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Day 345: Star Wars Piano

Star Wars Piano Medley

Star Wars Piano Medley

Although I’m now posting all of my Star Wars content to Lando’s ‘Stache, I couldn’t resist sharing the Ultimate Star Wars Medley here. It’s a brilliantly produced video featuring a supremely talented pianist covering five of the most popular Star Wars songs. The pianos themselves are also stars, as you’ll see in the video.

After watching this I was reminded of one thing: not everything in the prequels was awful, thanks to magic of John Williams’ music. Duel of the Fates is a classic Star Wars song and as arranged by Sonya Belousova, it fits perfectly into her medley below.

Day 344: Grammy Museum

The Rose That Grew From Concrete by Tupac Shakur

The Rose That Grew From Concrete by Tupac Shakur

We took our trip to the Grammy Museum tonight and it was amazing. My wife and I scored tickets from Yelp as a perk for being part of their street team this summer. (Thanks, Yelp!)

The hour-long drive into L.A. was totally worth it since we got to explore the museum for an hour before the show. The second I learned there was a Tupac Shakur exhibition on the fourth floor, I knew where we were going first.

The exhibition featured some of Shakur’s original writings, including the poem, “The Rose That Grew From Concrete,” which was the title of his posthumous book of poetry. 2Pac was always an enigmatic figure: he was a brash hip hop figure, but also an introspective and intelligent young man. The exhibition did a good job of showing this more thoughtful side of him without denying his controversial side.

Afterwards we walked around the third and fourth floors, exploring different styles of music and learning the history. I could’ve easily spent hours here, but time was limited.

At 7:30pm, we went back to the second floor to the little theater for an Ukulele Beatles show. We’d seen Jake Shimabukuro last year and were blown away, so we thought tonight would be a nice little concert. It started off that way with Ryan Imamura, as the young man played some medleys and then individual Beatles songs. He was great, but then Ryo Montgomery took the stage and proceeded to rock the house.

Yes, he killed it with his ukulele. We were absolutely impressed, as was the rest of the audience.

Montgomery reminded us a lot of Shimabukuro; not only his otherworldly talent, but his stage presence. He was a natural up there and just owned it. He brought back Imamura for a few songs and they were awesome together. We loved how they ended the set with “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” using Shimabukuro’s famous arrangement.

It was a mind-blowing experience tonight, looking back at hip hop’s past before looking forward to the ukulele’s future.

Day 343: Catching Up

IMG_20151208_134001

I committed to writing 100 Yelp reviews this year and I’m lagging. I’ve been focusing on board gaming as well as posting a bunch of stuff on my Star Wars blog, so my Yelping has fallen behind schedule.

I’ve got a bunch of half-finished Yelp reviews, so I’ll try to finish my 100th by the end of the year. Actually, I’ll do that by the end of the year. Do or do not … well, you know.

Day 342: Snack Time

Seafood City Snack Aisle

Seafood City Snack Aisle

My wife and I enjoyed Korean spicy tofu soup tonight and we were craving dessert. She opted for Jolibee’s delicious peach mango pie (think old school McDonald’s apple pie, but better) while I spent way too much time at Seafood City’s snack aisle (shown above).

I wanted Pocky, but they didn’t have the regular ol’ flavor. Instead, there was strawberry, green tea, and some ultra-thin variety that looked like the regular, but I wasn’t in a trusting mood. I just wanted straight-up Pocky.

I went to the knockoff Pockys next, like Pejoy (no chocolate flavor available) and Jack and Jill (I didn’t like these last time). There was even something called Pretz, but when I saw they had pizza flavor, I decided to go with something else: Lucky.

Lucky wasn’t exactly Pocky, but it had a similar taste and it looked like a chocolate light saber, which is all I ask for in any Pocky rip-off: chocolate flavor and a shaky resemblance to a Star Wars weapon.

Day 341: General Cinema

GeneralCinema-Logo_2

Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s usually meant going to the mall to see movies.

This meant seeing films in the General Cinema multiplex, which always ran this before the feature presentation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F_tv1XNoCc

I may not remember all of the films I saw during my youth, but I recall laughing hysterically whenever this clip was on screen. My brothers, cousins, friends, and I howled with delight every time this was shown.

I’m still not sure why this tickled our funny bones back then. I’m assuming that after the first or second time, it became a Pavlovian response; it might not have been funny, but hearing that initial high hat guaranteed guffaws from all of us.

 

Day 340: Sweating

Kashyyyk Wookies

Kashyyyk Wookies

Both of my fantasy football teams are in contention for the playoffs in two weeks, so I spent today sweating out the action. I normally don’t do this on Sundays; I usually watch the Raiders game and occasionally check my fantasy stats along the way.

Today was different, though.

In my main league my Kashyyyk Wookies came back from the cellar to lead my division, but there’s been a lot of luck involved. I’ve played some low-scoring teams and my main guys never seem to be on the same page. I’ve had to deal with the Andrew Luck situation and now my brilliant drafting of Todd Gurley looks to be for naught as defenses stack the box to slow him down.

In my secondary league my Tusken Raiders have managed to crawl back into the playoff hunt after suffering a few early season bad beats. Of course, once I started rolling, Gronk went down. Luckily, I was able to snag Chandler off the waiver wire (another reason why I HATE non-auction leagues now; free agent pickups shouldn’t be such a luck fest).

I wrapped up my secondary league game as Mark Ingram scored for the Saints, but that meant my main team was facing an even bigger deficit. Oh, the joys of rooting for/against the same player.

So it looks like I’m in good shape entering next week’s final regular-season game, but you never know. I haven’t tried to figure out all of the tiebreaker situations yet and I don’t plan on doing so. I’m treating next week just like this week: it’s a must win game for my imaginary team of players.

And on the basketball side of things, my Warriors-esque type start (five straight wins to open the season) looks to be finished tonight. It was bound to happen, but it sure didn’t help having Okafor suspended for two games due to his off-court behavior.

Day 339: Meet the Beatles

The Beatles.

The Beatles.

My family and I recently took a road trip to Las Vegas, which meant I had to get into DJ mode for the ride. Back in the day that meant collecting cassettes (!) or CDs, but now it’s loading up the phone with playlists or stocking up the car’s built-in CD library with music. I opted for the latter, since it was the fastest method.

I had two Beatles greatest hits compilations (I still have the vinyl versions of the collections and I re-bought them on CD decades ago). Not surprisingly, they got the most play to and from Vegas

It’s fun listening to the songs, since so many of them have been ingrained into our collective consciousness. My parents grew up during the midst of Beatlemania and I remember my dad playing his Beatles 8-tracks on occasion, particularly this song.

Even though I was born after the Beatles had broken up, I still knew most of their catalog by heart. I never owned many of their albums (Revolver and the White Album are the only ones I have now; I really need to get Abbey Road some day), but their music always seemed to make itself into my life. I’ve always had a deep appreciation for them and this only grew after I took an online course on their music. I’d highly recommend checking out that class.

Day 338: Hollis-day Music

Peanuts Christmas

A Charlie Brown Christmas

I can only take so much of KOST 103.5’s 24-hour, 7-days-a-week Christmas music programming, which starts earlier every year. I’m far from a Bah-Humbug type, but let’s just say that I don’t look forward to when they start broadcasting holiday tunes two weeks before Thanksgiving.

Thankfully, there’s one song that I always gets me into the holiday spirit: Run DMC’s “Christmas in Hollis.” It’s even better when it’s been mashed up with A Charlie Brown Christmas, as seen below.

Day 337: Lando’s ‘Stache

Lando's 'Stache

Lando’s ‘Stache

The other day I launched my Star Wars blog, Lando’s ‘Stache, over on wordpress.com. I’ll be posting my Star Wars content over there, so this will probably be my last one here until the big day.

Follow me there for my online Star Wars scrapbook. You’ll find plenty of stuff from that galaxy far, far away and I promise two things: no spoilers and no Jar Jar.