Over the Rhine was splendid. Karin belted out some really great new soulful country-tinged tunes. Someone go and purchase me their new album so I don’t have to (not that it’s not worth it, but it’s the season of giving, etc. etc. Plus then I can spend the $18 I save on another OtR record).

Go! Room 4 is a great little venue. It’s easily the smallest place I’ve ever seen a band play in, second only to Raleigh’s own Brewery. And, Go! has a few cool features:

• I’ve never seen a band play where they had to walk through the crowd to get to the stage.
• They have a working Kung Fu Master arcade game.
• The restrooms flank the stage (girls on the left, boys on the right). Now, you too can urinate right next to the lead guitarist and be separated by only 3/4" of drywall.

Finally, you may remember Domo-Kun, the lovable little turd-like mascot from a Japanese satellite TV concern’s advertisements. You may also remember that oddly haunting cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World” from the movie Donnie Darko. Well, someone has gone and put the two together (RealVideo required). Quite touching, actually.

Thanks to Wikipedia, I discovered that, along with sharing a birthday with Umberto Eco (1932) and Walter Mondale (1928), I was born exactly four years after Marilyn Manson (1969).

Aside. Also, I have finally grown tired of how awful this blog looks in Internet Explorer, and hope to do something about it (damn CSS bugs, grr). Really, it looks smashing in Mozilla or Safari. But the fact that the sidebar slides to the bottom of the page whenever something goes wrong in IE just irritates me. I’ll fix it tomorrow, along with all the other things I’m supposed to be doing (like, say, preparing the spare room to be a nursery for the little one’s arrival).

That is all.