How I won a Big Hunk

Having returned from Illinois and a glorious concert-going weekend just in time to get my ass to work (only SLIGHTLY late), I now get to sit here in all my zonked-out, road-weary glory and reminisce about the wonders of nerd rock.

Hillary and I got to the DG in time for Battlestar, and enjoyed that along with some pizza. This was followed by Iron Man, which was surprisingly excellent. It avoided most of the superhero movie pitfalls, like a lack of characterization, excessive and egregious fight scenes, and frequent lame-ness. Not all of the recent bout of superhero movies have these, but many do, and Iron Man actually dodged them all. It's got some damn fine acting, excellent humor (with only a little slapstick), and a surprisingly tight storyline. And when they do break out the fight scenes, they do it quite well. Definitely worth a viewing, even if you don't know shit about Iron Man, pretty much like myself. And if that's not enough, you get to see Jeff Bridges being bald, intense, and evil. Which is pretty awesome after you remember that he was The Dude.

Saturday, after the ritual consumption of sushi, Hillary, Hans and I went downtown to see Jonathan Coulton. It was even better than I expected. The opening band, which opened with the song, "Opening Band", was Paul and Storm, a surprisingly energetic and versatile pair of weirdos who pandered brilliantly to the crowd with lolcat and pirate references, among others. They also tossed candy bars with suggestive names into the audience for random things, one of which I won for yelling out a pseudo-pun. It's hard to explain, but it got a laugh and I won a Big Hunk, which I just braved a Google image search for:


I actually haven't eaten the thing yet, and now that I've seen what it looks like, I may have to think twice about that. But, freaky snacks aside (at least I didn't get the Pink Snowballs), Paul and Storm were damn good and appropriately quirky in their own way. Which, as it turns out, shouldn't have been surprising: they were half of DaVinci's Notebook. They gave us the Enormous Penis song, and now they've given me a great opening act as well. And now that I've written that sentence, who knows what kind of spam comments this blog is going to get.

Jonathan Coulton himself was superb, and played everything from Shop Vac to Flickr to re: Your Brains, complete with an audience-participation zombie chorus. The rampant "Arrrr!"-ing of the audience, prompted by one of Paul and Storm's songs, continued and even caused him to lose his composure, such as it was, a couple times. The audience was really energetic and he played to us well, and it felt like a real show. Also, he Rick-rolled us. He had this weird mix/synth board for Mr. Fancy Pants, and, well, one of the buttons was linked to "Never Gonna Give You Up." Auditory shenanigans ensued.

Describing it, as with any concert or really most things that I'm trying to encapsulate into a blog post, is damn hard without the energy of actually being there (and 2nd row center, no less). Hillary got some video, which she may post at some point. In any case, this concert is my pick


of the week.