Cover Your Shame

It has been a while...

Seeing how I haven't updated in so long I'm going to treat you kiddies to two consecutive days of updates!! Look at it as a way of trying to atone for my laziness, seeing how I have been home from Arizona since January 4th, and it is now January 10th. You wanna fight about it?

Most of the vacation was actually quite relaxing, and I got to go on a little hike up a small mountain. But on the way down i fell on a cactus and I'm still picking the needles out of my hand. It would be cool if I liked having cactus needles in my hand, but I don't so its not.

The only real "highlight" is New Years. And not because it was super fun or I got beligerently drunk or anything, but because some funny things happened. I was with my family, because Smitty and his buddy RP decided that they'd go away from the area for NYE, while I went to the Phoenix area.

We went to the New Years Eve Fiesta Bowl Block Party in Tempe, held every year prior to the Fiesta Bowl.

--I'm gonna digress here for a minute... As you probably know, Ohio State played Notre Dame in the Fiesta Bowl. The resort that I stayed at was filled with Buckeye Faithful. I was inundated with red shirts and old people dressed in Ohio St. track suits. I mean seriously, these people only wore OSU gear. All the time. Golf shirts, track suits, plain t-shirts, hats, you name it, they wore it. It made me hate OSU supporters even more than I already do. They are so fucking pretentious, calling it THE Ohio State University, like its the only fucking school in the entire state. Yes, I go to THE University of New Hampshire, but i'm not a prick like them. Yes, you have a football team that is competitive every year, and occasionally your other sports teams are competitive too, but all your constituents are stupid punks (See Maurice Clarett). And until the NCAA fixes its flawed football post season, college basketball will always trump college football in my mind, because March Madness is where its at. Yeah thats right, all you dumbass OSU fans flew a few thousand miles to support your team in what basically amounts to an overhyped, money generated exhibition game, because the only game that really counts is the National Championship game. But, I digress....

When I first heard about this, I was told that there was just a huge block party that night near Arizona State University. I was hoping that this would be on par with the legendary Fox Hills/Ashby block parties that kick off the school year at JMU. I haven't been to a good block party in a while, mostly because the off campus housing in and around Durham is not really conducive to block parties. But my hopes were high....then summarily crushed when I learned that the party was sponsored by the town of Tempe. No public alcohol consumption except at overly crowded bars and in "Beer Gardens." It was kinda lame at first, but then I wandered into one of the beer gardens and found a little live music....and this....

Who does this? I mean seriously?

This is a picture of a man with a video camera, filming the live music. Ok, that occasionally happens, and often small bands encourage it to help get their name out there. But this small band, The Zoo Station, isn't just any ordinary small band, they are a U2 cover band. Now, it would be one thing if this was an original band, or he was actually filming U2, but its not. I wonder if he got up that morning and said to himself "don't forget your camera to the block party tonight to film the U2 cover band." I'd like to know what he was thinking. On a side note, they were pretty good at exactly replicating the U2 sound, and I only got upset when they played "Vertigo" because new U2 sucks and old U2 is kinda good.

I later found this man.


That is supposed to be "Ozzy Osbourne" wearing a giant foam novelty cowboy hat. (Its actually CrazyTrain, [ultimate tribute to Ozzy Osbourne]) Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but last time I checked, giant foam cowboy hats were NOT metal. So this guy is kinda disrespecting Ozzy. They also had a guy in a blond wig (you can kinda see him on the left) who had on a black leather vest with NO SHIRT on underneath it. Now thats metal. And that guy was actually a pretty talented guitarist, as their rendition of War Pigs was pretty good. But since he doesn't do anything original that I know of he loses a little credibility with me.

After the ultimate tribute to Ozzy Osbourne got off the stage on came TNT (as AC/DC). These guys were the "headliners" of this particular stage. (The overall headliner of the event was Blues Traveller, but I had no interest in them). At first, the guy in the leather vest came out, only this time he was dressed as Angus Young from AC/DC, and again, did a pretty damned good job of emulating him. Then out came the singer, and instead of a man trying to be Bon Scott, there was a man trying to be Brian Johnson trying to be Bon Scott, and he got many boos. But the area in front of the stage was so crowded I still couldn't get close enough for a picture, thats how loved these guys were. Unfortunately earlier while I was watching the U2 coverband, I missed Metal Gods (super tribute to Judas Priest). Oh well

I came to the conclusion that night Tempe, AZ is only known for 2 things, the first being Arizona State. The second is being the location of the greatest cover bands in the world. Because as I looked over the schedule of events, there were maybe 3 original acts there, one of them was Blues Traveller, one of them was Kinch (who oddly enough covered "I'll tell my ma" an old irish folk song covered by both The Cheiftans and The Pogues), and another called Blue Fur, which I neglected to see. And my night actually ended pretty early because I was on east coast time, so when midnight hit out west, it was like 2 AM back home and I was kinda wiped.

The rest of the vacation was pretty uneventful with the exception of the trip home (covered tomorrow) and the fact that we changed hotel rooms like 3 times. On the third time, we got a suite with a grapefruit tree in the yard. And my brother and I proceeded to throw grapefruits at anything and everything....but mostly our little sister, which was hilarious. We wasted so many unripe grapefruit in a span of 2 days that it was almost sickening.

That is just a small fraction of the wasted fruits, as many went over the surrounding fences on to the tennis courts, into the maintenence area, into the road, any direction i felt like, and many towards my sister. But some we just grabbed and whipped at that stucco wall right there, and thats what those are.

Ok, so I got bored on my last couple days there....


tomorrow will be the conclusion of the vacation

ps-i know this post isn't as good as it should be, but i was actually working on it yesterday, and it was damned funny, but the were two power outages localized entirely within my room and i lost my update twice. i have since forgotten the best parts of it, and i tried my best to resurrect it, but i don't think i did the old one any justice. i'm sorry