Verizon Wireless's voicemail is down. Completely.

I'm not sure when it went down, but it's sure as hell down right now. Tried it from my phone and my wife's, and tried calling *86, my own number, my wife's, as soon as you would run into the normal voicemail interface, you get a fast busy signal.

Tried calling customer service, but apparently they don't have 24-hour customer service anymore either. Funny, hadn't noticed that till now.

So, folks, You Heard It Here First. Verizon's voicemail is down, and there's nobody you can talk to about it till the morning. Hope no one important calls tonight!

So, I'm sure everyone's heard about this by now, but Boston freaked out.

What happened is that, like in several OTHER large cities across America, someone left lots of blinking LED signs in conspicuous, public places in Boston. These signs bore clearly the likeness of popular Aqua Teen Hunger Force character Ignignot, and were placed as a kind of guerrilla marketing technique to promote the Aqua Teen movie coming out soon.

(Aside: The title of the new movie is "Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon: Movie Film for Theaters". Awesome. :)

When this happened, in Boston, Boston had a shit fit, deciding that the innocuous blinking signs, ubiquitous across America, needed to be taken out by SWAT teams and Bomb Squad. Not because Boston is secretly like you and I, and simply made a mistake, but because that sort of thing is the rule rather than the exception for this city. Look it up, and you'll find a history of Boston blowing things so far out of proportion that they end up Euler bottles, their exteriors twisting in and fusing with their very cores.

Enough with the Penny-Arcade style. :)

What I really take issue with is the fact that Turner Networks, the parent company of Cartoon Network (and thus, Adult Swim), made this big, public apology to Boston and paid them a million dollars in pain and suffering money.

That's right, and because I want this fact to hit you in the face again, I'll repeat:

Boston's overreaction got them paid to the tune of a million smackers.

And, yeah, those BS and SWAT guys don't get sent out much in Boston, I'm sure, and I'm betting the city had to pay their salaries somehow for the officials' little unecessary tirade. But it is genuinely offensive, it is sickening, to me, that their sanctimonious idiocy resulted in a decent network, parent company of an AWESOME network, handing over a MILLION DOLLARS and a public apology for something that several other cities across the US had no other problems with. And maybe Turner can afford it, but Cartoon Network can't, and if Adult Swim had to pay I'm thinking it would hurt them just a little.

It's just so stupid, so juvenile, such B.S. I wish we could boycott Boston in return, but that's kinda difficult. Maybe at least it'll become a pop culture phenomenon, kinda like the way some people label anything disdainful as Canadian. Maybe people will start to walk around calling people not "spaz" or "tool", but "Bostonian".

You suck, Boston, for not getting the joke when everyone else did, then whining about it and bending over backwards to put on a show, then getting paid for your retarded efforts like a whiny also-ran in a footrace of three-year-olds, demanding a trophy for being special.

Goodnight. :)

Welcome to Smuckers' Stars On Ice!

We're here, at the St, Louis show, and we're so excited. My beautiful wife Christi got to meet and talk to John Zimmerman, Kyoko Ina, Jamie Sale, David Pelletier, Katia Gordieva and Ilia Kulick, and even guest star Sasha Cohen, Olympic silver medallist last year. She's doing one number here, but we don't know what that'll be yet.

She got to meet all these fantastic skaters, and I got the WHOLE thing on tape. :) I'm so excited to be here, and it's so much better that we get to meet the skaters, it's unreal. Like an experience this guy I know, Cullen, had; went to a Tool show, then got to hang out afterwards with Maynard and Jphn Romero all night. No one gets to have those kinds of experiences..

I'm about out of room in this pix message, so I'll post more (and more pictures) in a day or two, probably when we get home.

So good night, and God bless you. :D

-J

So, yeah, I feel like My Chemical Romance has SOME aspects of the kind of thing I'm looking for, but not everything.

I feel like the whole overwhelming hope thing comes through; "Welcome to the Black Parade" has that good feel to it. I feel like it's all just fake, though; the lyrics don't betray any real meaning, they almost seem random in most of their songs.

That may be fun for some people, but I just don't feel like playing anymore, I want something real.

One song I'm talking about is one of the Big Two off their last album, "The Ghost of You". Starts out pretty promising, but like most of their stuff, degenerates into randomness:

"I never
Said I'd lie in wait forever,
If I died, we'd be together,
I can't always just forget her,
But she could try..

At the end of the world,
Or the last thing I see, you are
Never coming home, never coming home
Could I? Should I?..

And all the things that you
Never ever told me,
And all the smiles that are never ever

Ever,
Get the feeling that you're never
All alone, and I remember now,
At the top of my lungs, in my arms,
She dies,
She dies..

(repeat chorus)

..and all the smiles that are ever gonna hold me,
Never coming home, never coming home
Could I? Should I?

And all the wounds that are never gonna scar me,
From all the ghosts that are never gonna catch me.."

It's all right, I feel like there's the ghost of some meaning there (pun), but not actual substance. I mean, I want to listen to a song and start crying at the truth of it. And I don't care that that's a tall order, there ought to be something out there that does that; I've read plenty of books that do that to me, why should music be so different?

What kind of depresses me is that it's always been this way, there hasn't been much meaning to songs for many years. I wonder if one reason is that an album has to have at least ten songs or so, and take up 30 minutes. I mean, if I was a songwriter, I could easily see myself coming up with three good ideas, and using eight half-baked ones as album filler. Screw that.

The time has passed when the demand for length in a musical recording is all-imporant. In older days, they'd sell long-playing records on the fact that they played longer, there was more music there on a single album. Now, with all the options available to buy single songs, I would almost be really scared to buy a whole album unless I was absolutely sure that there were more than, say, eight songs on the CD I wanted. With iTunes, a song is 99 cents, and an album is 9.99; therefore, if you only want five songs from a CD, it makes far more sense to buy those individual songs so you have what you want; instead of spending $10, you've spent $5 and you now have every bit of content you wanted from that CD.

I still really like MCR, of course. I bought the entire album from iTunes after having heard two songs off it, and I like a lot of the songs that they didn't make videos for. And I'm enthralled with the new song they've released from the upcoming CD, "The Black Parade". But it sucks, because once again I feel like I enjoy a band, but they're not like the band of my life.

I mean, why shouldn't music mean something?