pleo and the cheese

+ Mae is releasing it’s 3rd album, Singularity, on August 14th. I’ll be picking that puppy up on release week for sure. They’re also touring with The Fray, which would be fun to go see.

+ Chad Gibbs, a friend of mine from Alabama, has a new piece on Burnside this week about his 10-week stint as a maintenance worker at a mental health facility. You can read it here. There’s tens of thousands of people in the world that are funnier than I am, and Chad is one of them…it’s quite a distinction, I know…probably something he’ll put on the cover of the book he just finished. He sent me the book proposal for it, and it looks like it’s going to be great. In fact, if you’re a book publisher and you found this site because you were googling “Chad Gibbs” to see if he was a peeping tom, then you need to publish Chad’s book because it will make you rich and famous. As for whether or not he is a peeping tom, i can not vouch for him.

+Frightening story on “cheese heroin”, a low-cost drug that has killed over 20 kids in Dallas. It only costs about $2 per hit and is a combination of low-grade heroin and the over-the-counter antihistamine diphenhydramine.

+Hey look, here’s a successful writer who has a chemical engineering degree. Maybe i can follow in his footsteps! Oh wait…he’s a she, not a he…and she writes “steamy sex novels set among black professionals”…ok, well maybe not so much.

+You know how there’s one hot toy every year? Well, this could be it for 2007. Pleo is a six-inch dinosaur with 14-motors, 6 processors, and a $300 price tag. It’s like the Furby on anabolic steroids (and actually created by the same guy). Parents who actually buy this for their kids will probably need to be institutionalized when their little ones have more fun playing with the box on christmas morning.

+I’m playing Chesapeake Bay on Friday with some blokes from work. Our 10am tee time will mark the first time i’ve ever played golf in Maryland. In honor of the event, the Governor of Maryland will be breaking wind in his office, unaware of my plight. Hopefully i can improve on the abysmal 110 i shot last time out. what’s that? Hole #7 has a triple-tiered green? oh brother. Perhaps I’ll report back next week as to how i shot.

and finally…

+Andy Osenga, Caedmon’s Call member and owner of only 19 digits, just released an EP over at his website called Letters to the Editor, Vol. 1. You can download it for free, and if you have a soul like it, you can donate some money for the disc through paypal. What’s so special about it? A month or two ago Andy petitioned readers of his blog for song ideas, either a specific line or just a story, and then he built songs around what he received. He even had blog readers send in background vocals that they recorded on their own computers for him to use in the songs. It’s a brilliant idea that few could pull off, but Andy can (and did) because he is extremely talented. I haven’t listened to the EP yet, but i will probably give it a spin today.