, Zednik needed five units (roughly five pints) of blood, a figure that suggests one-third of the blood in his body gushed from the wound before bleeding could be controlled.

And by all accounts, his recovery was going as well as could be expected.

Shortly after Dr. Sonya Noor checked in on Zednik one day after stitching him back together, the Panthers’ forward already had a question.

“He actually asked me when he could go back to training?” the vascular surgeon said with a smile. “And I said, ‘Next season.”‘

But that’s a far better prognosis than the one many feared a day earlier, when Zednik raced off the ice.

“He looks very good. He’s alert, awake, oriented. He remembers what happened last night. … He’s right on target,” said Noor, who performed the one-hour surgery. “He’s with his wife upstairs. They’re talking, and we’re just very, very happy. We were all lucky last night, not just Richard.”

Zednik, who was cooperative and never lost consciousness on his way to surgery, had several things going for him.

Doctors were astonished the skate blade did not hit any other arteries or veins, including the jugular, or cause any major nerve damage. It also helped that the artery was not entirely severed — “It was hanging by a thread,” Noor said. That lessened the time it took for the carotid to be clamped as it was reattached, and decreased the chances of brain damage.

“Luck,” was a factor, according to Noor. “He might have some hoarseness and that’s about it at this point.”

Zednik could be discharged from the hospital by this weekend.

car show

today was the buffalo auto show with pat and heather, met up with jenn and jeff, and phill and his brother – all because ryan miller and brian campbell were signing autographs. haha i actually didn’t need either of them on my posters, so i just went for something to do. car show = boring. it was just a giant show room of normal cars, and i didn’t see any of these futuristic concept cars or anything fun. waited in line for a long time, to make sure we’d get a chance to see miller or heather would have killed someone hahah. it was successful, but heather froze and couldn’t speak to him LOL i assured her that was normal hahahah. we were out by quarter to 8, and we headed back to brian and danielle’s to return their son, whom pat and heather brought to the show to get his miller jersey signed (he’s 2 haha). hung out there, and next thing we knew it was 2am hahah. time flew. back to work tomorrow, then off saturday since it’s chinese new year today and they’re doing something at work for the asians on saturday. it was a must request off day hahahahahah

hockey

took my dad to the sabres game tonight, vs nj. it was stressful. first the weather was pretty terrible, icy, so he drove. my usual parking lot next to the aud was closed…which was depressing because i don’t know if it was closed because the attendant didn’t feel like being out in the ice, or cuz of demolition. so we had to park the next lot over, walk/run in the ice blahblahblah. suck. then the game, lost a 2-0 lead, went to overtime, then shoot out which i figured was another guaranteed loss. stafford was our first shooter, scores. yay we got at least one. our 2nd shooter…tallinder?!?!?!?!?! wtf!?!?!?! then he comes out with a sweet move and scores and we win (miller stopped both nj shooters). awesome! hahahah.

i had noticed alot of NT varsity jackets when i was walking around looking for my dad. turns out there was a TNT hockey team shootout during 2nd intermission (NT won haha). that explains it.

bowiieeeee

I’m closer to the Golden Dawn
Immersed in Crowley’s uniform
Of imagery
I’m living in a silent film
Portraying Himmler’s sacred realm
Of dream reality
I’m frightened by the total goal
Drawing to the ragged hole
And I ain’t got the power, anymore
No I ain’t got the power anymore

I’m the twisted name on Garbo’s eyes
Living proof of Churchill’s lies
I’m destiny
I’m torn between the light and dark
Where others see their targets
Divine symmetry
Should I kiss the viper’s fang
Or herald loud the death of Man
I’m sinking in the quicksand of my thought
And I ain’t got the power anymore

Don’t believe in yourself
Don’t deceive with belief
Knowledge comes with death’s release

Ah ah ah ah
Ah ah ah ah ah

I’m not a prophet or a stone age man
Just a mortal with the potential of a superman
I’m living on
I’m tethered to the logic of Homo Sapien
Can’t take my eyes from the great salvation
Of bullshit faith
If I don’t explain what you ought to know
You can tell me all about it
On the next Bardo
I’m sinking in the quicksand of my thought
And I ain’t got the power anymore

Don’t believe in yourself
Don’t deceive with belief
Knowledge comes with death’s release

Ah ah ah ah
Ah ah ah ah ah

Don’t believe in yourself
Don’t deceive with belief
Knowledge comes with death’s release

Ah ah ah ah
Ah ah ah ah ah

and in other news apparently stone temple pilots are touring again this summer, and….new kids on the block may be reuniting. and i’m not even going to comment on that. those that know me know what i’ll be doing if that is true /nerd. ha