Capybara

Capybara made its debut Down Under today on national Triple J radio.  Anyone catch the track?

In the meantime, check out these tracks below:

Capybara – Hello City Glow

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Capybara – The Wimp

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it’s late, so i’m going to try and make this quick.

our tv here in new mexico only gets about twenty channels.  fortunately, it gets abc and nbc, which allows mark and i to fulfill our weekly Lost and Office obsessions.  but whenever people just want to relax for a bit and watch some tube, there is rarely anything good on.

except of course, for our new favorite network: Nickelodeon GAS.  the “GAS” stands for “games and sports,” which is fairly descriptive considering that the only thing this network shows is reruns of old nickelodeon game shows. it took us a while to realize this, but in fact this channel only shows six programs at any given time of day.  those six are: legends of the hidden temple, GUTS, figure it out, nick arcade, get the picture, and double dare 2000.  no matter what hour of the day you tune in to nick GAS, you are guaranteed that one of those shows is on.  it is a sad truth that more often than not, whatever nick GAS is showing is much better than anything else on tv.

that being said, we have been watching a lot of early- to mid-90s nickelodeon game show programming.  it is to the point where i can immediately identify any episode of legends of the hidden temple as belonging to season 1, 2, or 3 (for example, they didn’t implement the real-time map of the contestants’ progress through the temple until season 3. pathetic, right?)

what is more depressing about this network, however, is the fact that it is obviously completely automated from some barren control room.  a nice aspect of nick GAS is that it has no commercials; instead, there’s original sports and games-related content that was produced at least 5 or 6 years ago.  how do we know this? one of the segments features the tennis player maria sharapova, and her age is listed at 15.  she is 21 now.

anyway, as i mentioned above, one of the six shows on this channel is figure it out, hosted by the lovely summer sanders (whom we now all have a crush on – her and moira quirk, the ref from GUTS).  far less lovely is lori-beth denberg (of All That fame), who is one of the panelists on figure it out.  in case you don’t know how this game worked, here’s a description from wikipedia:

Kids with special skills or unique achievements compete as contestants on the show while a panel of four Nickelodeon celebrities compete against the clock as they try to guess the predetermined phrase that describes the contestant’s talent.

now, if the panelists DON’T guess that predetermined phrase, the kids get a bunch of prizes.  if the panelists DO guess that phrase, the kids do NOT get any prizes.  follow me?  okay.  so basically my problem with lori-beth is that she ALWAYS guesses the phrase, thus robbing these innocent kids of their well-deserved prizes.  you can tell that the other panelists (with the possible exception of danny tamberelli – the younger brother from pete and pete) are purposefully NOT trying to guess the phrase.  why? because the other panelists are decent human beings who are okay with the kids getting a prize.  lori-beth, however, is clearly not okay with this.

i hope that in the several years since this show went off the air, lori-beth’s karma has finally caught up with her.  maybe she was in some kind of situation where she could’ve won something cool, but was robbed of that chance by a mean friend.  one can only hope.

oh, and we also saw an episode of legends of the hidden temple tonight where the parting gift for the teams who couldn’t complete the first challenge was: tuna.  that’s right, a few cans of tuna.  10 year old kids don’t even LIKE tuna.  it was an insult.

LOTHT Producer: “Oh, you couldn’t cross the moat in time?  Here, have some cans of tuna you stupid little kids.”
Losing contestant: “Ow, that can hit me in the face! Now my face has a dent in it. A dent shaped like a can of tuna.”
LOTHT Producer: “And don’t come back!”

We are really stoked about all of the visitors we are getting here at the ol’ Myspace.  So excited, in fact, that we’re got a little offer that you might be interested in: if you are our profile view number 11,111 and take a screencap of it, we will send you a postcard and maybe a few little goodies with it.  to take a screencap with a pc, just hit the “print screen” button on your keyboard, open up Paint, hit control-v and voila.  on a mac, hit command-shift-3 and then the screencap will be saved on your desktop.

we wanted to do this with whoever was visitor #9999, but by the time i was writing this we were already up to #9990. you know what, heck, if you just send us a message requesting one, we will send you a postcard anyway.  good luck all the same!!!!!!!

Now, in our last blog post here, Jared mentioned that he found a brown leather purse in our backyard that hadn’t been there the previous day.  This really creeped him out, because it would’ve meant that some creepy lady had been skulking around our house at some point without our knowledge, and had, during said skulking, left behind a purse.

Well, when Jared told me about the purse, I had not yet seen it.  Today was really nice outside, so I decided to check it out.  I went out in our beautiful backyard with its vista of the New Mexican desert and quickly found the purse in question.  I approached it to get a better look.  Upon closer investigation, however, I realized that the “purse” was actually a bucket.  Made of what had become really rusted metal.  I guess from afar it kind of looked like a leather purse.  But it had definitely been there for some time, and was definitely a bucket.

With that out of the way, I could focus on more important things, like the photoshops Mark made last night.  He couldn’t resist inserting himself into a picture of an eagle picking up a fox, and after I saw that little piece of genius, I had to suggest to him one of my favorite pictures: a lion killing an alligator.  It kind of snowballed from there.  The last one, the one of Jared patiently waiting outside of some kind of women’s meeting, is my favorite.

Visual art and I have a troubled past.  Music didn’t exactly come easy to me, but I at the very least can make my fingers do most of the things I want them to when they are holding a musical instrument.  This is not the case if I am holding some kind of drawing or painting implement.  One of my old art teachers used to pound the same phrase into our heads, day in, day out: draw what you see!  Okay, I’ll get right on that, Ms. Grundy, as soon as I figure out how to make this pencil do a straight line.

I actually love visual arts, but it is just not something I will ever be good at.  I am okay with that, really.  But in the sixth grade, it was a problem.  At some point during that year, I had to do a project on Easter Island.  This project had to involve a sculpture of some kind, and naturally I decided to sculpt one of those giant stone heads (moai).  It was not easy.  Fortunately, my sister was around that day, and said “oh, here let me help you with that.”  Three hours later and she had all but finished the entire sculpture with very little help from me.  I ended up getting an A+, probably because the sculpture was so good.  Imagine my horror, though, when I am told by my teacher that the sculpture is SO good that I have to present it to the entire class so that they can get a good look at it.  I ended up having to give a ten minute speech about how I went about making the sculpture.  I think I just winged it (wung it?  Which is the preferred term?).

So thanks, Remi, for helping me with an Easter Island stone head sculpture for my sixth grade history class.

-Darin