And now I do have a job! How excellent. I start… tomorrow. Kind of sudden, I know. Their current receptionist’s last day is tomorrow, and they want her to give me some training before she leaves. It’s a temp-to-hire position, so we’ll see if I get a formal offer three or four months from now.

Now that I have a job, it’s time to start pruning my Tivo season passes. A lot of things are going to go to “first run only.” Goodbye, Good Eats reruns! I think I’ll miss you most. Well, you, Deep Space Nine, and Farscape.

So, there was this race, and it was pretty darn amazing. I really enjoyed watching The Amazing Race these past months, and I highly recommend it to you all when it comes back at midseason (or whenever).

D&D last night was fascinating, even though I didn’t get to beat on anything at all. We had the problem of our company being stuck 100 feet below the battle. Heh, “battle.” It was our cleric, Joanna, against four mindflayers and a construct. If any of us had actually made it up there, we would have gotten stunned and had our brains sucked out very quickly indeed. (I tried to go up, but the rope was cut, and I fell. Again. But only forty feet or so.) Joanna’s got a killer Will Save, so she was able to shrug all the stunnings off. Well, all except one. The only way she failed was to roll a one on a d20. Thankfully, we were able to get our wizard invisibled and up there to teleport her back out.

I know I have no qualifications to give out any music advice to people, except maybe about which recording of Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony is the best. (Conclusion? Save your money. I haven’t found a great recording yet. Almost every recording plays the second and third movement too fast. Or the piccolo uses far too much vibrato. Or the xylophone isn’t loud enough in the second movement. Or… I could go on.)

Anyway, after a long hiatus (seriously- ten years or so), I’ve started listening to the radio again. I turned it on in my car a few months ago when I was bored of my CDs. The first song I heard was from a group called Franz Ferdinand. I cracked up when I heard the band name. I don’t know if anyone else besides my family remembers this, but on a old episode of Saturday Night Live (Roseanne hosted, I believe), there was a sketch called “Comedy Killers,” or something along those lines. It was a Jeopardy-like game show, where the questions dealt with topics that are never, ever funny (I think Kevin Nealon played the host). The final question was, “What is the Ultimate Comedy Killer?” I can’t remember all the answers the constestants gave, but Roseanne’s was about making fun of the American flag. However, everyone was wrong. Why? Because the Ultimate Comedy Killer is the Archduke Franz Ferdinand (cut to a very solemn sepia-toned picture). Mom, Jon, and I laughed so very hard. It must have been something in the execution, because no one we ever told about it thought it was funny. But I guess that makes sense, Ultimate Comedy Killer and all.

Anyway, I’m listening to the Franz Ferdinand on the radio (yeah, it was “Take Me Out”), and they’re getting a crapload of airtime. Not that it’s a bad thing, I like the songs. I remember telling Jon that the stations seemed to play their music a lot, and that, “It’s fun music, but I imagine it’d be pretty difficult to arrange for an a cappella group.” (For those of you who don’t know, Jon’s an a cappella arranger and a damn good vocal percussionist. He got me into the genre when I was in high school, prompting many people to smack me when I said, “I’ve got a really great a cappella arrangement of that!” Because I didn’t listen to the radio, you see [the reception sucked where we lived], and so it happened a lot that the first time I would hear a song would be in an a cappella arrangement. And sometimes, when I heard the real version of a song, it would be disappointing [I’m looking at you, Evanescence].)

So I issue a challenge to the a cappella arrangers out there. I’d like to hear if “Take Me Out” can be done well.

This ended up a lot longer than I was planning.

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