Andy Gapin

I just got back from an amazing weekend in New Hampshire. It was pretty crazy from start to finish. I went to work for a full day on Friday and then went into NYC for an amazing burrito and to go see the Gaslight Anthem at Webster Hall. Then took the PATH back to Hoboken, hopped in my car at 12:15 AM and started what was supposed to be a six and a half hour drive up to New Hampshire. We got lucky since it was so late and there was no one on the road, we made it in 5 hours and 45 minutes. Not too shabby and driving on Route 302 in New Hampshire was a ton of fun. It was empty and really windy. Perfect for the stick shift driver that loves to really have some fun behind the wheel. We got there at exactly 6–the sun was starting to light up the mountains–and immediately rode a moose. But then we found out that the rest of the group that was already there was sound asleep and not being woken up by our calls. So we had to chill out in the car for a couple hours. It was freezing and we were tired as all hell. This was kind of miserable.

At this point, we should have gone to bed, but that didn’t happen. It was time to head across the street to Attitash and go snowboarding, the entire reason for the trip. By this point, I had been up for over 24 hours straight–by the time I went to bed, it was about 42. I should have broken myself trying to snowboard without any sleep, but I think I somehow tricked my body into thinking that I did sleep because I felt perfectly fine and had tons of energy.

The only sucky part was that because of the weather we only got to go one day. But that one day was awesome. A really nice way to end the season. It was really warm out, I think it hit about 50 degrees, and the snow was really wet, but the trails were great and groomed very well. It was a lot of fun. Of all the mountains that I’ve been too, I think this was the best. The mountain also had some really beautiful views of the surrounding area and of Mount Washington.

And even though it rained the second day, we had a great time exploring. We embarked on what was supposed to just be a trip to the store for some more food, but ended up going on a covered bridge tour of New Hampshire. We found four of them within only a few miles of where we were staying. As we were checking out the second one, we realized that we were really close to Mount Washington so we decided we’d randomly go drive up it. Even though it was raining, this was one of the most beautiful drives ever, but since we’re from Jersey and don’t know anything about it, we didn’t know that the road to drive up the mountain is closed until May. That was a bit disappointing, but it really wasn’t very far of a way to go so it wasn’t too bad. On the way back we passed Storyland and had to stop. It was closed, but we had to get some pictures.

On the drive back to Jersey, I caught a vanity plate that said “taxes” and one that said “dgrssi.” We couldn’t snap pictures of either in time though. I also tried some pizza in Connecticut that was really awesome. It was half buffalo chicken and half peppers and onions. It was sliced very oddly though. Instead of being sliced the way a pizza normally is, it was sliced across the pie to form eight rectangles. This made it really hard to eat, but it was worth.

Here are the pictures. We took about 400 in all, but only some select ones are there. Check ‘em out!

I’m still really loving this Neko Case album. So good from start to finish. Other than that, nothing super new to report about music-wise here for the last week so I’ll just give you the list of what I listened to the most.

• Neko Case
• The Replacements
• Less Than Jake
• M. Ward
• The Jealous Sound
• Harvey Danger
• The Falcon
• Pixies
• The Gaslight Anthem
• The Lawrence Arms
• Mike Birbiglia
• Tenacious D
• Lifetime
• The Steinways
• The Hold Steady
• Let Me Run
• Minus The Bear
• Idlewild
• Thorns Of Life
• The Loved Ones
• Sundowner
• Placebo
• The Promise Ring
• Mitch Hedberg
• Scream Hello!
• Radiohead

Last night’s show had a lot of flow, but there was a big period of slowness in the middle while starting and ending much more upbeat. I think it worked though. The show was done in the production studio since there was some training going on in the normal air studio. Even though the studio has been rebuilt from the ground up over the past two years, it’s still a little different of an experience and can throw you off a bit because of the lack of space in front of you. Other than the added minor stress of that, it was a very good show. Here’s the playlist…

Source: 90.3 The Core

And here is a video of The Gaslight Anthem covering “Left of The Dial” by The Replacements…and not butchering it at all. As much as I generally hate hearing my favorite bands covered, I can’t complain about this one and having it done by another of my favorite bands makes it even better.

And this…is…awesome. It’s the audio of the Watchmen trailer mashed up with the WALL-E trailor. So good.

A few weeks ago I was thinking about how cool it would be to start a blog about all different kinds of beers and stuff. I’m a big fan of beer and I really like to try different kinds so I thought it would be a lot of fun. But after thinking about it a little bit, I started to feel like it would be really hard to keep up with that kind of thing. I don’t really think that I’d be able to write enough about a lot of the beers. I’m sure that some would be really easy, but I’m definitely not the kind of person that could make an entire blog entry about every beer.

So what I decided to do instead was to set up a Twitter account and just post little blurbs about the beers there. Each tweet will basically be the name of the beer and the brewery and a very short description or quality rating. If possible, I’ll post a picture of the bottle or the tap handle. Nice and simple, nothing major. I think it’ll be fun.

Anyway, check it out and spread the word! If you’re on Twitter follow me!

http://twitter.com/sevenbeersnitch

I’ve also added a feed of the tweets to the right side of my blog as well, right below the feed for my regular Twitter account. So if you’d prefer to follow that way, you can.

Here’s what I spent a lot of time listening to last week. Pretty solid list, I think.

Black Kites is the new band that Tom from The Assistant and You And I is in. Sounds pretty much like what you’d expect, loud and awesome. And on the complete other end of the spectrum, the new Neko Case album is absolutely great. I very highly recommend it.

• Sugar Glyder
• Radiohead
• Cheap Girls
• Black Kites
• The Loved Ones
• Neko Case
• Gaslight Anthem
• Asobi Seksu
• The Lawrence Arms
• Drive-By Truckers
• Smoking Popes
• The Bitter Tears
• The Hold Steady
• The Weight
• Let Me Run
• Archers Of Loaf
• M. Ward
• Beulah
• She And Him
• Morrissey
• Marissa Nadler
• Agaisnt Me!
• Tom Gabel
• The Replacements
• The Jealous Sound

And for no reason whatsoever, here is a mini slide show of Leela taking a break from being a vicious killer to pose and look cute…

Every year on the first day of Spring, Rita’s gives away free Italian ice. And every year, I say that I’m going to go on a tour of all the locations in the area. This has never happened…until this year! Rita’s Tour 2009 started as a great idea, sadly, it did not end as a great idea.

Since it was a workday, we just did it after work instead of making an entire day out of it, though I did cheat and go during lunch. We hit four locations in a well orchestrated, but slightly mob-like, assault of gluttony. It was actually quite impressive. I didn’t think we had it in us to follow our dreams like that, but there was some serious inspiration behind all our eyes.

The biggest issue we faced was that since they were literally giving it away, there were lines and not a lot of flavors to choose from at a couple locations. One location only had pina colada and it sucked. The gods were on my side at two locations though and I was able to score vanilla and sweet tea. Vanilla is my favorite, but sweet tea was a nice departure from the ordinary flavors. It even had a slightly different texture.

Prior to the outing, I thought I would feel amazing after all the glory of getting Rita’s five times in one day. I was mistaken. Very mistaken. I actually felt ill afterwards. I’m not talking about the Beastie Boys kind of ill, I’m talking about contemplating forcing myself to throw up just to get it out of me kind of ill. I didn’t think that too much Rita’s was possible, but it is very possible. Not only did my stomach feel weird, but my whole body felt like it was crying out for insulin. There were moments of intense amounts of energy throughout the tour, but the crash after the last stop was awful. The four of us were sitting in a diner booth looking like we were hungover and hadn’t slept in days. I felt just as bad as I looked.

While it will be forgotten over the next 365 days, there is a lesson to be learned here. If you are going to try to eat Rita’s out of business, you need to start early in the day and spread it out. Don’t try to do it all at once. Realize your sugar-intake limits!

For a more in-depth account of the outing, check out this.

And on a very related (read: completely unrelated) note, I got two new zombie shirts this week. I’ll have to double check the count, but I think these may be zombie shirts four and five. Both are from 6dollarshirts.com. But they’re printed on Hanes shirts which always fit a little weird so that kind of sucks.

Since I like to post something Lawrence Arms related at least once a week, I figure that I should point you to this awesome rant by their bassist, Brendan Kelly. His blog is one of the funniest things out there, but he updates it everyday and always writes so much that I rarely get to actually read it. This one is worth the time though.

The show last night was just alright. Not the worst I’ve done, but probably one of the weakest shows so far this year. I was pretty beat so I didn’t get to put a lot of energy into it. I also wasn’t really feeling the new Trail Of Dead stuff. It seems pretty meh.

Source: 90.3 The Core

I had never heard of these things before, but I was at a friend’s place last night and he made me try one. Basically, you let one of them dissolve on your tongue and then, for the next half hour or so, everything you eat that is sour or bitter tastes sweet. It’s totally weird as hell. I ate a slice of lemon and it tasted like pure sugar. No, no pure sugar. More like Splenda! The strangest thing was the contrast of the sourness that I still felt on my lips and the sweetness that was on my tongue.

And it made my Guiness taste like an Irish car bomb without adding anything to it.

Watchmen

I think that what I got most from Watchmen was that I need to find a way to increase my killing power. Seriously, I need to get on the ball be able to just explode people and teleport them places…like Mars. Or at least have the badassitude of Rorschach. I would be so much more awesome.

As I often need to state with comic book movies, I never really got into comics much as a kid and haven’t made up for that as an adult either so I can’t really speak about the accuracy of the film, but from a strictly movie-goer point of view, this film was great. Extremely well done with great effects that looked very real. The story is really interesting and the way that the past and present are brought together throughout the movie was really amazing.

At 2 hours and 43 minutes, it didn’t feel long at all. I could have easily sat through another hour of it.

Rating: A

Last House On The Left

As usual, when I find out that a horror movie I love is being remade–speaking of which, is there anything else left?–I tend to cringe. Though, to be fair, I was thinking about this on the way out of the theater and realized that I like way more of these remakes than I hate. But getting back to the point, when I heard about this one, I had my standard reaction of “oh god why must they ruin everything I hold sacred?!?!” The original was a pretty brutal movie and existed for a purpose. I didn’t really see how that purpose was going to be able to be given justice in 2009.

On its own, the 2009 version is a very entertaining, but cookie-cutter kind of a horror movie that was clearly put together for audiences in 2009. It’s a pretty brutal movie and it does have some shock value to it, despite most of the attempts at being shocking failing. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone who doesn’t like seeing movies with relatively graphic rape scenes, but other than that, the shock value was pretty low. The fights and brutality were pretty on point and I think that the actors all did a good job portraying their characters as intended. The movie earns some high marks there.

However, compared to the 1972 version, this falls very short. The graphicness and shock value don’t compare at all. And where the 1972 version was much more of an exploitation film, this was more just a standard let’s-beat-up-and-murder-some-people kind of a thing. This was pretty much the fear that I had with them making this remake, the movie exists to be exploitative and when you downplay that you end up losing a lot.

My bottom line on this movie that it’s a really good horror film if you separate it from the original and just take it as its own entity. Had they named it something else and passed it off as being unrelated, I think I’d be able to get behind it a lot more. But a feeble, 2009 Hollywood style attempt at remaking Last House On The Left almost ruins the name.

Rating: B-

Previews

I normally don’t talk about movie previews much, but seriously the Star Trek movie looks awesome. I don’t even like Star Trek. I never have, but this cast looks awesome and everything else about it looks like it’ll reach out to non-Star Trek fans. I’m kind of getting psyched for it.

Before Last House On The Left, there was a preview for a movie called The Orphan, which as far as I can tell is just The Omen with a girl instead. And maybe a little bit of influence from The Orphanage, but seriously, was there even an attempt and creativity there?

I’m pretty sure that tonight’s episode of How I Met Your Mother was one of the best episodes of any TV show I’ve ever seen in my life. Definitely in the top 10. I literally fell off my couch laughing when Lily planted the Creed CD in Ted’s college girlfriend’s dorm room. And I’m almost 100% sure that I would consider a girl owning a Creed CD to be proper grounds for ending the relationship as well.

Speaking of ending relationships for silly reasons–alright, owning a Creed CD is NOT a silly reason, but I swear I’m about to go into some silly stuff–I met a rather cute girl on Saturday at the mustache party/show that I attended. No big deal really, that’s not the point of this post. The point is that when I got home, I immediately did exactly what I hate, I went on Facebook and looked her up. Her profile permissions allowed me to see everything. I’m not if it’s because we went to the same college or if it’s because we know a couple of the same people (which is what made it so easy to find her) or if it’s just because she has them set to allow anyone to see anything, but it was all there.

It’s probably pretty clear that I am an internet nerd and wouldn’t know what to do without the internet,¹ but this is one of the ways that I think the internet has ruined things. In reality, things may not be ruined, just changed, but for the sake of the next few minutes of your life, let’s assume that they are indeed ruined beyond any possible repair and, as a species, we’re all screwed. Being just short of 26, I’m in that age range that is just young enough to have gone through most of high school and college with the internet, but is still old enough to remember life before the internet. So keep in mind that that’s where I’m coming from with this.

My last four relationships cover my life back until I was 18.  If you add up all the time in between them and since my last relationship ended it’s only about ten months and I was friends with all four of these girls prior to dating them so I can’t say that I have a lot of experience in getting to know a girl in the context of trying to start a relationship. It’s not completely foreign to me, that time in between those relationships wasn’t spent avoiding the ladies, but still there isn’t a lot of experience there. However, what I do know from these ten months and from what I remember from high school is that you need to get to know someone over time, directly, and in an organic way. The internet has kind of ruined this idea. Maybe not for everyone, but definitely for people like me that have no self-control to not access easily available information.

You can get to know a ton about someone in just a few minutes now. Log onto MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, their blog, etc and it’s all right there. There is so much information about people out there now and it’s so easy to find, but it even goes beyond just things that people put up themselves, you also see what kind of people they are friends with and the kind of interactions that they have with each other. And you have no real context for this stuff at all. None. It’s just there to speak for itself. You don’t know the inside jokes or the dynamics of these friendships. You can only take them at face value and that’s usually not a very good thing at all.

So now, rather than getting to know someone through conversation and spending time together, you found out everything about them in roughly five minutes. For some, this may not be a big deal, but for me, it’s a horrible thing. I don’t want to get to know anyone in this manner and I feel the same about people getting to know me so I keep most of my profiles on sites private except to those that I’m friends with in real life (IRL OMG!!). Twitter and this blog are two exceptions, but I think there is good reason there that doesn’t need to be explained. Anyway (how many times have I used this word?), I’m the kind of person that will easily see one or two things that are minor turn offs and lose interest right then and there. They won’t even be big things at all, such as owning a Creed CD (or Uggs), they’ll be little silly things that I wouldn’t even care about if I just found out about them in a more organic matter. Nevermind the fact that most of them can probably be explained away very simply. But you present it all to me at once like this and it’s a whole different story. They become dealbreakers.

I’m sure that many people don’t have this problem at all, but I have no self-control to not look people up online…hmm…that sounds like I stalk people. Yikes! Is it stalking if you don’t really pry beyond a few socially accepted websites? I guess that’s a question for another time, but the point here is that I have no self-control and I’m easily turned off by little things so the internet has ruined getting to know new people outside of work or any social circles that I’m already a part of.

Let’s go back up to the beginning of this rant and get back to the girl in question, at the party I thought she seemed pretty awesome. We had great a conversation throughout the night and I was getting a decent vibe, but then when I looked at her Facebook I found a few little tiny things that made me lose some interest. Again, things that wouldn’t bother me in the least if I found out about them over the course of time, but that’s not how I found out about them. This brings us up to where I stand right now. I’m going to try to ignore these things and move past them, but it’s hard for me to ignore that this is the world we live in now. I take very good advantage of all of the great things about there being all of this information at our fingertips, but, at the same time, I can’t turn away from how scary the effects that it is having on social interaction are. I think that once people already know each other a bit, technology and social media can be great in helping continue that relationship, but in the early stages…eek!

¹That’s right, bitches! I included a footnote! Recognize! Just before I typed this up, I was going through Google Reader to try and get rid of a few subscriptions to sites that I lost interest in and when I was done, I still had 172 sites in there. This isn’t the first time I’ve go through and purged stuff either. This is ridiculous though. I get like a solid 500-600 new articles in there every day. It’s almost a full time job to keep up.