I should probably blog about myself because who wouldn’t want to read all the exciting exploits of a late 30’s guy with a wife and a kid and a job and a band that may or may not be a midlife crisis?  So at least for this post, here goes…

For one, I’m getting extremely musically frustrated. It’s been almost a month since I’ve been to band practice. We’ve had to cancel or I’ve had to bail for a while, then I went on vacation (more on that vacation later), then my drummer and singer went on vacation. My keyboardist is having all sorts of trouble with his living situation (leaving an apartment with a spun out meth dealing neighbor who keeps him up at all hours – and then couch surfing until he can find something more stable) which may lead to him missing more practices which really sucks because he’s the musical genius glue that holds us all together.

When I don’t have the outlet of playing music, I get a little nuts. I’ve had this disastrous trip home where various parts of my family did not get along and I got stuck in the middle of all the high drama. There was very little time to recover from this trip as I had to get right back to work and caught up on a bunch of things that needed to be done there while my wife did the same at home… until she fell down in the parking lot of her doctor’s office and was all sorts of out of commission for almost a week. Add a kid who rages against sleep almost every night on top of all this and a supporting cast of wacky neighbors and their wackier pets and you’ve got a situation without a whole lot of enjoyable moments to offset the stress. Ordinarily knowing that I’d have at least a few hours in the week to play some loud rock and roll will get me through times like these. Having a new job that I don’t dread going into every day certainly helps, but it does not scratch the itch like music does.

The other negative effect of not having my usual creative outlet is that I start thinking about politics. I am a recovering political blogger. No good can come from blogging about politics. It just made me angrier and angrier. Today’s political landscape is making angry people take it to the next level. You’ve got Americans flying planes into IRS buildings, shooting at guards at the Pentagon, hanging nooses around college campuses, going to these “tea parties” and engaging in all sorts of asshattery, douchebaggery and wingnuttery. You’ve got blogs, talk radio and a certain ideologically driven cable network masquerading as news stoking the fires of the crazy and I am not going to be part of that anymore. I once believed that there could be good done through politics. I no longer believe that. I’m probably going to stop voting. Why bother? There is no point participating in this system that is broken beyond repair.

So what do you do when your county is circling the bowl and there’s not a damn thing you or anyone else can do about it? You make music and try to enjoy yourself. Play the fiddle while Rome burns. It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine!

So this episode starts with Bill and Joey driving down to Mexico to rescue Benny. Barb calls Bill up and he says that he’s off to Seattle to deal with a lumber distributor. Back on the home front, Nicki finds out she can no longer get pregnant, but that her mom, newly sealed to her creepy ex husband who is the polygamist version of the creepy governor he played on Oz and the creepy black ops guy he played on Heroes. She is none too pleased about it, and there is apparently something sinister afoot because Crazy Wanda has a scene of crazy face acting with her creepy brother who threatens her with exposing Joey for killing Roman.

Margene realizes that Bill’s plan to out them as a polygamous family is going to kill her business and sees a way to keep her business safe while keeping Ana from leaving the country with Bill’s new unborn baby by marrying Ana’s boyfriend to keep him from being deported and to give herself a legal marriage on paper. Barb is not happy about this.

And then we’ve got the loonie evangelical crowd picketing the casino, led by a character obviously supposed to real life theocrat douchebag Ralph Reed, using the excuse of free speech to torment and intimidate anyone who gets in the way of his theocratic plans. Barb has the line of the night when she says that at least Mormons would be polite about it. And it looks like their new lobbyist might be playing both sides.

So back in Mexico, Bill can’t get the local authorities to do a thing against the Greens, who make the Juniper Creek compound look like a bunch of peace loving hippies. Hollis Green is staging a kangaroo court for Bill’s mom, dad and innocent bystander Ben, and to show he means business, he has Selma take out the illegal bird seller and shoot him.

Bill and Joey are on their way to the compound when Joey shows Bill the arsenal in the trunk and tries to get him on board with his plan of going in with guns blazing. As the captives are about to be executed, Ben asks if there is an appeals process and Hollis allows them to file an appeal out of some twisted idea that he is some kind of legitimate ruler. And then his whole compound starts having a wild Mexican fiesta allowing Bill a chance to sneak in and free them. They almost get out when Joey shows up with a shotgun looking for Hollis and bringing all the attention on him and his escaping family.

Bill offers himself in trade for his family and just before Hollis can order him killed, Bill’s mom grabs a machete, hacks off Hollis’ arm and says “don’t you lay a hand on my boy” with her face splattered in blood and the craziest look she’s given yet. Between her and Crazy Wanda, there’s some of the finest crazy face acting I’ve ever seen!

So they get away and return home to let us wait for next week to see the fallout from Margene’s new marriage, the ongoing feud with the Greens, Creepy Albie and his dead gay trustee lover, and their lobbyist screw over.

I don’t know how they manage to keep ratcheting up the intensity on this show, but it keeps getting more and more intense as it goes on. I’m bummed to see Amanda Seyfried leaving at the end of the season, but she’s on to bigger and better things I suppose, and her TV hubby needs to get back to his job as a meth cook on Breaking Bad. I’m even more bummed at the lack of Harry Dean Stanton, though the version of Roman that lives in Albie’s head to taunt him occasionally is fun to see.

Come join Music Monday and share your songs with us. Rules are simple. Leave ONLY the actual post link here and grab the code below and place it at your blog entry. You can grab this code at LadyJava’s Lounge Please note these links are STRICTLY for Music Monday participants only. All others will be deleted without prejudice.

Powered by MckLinky

Click here to enter your link and view the entire list of entered links…

I’ll post a few different versions of it. First is a snippet of Genesis doing it live in 1975 from a rare video from their Lamb Lies Down on Broadway tour:

Here’s Tony Levin and his band doing it:

And here’s the Genesis tribute band, the Musical Box, recreating the original stage show:

Come join Music Monday and share your songs with us. One simple rule, leave ONLY the actual post link here. You can grab this code at LadyJava’s Lounge Please note these links are STRICTLY for Music Monday participants only. All others will be deleted without prejudice.

Powered by MckLinky

Click here to enter your link and view the entire list of entered links…

I’m still not quite sure I really like this show. It’s hard to think about it without thinking of Battlestar Galactica, and I wonder if it would really hold up independently. But I suppose I’ll keep watching it and since I have this new blog I might as well keep writing about it. Don’t go past the jump if you don’t want spoilers.

So this episode starts off in the aftermath of Amanda Greystone’s revelation that Zoe was part of the terrorists who blew up the mag lev train in the pilot episode. Things are not going well for the Greystones. The press are mobbing them, their stocks are tanking, their pyramid team players want to get traded, and Amanda, now referred to as “Terror Mom,” even gets a bottle hurled at her. Probably the best thing about this episode is the take on the media which, surprise surprise, looks a whole lot like our 24 hour cable news here. And their version of a Jon Stewart/Jay Leno hybrid is played by the great Patton Oswalt who we should be seeing more of in the next episode.

Daniel Greystone gets the frak kicked out of him by Sam Adama who is revealed to be married to a dude named Larry. I suppose this makes up for Gaeta’s man-fling being segregated to a webisode on BSG. The future (oh wait, it’s actually millions of years ago in a galaxy far far away, isn’t it?) is much cooler about not discriminating based on sexual preference than they are about monotheism. Of course, I’m sure that today’s monotheist culture warriors are all up in arms over the big bad liberal Hollywood agenda trying to make their kids catch the gay, but that’s not the kind of rant I’m going to get into here and now.

So Apollo’s gramps wants to get back into the virtual world to see his daughter’s avatar (or is it more than just an avatar?) again, but she’s not there because the Zoe/cylon/more-than-just-an-ordinary-avatar and Lacy let her loose into cyberspace. Uh oh!

The episode ends with Joe hinting to Sam that he wants Amanda Greystone offed since he lost a wife and daughter in the explosion and Daniel only lost a daughter. Are they really going to kill off a main character this early on? Of course, she could also end up as another cylon. We shall see.

A few weeks ago I read an article somewhere (and I gave up searching for it after a few minutes) about how there were a whole bunch of premium cable shows that were pushing the envelope in the sex and violence departments. The article mentioned Spartacus: Blood and Sand, a show on Starz full of swords, sandals, buckets of bright blood spraying in 300-style slo-mo and all the ancient Roman sexual depravity of Caligula. The one act of sexual depravity that the article went into detail about featured Lucy Lawless of Xena and Battlestar Galactica fame and her ancient Roman TV husband about to do the deed, using their slaves as fluffers. So of course I had to check that out, right?

And yeah, there’s a bunch of slo-mo blood sprayage, and plenty of naked body parts that were far more surgically enhanced than possible in ancient Rome. It became obvious early on that the main intent of this show is to be brutally shocking. These ancient Romans sure do like talking about genitals and bodily functions in graphic and ugly detail. And it’s not like I’m getting prudish here. I enjoy that kind of material when it serves a purpose other than to gratuitously show how shocking you can be. But this is like Deadwood without the benefit of good writing.

So like the lord of the gladiator ring, I give this show one big thumbs down. Off with it’s head! But not before every geek out there has had a chance to pause their TiVo on Xena’s naked boobies.

The only agenda I have is to try something new. I’m just going to start by playing around a bit, throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. I’m not getting any younger, so the old angry snarky profane political thing doesn’t really suit me so much anymore.

Of course, I am open to suggestions. What do you, all 3 people who might know about this, want to see here?