A Girl You Can Never Forge

This music download site I use often chops off track names if they get a little long, resulting in results like the above, which I found amusing. Anyway, a pretty nothing day, just recuperating from a party I went to last night. I left my camera either at the house or in the car of friends who drove me and my buddy Jeff back, but I haven't called about it yet. Assuming no one at the party is a thief, it's probably there, you know?

I didn't even really get out of bed until about 3:00, just reading music reviews on allmusic, mainly. I didn't even eat, but am heading out after this to pick up a burger from Chili's take-out, a little treat for me. Downloaded and listened to Paul McCartney's DRIVING RAIN from 2001, which is okay. I like Paul and it was pretty cheap; he seems fairly energized on this one and it's not too busy, with a lot of acoustic guitar and even some decent rocking out here and there. That "Freedom" song is kind of embarrassing--his response to 9/11, pretty much--but musically it's hard to ignore. Also downloaded and listened to Fleetwood Mac's RUMOURS, which really is a very good album, though not one I would listen to often. Right now I've got the new Oasis playing, DON'T BELIEVE THE TRUTH, which expectedly doesn't seem to show much growth, but it's pretty good so far.

I finished Irregular Joe #3; hopefully the romance and pathos work as planned. I did change the ending quite a bit from the outline. I had some fairly stereotypical federal agents coming to get my lead character to go with them, and decided to just have one of the "villains" of the piece come by himself, as a) the Feds wouldn't really be involved; b) it's a secret op that this guy wouldn't want many others involved in, and c) it served to develop his character a little more as a manipulator and someone who sees himself as a hero. Better that than faceless federal agents any day, right? So, before they'd begun, the fictional lives of Agent Fregosi and Agent Crocker are over. The names allude to baseball and apple pie, sort of, as Jim Fregosi is a well-known MLB manager, and Betty Crocker bakes, well, cakes and stuff, not so much the pies. I didn't want it to be a joke obvious enough to undercut the scene.

Now that that obligation is over for now (I need to start the revisions to the previous issues this week), I might get the next Breakdowns in shape tonight, though I probably won't finish for a couple more days. It will feature new reviews and some refashioned reviews from the blog (probably not real different, actually), and I was thinking it might be fun to bring the column back to the blog after it goes on CBG, to do a kind of author commentary on it, how the reviews came together and such. We'll see if there's enough there to make it worthwhile.