Thursday, October 28, 2010

Man oh man oh man

It seems like a lot is going on lately, but really I don't think that's the case. Maybe just a lot going on in my mind.

Last weekend I went to see the Gorillaz, which was one of the best concerts I've seen. I wasn't sure how I felt about their newest album, but it's grown on me quite a bit. As for the concert, it was simply a lot of fun. They had a huge screen behind the stage where they played animations and music videos, and they never had less than 10 people on the stage performing. They had a strings section, the occasional brass section, an Syrian/Arabic music group for a couple songs, a couple drummers — you name it, they probably had it on stage. When they played their singles that had corresponding music videos, they were always timed well. When people were singing live, it was correctly matching up with lip movement in the videos. The animations really raised the fun factor in my opinion. Not to mention that everyone on the stage (including Damon Albarn) was having a blast and was very energetic.

I took a couple videos on my phone, but I have yet to really figure out the best way of uploading videos to YouTube. Strange that I've never done that before. Fear not, though. They have live performances on YouTube already for your viewing pleasure!

For no reason other than to make my blog post longer, here is the setlist for their concert (notice how many guest artists they had):

-Orchestral Intro (Extended)
-Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach (with Hypnotic Brass Ensemble)
-19/2000 (with Rosie Wilson)
-Last Living Souls
-Stylo (with Bobby Womack and Bootie Brown)
-On Melancholy Hill
-Rhinestone Eyes
-Superfast Jellyfish (with De La Soul)
-Tomorrow Comes Today
-Empire Ants (with Yukimi Nagano)
- Broken (Extended)
-Dirty Harry (with Bootie Brown)
-El MaƱana
-White Flag (with Kano and Bashy and the American Syrian Orchestra; extended)
-To Binge (with Yukimi Nagano)
-DARE (with Rosie Wilson)
-Glitter Freeze
-Plastic Beach

Encore:
-Cloud of Unknowing (with Bobby Womack)
-Feel Good Inc. (with De La Soul)
-Clint Eastwood (with Bashy and Kano)
-Don't Get Lost In Heaven
-Demon Days (with Bobby Womack)


That's quite the setlist, don't you think? If they ever come back to Austin in the future, I will definitely go again. Oh, I almost forgot to mention that N.E.R.D. was the opener! They were also good, but unfortunately they played 90% new songs of their upcoming album which I didn't know. I wasn't able to get into their songs as much because of that. They performed well, though.

The rest of the weekend was pretty uneventful. The Longhorns lost to a terrible team Iowa State and people are really beginning to question what our coaching staff is doing with our players. Cowboys lost on Monday to the Giants.

I had a midterm in my class on Tuesday and it went well enough. It was a hard test to study for in that there weren't many things to study for. We've only learned a handful of concepts, and the rest of the class has been learning how to apply those concepts. At this point, you either understand it or you don't. Most of the test was easy, but he did design some intentionally hard questions to throw some people off. I'd assume the average on the test was a mid-to-low B, and that I scored somewhere around average. I'd be surprised if I eked out an A, and I'd be equally surprised/upset if I got a C. I'll find out next week, I suppose.

We had our last kickball game last night and we finally won again! It was a really good game. Both teams were into it, but were still having a good time. Both teams respected each other and showed great sportsmanship, too. After a hard fought battle (where I injured myself as usual), we sneaked out a win in the last inning, 6-5. We are likely not in the playoffs, but we still finished out the season with a win, bringing our record to a respectable 4-3.

Today is the last day of my work week, and I'm ready for it. This weekend is Halloween weekend and I don't have any solid plans, but there are a lot of potential things going on. We also have a game against Baylor which we will probably lose. Losing to Baylor, the #1 team in the Big 12 South — what is happening to the world?

Other stuff probably happened in the past week which I forgot to mention, but that's what happens when you don't update in a while.