NP: Various Artists, Real Book playlist (MP3)

I shed no tears for Kentucky or Stanford, for I was a bit too frantically busy last week to bother filling out a bracket. I'm not sure if I would have gone with the "bet on the smart school" conceit with Stanford or not. I might have gone against Kentucky. Who am I kidding, I'd be so out of the running already my head would be spinning. One thing I want to know -- WTF is up with this "St. Louis bracket, Phoenix bracket" bullshit? It's the Eastern regional, not the "East Rutherford bracket." Who the hell made this all geopolitically correct all of a sudden?

Over the weekend, I sorted all my junk mail, and it came to my attention that I was pre-approved for a home equity line of credit. This amused me quite a bit, mostly because I'm easily amused like that, especially when it comes to poorly executed direct marketing. One typically needs a home in order to have equity in it. I was halfway tempted to fill it out, with "value of home" at zero, just to see what would happpen, but it could ultimately mess with my credit report, so better just to have the private (now public) chuckle about it.

My current musical selection may be more by necessity than choice, as I may have stumbled into a jazz gig. When I'm outside of my "core competency" as a drummer (which is to say, not rock), these things tend to have to find me. The bar Diver played at last week has a Sunday jazz brunch that's currently without live music. And might like some in the future. So I've got a trio tentatively set up once I can talk a bit more with the bar's manager about it. Because I'm a big honkin' geek, the name of this new little project will likely be -- wait for it -- C3Trio.

Speaking of said bar, Friday was by far the most fun of the recent spate of shows. Anto's voice returned, and I think he felt obligated to sing every song we played instead of having Tony cover his normal handful, since Tony had picked up the slack for the last couple of gigs. So we whipped out some stuff from the Open Jam book, which was then communicated to Avi through an elaborate system of hand gestures and yelling across the stage of chords. It was good and loose, and we all seemed just a bit slap-happy once it got going.

I haven't gone back and looked at how many consecutive weeks I've had paying musical gigs now, but it's a lot. If the jazz thing happens, even better. And there's a chance the Zappa band may be back on track as well, although I can't really count that as having much revenue potential.

Also discovered over the weekend, after much suspicion, is that I really suck at video games.