Lueders Haus Blog

As Sherry and I start planning our wedding we are going to need all the inspiration we can get. What did the Google guy do for his wedding?

Google has declined to disclose any details of the wedding, but according to various news reports, the location was such a closely guarded secret that wedding guests boarded the jet owned by Mr. Brin and Mr. Page unaware of their exact destination until they arrived on a private island in the Bahamas.

Guests who attended said the bride wore a white swimsuit, the groom a black one. Some guests took a boat while others — including the bride and groom — swam to a nearby sandbar, where the couple exchanged vows.

We went to the Dinosaur Jr. show last night. My ears are still ringing a bit, that can’t be good. They played a good mix of new, old, and even some post-Lou stuff. I would say they sounded better than their last tour. The kids in the front took it upon themselves to re-live Lollapalooza ‘93 by starting a moshpit on the Showbox floor. Of course, someone eventually got wrestled down by security and taken out back.

Goes to today’s NYTimes for “Rock Star Still Hasn’t Found the African Aid He’s Lookig For“. If you don’t get it see here.

Sherry and I had a music fill weekend. After spending the day cleaning on Saturday we headed over to the Tractor to see Califone. Eric Johnson of the Fruit Bats was the second act. The Tractor’s crowd was pretty loud but Eric’s cover of Neil Youny’s “Tell Me Why” made it all worth it.

On Sunday, after a long afternoon of prying off rusty bolts we went to the early show of Peter Bjorn and John. They played their whistling song and fun as had by all.

The Arts section of today’s Sunday Times was very Sci-Fi themed. First with a piece on Philip K. Dick’s new Library of America volume (edited by Jonathan Lethem).

The books aren’t just trippy, though. The best of them are visionary or surreal in a way that American literature, so rooted in reality and observation, seldom is. Critics have often compared Mr. Dick to Borges, Kafka, Calvino. To come up with an American analogue you have to think of someone like Emerson, but nobody would ever dream of looking to him for movie ideas. Emerson was all brain, no pulp.

From the descriptions of him he seemed to channel Charles Bukowski.

For the nerdier Sci-Fi fans they have a piece on the revival of sorts of MST3K. Canceled in 1999, the creators have a new gig, called rifftrax, creating alternate alternate sound tracks for recent movies, instead of old B-grade sci-fi movies. Thanks to broadband you can now download their sound tracks as MP3 and play them along on your computer while watching the DVD. You have to get your girlfriend (if you have one by now) to do the robot puppets on the bottom of the screen. Sounds like a party to me!

I rented 21 Grams last night. Its from the same writer and director as Babal and has the same structure with three intertwined stories. The movie was good, maybe even better than Babal. But I have trouble watching gut wrenchers like this and I’m not much of a Sean Penn fan.

Is there no limit to what economists will do in the name of research? In studying the psychology of eating Cornell’s Brain Wansink fed movie goers stale popcorn and bottomless bowls of soup.

Over the years, Mr. Wansink has done similar experiments with everything from different-size dinner plates to bottomless bowls of tomato soup that are secretly connected to a tube underneath a restaurant table. His overarching conclusion is that our decisions about eating often have little to do with how hungry we are.

Conclusions? We all need to switch to the cute old diner plates.

After reading the Pitchfork review of the new Dinosaur Jr. album I was reminded that I don’t just have to listen to it on KEXP anymore. So headed over to Silver Platters and bought me a copy. Even after twenty years J and Lou can still “bring the noise”. This is definitely some of the best stuff either of them have put out in a long time. I can’t wait for the concert later this month, hopeful we won’t forget the earplugs this time.

I couldn’t leave without picking up another album as well. So dug back into the Mountain Goats archive for his 1995 release, Zopilote Machine. Great stuff, even more lo-fi then his recent releases.

After Blades of Glory last weekend Sherry and I could not get enough of Will Ferrell so we rented Stranger than Fiction. (Ok, maybe it was Saturday afternoon at the rental shop and the pickins’ kind of slim.) I enjoyed it. Reminded me a lot of a Charlie Kaufman movie. Ferrell’s character could have easily been played by Jim Carrey.