I can’t believe it - Ozzy is going to be in Las Vegas the day I get there. Unfortunately, tickets are going for $100 to $250, at the Palms casino. Either that is a really small place, or Sharon is really screwing people over, or both. For that price, he damn well better bite the head off of something. Paul McCartney is at the MGM Grand the next night, but it’s $150-$300. I guess I like the Beatles sort of, but not that much. I think you can get the entire Beatles discography on CD for that much.

Today seems to be one of those days. I tripped over everything in the house on the way out, and then found out my headphones are shorted out or something. So I need to go buy another pair after work. I also brought a bunch of coins so I could buy some Cokes today and it turns out that one of them is actually a French Franc. I don’t even think they use those anymore, so I guess it just becomes another coin-related keepsake to throw on the shelf with my obsolete Vegas tokens, Susan B’s, and gold dollars. (And I just got a shitload of gold dollars, because the LIRR ticket machine gave me back $10.50 in change, all in coins.)

I’ve been trying to write each night, but it’s hard, with no concrete direction for this book. I had a lot of thoughts about it this morning as I was half-asleep, so I need to think about it more, develop a plan. I spent most of last night dicking around with my Korg M1 and the MIDI hookup to my computer. I found a DOS program that shows a staff of music and reads in a MIDI file and displays it. Then it plays the song and shows you what keys to play on your keyboard; a tutor of sorts. But it wouldn’t recognize my workstation, so I gave up on it and tried to get Cakewalk reinstalled correctly. It worked, but the patches were all messed up by default, and I didn’t have a spare ten weeks to sit around and rename all of the shit to work right. So you would pick Xylophone on the program, and the workstation would change to the drum patch. Or whatever. I also downloaded the free version of PowerTools and completely crashed my machine three times before I gave up on it and put everything away. I didn’t really practice or anything either. I am thinking of getting one of those $60 piano tutor packages, but I’d probably only use it twice.

My Sick Speed CD finally showed up in the mail. I should be listening to some Zappa before I go to this Project/Object tribute show tomorrow, but I’m too lazy. I think I’m going to go review some more concerts.

It’s pouring rain, but it’s nice. I didn’t really want to leave the house today, but I felt an overwhelming guilt to go do something. But I didn’t want to spend any money, and I didn’t really know what to do, so I fell asleep and woke up to a heavy rain, which kept the nap going and fairly enjoyable.

Last night, I went to Jones Beach to see Dream Theater and Joe Satriani. It took me about two hours to get there via trains and bus, and then while I was there, it rained. (Did I mention it’s an outdoor venue?) It was good to see what it was like down there, but the whole thing sort of left a bad taste in my mouth. I’m also recovering, since it threw off my sleep/food/nutrition/hydration/etc situation so bad, I feel like I just flew around the world twice in a biplane.

I also went to see Quiet Riot on Thursday. I’m not going to write more about either of these because I’m currently making a page just for reviews of shows, as I’m going to a lot more of them. I’m also attempting to review old shows, at least as much as I can remember. I’ll put a URL out there when I have the site in a presentable state.

A bunch of other news - I am going to Vegas again at the end of October, staying at the Stardust again (but not in the rock-star suite like last January.) I am also going in January for my birthday, but hopefully with a few other people. I got tickets to see Rush the day before I go to Vegas, at MSG. $90! And I got tickets in November to see Dee Snider and a segment of his Twisted Sister band, at Lamour. So a lot of crap coming up. And I’m also extremely broke until 2003.

Very depressed otherwise, it’s just one of those days where you sit in front of the TV watching really bad movies on TBS with seven minutes of commercials every six minutes and wondering what the fuck you’re doing with your life. I think the Dream Theater concert threw me because half of the guys there were geeks that spend 20 hours a day practicing a musical instrument, and half of them were geeks who somehow managed to have a girlfriend, and then there was me. I don’t really know the importance of having a girlfriend or knowing how to play an instrument, but it really bugged the hell out of me for some reason.

OK, I should be trying to write a book now, but the air is as hot and humid as some kind of Cambodian shithole, so I think I will just play Playstation until I piss away the time until dinner.

I think one of the biggest disappointments of my childhood was black stickers over cardboard packaging. Let me explain.

I had a lot of Star Wars stuff. Figures, playsets, the Death Star, the Millenium Falcon, the Slave One, and a bunch of other assorted crap, like a lizard with a trap door in his back so you could put figures on it. Also, when you moved his head, the tail would move in the opposite direction. So anyway, I got a lot of these figures. They came in a little blister pack, a figure on a card with a square plastic bubble that held the dude and his gun. On the back of each card were photos of other available toys. Well at one point a bit before Empire came out, the cards were printed with a special offer - if you clip enough proof of purchase seals, you can send in for a free figure for this dude from the next movie, named Boba Fett.

Of course, I immediately amassed as many of these damn coupons as I could find. I think I had enough seals for TWO figures, so I was in a frenzy over this. And this Boba Fett - nobody knew anything about him, but he looked like Darth Vader or a Stormtrooper, with an armor suit and so forth. But the coolest part was his rocket backpack. And the rocket looked like the same missile that equipped various Battlestar Galactica toys - a red rocket that SHOT WHEN YOU PUSHED A BUTTON!

There was no information about the rocket on the packages. My nine-year-old mind wondered why they didn’t advertise this in 72-point type, as it was obviously the biggest selling point of Mr. Fett. I mean, the big and somewhat dumb-looking Battlestar ships had two rockets, but that was on an entire ship. Boba Fett had a rocket on a single portable launcher, which meant a much higher per-capita killing capacity for him. Why didn’t they tell me more? Why weren’t there commercials every fifteen minutes during the Hanna-Barberra lineup every Saturday morning? I didn’t get it.

I heard rumors that some kid shot the Battlestar Galactica rocket down his throat and killed himself. Also, someone said Coke and pop-rocks may have been involved. And something about Rod Stewart getting his stomach pumped, but I didn’t entirely get the details. This was before the Internet, so I couldn’t just do a search on Bobo Fett or whatever the hell the guy was called. So I investigated the package further, and found a strange detail - the mail-away offer was printed on A STICKER that was glued onto each action figure package.

I also thought this was suspect. Were you suppsoed to peel off the sticker and put it on a card to mail in? Was I ripped off and did some cards have cooler stickers, like maybe a Death Star I could put on my lunchbox? The sticker didn’t peel off though, so I spent a few hours trying to carefully pry it loose. When I did, I saw a picture of Boba Fett’s backpack FIRING THE MISSILE! Why did they hide this? I don’t know, but I quickly begged my mom to send in all of the paperwork. I patiently waited the 16 weeks or whatever, and when the package showed up, NO MISSILE. The sticker was like a conspiracy theory to me, like a hidden level in a videogame that you know is there, but you can never find. I searched for stupid conspiracy theories like this in all of my toys. I took apart everything to search for hidden functionality. I played our Sears pong game for hours, thinking there might be a magic way to unlock a secret mission of some sort. The closest I ever got was a misprinted card in Trivial Pursuit.

And then when I got older and didn’t care about this anymore and my step-brother had a Nintendo and the game Contra, he told me about the up-down-up-down-left-right-left-right thing to unlock infinite lives, and I felt like my entire childhood had been betrayed. When I was a kid and my parents were spending their hard-earned money on my toys, there were no secrets. Now, everything is about extra features, bonus tracks, unreleased scenes, secret codes.

Oh well. I don’t know where I’m going with this, I was just thinking about that Boba Fett backpack.

It’s been a slow weekend, and I didn’t get out much. But today I got the bike out for a ride, and had a decent time with it. I have an e-bike - it is a retrofitted Heinzmann kit that I installed on a Mongoose mountain bike. There’s a motor built into the hub of the rear wheel, and then a self-contained battery/electronics kit rides in a modular pack that fits on a rear rack. Using a thumb-controlled throttle on the handlebars, I can get going from a dead stop up to 15 MPH or so. It also enables me to pedal normally, either alone or with the motor. The motor cuts out at 18 MPH, because that’s the limit for motor-assisted bikes as opposed to mopeds or scooters, which require a license. The battery, which weighs about 20 pounds, takes an hour or so to recharge, a bit more to get a good charge, and it lasts for about 10 miles of unassisted power on a flat surface.

So I got all charged up and headed east, trying to hit a bike lane on 34th Ave that cuts across Queens. The city has started painting these bike lanes on a few streets, and you can get maps of where to bike in local shops or online. But no drivers know what the hell a bike lane is, so you have to keep your eyes out. It’s always strange for me to ride away from my own neighborhood, into the areas that aren’t near subways or main roads. Queens rapidly becomes a car-centric area as you go east, so the landscape changes to more stores with parking lots, strip malls, and bigger areas that only cars would go.

I live on 36th Street and I watched the numbers go up slowly. The bike lane helped, but I could only hit a few lights and then I’d have to stop. Finally, I got into the hundreds, and reached the area by Shea Stadium and Flushing Meadows. I cut down 114th and ended up in the roughest neighborhood you could possibly imagine outside of a RoboCop film. The only cars I saw on the street were 100% stripped out and burned down, just the frames left. Luckily, I cut over a block and then down, and got to the park entrance.

Flushing Meadows is a strange little place. It’s a park where the old World’s Fair lived back in the 1960s. Now, all of the exhibits are gone, and there are neatly cut lanes that spoke outward, with trees and park benches. Some stuff is still there - I managed to get there on a big day for the US Open, and there were cops and limos and busses all over the place. I could hear the roar of the crowd in the tennis pavillion, probably watching the men’s singles matches. There’s also the hall of science, and those two big towers that were in that Men in Black movie.

So I rode around a bit, and went to the big fountain with the globe, which was empty. What was weird though is there were two blimps overhead, and there were these planes skywriting. But it wasn’t one plane, it looked like five planes in a line, so it worked like a dot-matrix printer. I think they may have been models of some sort, maybe flown from the blimp. But it was weird because they were skywriting these perfectly linear dot-matrix letters in a perfect circle around the fountain. I wish I would’ve brought my camera because it was a truly strange sight.

I also watched some kids with remote-control cars, in an area where they had an oval set up. These aren’t the cheap cars you get at Toys-R-Us and fill up with AA batteries. They had the variety that cost several hundred dollars, and had model airplane-type radios and chargable battery packs, with gearing that made them drive at scale speeds. It was cool watching it, because the tires must have been a “real” ply - every time they braked to go into a corner and then took off again, they would leave tread and smoke a bit. I saw a pretty incredible collision between two cars where one car lost traction and went sideways in a curve, then another t-boned him at full speed. It looked like a lot of fun, and I bet you could make tons of money sitting out there and renting out some cars and fresh batteries.

I rode around a bit, and headed back without too much incident. I hoped to save enough batteries to just coast back with the motor doing all of the work, but I lost a lot of juice and ended up only using the assist on start-up. I could get it up to about 18 with a bit of effort and then cruise through three or four lights before a red. The gearing really sucks on that bike, and there’s no high-end to really let me get going on flat spots. It’s also hard to get going from a dead stop because the battery and motor probably add 30 pounds to the 20 pound bike. It rides like a fully-loaded touring bike when I’m only hauling me, a bottle, and a small kit with a couple of tools.

So that was decent, except getting the bike in and out of the house. Other than that, I am fuming and fretting about this embryonic book, and in a strangely nostalgic mode. I could go on about this forever, but instead I want to get out of here and think about it for a while. So there.

I’m trying to remember what year Coke introduced Cherry Coke. I could do a web search but that would be too easy. Coke was always available as Cherry Coke back in the day of soda fountains, but they didn’t start putting it in a can until about 1985 or so. There used to be a pretzel shop in the mall where I grew up, and they would make a Cherry Coke for you - they had a pump full of the cherry syrup, and they’d add it to the fountain Coke. I think that approximates the taste of the original soda fountain drink, and it’s very cherry-flavored. The stuff in a can is barely any different than regular Coke, and I remember first trying it at the Elkhart county fair, when I was there with Tom G. and his folks. I think his dad was the kind of guy that had a stockpile of 200,000 cases of “old” Coke when they switched to “new” Coke, and he didnt’ like the Cherry Coke. I didn’t really like it either, but it was one of those things where I was glad I tried it, just so I had a conversation item for future use.

I almost forgot why I started talking about Cherry Coke, and that’s because they changed the can, I guess to be more inline with the new Vanilla Coke, which I still haven’t tried, and probably won’t, because I hate the taste of vanilla. I liked the previous cans better, and it’s weird that I can’t even describe what they’re like. It’s always weird how Coke and Pepsi cans morph over time and you barely notice it. I have pictures from ten years ago and Coke cans look completely fucked up. And they were even more strange in older movies, like when they had the old-school pull-off poptops. Does anyone even remember those anymore? I was collecting them, because I wanted to make a suit of chain-mail armor out of them. I think I got like one line about a foot long. Oh well.

Five new copies of Rumored are on my desk. I’m not sure where they will go, but I need to send out more review copies or something.

Slow afternoon. I need to get back to it…