Chad Smith

Note: This isn’t exactly timely, but I’m over the pain enough now to post this. Yeah, that’s right. Fuck off.

I was in a friend’s van on the way back from a spring near DeLand years ago when I first heard The Smiths. After I got home that night I started downloading the band’s more popular numbers. Some time later a friend made me a mix CD of Smiths and Morrissey songs, and we wore it the hell out driving to and fro wherever we went in those days, testing the limits of the shitty factory speakers in my 1993 Chevrolet Cavalier. I’ve believed ever since.

I wouldn’t get to see the man in the flesh until 2007, when I went to two shows in three days. If there was a ranking of the best moments of my life, that second concert would be included in the top five, possibly top three. That night, the band debuted “I’m Throwing My Arms Around Paris” and I got handshakes during two of my favorite Smiths songs, “The Boy With the Thorn in His Side” and “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” a song that was rarely played on that tour.

But, as if to punish me for having too grand an experience, Moz has let me down time after time after time since.

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Recently, whoever keeps track of such things declared “Web 2.0″ the millionth word in the English language. The newspaper I work for — traditionally stubborn toward the Web, the norm in the industry — last week set up Facebook and Twitter accounts. The Time cover story last week was about tweeting, and several of the podcasters I listen to regularly — Bill Simmons, Adam Carolla, etc. — in recent weeks have gone from talking shit about the tweeting phenomenon/claiming ignorance about it to using it to promote upcoming shows and criticize Dwight Howard.

Sigh. I guess I might as well get on board too.

I think there’s a legitimate news application for Twitter, and I guess there’s a legitimate social application as well. It seems to work for The New York Times, as it does for Miley Cyrus. (By the way, if asked to bet I would have guessed Miley has more followers than The Times. Not so. NYT leads by about 200,000. I suppose that’s encouraging.)

I’m excited about the possibilities of implementing it at the paper, but we should all quit if mainstream, legitimate news ever begins to look like this:

we getting hustled? all candid’s pre-selected by clerics and hold position a-jad regime? takes bite out of “populist revolt”? #iranelection
about 10 hours ago from web
ChrisCuomo [ABC anchor]

Right.

So begins Round 2 of my Great Twitter Experiment. I had an account for about a week senior year, but I quickly realized I neither had the time to “micro blog” nor was I interesting enough to do it consistently. But if the aforementioned starlet can figure out something worthwhile to, uh, tweet, I better be able to come up with something too.

(Sry for goin over 140 chrctrs.)

My favorite scene in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” has to be when the king comes upon peasants toiling in a field. Of course, British hilarity ensues:

King Arthur: I am your king.
Woman: Well I didn’t vote for you.
King: You don’t vote for kings.
Woman: Well how’d you become king then?
King: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king.
Dennis: Listen, strange women lyin’ in ponds distributin’ swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony…

And it goes on in that way.

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On the plane to England we watched “European Vacation.” Now in France, it’s easy to wonder whether the French-speaking waiters, shop clerks and hotel receptionists are saying the same things to us they said to the Griswold clan. That said, we haven’t experienced a lot of the oft-discussed French rudeness. At least that we’re aware of.

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Put me on the train for London town.

Spent a few days in Austin last week and…

ate a Texas-sized (because everything is Texas-sized in Texas) burrito

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Orlando date canceled; Jacksonville date postponed:

3/1 – Orlando, Fla. – Hard Rock Live
3/3 – Jacksonville, Fla. – Florida Theatre
3/7 – Atlanta – Variety Playhouse
3/9 – Asheville, N.C. – The Orange Peel
4/12 – Austin, Texas – Bass Concert Hall
5/11 – London – Royal Albert Hall

A brick in the small of the back again…