Guitar Drop

So this one is more of a concept-piece blog.

New Year's Eve, downtown. Cold for us... not like snow or sleet cold, but shivery and a bit windy.

In the middle of the picture to the left, you can see it. In New York, they drop a massive, expensive, mirror/glass/precious metal ball. Slowly, so all the world can ring out the last few precious seconds of the old year.

Here? We hung a guitar from a crane over the Hardrock Cafe, and somewhere near the time of the transition, the crane operator hit the lever to lower the guitar toward the street. Ok... find the guitar in the picture. Start with the beam furthest to the left... the guitar is hanging between the 2nd and 3rd beam, slightly above and to the left of the green sign. You can make out the crane going down and to the right from the shimmering guitar. (If it is hard to see, it might be because this was not a replica of a guitar we dropped - huge and glowing. It was a guitar-sized guitar.)

Interesting differences between their Ball and our Guitar:

1) 15 minutes before Midnight, we were able to walk up and stand directly under the guitar (or a few feet away because of the police tape strung between pylon cones).

2) The crane operator's "precisely honed" sense of calibration made it somewhat less likely that it fell in any sort of exact manner.

3) People on the street (tourists, no doubt) who wanted to go into bars and get out of the cold were having their own spontaneous countdowns in the hour leading up to New Years. You would suddenly hear a crowed of 5-7 people count down from 10, yell "Happy New Year" and then go inside. Perhaps they were just practicing counting backward... our school system here is not as strong as one might hope.

and my favorite difference between their Ball and our Guitar?

4) Look carefully at that guitar. See how small it looks? You might think we were standing miles away. Not so. The green sign in the foreground is for Silkys. The guitar was hanging at Hard Rock, which is one block down from Silky's. I would estimate our distance from the guitar at about 100-200 yards.

Wonder if we received any national news coverage. At least there were no reported incidents of people randomly firing their guns into the air. (We had warnings and requests not to do this for Forth of July this year. The explanation that "what goes up must come down" fell on deaf ears... again.)

New Year

Worth noting: The last official iTunes purchase of 2008.

These were bought by Joel, who has discovered Pandora, a service on the web that allows you to enter a song and build a radio station based on what people who like this song also like. That way, bad taste can spread virally.

We saw Bedtime Stories the other evening, they played Don't Stop Believing, and now, a few days later, I am finding myself wanting to locate my old, brown, flared corduroy pants for Joel and see if we can't jumpstart this 70's revival.

New Year's Resolutions

Happy New Years to all blog readers and participants.

In keeping with the spirit of the season, I am setting forth three modest resolutions for myself:

1. To become Barack Obama's 1,500,000th friend on myspace. He's currently at nearly 1,100,000, so I'll have to watch his myspace every day to make sure I hit this just right. But with everybody around me myspacing, facebooking, twittering, poking, prodding, zombeeing, watching, "what I'm doing at this exact instance"ing... it's time for me to get on the bandwagon.

Alternately, I could just go out and find 1,000,000 people to push a button and be my friend. One or the other.

2. I resolve to go to Wal-Mart and leave inappropriate messages on every, single recordable Valentine's Day greeting card. You know the ones... push a button, leave your message of love. Well, they'll start with mine. This is going to take a few hours to pull off, and I'll need to avoid being thrown out of the store... but if it were easy, then it would be everybody's goal, right?

3. We will be working hard as a Southern Crew to get Joel and Erika on a Von Trapp Family-like whistle system. This will be much easier and more effective than actually using their names for the next year. One short whistle for the big one, two long whistles for the little one.

Other than that, it's just gonna be us being us in 2009. Actually kinda looking forward to it.

Fighting Crime In Gotham

What you are looking at is a flashing sign that our local police department has had downtown through and following Christmas. The idea is that we should not leave our Christmas loot laying around in the backseat where passers by might covet and steal.

While I appreciate the concern the police force has for the kids' new digital cameras and my tea-maker, we live in the city ranked 2nd for most violent crimes in America. I would probably rather see flashers aimed toward solving that problem, assuming these flashers are, in fact, effective reminders. Off the top of my head, I might suggest:

MPD SAYS... HUG IT... DON'T MUG IT

MPD SAYS... LIFE IT... DON'T KNIFE IT

MPD SAYS... FRUIT IT... DON'T SHOOT IT

I would go on, but I can't seem to think of anything that rhymes with METH LAB EXPLOSION.

The thing I like best about this flashing message of wisdom is that it is exactly seven words long. Putting those words across three flashes may, of course, have led to one or two traffic accidents, but it's the spirit of the thing that counts.

Home(ish)

We made it home from Cali late Friday night. The kids had to make a quick turnaround to head up to Indiana Saturday morning to spend a late Christmas + New Years w/ that side of the family. Despite the weather and jet-lag, sounds like the trip went well.

As you can see from the picture, the group is not a bunch of little kids anymore.

My New Years plans are still undetermined. Watch the network coverage of the ball dropping in some metropolis and you might see me out there braving the weather for my 15 seconds of fame. Yeah right. I'll be inside somewhere where it is warm and cozy.