I get to wake up early tomorrow and learn how to use the new electronic voting machines. Aren't I lucky? Bring back the old voting machines!

I know what I want for my birthday.

Koulourakia!

The final day of the Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Cathedral Food Festival is on my birthday.

I should make a whole week of it.

Koulourakia!

I had an interesting day at AIR yesterday. There wasn't anything going on in the afternoon so I printed some more sea monsters. I stopped about half way through the batch last week because I was losing it and it was 11:00 pm, and this was after a very long day. I finished up the orange ones and did some green ones. I also printed a couple sea monster t-shirts. One of them came out perfect and the other one moved during a hit but it's still pretty sweet. It's a really good feeling to be walking around wearing a shirt you made.

After that all went down, it was Last Friday. Heather had a pretty nice spread going. It was a shame that exactly zero people showed up for it. There were six people from the Zany Umbrella Circus printing t-shirts during the Friday open studio so the food and wine didn't go to waste. While they were printing their 300 shirts, I sat in the corner drawing. There's nothing like drawing for three or four hours straight in a hectic yet laid back atmosphere.

I also watched the fireworks from the Pirate game out the front gallery window. Gotta love fireworks.

I think I should do a poetry reading for next month's Last Friday.

So, Last Friday seems to entail the gallery being open later.
And wine and cheese.
Classy.

I need a good kick in the ass.

Here's an artist's conception of my new driver's license photo.

See you in 2010, driver's license renewal people.

The pain that passes. A pain that never stops passing. A pain that never stops going away. To grow older painlessly. A graceful ache. He lived with an elegant ache. The grace to forgive your body for breaking down. A list of forgivenesses. Every man writes his own Gospel. Kill the waking brain. Make it all go away. It all existed under the surface like lovers under the sheets. Like spent lovers under the sheets. Like spent lovers whispering under the sheets.

Baseball thoughts:

• Why does Jason Bay stand so far from the plate?
• It is possible for both Lloyd Mclendon and Jim Tracy to be horrible managers.
• Joe Randa and Jeremy Burnitz should retire.
• Freddie Sanchez should be playing every day.
• Your chances of winning improve if you field your best possible lineup every day.
• Dave Littlefield sucks.
  

The Top 19 Movie Blunders of All Time:

5) In Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade, Han Solo (Indiana Jones) decides that a simple wooden cup is the Holy Grail, as it is “the cup of a carpenter.” I know many carpenters, and none of them drink out of wooden cups. When I mentioned it to them, most found the idea ridiculous, and faintly insulting.

From the Usemycomputer.com forums.

The first of AIR's Last Fridays is coming up this week although I really don't know what that entails.

It's from 7-9 pm on Friday...whatever it is.

I once took a life drawing class where we had a young, very pregnant model for one of the sessions. After arriving, she went into the tiny bathroom to remove her clothes and I had to smile at the incredulous whispers of my fellow artists.

"She looked..."

"Is she..."

Yes.

Very.

As she took her first pose there was a weird vibe in the room, but only because this was a new experience for all of us. We had drawn naked people. We had drawn fat, naked people. But we had never drawn this.

As the session went on any cultural taboos we may have harbored faded away and we were all totally captivated by her radiance. There was some indefinable quality about her that morning. She wasn't just a naked girl. She wasn't just a pregnant, naked girl. She was beauty. She was life. By the end of the class there was this amazing energy in the room. Everyone had these dumb grins on their faces. I've never experienced anything like it.

Later in the year, after she had had her son, she modeled for us again, and although we all remembered how it had been, and wanted so badly to relive that moment, it wasn't what it had been.

This time she was just a naked girl.

While coming home from the movie last night, my brother and I were joking that they should make a big budget, Hollywood remake of I Am A Sex Addict starring Tom Cruise, and then we were wondering if it would be better to just straight remake the movie with Tom playing Caveh Zahedi or change it so that Tom is playing Tom Cruise talking about his own sexual escapades, marriages, and runs ins with prostitutes. The encounters with prostitutes being pure fiction since why would Tom Cruise go to a prostitute?

And then I read this and now the universe is scaring me.

My brother isn't in this commercial but it's still pretty good.

My brother and I saw I Am A Sex Addict tonight at the Melwood Screening Room. There was an interesting chain of events leading up to us going. My brother had heard about the movie and wanted to go. I didn't think it sounded very interesting and was my normal non-committal self about going. But then I went to the gallery crawl on Friday night, and I was hanging out with a group of people at the SPACE gallery on Liberty Avenue when this really old guy walks up to us and hands me, and only me, a flyer for the movie. He only gave it to me because he thought I looked like or, in fact, was Tom Cruise. That is what we atheists call A Sign From God, so, I knew I had to go see the film and I'm glad I did because it was pretty funny.
Go see it if it looks like your kind of thing.

Some of this post is true.

I'm naming my first child Jumpkick Acidblack Fredland.
Just try and stop me.

I would buy these stamps.

This was on Jonathan Carroll's blog yesterday.

"I'm the type of person you might not hear from for sometime, but then, suddenly, one day, bang, you never hear from me again."
Will Eno

This is post #666.

We be gallery crawlin' tonight (not to be confused with the 9th World Wide Sketchcrawl which is tomorrow). Tonight we're meeting at the Wood Street Gallery at 5:30. Join us. Stalk us. Rock and roll us.

Happy National High Five Day.
Go high five someone!

Today's haul from the comic shop:
The Tourist.
Batman Year 100 #3.
Nextwave #4.
Marvel Romance Redux #1.
Draw! #12.

"For a brief moment as she walked to her car in the Chuck E. Cheese's parking lot, Sharona wondered if it had been cruel to buy $40 worth of tokens for her friend's children right before she left the birthday party, but how could it be cruel when it made the kids so happy? As a bonus, maybe Allison and Brad would learn a valuable lesson about making comments about her still being single."

What a beautiful game last night. There was an amazing atmosphere in the arena all night and when Ryan Malone buried Sidney Crosby's pass, giving #87 100 points for the season, the place went crazy.

I got down there around 6:00 and the student rush line already stretched around the corner. It was the third standing room only game I've been to this season but the first one where I didn't have to stand. They were scraping the bottom of the barrel and giving the students suite and club box seats. I ended up with a bunch of kids in a $135 a seat suite (I was totally bummed that I didn't get a club box which, although farther from the ice than where I was, have couches, but if I wanted to watch the game on a couch I could've stayed home, right?). I couldn't see one corner of the ice but I was directly across from the goal the Pens shot at twice. Crosby's second two points were at the other end but I had a great angle for a lot of very pretty goals and Fleury's stop of the penalty shot.

See you next year, boys.

Is it wrong to fake an orgasm when the dude is patting you down when you're going into a sporting event?

It's the second anniversary of this humble blog, the first blog in Nicholas Fredland's Fine Family of Blogs (one blog is never enough).

Say a little prayer tonight at 9:05.

As always, all the blame goes to Kelly.

3 things I did for Easter:
1. Ate.
2. Played capture the flag.
3. Played poker.

A lazy Saturday. Then I headed down to the ballpark to see the Pirates with my brother, John. We didn't get very far before my mother called and said that Steve wanted to go to the game with us. Who? Steve! Who? Your uncle Steve! Cool! He hadn't been to a Pirate game in Pittsburgh since the mid 70's! We swung over to the South Side and picked him (and some ham sandwiches) up at my grandmother's. Then: tickets from the ticket kiosk and a thrilling one-run victory. Next: back to the South Side and a second night in a row at The Rex to see The Cynics. 2:30 am: You have to leave! You really have to leave! I mean it!

Whew.

I had to buy some stuff Friday morning and a Rhett Miller ticket that night so I really wasn't looking forward to buying a ticket to the ball game and the Cynics concert but my uncle bought the Pirates tickets (thank you!) and my brother was on the guest list for the Cynics and I was able to get in free on his coat tails. In the end I didn't end up spending any money at all. Cheap bastard, hoooooooooo!

2 signs I really enjoyed the show:
1. I'm playing the artist's songs over and over the next morning.
2. I want to follow them to the next stop on the tour (It's only a 6 hour drive to Louisville. We've got plenty of time to make the 8:00 show!) .

"My name's Stewart Ransom Miller. I'm a serial lady killer."

Unbelievable show from Rhett Miller tonight at The Rex. That man leaves it all out there on the stage. Rocked the show with my brothers. The only other time I was in The Rex was back when it was a movie theater (fun fact: the movie was Back To The Future III). This is going to be disjointed because my mind has been blown. Say it with me: WOW. How can you not love a woman rocking the drums in bare feet? And she was from around here so her parents were in attendance.

The highlight of highlights: mid-set three song solo acoustic break. Salome (sweet fucking god. Amazing). Question (which he did the end of in French. Holy fucking amazing.). And then Timebomb which was kind of out of place but still cool. I was in total teenage girl mode--singing along and screaming. If I were a girl (or a gay man) I would totally be in love with Rhett Miller (who am I kidding...I am anyway). Our Love. Oh, my god. Singular Girl. BARRIER REEF! The show could only have been better if my sister had been here to see it with us (shout out to Texas: we all got a huge kick out of your text message).

Here's what made today great:
1. Made a slick dragon print at AIR.
2. A kiss from my grandmother.
3. Rhett Fucking Miller.

Don't you hate that I don't have tickets I hope it isn't sold out by the time I get there feeling?

Hey look, a link to my art blog. That makes me happy and motivates me to put more stuff on there, too. It's all good.
Thanks, Mason Poe.

Sunny day driving around with the windows down mix:
Miracleworker - Self
Stutter - Elastica
K Street - Fastbacks
Girlfriend - Matthew Sweet
Half-Life - Local H
Working On The Highway - Bruce Springsteen
Box Full Of Letters - Wilco
The Last Dictator - Spacehog
Sister Havana - Urge Overkill
Caligula - The Modey Lemon
I Can't Wait - Superdrag

In the future, art historians will agree that the most significant art form to come out of the early 21st century was girls taking pictures of themselves and posting them on the Internet.

“It’s short for Marigold.” She said.
Swear on the secret names of your daughters and sons.
Daughters named in code.
An algorithm to name your children.
He hid the secrets of the world in the names of his daughters and sons.

Heather Graham, looking to rebound from the disappointment of her television show, prepares to mount a one-woman show in my bathtub. We have a long conversation about what it's like being a celebrity in the information age. She rebuffs my every advance.

What a great holiday.
Here are a couple honorable mentions:
Lone baby.
Illegal car seat.

Happy Little Kids Sitting On Couches Day!

Happy Little Kids Sitting On Couches Day!

Plop some kids on a couch and take some pictures!
Here are the official rules.

I take my Flickr favorites very seriously. Looking at people's photos and their favorites I think you can get a pretty good read on them (this guy really like cats and boobies!). I find it especially fascinating when someone takes really interesting pictures but has really boring favorites (where as I think I have really cool favorites and not the most interesting photos).

I love going through people's photos and starring a bunch of pictures I like and then looking at my favorites page for interesting patterns. There'll be stretches of cool or warm photos or interesting juxtapositions like these two; marked as favorites back-to-back by pure chance:

My dad and I sneaked out and played nine holes this afternoon. All the new clubs deserted me but I had my chipping and putting going on (who needs practice!). Overall, decent for the first round of the year but still kind of frustrating.

The Flickr tag of the day is shinyhappypeopleholdinghands.
Sadly, there aren't any pictures with that tag.

Walter,

Morgan Cahn is one of the coolest people in the world. At AIR's birthday party she was all like you should go to my opening next Friday at the Brew House but when grilled she wouldn't tell me what she was showing. She's pretty sly that one. So, Friday rolls around and I'm practically bursting with anticipation. After helping put the finishing touches on the memorial for Don Gould at AIR (and then hiding in the office the whole time it was going on because it was a very adult gathering and, you know, I'm not very adult, but I did eat the food because, you know...) I headed over to the South Side, right ahead of the rain. The show is amazing. You should find a way to check it out. The opening was great fun. There were salt sticks, a DJ playing some truly classic tunes, and a bunch of hip people including my cousin Sonja.

I took some pictures.

The show is up until April 29.
The Brew House Space 101 is at 2100 Mary St. on the South Side.
Gallery hours are:
Wednesday and Thursday 6 - 9 pm
Saturday noon - 9 pm.

Go see it.
I mean it.

I went to the driving range for the second time this year with my dad today. The new driver we got is one of the ones where you can make adjustments to it to compensate for your flaws. My dad changed it from whatever the default was and whatever he did made it so that I was bombing just about every shot dead where I was aiming it. It was pretty sweet. I also had the new metal 5-wood (metal 5-wood?) working. I've just got to get my hands on a set of Ping irons and I'll be all set to go.

Jamie Dixon's sister died.

This. And this. And this.

Bryan O'Malley has some good news for you (the second part).

The University of Pittsburgh Studio Arts Student Exhibition opened today. The show is up until the end of the month. There's some good stuff in there. Check it out if you can. Were college students that young when I was in school? I mean, I wasn't, but was everyone else? It's always good to see the old studio arts crowd and I talked to some people that I hadn't talked to in a good long while including the only person to ever give me a Christmas card. I'm actually becoming social in my old age. It's a weird feeling for me. And, of course, any day I get to talk to Edward Powell and Delanie Jenkins is a good day even if I didn't end up getting any free food.

For some reason FSN Pittsburgh is showing the Cleveland Cavalier's basketball game instead of the Pirates tonight, but I'm enjoying 'watching' the game on ESPN.com's new MLB gamecast. Jim Tracy made all the right changes for tonight's game--McLouth in CF, Craig Wilson in for Burnitz, and Doumit behind the plate. Now he just has to get the lineup right and we'll be ready to go.
I'm back on the bandwagon!

It's always in the back of my mind when I'm reading Eureka Street. No matter how much I'm laughing at the GIANT DILDO REFUND, or Jake Jackson trying to catch his cat so he can piss on it, it's always in the back of my mind--when am I going to get to that chapter? If you've read the book you know which one I mean. Chapter eleven.

Chapter fucking eleven.

Every time I finish chapter ten, turn the page, and see Rosemary Daye's name I have to stop reading. I have to give myself a little time to get ready for what's to come. I remember the first time I read it. It was back when I was at Pitt. I was sitting in Posvar between classes. I usually do a good job of not being the guy sitting over there by himself crying (you know us homeschoolers are prone to crying jags) but what are you going to do? It's heartbreaking. Every time I read it it hits me just as hard as the first time and I curse Robert McLiam Wilson for a bastard.

Well, that was sadly predictable.
Consider me off the Pirate bandwagon.

It's opening day. Up until maybe five years ago baseball was my favorite sport. It's the organized sport my brothers and I played when we were kids. It's the sport I know the most about. It's the sport where I'm least forgiving of professionals who forget the fundamentals (tag the base!). It's the sport my dad played in college (where he pitched batting practice to Roberto Clemente). It's the sport that had an instructional clinic named after my grandfather.

In the early nineties when the Pirates were good and the Penguins were better I only really had eyes for the Pirates. The last few years, the Pirates have made it really hard for me to get into baseball the way I used to. I still follow them pretty religiously but there's no joy in it anymore. The Steelers have surpassed the Pirates as my favorite local team, and the Penguins have become my favorite team to watch in person, but it's opening day, and, at least this morning, baseball is the greatest game in the world.

Ben Folds played the Bigelow Bash yesterday???
Why the hell didn't I know about that?

I'm just now fully recovered from Friday's AIR10 birthday party and its 2:1 beer to cupcake ratio. Those were some mighty fine cupcakes. It was raining as I set off for Pittsburgh's historic North Side but it stopped soon after I arrived, and, through powers no mortal can understand, we were graced by a stunning rainbow. Then I started drinking, and I was pretty tired, so everything after that is a blur. I think I saw Mike Budai play a game of pin the tail on the donkey that was so engrossing I forgot to take any pictures. Around this point I was given the nickname 'Scott' by Bill 'Buffalo Bill' Rodgers, but this is a family blog so I can't go into all the details.

Someone made the very wise decision to get, instead of a clown, a balloon artist who made some crazy good balloon creations including a balloon chicken hat.

The musical highlight of the night was when Smells Like Gina played a sweet set while the Matrix played on the wall behind them. Their set featured a broken string and a drum pedal malfunction that were covered up by an improvised song about changing a broken string and some human beatboxing. I bought one of their patches after the show.

Then things got really wild. The streamers came crashing down, all those years of Little League came through as I destroyed a pinata, helium was inhaled, fingers were magically inserted up noses, and can after can of Pabst Blue Ribbon was consumed. All in all an awesome night and I'm probably forgetting a ton of stuff. In the end I went home with a tiny cake. Good times.

Happy birthday, Artists Image Resource.

I don't know why I always get my hopes up.
Comic book movies = bad.
V For Vendetta = comic book movie.
V For Vendetta = bad.

This blog is 100% April Fool's Day hoax free.
At least this year.