Editing / Lake O / Comedy dorks

Man, it has been really satisfying to do digital editing on the new album. Taking out the bad parts, swapping in new drum parts, FIUMing* things as needed. Realizing that I have the power to polish these things that I put together super quickly in time for songwriter's group after letting them ferment for a little while. So gratifying.

Our wealthy neighbors across the river (L*k* Osw*g*) are being forced to open up their fake lake to the riff-raff. It's been a long, comical saga, but what I didn't realize was that, in a maximum Lake O move, they blocked off the entrance to the park for kayakers using the "public art" piece "Spirit of the Marsh." The combination of snobbiness and pettiness is quintessential Lake O and I have to begrudgingly admire it. Anyway, this bespoke obstruction is apparently on its way out. And I will still order the excellent fiction that Lake O's library stocks via inter-library loan.

I had never watched M*nty Pyth*n before after being confronted with a million quotes from it from insufferable dorks, Objectivists, etc. in my college years and thereafter. But I picked up the complete DVD set for a few bucks from a neighbor of mine at a yard sale last summer and I've been cracking it while riding the exercise bike. Pretty good so far. Better first-hand than second-hand, as many things are.

(*Effing it up more, a technique that I frequently recommend in said songwriting group) 

New album forthcoming / Waffelos

I'm in the listen-to-rough-mixes-at-work phase of my recording life. I have to say that it is nice to be able to do things like update bass lines on the fly on my laptop rather than "punching in" on a four-track. The future is convenient, even if I haven't really changed all that much now that I'm sequencing stuff like a robot.

This evening while brushing the boy's teeth, somehow I flashed back to the time when I woke up early on some Iowa Saturday and consumed an entire box of Waffelos cereal while watching cartoons before the folks woke up. Peak Gen X memory, right?! I was trying to explain the existence of this short-lived cereal, and of Saturday morning cartoons, to my kid, to whom this is all very foreign. Of course I ended up on MrBreakfast.com, where Waffelos are currently #31 in the top 100. We watched the deeply 1980 commercial embedded therein and my kid started cracking up at the talking horse. 

I set a timer on my phone with the alarm tone "By the Seaside" and sang something like this when it went off:

Waffelos
Your daddy ate the whole box
The commercial
It's got a guitar-playin' horse
Waffelos, fellows, fellows 

Grape soda: Status update 2025

My wife and I were discussing matching sparkling beverages to shirt colors (don't ask) and I mentioned that I'd need to find some grape soda* ** to match my Purple Stride t-shirt.

"Where would you find grape soda?" she asked. My quick dad joke: Oh, at a vending machine near a junior high school.

Of COURSE I needed to check and see what today's grape soda landscape (landsgrape) looks like. I check walmmmart dot com and - wait, seriously? They have no grape soda available at my local affiliate?! Shipping only?!?! What sort of maniac ships grape soda?!!!!! Making things worse, my local Walm would be glad to sell me strawberry soda, always the worst possible fruit-flavored pop?***

Fredd Meyyer, too: No grape soda except some sort of foo-foo prebiotic stuff that's three bucks a can.

At last: Saifwhey has twelvers of either Crusssh or Sunnnnkystttt brand grape soda. I don't need it, but it is reassuring. The world can go on spinning.

*I'm totally on team "pop" rather than team "soda," but "grape pop" is too monstrous a phrase for me to even consider

**I have not consumed grape pop, or for that matter any pop, in probably a decade? Maybe longer? 

***Though the phrase and concept is dignified by its awesome appearance in "Burn Rubber on Me"

Esperanto rabbit hole

Got a text from a college friend this morning mentioning that he had found a copy of Why Learn to Speak Esperanto in 2025? in a Little Free Library. I love that Esperantists are still at it even if my own skills - hard acquired on the interminable bus voyage from Tualatin to Lake O to PCC-Sylvania to a terrible summer job in Beaverton in summer 1992 - are super rusty. 

Of course this sent me down an Esperanto-in-2025 rabbit hole. I ended up at the delightful Esperanto World webstore, where one can buy pronoun pins, including ri, a gender-neutral pronoun that has emerged in the ensuing 33 years! Esperantists against Fascism pins, pins declaiming one's love of a certain controversial consonant (ĥ). Love it.

It gives me joy to see that the community aspect of Esperanto is still a thing. Back in those days I loved learning the language but was terrified to actually potentially speak it to anyone. The years have softened me. There was a Cosmonox show a while back where I did a bunch of banter in extremely broken Esperanto. I was still a little scared that someone might actually heckle back in Esperanto, but the odds of that happening at a dive bar on SE Foster are pretty low, I guess, and anyway, high concept jokes sometimes don't land like you think they will. I went back to my usual incomprehensible speech in my native language after the first couple songs.

Salad spinner

Boyo and I were riding back from after school care when I saw some stuff laid out in a free pile at the side of the bike path. Wait, was that?!?! I turn our big cargo bike around.

Yes! It's a salad spinner!!! We currently own a semi-broken cheapo Ikea model that is partially functional, but with one plunge on this one's handle, it is clear that our salad spinner game has been substantially upgraded. The boy contentedly cranks it as we ride back home.

So I guess this is a free plug for OXO brand salad spinners. Plunging on this thing's handle makes me feel like I'm starting up a helicopter. It hums like a spaceship. Using a manual kitchen gadget should not be this fun. And does it spin the absolute bejeezus out of our salads? It does.

Hill Killerz/GF tiramisu

Portland Bike Summer has begun. I will admit that it is tough to look at all the fun listings and shake my middle-aged fist at the reality of having job/kid/home in the hinterlands. Though of course it's also nice to have a job that isn't terrible, a kid that is awesome, and a house with an affordable mortgage. 

REGARDLESS: I saw that near my house on Tuesdays there is a "hill killerz lunch hillz" ride - ride from the bottom to the top of SE 52nd Ave. five times in a half hour. Seems like my kind of ridiculous, I thought, even as someone who doesn't particularly love hillz. But doing ridiculous thingz together with other nerdz? And using lots of Zs to pluralize nouns? Sign me up! 

I bike the ten minutes from my house to the bottom of the hill and will my cranky gears into their lowest granny settings, and off I go. I get there and it's a very positive scene. Bells are rung, thumbs-ups exchanged. People cool off in the shade at the top of the hill. There's lycra, athleisure, me in the same schlubby work tee and shorts combo I wore yesterday. No one is judging anyone. Within 20 minutes I've done my requisite five rounds and I head off into a perfect Clackamas afternoon.

Gluten-free treats update: Today my dear wife randomly brought home gluten-free tiramisu from the coffeeshop near her downtown job. I would never have thought to buy this or consume this, but I have to admit it was a good idea.

Garage sales by bike

I rode around to some yard sales on the bike this week. Going by bike has the added benefit of making it very impractical to buy large items, which is good because yesterday I was eyeing one of the old iMac G4 lamp-shaped computers. I remember thinking my artsy bandmate's lamp computer - sheesh, 20 years ago?!?! - was super cool. Super cool, yes, but something I need in 2025? Thankfully it was too large and unwieldy to fit in a Jandd shopping pannier, so the decision was made for me.

Today I biked to a few more yard sales (slow weekend) and picked up some smaller things, including some old Peanuts and Heathcliff paperbacks for the boy. While OG Heathcliff can't hold a candle to the ludicrous current strips, there is something very pleasing about buying trashy old comic strip paperbacks at five for a buck. Another sale had an Enron mailer that said something about "values and commitment" or something wildly inappropriate. The woman holding the sale saw me looking at it and mentioned that Enron had somehow stolen something like 200 grand from her husband's retirement, and that Jesus was the only one you could trust. I wasn't sure how to respond. I got some free Lego magazines for the boy and headed home.

 

Luxury update / BT Express / Sha Na Na

The other day I wanted to transport my upright bass and my son at the same time. After decades of being used to the subcompact lifestyle, I was a little shocked to find that I could fit both of them in the vehicle at the same time rather than having to arrange a series of multiple trips. Bizarre.

 The Midnight Special served up an episode from 1975 with B.T. Express and Sha Na Na:

B.T. Express, it turns out, are really good. Tight, danceable, bass heavy, no filler, no ballads, hypnotic dance moves, flute solos, excellent taste in 70s goldenrod clothing. I'm mesmerized by the lead singer's insistent and unergonomic tambourine shaking. The prude in me is a little put off by the orgasmic moment in the middle of "Do It ('Til You're Satisfied), but has to admit that it makes sense. 

Then Sha Na Na comes on and... I don't get it. I'm trying to contextualize this absurdist greaser-nostalgia act in the context of the late 60s and early 70s, and heaven knows I love absurdist humor, but this is like fourth-order nostalgia at this point. And it doesn't help that the performance is notably half-assed and all over the place compared to the laser focus of BT Express. Maybe they were over the hill at this point? Maybe it made more sense in the context of the times? I guess I'll have to talk to the boomers in my life.

Gentrification notes/Yoko on CD/website

Dear little downtown Milwaukie, Oregon, getting all grown up and having multiple vintage stores and a record store. I biked to B-Side Records & Vintage after dropping off a bunch of the boy's cat manga at the library and there's some good energy, even if I, as someone who has entirely too many records and too much kitsch on hand, am not likely to drop much money there.

TIRED: $20 used Elton John records
WIRED: $3 NOS Yoko Ono CDs

I picked up some late-period Yoko Ryko reissues (Starpeace, It's Alright (I See Rainbows) etc.) on gleaming digital media and plopped them in my CD player. Their particular flavor of futuristic 80s cheese (this is a compliment) goes great with that icy laser sound. You can almost feel the beams glancing off her awesome oversized sunglasses.

It's a little sad that I haven't updated my website in years and years. Considering yoinking what I put up a long time ago (developed on Dreamweaver 5.5 back when) and just going with good old-fashion HTML. Will report back.

Guadalajara 2025 part 2

Tuesday we are gripped by FOMO and decide to do it all. We go back to the best vegan restaurant for brunch and are delighted that they have merch featuring their cute vegan cave people. 

We take an Üüüüübür to Tlaquepaque and tourist it up. We buy cute souvenirs, visit the Taller de Dulces at Nuestros Dulces where we see delicious sweets being made (for pretend at least) and make out a good portion of the rapid candy-focused Spanish. The boy asks for a small lollipop in delightful Spanish and everyone seems pretty charmed. There is some sadness that rompope will not work on the carryon. 

On a hot Tlaquepaque afternoon I have a nieve de agua, yerbabuena (spearmint) with lemon, and it is completely perfect for the situation. I remind myself to remind our local water ice (and video and espresso) emporium to try something similar. 

I pay six or eight pesos to use a pay toilet in the back of an endlessly fluorescent electronics bazaar. Each stall has more dubious phone cases and more bright lights than the last.

We head back to town and stop by Nimia, the sort of arts and crafts and clothing and jewelry store that would be my go-to for thoughtful creative gift-giving if it were not several thousand miles and one national border away. We get some very cute art for the wall. They also sell paletas and ice cream sandwiches from a charmingly twee little window. The boy does not say no.

Wednesday we cram into a tiny vehicle to go to the airport against the awe inspiring sunrise over endless industry. The Guadalajara airport is pleasant and efficient and we spend the last of our pesos. LAX is awful, especially in comparison. We make it back to Portland, my mom takes us home, and we try to process it all.

RLLRBLL/Lorena Álvarez/The Bats

I got a chance to see RLLRBLL last night for the first time in ages. Man they're good. As they have shrunk down to their core trio over the decades (!) they have cut out all the fat, just lean volume all around. I was positioned in front of the subwoofer at Bunk Bar so I got to take in all of the bass heroics. New album Gilliam contains no major chords per my accounting, all minor, and drops the line "God I love the Wipers" in "Negate" - is this their Youth of America?

The boy got way into the charming game Alba: A Wildlife Adventure and so I got to hear its great soundtrack again. Lorena Álvarez's discography is also great, it turns out. Great video for "La Boda" featuring dancing dogs, a butt with a smiling face, and a rainbow-striped cardigan that I would totally consider stealing. 

 

The Bats have a new song and it sounds exactly like you would want it to sound, which is to say it sounds exactly like the Bats. Also, the video features some pretty sweet vintage (folding?) bikes: 

Guadalajara 2025

TL;DR the author and his family visit Mexico - this may be edited later

With the kid in dual-language Spanish immersion and myself desperately needing to (1) practice Spanish and (2) see the sunshine before July, we decided to treat ourselves to a trip to Guadalajara. Why not. The flights were relatively cheap and it looked exciting.

The flight (our kid's first ever, and JL's first ever trip outside the US!) was pretty calm, thank goodness. We weren't sure. We had shown him some "Flying on an Airplane!" type DVDs from the library and brought the Steam Deck so he could play endless Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip on the plane. 

Layover in LAX - I had forgotten how crazy it is (the boy kept saying "why is this airport a shopping mall?!"). We eventually make our way to the Aeroméxico gate at the farthest end of the airport where we realize we are among the only English speakers there. All right, party's on!

Airport hotel shuttle. I am immediately glad I did not rent a car - I'm too timid a driver, I'd get smushed. We get hotel food and I realize I should have boned up on how to do things like ask for the bill, how to tip, etc. Oh well. The waitress is gracious and helps me with some of the lingo. Our room overlooks a trucking yard, which is endlessly fascinating to the boy the next day.

The next day we take an endless Üüüüüüber to our fancypants Colonia Americana Erbenb. The neighborhoods slowly change before our eyes from bonfires-at-night to building supplies to coffee shops and boutiques. The view from the Erbenb is nuts. Crazy sunsets and sunrises. There's a brunch restaurant on the block that only serves black food.

We walk and walk and walk. Chilaquiles every day. Coffee. Bookstores. New flowers and hand-painted signs at every corner. Great design on every brunch menu. Flyers on every corner for desaparecidos. Men's names called out in spray paint as an abusador. 

Friday we go to the zoo. It's a great zoo and the kid is a great age to take to the zoo. The heat is a problem for boyo and Oregon-bred spouse, so we head back to the Erbnb and they rest in the AC. I head out on a MiBici and ride around looking for a restaurant. The restaurant is not there, but I ride more and make notes of new places to check out. Biking here is fun. I lurch through intersections, assert my place in the street. It feels awesome.

I fail to get dinner and bring back potato chips. Oh well.

Saturday is a rest day because I get the dreaded traveler's dyuhryuh. It takes me out pretty bad but I recover quickly. I may never eat potato chips again. The Erbnb host's description of the suite mentioned "small gatherings on the roof" on weekends, but it turns out this small gathering was a high-volume dance party that shook the ceilings until 1 am. Fortunately, I was totally spent and passed out at 10.

Sunday we get more great chilaquiles in a candy-colored hole in the wall and I hurry back to catch the last hour or so of the Vía Recreactiva, in which the city closes down a bunch of major thoroughfares and people actively transport themselves through the city. It feels spectacular to be part of a huge crowd, from hipsters and goths on rollerblades to kids popping wheelies on BMX bikes for blocks.

We only brought two books for the boy, Garfield: Fat Cat 3-Pack Vol. 16 and My Cat Is Such a Weirdo Vol. 5. He has read each of them about a trillion times and has started reenacting scenes from both. The kid dresses up as a chef and pretends that My Cat Is Such a Weirdo is the menu, so we end up ordering a lot of "THUD-OOF!" and other delicacies.

So many little cars.

Monday we take the bus to Centro and walk around the cathedral, the central plazas, the grid of narrow shopping streets. The boy is mesmerized by a barrel organ. We take the last ride on the carousel before it closes for siesta.

MORE TO COME

Luxury middle age second-hand item alert

I bought two larger newer things to replace two smaller older things:

(1) We bought an electric vehicle, a Nissan Ariya. Second-hand, of course, but with very little use. Massive depreciation and the tax credit finally brought this cushy crossover into our price range. It is massive compared to my previous subcompact gas vehicles, but my kid calls it the "comfy-mobile" and is not incorrect. We're closer to weaning ourselves off fossil fuels in the household - just need to replace our gas water heater. 

(2) My old cheapo second-hand exercise bike finally started making horrendous sounds after a little over a year of frequent use, so I drove said electric vehicle up the mountain into Happy Valley to buy an open-box exercise bike off Craigslist. After much effort*, I assembled the thing, and while it, too, feels massive compared to the previous model, it is smooooooth, and I am less worried about waking the kid, who somehow slept through the incredible racket of the old one. While riding it, I've been playing Ys games (this time Memories of Celceta) and they are good cheerful low-brain action for keeping the legs moving. If you do Steam, most of them are on sale right now.

 *Said effort largely due to a Z-tier translation of the assembly instructions (naming and shaming: Xterra SB600), in which the various parts are referred to by a number of different part numbers, never consistent. My day-job mind struggles to imagine what would have led to this sort of error.

Cosmonox @ Firkin Tavern Portland 2/28/25

I'll be playing the squeaky card reader thingy plus a couple actual instruments this Friday at the Firkin Tavern in the rainy city of Portland, Oregon, USA. We open up the evening, hooray! Our musical brothers and sisters in the Vardaman Ensemble will be showing their latest evolution. (I'm not sure they've actually changed since the last time I saw them, but I think it's fair to assume.) I don't know Water Shrews yet, but they do have good taste in opening and closing bands.

Eternal Gormless Youth and Obscurity

The video for Snowy Band's "Looking Back" is very funny and a little poignant. Present-day Snowy discovers a video of himself in his tender years and copies the backgrounds and, um, choreography? I had some extreme feelings of recognition of myself in my gormless Guitar Vanity* years in my own nondescript suburban home. 

In a similar vein, I checked out Simon Hanselmann's Below Ambition from the library (yay libraries) and its depictions of self-indulgent patience-testing noise band squalor ring exceptionally true. His stuff has a strong flavor that I can't always take too much of, but I like this one.

The game Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip has been very popular with adult and youth alike in my household. It is sweetly anarchic and goofy. The writing is great. You smack everything in sight with a pipe. And importantly, it features a controller button solely devoted to having Terry make silly noises.

I plowed through Toni Tennille: A Memoir in a couple quick sittings. Not a great book necessarily, but earnest and readable. I now appreciate how much of a weirdo the Captain (RIP) was, and how difficult. The 70s were a weird time all right.

Is this a hot take? "Love Will Keep Us Together" > "Love Will Tear Us Apart." 

Also, I remember writing a blog post a couple decades ago about how it was comforting that you could always find a copy of Love Will Keep Us Together in the thrift bins, but I looked through the overpriced $3 records at my local Mormon thrift and didn't see it. The churning sea of thrift-store records does change eventually. Somehow I only seem to own a copy of the Spanish version Por Amor Viviremos.

I'm buying an Electrix Filter Factory from a friend and finally broke it out in Cosmonox Mode the other night. Holy mackerel that thing has the power. It will feature prominently at the show this Friday, hint hint, see next blog post.

* I need to put my album Eternal Youth and Obscurity up on Internet Archive

Cosmic Future Groove/Rose City Reads/Voice of Harold

Always interesting to see what sort of things the kid likes. Unexpected recent passion: Cosmic Future Groove Vol. 2. I did not expect my son to want to listen to 70s library disco over and over again, but I am not complaining. Today after the bath he mentioned that he would like to have a time machine so he could go to the 70s and listen to this music. He has been warned that the 70s also include "Muskrat Love." I think he thinks I'm joking about that being a real thing.

Because I cannot refuse a good segue: I had a chance to stop by the Friends of the Library's new book store Rose City Reads the other day. I picked up Toni Tennille: A Memoir because I had to. Will report back. Anyway: While the cheapskate in me misses the low low prices and beat-up library discards of the former Title Wave, the joy of discovery is still there, and a lot closer to me no less.

Sick boy. Lots of library Bluey DVDs. Sometimes things that are popular are good.

We've been reading old Childcraft stories at bedtime. One must tread carefully around some of the dated racial attitudes etc., including "The Five Chinese Brothers," yikes, but in any case that got the R.E.M. song of a similar name stuck in my head, quickly to be supplanted by the far superior "Voice of Harold," and my thanks go to rschreck for syncing up the song with its source material, the liner notes from the Revelaires' The Joy of Knowing Jesus:

Little stereos

At a Happy Valley yard sale last summer*, I picked up a very cute little vintage Realistic/Radio Shack stereo amplifier. I wasn't sure if I would have a USE for it, but it was only a couple bucks and it had the best aluminum knobs.** So I picked it up and found a place for it in my bike bags among my other finds.

Today I realized I wanted to give it a shot. Turns out it works super well (once I worked out all the dust from the potentiometers by sweeping them back and forth), and it looks pretty good. I picked up some super cheap speakers from the Mormon thrift store down the street, and for the price of a Costco pizza***, I'm in business.

I have set up so so many stereos over the years. Always a new apartment, always a new garage sale receiver, always fiddling with the speaker wires. Wires all over, my perpetual condition. Today I got out my wire strippers and triumphantly did some wire stripping. It is so satisfying. I could never be an electrician, but stripping speaker wire feels pretty good.

*Of course I went to a gazillion garage sales in this beautiful and bland suburb by e-bike, it was great, see my write-up from 2023
**I know, I'm a pervert for liking knobs and buttons so much
***RIP gluten, I miss you