Three reasons, mainly.

One:

Two:

Three:

For the sheer hell of it.

The band The Mountain Goats (reason one) was performing at the 6th and I Synagogue with John Vanderslice (reason two) and a friend of mine invited me along. Since I had never been to DC and my work magically decided I would be the only one in the department granted time off for the month......thus we get reason three.

Here is a pic from the concert, courteously stolen from bookish on Flickr because I had left my camera at the hotel:

John Darnielle, aka The Mountain Goats, is on the left, John Vanderslice is on the right. Both are extremely nice and funny guys with highly literate, intelligent lyrics. JD is a geek who has this awesome closet love of Ace of Base and is known for playing The Sign at live shows, which just makes him more endearing as I also loved Ace of Base back in the day. JV is my friend on Twitter and is the producer of a number of tMG albums.

I can't pick just one favorite MG song, but my top five (in no particular order) are:

--In The Craters of the Moon
--So Desperate
--Jenny
--No Children
--Half Dead

My favorite, favorite John Vanderslice song is Nikki Oh Nikki and that is the second song performed in the video above, the first song being Time To Go.

Here is a playlist of just tMG and JV songs in case anyone is interested enough to listen to more. Huzzah for tMG and JV in DC!

Hahahaha, I bet some of you clicked on this title thinking I was talking about me. Funny funny. Nope, it is my brother who is getting married to a lovely girl named Warren. Both of them live in Las Vegas (Warren is a junior high teacher and Alan is a lighting tech at The Mirage) and our sister Jamie is a photographer, so all the Peterson sisters roadied down to Vegas last weekend to take their engagement pictures and drive down Las Vegas Blvd blasting the Numa Numa song (aka "Dragostea din Tei", it's Romanian.)

Alan and Warren were hellbent on not getting anything even vaguely Vegas related in their pictures (they aren't particularly fond of the city), so they picked this place for their pictures called Lake Las Vegas; it's about 20 minutes outside of Henderson and totally fake. It's a Ritz-Carlton resort designed to look like a little Italian town right down to the cobblestone roads, arched bridges over a canal and "neighborhoods" with names like "Vita Bella," "Casa Palermo," and "Luna di Lusso." Granted, it's very pretty. Jamie also did good work incorporating the Italian feel into their pictures. Here are a few of my favorites.