Here is a set of photos I shot of The Sword and Black Cobra, live at the Bowery Ballroom last night. The Sword was awesome from start to finish. I had a great time, although I got far more drunk that I should have or had intended to. At one point, while in the crowd, two guys came crashing to the ground in front of me and I reflexively started to control the guy on top, like I used to do in Aikido, with one hand on his neck and the other displacing his hips, thinking there was about to be a big fight. Two seconds later, it dawns on me that these guys were moshing, lost their balance, fell and if I don’t let go now, I’m probably going to get my drunk and delusional ass deservedly gang-beat. Luckily, the guy I was manhandling seemed a bit drunk as well and more focused on whether he hurt the guy he fell on top of, likely thinking I had been trying to help him up, if he even noticed me at all. Oops.

I caught Norwegian Black/Viking/Progressive Metal band, Enslaved at BB Kings last night. The night was a total fucking wash until the they came on. One of the opening acts, The Agonist, has to one of the most depressingly shitty, pretentious, weak-ass bands I’ve ever seen live. Fucking shit generic sound, prancing around the stage and swinging their guitars around like total douchebags. It was embarrassing to just be there in their presence while they played. At least the band name was appropriate, since it was agonizing to suffer through their set. They need to retire, shoot themselves or whatever—just go away.

Another opening act, Arsis had a pretty good sound, but their bass player kept weirding me out. First off, the guy looked to be wearing woman’s jeans, which was fairly creepy. Second, every time before the band kicked into a song, he spent way to much time arranging his hair to hang in the appropriate Metal style. Third, he wasn’t a particularly great bassist and he’s got this huge six string, showing it off, posing and tapping the strings over the top of the neck with his right hand, something that from what I saw from his finger positioning etc., would pretty much sound like drivel, but sure did look spiffy. Still, they were a fuckload better than The Agonist.

Enslaved was awesome. Once they came on the night went from being a rip-off, to a good time. I have all of Enslaved’s albums and while I really liked them, never counted them in my top list of bands. After seeing them live, my impression of them is greatly raised. They sound fucking great. I took a good amount of photos and posted them to my Flickr stream for all to see.

George is my fat, neurotic and questionably gay (yet total eunuch) of a cat. He’s nervous, lazy and incredibly smelly at times. Kicking back on the couch with him on a typical evening, he will drop the stankiest, most vile, evil bombs without so much as hint of shame.

I’ve had George for two years now. He was five months old when I picked him from a cage at a city animal shelter in Brooklyn. He was small, cute, extremely affectionate and liked having his stomach rubbed. Now, as time has passed, he’s become tubby, paranoid and strongly averse to being picked up. Who knew that such a darling kitten would grow to be such chunky bastard of a layabout? Not I.

Still, he is my fat, gay son and as such, I accept him. More truthfully, I enjoy ridiculing him. He’s a truly weird cat. Check out the hundreds of photos of him on my Flickr stream. Then, after doing so, perhaps you will realize how weird I may be for taking so many pictures of him.

Last night. I caught Boris, one of my all-time favorite Drone Doom bands, live at the Bowery Ballroom with Michio Kurihara. Without a doubt, it was one of the best concerts I have been to in a good long while. Boris has a massive sound live. My ear filters were put to the test and yet I still went to bed with my ears ringing. I’d never been to the Bowery Ballroom before. It’s a pretty nice place. I spent perhaps a little too much time in the bar downstairs, skipping the opening acts that I didn’t give a fuck about in favor of a good number of Stellas. I ended up with a greasy, green and morbid motherfucker of a hangover this morning because of it. Still, I had a crazy good time head-banging in the middle of a bunch of posers who have no clue about Doom Metal. I love Boris.

As usual, I took a ridiculous amount of photos and uploaded them to a Flickr set. Feel free to check them out.

It took a hell of a long time, but I’ve finally finished uploading the photos I took while in Hawaii to a set on my Flickr account—all 748 of them. I still have some tagging and naming to do, but feel free to check them out. A lot of them are overkill, but I think I did manage to get a few really cool shots here and there. Hawaii is an incredibly beautiful place. It’s hard not to go apeshit with a camera.

Yesterday, I got a Lumix DMC-FX30 digital camera from B&H (an insane Hasidic camera and electronics juggernaut, here in NYC, complete with conveyor belts and free kosher cola) in preparation for my impending trip to Hawaii. I’m loving this gadget. It’s more than small enough to fit in my pocket, at 7.2 megapixels with Leica lenses, it takes some bad-ass photos. My last camera was circa 2001, so this thing is a huge step forward from the pretty crappy quality I was used to putting up with. There’s a big mess of presets for different photo-taking scenarios built in to the camera and last night, I was trying them out on my uber-tubby cat, George. I noticed that the “Pet” preset wasn’t really working out with him, but I had much greater success and quality photographing him with the “Baby” preset. Read into that what you will.

There’s this huge-ass dry-erase board in my newly-built office that I share with four other people. Together, with a cubicle buddy from back in the day, who is similarly graced with a fat-ass whiteboard, I have created a Flickr group dedicated to all things taking place on a dry-erase board.

“Dry Erase Yer’ Face” has only one rule. All images must consist of dry-erase markings on a whiteboard. It can be art, a cartoon, scribbles, notes, graphs, flowcharts or semi-realistic radioactive-orange vulvas—I don’t give a shit, as long as it’s dry-erase.

If you have access to a dry-erase board and a camera, join and post to the group today!

I think this is just about the coolest thing ever. A man in Germany rigged a digital camera with a timer and attached it around his cat’s neck, setting it to take photos at set intervals throughout the day. The result is so fucking awesome. Life, seen from the perspective of a cat, tooling around, doing what cats do. Check the gallery that’s up so far.

Unfortunately for me, the setup for the project is far above my engineering and electrical craft skills (which are nonexistent to be truthful) and both my cats, while neat and fun to look at, are both indoor pets, since I live in Brooklyn. It’d be a pretty boring and repetitive photo collection.

I really want to visit the new Creation Museum [wiki]. Unfortunately, it’s in Kentucky and you couldn’t pay me to go to some fucked up place like that. Still, Creationists are head-up-the-ass retards and a museum dedicated to a serious display of such a ridiculous and pathetic theory deserves a good laugh.

Luckily, I came across this Flickr set where some brave individual forged deep into the bible-thumping, fat-head, Jesus-humpers and paid the museum a visit with their camera.

This photo of Eve and a velociraptor has to be my favorite. Fucking idiots.

Mad, gibbering, armchair Mars nerd that I am, I can’t get enough about these supposed cave/sinkhole entrances on the surface of Mars. Apparently, there’s a bunch of them around the Arsia Mons volcano.

“Images from the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) aboard NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter have revealed seven possible cave entrances on the flanks of the Arsia Mons volcano. The caves, named Dena, Chloe, Wendy, Annie, Abbey, Nikki and Jeanne after loved ones of their discoverers, are collectively known as the “seven sisters.” Cave entrances measure from 100m to 252m wide and they are believed to be at least 73m to 96m deep. Because light does not reach the floor of most of the caves, it is likely that they extend much deeper than these lower estimates and widen below the surface. Dena is the only exception, its floor is visible and was measured to be 130m deep. The interior of these caverns is possibly protected from micrometeoroids, UV radiation, solar flares and high energy particles that bombard the planet’s surface. Some researchers have suggested that this protection makes the caves good candidates for future efforts to find liquid water and signs of life.”

Caves beneath the surface of Mars. Very sweet.