it's the waiting that kills you. the feeling of helplessness, and being unable to do anything else but just wait and hope for deliverance.

lol... remember mr. robinson's neighborhood?

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dennis rodman: beyond the glory

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i must be really childish to laugh at today's "pearls before swine" comic.

this cracked me up yesterday

and this

if i were still playing counter-strike 1.6, you'd bet that 1st picture would be made into a paintspray.

i must say, cowboys and patriots look absolutely disgusting this season. don't be surprised if this is the super bowl matchup for this postseason. as for which one is the champ? whoever wins the last game; john madden DID say on david letterman that "so if you win every last game, you're probably the super bowl champ."

so yesterday i was kinda bored, and started looking up various pages about electric violins. first, i started by looking at google checkout: various electric violins

so it's not that surprising that the prices are similar to electric guitars; the really good ones topping at around 2K, and then more commonplace, economical ones around 500. what kinda shocked me was that fender made one too(apparently electrical musical instruments with budget over price priority always have the name fender written over them), and the one they made, the black one, looked very similar to the electric violin the musician on the worship team at university covenant church in davis used.

so i decided to visit wikipedia to see if there was anything else i could learn. wikipedia - electric violin

apparently, they're not used as much in classical music. they're designed for more popular music, but only a few bands use them, let alone rock bands. one of the ones i remember even before writing up this article was the punk rock band yellowcard.

yellowcard's myspace page i would take a listen at their song, "ocean avenue;" it was the hit song they had that got played all the time on the radio a while back.

and i was lucky enough to find a copy of that album at the library for checkout.

although, i have reservations for electric violins in rock music if you intend to play them rock style, and here's why; they don't stand out enough; they sound too similar to the average electric guitar. electric guitars in rock music already use an overdrive pedal, or have an amp with that setting, which gives the guitars the ability to have long sustain with each note played, on top of this fuzzy sound. but when a violin is played, strings are not being plucked, but being pushed and pulled with a bow, which essentially gives out this long-etched shreeky sound already found on the electric guitar; now the sustain with an electric guitar fades slightly near the end of each note due to the guitar being played with either strumming or plucking(usually; let's ignore all the funky stuff eddie van halen does which nobody else does anymore), whereas an electric violin, the so-called sustain remains all the way, but in a lot of cases, those differences are really subtle and hard to do something with.

bass guitar stands out from electric guitar though they're essentially the same notes, because it is played with no distortion, with thicker strings, and with fingers, not picks, giving short, fat, dull sounds. drums are drums. vocals are vocals. but that electric violin seems to hit a gray area to me. so imo, the only way you can really make an electric violin stand out(which is the original reason you have different instruments, or even 2 guitarists, so each instrument or playstyle makes each member sound unique), is to play ochestra style; like try getting an echo pedal to help make the violin sound like a bunch of strings together, or something like that(ever listen to metallica playing with a symphony before? something like that). i'm not saying electric violins can't work in rock(my musical tastes repeatedly turn a blind eye to country, because like jeremy camp once said, "i can't stand the twang"). but if you're not thinking this through, it can essentially sound like another electric guitar.

fyi, i wondered whether it'd be cool for a bassist to also carry a bow, so that in some songs, the bass can be played like a cello. it was a cool thought, until i realized i forgot that cellos and bass violins have the strings arranged in a circular motion, otherwise it'd be impossible to play each string with a bow individually.

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for some reason though, i seem to have this utter fascination with a couple of asian musical instruments, like the koto, i think it was called. it's like a sitar you play with long fingernails, or something like that. sometimes i wonder how much one of those must cost, and how hard it might be to learn how to play one of those, because like i said, i love how they sound in stuff like old japanese music. seriously, if i actually earned a lot of money and had no restraint, i'd probably end up burning a lot of it, almost all of it on all these musical instruments and pedals, and ways to hook them up to my laptop to record some songs. i think people who never learned how to play numerous musical instruments and have a creative mind don't realize how much fun it is to just sit in front of a cpu that can record sound and fool around with all types of stuff(instruments, vocals, pedals, software) trying to make a recorded song.

family guy on the emmys

"john madden" on david letterman

enjoy your craiglist's posting's "laugh of the day" folks

love how the last part he admits he's allergic to cats.