Ben Folds Five is back!!

For serious. This is the most exciting news I've heard in a while. The original band, including bassist Robert Sledge and drummer Darren Jessee, will be performing one show at UNC-Chapel Hill's Memorial Hall on September 18.

I'm an obsessive Ben Folds fan -- I camped outside for his show two years ago in Chapel Hill with nothing but a sleeping bag and a backpack as a pillow -- and started listening to him long after the Five had broken up, so I am unbelievably pumped for this rare opportunity. The group hasn't played together in 10 years.

According to the website, the band will be playing their album The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner in its entirety, which means they'll be playing "Army" and "Narcolepsy," two of my favorite Ben Folds Five songs. And to add icing to the cake, Jessee's new band, Hotel Lights, will be opening the show. Can it get much better?

I hope students get a first shot at these tickets, otherwise I will be all over etix.com next week.

Palin, P. Diddy and Politics

I try to keep from harping on politics too often on this blog, but I saw a few articles today that I just had to mention.

First, the 17-year-old daughter of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is definitely preggers. How did that abstinence-only education work out for ya Mrs. Palin?

Then, while browsing around CNN.com, I found this little gem about Palin's husband getting a DWI. So what if it's 24 years ago? The religious right isn't going to be very happy about that.

Finally, some sad news from the Diddy camp. The rapper and name-change enthusiast is being forced to -- brace yourself -- fly a commercial jet!! No more private jets for Mr. Combs. What is the world coming too?

"I'm actually flying commercial," Diddy said before walking onto an airplane, sitting in a first-class seat and flashing his boarding pass to the camera. "That's how high gas prices are. I'm at the gate right now. This is really happening, proof gas prices are too high. Tell whoever the next president is we need to bring gas prices down."

I guess Making the Band just isn't making the dough. Maybe the Cadillac advertising on his website will help him out some.

He claims the video is a joke and says that all "media and hate bloggers" need to "loosen up." Uh-huh, sure Diddy. Here's the video if you're interested.

UNC Football and Slight Confusion

On Thursday, the Marching Tar Heels stayed 30 minutes after practice to work on a plan for how to make room for the aerial team that was supposed to land in Kenan Stadium with the game ball. It's happened many times before, no big deal, right?

Wrong.

When the band got to the point in pregame where they were supposed to split and make room for the parachutes, the band directors started scurrying around and yelling "Don't move!! We're not splitting apart!!" Everyone was confused and probably a little miffed that we had stayed after to work on this and it wouldn't even happen. It must just be bad weather in the area that kept them from dropping in.

Wrong again. They were just a little confused.

From The News & Observer:

Duke officials were a bit surprised when, at 6 p.m. Saturday, about an hour before the scheduled kickoff of their game against James Madison, two men parachuted into Wallace Wade Stadium and landed with a game ball.

Problem was, the Blue Devils -- who were warming up on the field along with their guests from Virginia -- weren't expecting it.

[...]

North Carolina was scheduled to receive the game ball for its contest against McNeese State via an aerial team at about that time in Chapel Hill.

According to UNC assistant athletic director for promotions Michael Beale, the plane was in the air but the jumpers from Virginia-based Aerial Adventures opted to cancel the leap into Kenan Stadium because of weather.

Evidently, when the clouds eventually opened, the pilot thought they were over the correct stadium, and the skydivers jumped -- realizing only when they landed in Wallace Wade that they were in the wrong place.

The two men immediately scrambled off the field with the game ball, and when UNC associate athletic director Rick Steinbacher was informed by a reporter of what had happened, he immediately called Duke officials to confirm the miscue and offer his apologies.

"In about five years, maybe this will be funny," Steinbacher said. "Right now, I'm just glad no one was hurt."

Classic. You just can't script things like that. But here's my problem. These guys are rigorously trained to do what they do and you're telling me they couldn't tell the difference between Wallace Wade -- a glorified high school stadium -- and the 60,000 seat Kenan. Let's have a look, shall we?

Here is Wallace Wade Stadium from the air:

Now for Kenan Stadium (sorry for the small size, Google images let me down):

See what I mean? Slightly bigger.

Too bad it seems like Duke was the better team in the ACC this week, winning handily over FCS school James Madison University, while the Tar Heels struggled through a two-hour lightning delay and a 35-27 win over FCS school McNeese State. The first quarter was great: Brandon Tate had some great returns, including one punt return for a touchdown. He also had a great 50+ yard reception that led to a second Carolina touchdown.

Then, after the rain and lightning subsided, the "new and improved" Tar Heels started to look a hell of a lot like last year's team. The same things that plagued them throughout the 2007 season were very present two nights ago: inconsistent and bonehead play from quarterback T.J. Yates, slow defense that didn't put any pressure on the quarterback and allowed him to pick apart the secondary, and sub-par running by Greg Little behind an offensive line that struggled against a defensive line they should have dominated. He's not going to get 1,000 yards that way.

The Heels have something to prove in two weeks against Rutgers. Right now, I'm not impressed.

"It's Carrboro"

Thanks again to the great Paul Jones for turning me onto another wonder of the internet. On our Ning site, he posted a great song called "It's Carrboro," the official Carrboro rap. (For any readers who aren't local, which I doubt, Carrboro is a crazy little town right outside of Chapel Hill.)

Carrboro-ans Billy McCormick and Brian Risk wrote the little ditty and even decided to make a video for it. You have to respect a song that has the balls to rhyme "spinach" with "Kucinich." Simply brilliant.



My favorite line:
"Open Eye Cafe, it's Carrboro.
It's cool to be gay, it's Carrboro."

The Noise Bazaar Wordle

This blogging/social networking class is really getting me re-obsessed with the internet and all its wonderful possibilities. I've gotten back into blogging, I read a ton of blogs, I've started messing around with Delicious and I even have a Twitter (although I don't update it much, nor do I have many friends). Just a couple of days ago, our professor set up a Ning -- an online social networking community where you can add your own blog, talk in a discussion board and upload pictures, music and videos.

The latest fun thing he showed us to day was a Wordle. Wordle takes a bunch of text, a blog or Delicious bookmarks and turns them into sophisticated word art. The bigger the word, the more the word is found in the text.

I now present you with the official Noise Bazaar Wordle. (Click to enlarge)



Exciting, huh?

Over at wired.com you can see a Wordle for Michelle Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention, or a couple of pretty Wordles for the oh-so-bitter but outwardly supportive Mrs. Clinton.

It's highly entertaining. I support wasting a few minutes on it.

Bob Dylan gets The Beatles high

I cannot vouch for the truth, likeliness or possibility of this story, but it's too awesome to ignore. According to Mark Katz, an associate professor in the UNC-Chapel Hill music department and my Intro to Rock professor, you can single-handedly thank Bob Dylan for the psychedelic experimentation that characterized the latter part of The Beatles' catalog.

We were talking the other day in class about common mondegreens (misheard lyrics) in popular music. The three we mentioned were:

"The ants are my friends, they're blowing in the wind." (Wrong)
vs.
"The answer my friends is blowing in the wind." (Right)
"Blowin' in the Wind" -- Bob Dylan

"Excuse me while I kiss this guy." (Wrong)
vs.
"Excuse me while I kiss the sky." (Right)
"Purple Haze" -- Jimi Hendrix

"I get high." (Wrong)
vs.
"I can't hide." (Right)
"I Want to Hold Your Hand" -- The Beatles

Now, this last line is where our story begins. That mondegreen comes from Dylan, who swore that the lyrics were "I get high." He couldn't believe that such a mainstream group was talking about drug use in their hit song, but was glad that they were putting it out there and were proud of it.

Not long after, Dylan got a chance to meet John and company while they were out on tour. He began talking about that song where they sang "I get high," and how great it was, but the Fab Four had no idea what he was talking about. Finally they realized he was talking about "I Want to Hold Your Hand," and proceeded to tell him what the real lyrics were.

Dylan was shocked to find out that The Beatles had never tried marijuana. Not surprisingly, Dylan changed that.

Pot leads to stronger drugs, which lead to the psychedelic glory that is, in my opinion, the best music that The Beatles ever made.

After hearing this, I did a little Google-ing and found that this story has been reported by others.

That doesn't mean that it's true, but, honestly, I don't care, it's a great story no matter what.

The Real Paul Jones

After nearly killing myself last semester with four of the hardest and most work-laden classes in the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication, I decided to give myself a little bit of a break this year. I'm a senior, dammit, I deserve it. So here's my schedule: Music Theory (the really easy one -- "Is this note ascending or descending?"), Musical Modernism, Introduction to Rock Music and Blogging, a new undergraduate class in the J-School.

The first day of my blogging class, I was surprised to see a fifty-something guy with glasses and long flowing hair that strangely resembled NASCAR's Kyle Petty standing in front of the twelve-person class. I was even more shocked when after talking intelligently for a minute or two he let out a nervous, geeky machine-gun laugh that sounded something like the Cowardly Lion when he's really nervous. I thought I had found the biggest geek on campus, and I may have. But I figured the class would be entertaining at the least.

Little did I know that I was sitting in front of a living legend of the internet. My professor, Paul Jones, is internationally regarded as one of the leading names of the open-source software and social networking on the internet. He created UNC-CH's ibiblio, which is essentially a website where anyone, anywhere can upload any content they want to and publish it to the web. You can search it like a massive library archive and find any kind of information that you want. It's like some kind of mix of Wikipedia and Blogger, even though it came out before the former and less than a year after the latter. He's done even more than that since, but I won't take the time to list them all here. You can check out his ibiblio bio, or read a great feature that the News and Observer did on him in 2001. It's written by David Menconi, the music writer for the N&O whose blog, On the Beat, is at the top of my bookmarks list.

And I just thought he was a nerd who knew more about Facebook than I did. How wrong I was...