Jimmy Swagger

Saturday night:
Thin Lizzy, Jailbreak
Queen, Queen

Sunday:
Denis Johnson, Train Dreams
XTC, White Music, Go 2, English Settlement, Black Sea, Oranges and Lemons
Charles Mingus, Blues and Roots
Breaking Bad

• The occasion for the goat curry depicted above was my buddy Sanjay's birthday, though I supposed all you need to justify the dish is some goat and the will to curry it. The bowl is this tiny dumpling sauce bowl from which I previously did a tequila shot - my friends are hippie types who operate with non-standard drinkware. You are forever drinking out of a jar or something earthen over there. I like how the little bowl makes it look like the curry has huge shanks of goat and whole potatoes in it. Fred Flintstone curry. Sault!


• For as good a band as XTC was, with the exception of Skylarking, they really couldn't sustain the magic they can cast in nearly any given song for an entire album. They would latch onto a twitch, a swoon, a gulp, and that grip would become a sleeperhold. They could do anything as long as they get to kill it after. That might be the key to their particular genius. This is Maya's favorite song from Oranges and Lemons, her new all-time favorite record.
  
  
  XTC, "Mayor of Simpleton"
  
  She's been making fun of my new shutterbug problem saying "Please be upstanding for the mayor of cameradom."
  
  Ed. to add: We listened to "Merely a Man" which mentions Jimmy Swaggart, still a big name in Baton Rouge. I told Maya who he is, that it was at the pool of his former bible college where she took swimming lessons. She said, "Jimmy Swagger? Sounds like a rapper." If it wasn't taken, I'd start doing everything under that name.


• During the tequila/goat feast on the patio, enjoying the weird pleasant air that Tropical Storm Lee became, they called for Thin Lizzy, and after that, Queen, not even knowing that it would've been Freddie Mercury's 65th birthday. Wrap your brain around how dashing a 65-year old Freddie Mercury would have been. To contain that degree of fabulousness, they would have had to create a reality show version of Fantasy Island, where the shit went down for real, like Freddie Mercury would bring people back from the dead or have them hunted by assassins or whatever. Those are the only two Fantasy Island plots I can remember and they both seemed to involve Charles Nelson Reilly.


• Today stretched across the plains of electro-Mordor in World of Warcraft - my blood elf Limulus (named for the genus of the horseshoe crabs found in the Gulf) is a piteous level two much to the mocking chagrin of my gamer family - to these crazy sand pits down River Road. In both places we encountered people just walking around with weapons, as there were some hunter types cracking off rounds out in the silt mounds. We also saw this:
  
  


• I'm not sure what I can offer that is more badass than a snake skeleton picked clean by birds of prey so I won't even try. More of the weekend is up on the Tumblr, which is proving to be more fun than actually tumbling, which I did at the sand pit. And in World of Warcraft. And maybe at the party what with the goat and the tequila.