Ranking Full Stop

At Santa Fe Brewing last night: The English Beat! Jett and Serena mentioned it when we saw them last weekend, and while we were dithering over going, they got us tickets. Good thing, too, 'cause it was sold out by Thursday.

We headed over about an hour-and-a-half early, to have some dinner and try and grab a table to be the base for the night. And we ran into Stacy and Jim, comfortably settled at a table with some extra space, so when Jett, Serena, and Will arrived later, we had a little spot staked out. Good thing too, 'cause it was packed.

Other than Dave Wakeling, there aren't any other original members, though according to Wikipedia some of them are from other Ska bands of the era.

KevLee, a local reggae band opened. And then The Beat took the stage, led through the jammed dance floor. They kicked off with some "dirty reggae" that led into "Stand Down Margaret." And from there, the show took off. They put on an energetic performance, and the floor was packed with people dancing and jumping. Raphael asked for the set list — just think of every Beat and General Public song you can remember off the top of your head, and they probably played it: "Twist And Crawl," "Save It For Later," "Tenderness," "Tears Of A Clown" (prefaced by, "it's not a party until somebody ruins a perfectly good Motown song"), and "Ranking Full Stop" into "Mirror In The Bathroom" (though "Too Nice To Talk To" was missing). The stage patter might have been standard, but the band was tight, the jams were terrific, and the energy in the room was amazing. There were a few songs I didn't recognize, but I got the impression they weren't new. At the end, rather than fight their way through the crowd and back again, they asked that we imagine they left the stage and we all cheered; a break, then "thank you for having us back!"

A total blast.

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IN OTHER NEWS

Ouch I got the Golf Ball into a fender bender in the parking garage at work. It's, relatively speaking, pretty minor, still drivable. But I'm pretty bummed about it. Because the body shops in town are all booked up after the big snowstorm, it's another couple weeks until it gets fixed.



Now, around the car, you'll note...

Snow Nothing to compare to the big storm around New Year's but we've been getting little snow showers most every weekend. Like this morning, a dusting, maybe a touch more than an inch. But last weekend, when it didn't even accumulate in town, the mountains got about 8".

Accompanying that, however, has been unnecessarily cold weather. Single digits overnight, 20s during the day.

Patriots, Poets & Pranksters Wednesday night, we caught a talk by Mark Dimunation, Chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress. He was brought to town as a part of the lectures around the Lasting Impressions exhibit, and gave a passionate and entertaining talk about "his" books and the Library. It centered, like the Library itself, around Thomas Jefferson's collection that formed the basis for the Library's collection, and he shared anecdotes about the books of early America.

We learned about the talk when we were visiting James The Printer at The Palace Print Shop. There, they had still had the type set from the posters they did for the talk.



Panel Press As the next step in Building Our Comic Publishing Empire, we've launched the Panel Press site. Panel Press is now the imprint for RBS as well as the new book with Jamie Chase and some hopefully upcoming stuff.