B33n3r & I went out and saw this last night. I would like to report it is thoroughly awesome.
When this movie was announced, many of my friends either already had read, or shortly thereafter, went out and read, the original comic books series. I meant to do the same thing, and even borrowed the book from Ben but I never quite found the time to get to it. The closest I got was watching the first two episodes of the Motion Comic, which I downloaded from iTunes. I got the whole season pass, but only watched a couple of them.
Having now seen the movie, I’m kind of glad I didn’t read the comic book first, because, while the movie was completely awesome, I did find myself getting a little impatient with all of the exposition during the first half of the movie. And if I’d read the comic and known all of that information already going in, I think I might have gone from impatient to annoyed. That being said, there’s very little I would change, because it’s all awesome.
Maybe they could have cut out some of the blue penis shots, though.
T-Rav has good ideas. This is one of them, so here we go.
So Saturday morning, Meghan & I slept in. I eventually got up and went and got us coffee. The day before we had been watching some HGTV and contemplated painting the family room. We had made a plan to go buy some small cans of paint and do some test painting. At some point, we also decided on going to check out tattoo parlors, since we’d both been wanting newtattoos for quite some time. We’d been talking about it since well before our wedding, and it seemed like every time the idea came up there was something we had to wait for before we could do it. First the wedding, then the trip to Cancun, etc…
A couple of months ago, Ben told us he & Kerry had been thinking about tattoos and then they went and schedule appointments. Kerry’s appointment happens to be today. Anyway, sometime Friday night we decided we would finally go look at tattoo parlors and maybe make appointments.
So Saturday morning, after coffee, we got up and drove down to Ace Tattoo(warning: they also do nipple piercings) to check it out. We talked to one of the guys and got quotes for how much it would be etc… and I scheduled myself an appointment for Sunday. Yesterday. Yep. Hehe.
Saturday afternoon we ended up spending watching TV and then went out to dinner at Monte Carlo downtown, which is apparently Minneapolis’s oldest restaurant. It was certainly old, I’ll give it that. The food was okay. I had some slightly overdone cajun pork chops and a baked potato. They had Fat Tire on tap, which was awesome. Meghan had a tasty cheeseburger.
Anyway, Sunday we decided to go have breakfast at The Park Tavern and then watched more HGTV (whoops, we never did buy any paint) before going back to the tattoo parlor.
So Ace is in a little strip mall in Golden Valley right next to the New Hope water tower. It’s small, but clean, and the people are nice (and often funny). Somehow the guy who was to do my tattoo got double-booked, but since I was the one actually written on the calendar (and probably because the girls who were also booked for 1pm wanted dandelion and butterflytattoos), I got to go first.
So, after getting my leg shaved and bullshitting with the counter girl about Minnesota tattoo regulations and how they’ve changed over the last 13 years, I got to sit and do this for about 40 minutes.
People like to say that getting tattooed doesn’t hurt that bad. And it’s true, compared to having a limb torn off or having some spherical reproductive organ explode, it’s probably not that bad. Heck, compared to a moderate headache, it’s not that bad. But it does hurt. The last time I got a tattoo, I thought of it like a bee sting that just kept going. This time, it felt a little more like he was carving into my flesh (which I suppose is accurate, but it felt more like he was slicing my skin with a slightly dull knife that anything). Enough to make one wince, not enough to make one cry.
Anyway, the result is totally worth it.
If you are one of the many people in the world who does not know what that is, it’s the emblem of the Galactic Empire from Star Wars. This is the second in my series of evil empiretattoos (the first was a Klingon Empire tattoo on my left shoulder). Neither of the tattoo employees knew what it was. I suspect they thought it was some tribal design or something. If you’re wondering why I like to get evil empire tattoos, the best I can come up with is that they have cool looking emblems. I think the Rebel Alliance emblem is okay, but the Empire’s is much cooler. I think I also like the fact that most people don’t recognize it.
So this weekend was the long-awaited A Flock Of Kobolds party. It was a completely awesome time, and I want to thank everyone for coming, because I definitely needed the good time. And, of course, I apologize for all the swearing and yelling. ;^)
I’ve been struggling all week with trying to write a blog post about it. I wanted to go over the history, because I was trying to explain to a couple people at the party how we came to be playing a bunch of Irish music, but I don’t think I did a very good job. Luckily, a Behind The Music series about A Flock Of Kobolds has recently begun internet-broadcasting (thanks to me), so you can just watch these short videos:
Anyway, as I said, the show was fantastic. It was really laid back, and I think, we, the band, got to let loose and have a lot of fun with it. Also, it was kind of like having two parties in one, because my sister’s whole family came, and Ben’s wife & child, and Lukas’s wife and child, and all of them stayed through the first set. So the party up through the first set was like a family get together, and then, after the children left, it turned into an old-fashioned all-out kegger. The band got ridiculous and played some awesomely bawdy songs, and everyone had a whole bunch of fun.
The party itself even had an encore of sorts, since five of us stayed up until 5am, long after everyone else had either gone to bed or gone home. I couldn’t have hoped for a better party.
For the record, here’s the ridiculously complicated setlist of the first A Flock Of Kobolds official gig:
Set I: Dark Streets Of London*, Haul Away Joe***, Fathom The Bowl***, Hanging Johnny***, The Son Never Shines (On Closed Doors)**#, Finnegan’s Wake***, The Wanderer*****, Streams Of Whiskey*##, The Wild Rover***, Whiskey In The Jar***
Set II: Alice > Swagger**, Hands Of Fate****, Death Valley Queen**#, Mingulay Boat Song***, Baltimore Whores****, Mariner’s Revenge Song*****, The Blarney Stone******, Drunken Sailor***###&, Good Ship Venus***, Boys From County Hell*, What’s Left Of The Flag**
Encore: The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald*******###, Cape Cod Girls***, Haul Away Joe***&&
* – The Pogues
** – Flogging Molly
*** – trad
**** – original
***** – The Decemberists
****** – Ween
******* – Gordon Lightfoot
# – T-Rav on vocals
## – Ryan on vocals
### – revolving vocalists on the verses
& – guest verse by Lukas
&& – guest verses by Kristian
And if you want to become a superfan, you can download the soundboard recording of the show here. Although, I must warn you, listening to the second set sober can be hazardous. ;)
