Thanksgiving and a few other bands at Marriage Records, Portland, Oregon, USA.
They Might Be Giants Download Store. Send them your money. There's an exclusive song called "Love is Eternity" - a rollicking 2 minute song for a friend's wedding. It's quite a nice song, really.
AND HERE'S WHY I THINK WEDDING REGISTRIES ARE A BIG GIANT SCAM
It takes some serious chutzpah to ask rational people to buy a $120 gravy boat you put on your wedding registry. No one buys a $120 gravy boat on their own. Why? Because no one has any need for a $120 gravy boat and no one is prepared to spend $120 on a gravy boat (a gravy boat only provides $120 worth of utility if it comes with $115 stuffed inside it). The last person who should be asking for a $120 gravy boat is someone WHO CANNOT COOK WORTH A TINKER'S DAMN and WILL NOT BE MAKING GRAVY ANYTIME SOON. But there it is. On their f'ing registry. You know what? You can have that stupid $120 gravy boat if you guarantee that you will cook Thanksgiving dinner once a month for the first 10 years of marriage, using the $120 gravy boat to hold $120 gravy ($120/(12*10) = $1, I figure it's worth $1 to keep your gravy in a boat instead of a bowl or small sauce pan). Weddings are a big scam perpetuated by a bloated wedding industry that gets fat on things like $120 gravy boats and useless flower arrangements. Does Pottery Barn or Macy's or where-have-you have any kind of self-interest in telling you that if you were a better person you might forego asking for a bunch of stupid crap like expensive flatware and towels and tell your guests that if they are so inclined to spend that kind of money on this, here's a list of non-political charities that could probably do something better with it than us - a legally bound pair of upwardly mobile white people who can surely afford $120 gravy boats when we decide that having such a thing is important enough to us that we'd buy it on our own? No, they don't. Instead the whole "wedding gift" vicious cycle continues because people THINK they are supposed to get "wedding gifts" that no one actually needs, that end up getting stuck in a china cabinet and never touched except for twice a year and then become some object of misplaced attachment during divorce proceedings. It's stupid and depressing. Here's better wedding presents:
-Xbox/PS2 games
-tickets to events - sporting (prison rodeo), cultural (prison ballet), or otherwise
-some common sense advice on money management, since spending $20,000 on a f'ing party is obviously a harbinger of a lifetime of poor financial decisions the happy couple can look forward to
I'm done with that.
MORE MEDIA FRENZY
I saw a screening of "Thunderbirds" and then afterwards I (we [brag - I have friends]) sashayed into "Spiderman 2" (which has nothing to do with baseball - I have no idea why they were advertising this on baseball fields and pitcher's mounds, it makes no sense). Thunderbirds is not targeted at me - it's targeted at children (I think). It's sort of standard kids-as-spies fare, but the underlying premise is basically "Home Alone" on an island with some rockets. It's not very good but if you have a crush on Bill Paxton, you may want to see it. Or if you feel bad that it cost like $70m to make and will probably not recoup its costs, you may want to see it.
FOOD FIGHT
Also, I've noticed something that's beginning to really piss me off: restaurants that are kind of crappy and could/should basically be fast food if they wanted to, but they are sit-down places with waiters so you are expected to tip them. And the price of their lackluster food is almost universally higher than what it ought to be. Sure it, aids in 'liquidity' in the restaurant market - filling the space in between places I want to eat and places I feel I can afford to eat with a place that I don't want to eat and don't want to pay to eat at - but it feels like a giant scam when the food arrives. Malls sometimes have these places, but there's plenty of them scattered throughout the greater Seattle area.
