Fortunately, the show was on a Saturday night, so I drove out there in the afternoon and got some dinner before heading to the venue.  They played at a large club called Northern Lights, in the suburb of Clifton Park.  The place is in a strip mall – here are some pictures of it that I took after the show:

I had arrived there at 6:30 (while it was still light out), and got in line outside, as the doors wouldn’t open until 7:00.  While waiting, I had to get a picture of this guy who was just a bit behind me in line:

He had an energy dome logo on the hat, as well as heavy, “Oh No, It’s DEVO” eyebrows on his glasses.  Fun!

I got inside pretty quickly, and immediately made my way to the stage.  This was a rare opportunity, and I wanted to be right up close.  Fortunately, I was early enough to get a spot right in front of the stage, or as close as possible anyway, as there was a barrier between the stage and audience, creating a narrow area for photo and video people to do their thing during the concert.

I had thought that the band was going to take the stage at 8:00, but it turned out that they weren’t going on until 9:00, so I had 2 hours to stand and wait (spoiler: it was worth it).  I talked a bit to some other fans nearby me, and got a pictures of things like this equipment case:

Also, the stage was located in a back corner of the club’s one huge room.  Just over to the right of the stage was the back door of the building, which was being used as a stage door, with the band getting ready in their tour bus outside:

At one point, a car pulled up next to the bus out there, and out of the car emerged the brothers Mothersbaugh.  Mark headed into the bus, but Bob1 initially walked into the building, and he was immediately greeted by a fan yelling, “BOB!” with a bunch of cheering from the rest of us.  He laughed and went back outside (unfortunately I didn’t have the presence of mind to snap a picture at that moment).

One interesting feature of the stage was the background screen.  They had a video screen actually made up of a bunch of large LEDs.  They were difficult to photograph when off, but here’s a close-up of a small portion of the screen:

They did take the stage at 9:00 sharp, with intro music and video playing:

The band were initially wearing their new light gray outfits with masks.  I had seen pictures of the outfits before coming to the show, but I didn’t know that the suits were highly reflective, so when you take a flash picture of the band, they glow:

Here’s a picture without the flash:

I captured a picture of the setlist before the show, though my view of the first few songs was blocked:

Once they played the first 3 songs, they caught up to where I could see the list.  Here’s all of the songs they did, in order (the first, third, and fifth are from the new album, Something for Everybody):

• Don’t Shoot, I’m a Man
• Peek-a-boo
• What We Do Is What We Do
• Goin’ Under
• Fresh
• That’s Good
• Girl U Want
• Whip It
• Planet Earth
• Satisfaction
• Secret Agent Man
• Uncontrollable Urge
• Mongoloid
• Jocko Homo
• Smart Patrol/Mr. DNA
• Gates of Steel
• Freedom of Choice
• Beautiful World

The setlist shows a few dividing lines.  The first two denote costume changes, and the third marks the planned encore.

Some pictures from the first group of songs:

Mark and Bob2 during “Peek-a-boo”:

After “Peek-a-b00″ they took off the masks.

The first costume change involved taking off the jackets and adding blue energy domes:

They played like that for 3 songs from the album Freedom of Choice.  Note, the shirts have blue energy dome logos on the sleeves.

Their second costume change involved putting on yellow radiation suits (and they all grabbed guitars) for a set of songs from their first two albums:

During “Uncontrollable Urge,” Mark demonstrated his urge by ripping his suit, as well as those of his bandmates:

A few pieces of suit got thrown out into the audience, one of which was grabbed by the guy next to me.  He tore off a part of that and gave it to me, so I have a small bit of Bob1′s yellow suit.

Dancing in unison at the end of that song:

For the song”Mongoloid”, Mark would crouch at the edge of the stage with a pair of pompoms, and would jump up and shake them.  Here he is crouching just a few feet in front of me:

and here he’s at the other end of the stage:

Back at the keyboard, shortly before they removed the suits entirely:

They ripped the suits off and threw them into the crowd.  None of them came near me, though I was happy to have the piece I’d already received, even if it doesn’t say ‘DEVO’ on it.  This left the band wearing just the black t-shirts and black shorts (and kneepads).

Mark then jumped down into the space in front of the stage, to get a bit intimate with the audience:

Sadly, he didn’t get close to my position.

I don’t recall why Bob1 was covering his ears here:

Shots from “Freedom of Choice” during the encore:

Jerry with his bass:

Mark had a few towels stuffed in the back of his shorts.  During the song, he would take each one out, wipe his sweat with it, then rub it on his armpits, butt, and crotch (outside his clothes) before throwing it to the audience.

Yes, at age 60 he’s still an edgy weirdo.

Their final song was “Beautiful World” – one of my favorites of theirs.

The song featured a special appearance by Booji Boy on lead vocals!  (for those not in the know, that’s pronounced ‘boogie’.)

In the middle of the song, during a long instrumental part, Booji told a story about getting to go the the Neverland Ranch to hang out with Michael Jackson.  I kept expecting the story to take a creepy turn, but that didn’t happen.

All too soon, the show was over.

The above shot shows “DEVO” in silver letters on Booji’s back.

And that was that.  They were only on stage for an hour-and-a-quarter, but I do feel like I got my money’s and time’s worth.

I hadn’t had a chance to explore these trails much the last time I was on them, but I had time to go further this time, hiking uphill on something called the “College Trail.”  This leads up the North side of the Holyoke Range, joining other trails and eventually linking up with the Metacomet-Monadnock trail.  I didn’t make it quite that far up, as it was late in the afternoon and I needed to get back home before sundown.

I did see something I don’t think I’ve noticed on other local trails – a tree with graffiti carved in it:

The oldest carving seems to be from 1979, assuming that it was actually carved that year and not backdated by the carver.

In an unrelated event, I was in the grocery store the following day, and I saw an unusual sign in the frozen foods aisle.  This is something one hears a lot about in modern American political discourse, but I didn’t think it was available for purchase at one’s local supermarket:

There you have it.

Would one be foolish not to read the series?

Nothing gold can stay, of course, and the melon is no exception – we’ll eat the whole thing within a week.

It sounds like the plot of a goofy comedy movie from the ’60′s, but it is apparently true.

The story can be found here.

I especially love the part about nobody noticing.

From: slime < xghuhirx@spbnit.ru >

Couldn’t have put it better myself.

Here is the story: Marge’s Kitchen is a small breakfast restaurant in Northampton, MA. It’s a short walk from where we live now, and, as we often like going out for brunch, we decided to try it today. The menu is not very extensive, but has most of the breakfast staples, and has very reasonable prices. There are a few unusual items as well, such as the choice of sweet potato home fries in addition to regular potato ones. The place also seems to have a slogan: “The customer is never right.” I found this amusing at first, but apparently it isn’t a joke. More on that later.
There were 3 of us, and among other things we ordered french toast and the sweet potato fries. We each just had water to drink (that detail will be important later). We waited 20 minutes or more for the food, which was not so unreasonable, given that the place was busy. Our server (who actually seemed to be be serving every table in the place – about 20 people total), seemed to get our order confused with another table a couple of times (she told us they were out of hash, and later said the bagel was coming – we hadn’t ordered either item), but again, that wasn’t so unusual given that they were busy.

Things got annoying when we were told, after about 25 minutes of waiting for food, that they were out of french toast. I must admit, I’m not sure exactly what it means to “run out of french toast.” The most likely definition would be running out of the batter, but in my experience, even the most complicated french toast batter is pretty simple to make. It shouldn’t take very long to whip up more, and I don’t imagine it would be a waste to make more batter at 12:30pm when your restaurant is open until 3:00.

At most restaurants, that probably would have been the most annoying part of the experience. The person who ordered the french toast was not interested in trying anything else on the menu, so we all thought it might be best to leave and eat at home. Plus, we were peeved about waiting that long, and getting hungry, before being told that that order couldn’t be filled. So, we got up to leave, and I went to the counter and said to the server and to the owner (who was doing the cooking) that we were going and that they should cancel the rest of our order. The owner’s response was to say that we weren’t leaving without paying – that we had ordered food and she had started cooking it, so we were responsible for paying for it. We pointed out that we were unhappy with how long they made us wait before informing us of the lack of french toast, and turned to leave.

At this point, the owner left the grill and grabbed the phone. It took me a second to realize that what she was doing was calling the police. The others were already outside, and the owner followed them. I came out after that, hesitating because I wondered if we ought to stick around if the police were coming. As the others continued leaving (and told me to quit standing there), and the owner started providing our descriptions over the phone, I left as well, still kind of stunned by the overreaction.

On the way home, a patrol car pulled up next to us and the officer got out to talk to us. He asked what had happened back there, and we explained the situation. He asked us whether we had received any food yet, and we pointed out that we hadn’t – that we only had water, and left before any food was served to us. That was all he needed to know – he said we clearly hadn’t skipped out on the bill, and then got in his car and headed off, presumably to the restaurant.

I must admit, I think this is the first time I’ve ever had the cops called on me. The crazy thing is that, while we hadn’t been so happy with today’s visit, and were going to leave without eating, there was still the possibility that we (or at least I) might have come back to try the food another time. Once the owner decided to make it a police matter, that certainly destroyed any possibility of our return. So the owner lost potential future business trying to recoup whatever she might lose in the few eggs and pieces of toast that were being cooked for us. Heck, much of what we ordered may have been able to serve other customers – there was a side of bacon in our order, and I heard another table order bacon later – so there probably wasn’t much wasted food at all.

In summary, I think the owner’s reaction was stupid and petty, and she may have preferred to merely intimidate us into paying with the threat of police intervention, but that’s still pretty short-sighted, and is no way to treat first-time visitors. I should point out that I’m only angry at the owner – the server seemed to be doing the best job she could and relayed information to us when she became aware of it. I would certainly recommend that readers living around here not eat at this restaurant. I do welcome comments from people about this, and would certainly be interested in hearing from anyone who has eaten there before, though I don’t think you’d persuade me to go back. I now know that the owner is quite serious about her slogan “The customer is never right.”

PS: The title of this post is patterned after an essay by Doug Shaw on The Olive Garden. His reasons for not eating there, however, are completely different from my experience today.

Plans were discussed.  Traps were purchased.  Traps did not work – that is, the traps (the live trap kind) were found closed with no rodents in them.  Soon after the setting of these traps, the noise ceased for a couple of weeks.

But then tonight, we heard it again, and opened the cupboard to get a good look at what was creeping around.   It looked too big to be a mouse.  Its head was not pointy enough.  Its tail was not thin and hairless.  In fact, after some googling of images, we discovered that we have a Southern Flying Squirrel lurking in our cupboards!
We have yet to actually snap a picture, or figure out what to do about the thing.  We are finding it bizarre and kind of cool to have such a creature in there, rather than a run-of-the-mill mouse.  Of course, the squirrel probably finds it exceedingly odd that there are people lurking in its ‘tree’.

First, one of the referring sites to my site was the blog of a somewhat famous person.

It turned out that, in comments about Mooney going to the midwest to speak, someone remarking on Michigan made a reference to using one’s hand as a map, and linked to this image, which I created a few years ago.

Second, I noticed that, among the top web searches that lead to hits on my site, some of the search phrases for a few months running were variations on “Michigan hand map.”

Third, though this might not be related to that image, for multiple months other referring sites were image searches.

I tried entering “Michigan hand map” on google image search, and I was hit #16. Strangely, if you do just “Michigan hand,” there seem to be more actual hands, but mine isn’t in there. At least, it isn’t in the first 200 hits.

Some of the encounters we’ve had (some fun, some not so fun):

• We had a hornet’s nest in one of the windows, and sprayed it, knocking the nest down and getting rid of it after the hornets had all died. Despite this, we still regularly have a hornet or two show up inside the house. Fortunately, they seem to mainly fly around the windows, trying to get back outside, rather than attacking us.
• We get the usual moths and other bugs at night, many of which get eaten by the cats. One night, though, a large, noisy flying bug was being pursued by the cats, and it turned out, on closer examination, to be a cockroach. Flying cockroaches = very bad where Sean is concerned. I mashed it furiously, and there have luckily been no more.(Update: We saw another of these flying bugs outside one of the windows, and the consensus now is that it was some kind of beetle, and not actually a roach.)
• One morning I came downstairs and saw and heard something dart across the kitchen floor. As I walked into the kitchen, it darted back the other way, and I saw that it was a chipmunk. It darted through a gap between a cabinet and the floor, and was seen no more. It probably decided that it didn’t want to return to the land of much larger animals.
• There are bats living in our attic. We actually welcome them, because they’ll keep the mosquito population down. They have not come into the rest of the house, which is just how we like it.
• I discovered a mouse in the ceiling of one room. They’re not welcome, but this just happened the other day, so we have yet to deal with it.
• Related to the above, on the day after seeing the mouse, I found a strange object on the floor of the same room. It turned out to be a mouse skull! Apparently, mice not only live in the ceiling, but have died there as well…
• Finally, just last night, I walked into the bathroom to discover a toad sitting on the bathtub. No idea how it got in. I grabbed a box and gave it a ride outside.

Stay tuned for the next exciting episode of Mutual of Belchertown’s Wild Kingdom!