opinions, rants and news from my distorted p.o.v.

After 75 years, Vandyland is closing it’s doors in June. My mom and I used to spend many an afternoon at Vandyland (then called Candyland) eating a banana split or drinking a milkshake before we headed home. We’d always sit up at the counter so I could talk to Mac and watch him work. I never wanted to leave because we were having such a good time. Plus, leaving meant we had to get on the interstate to head back out to Bellevue. I hated the interstate.

It’s sad to see a Nashville tradition shutting down after all of these years. I’ve been going to Vandyland all my life. I don’t know anything different. I feel like I’m losing a piece of my childhood today. I’ll have to make sure to make a few trips down there before June. If this keeps up, the Nashville of my childhood will be a distant memory.

Tags: Candyland, Nashville, tradition, Diner, Vandyland

Metroblogging Nashville went live this morning. Being a Nashville native, I applied to blog for the site back in September or October of last year. Here’s a direct link to all of my posts to date. I’m feeling more inspired in my blogging now, and hopefully this will translate into better content for both of my blogs.

As you can see, we’ve just made it through the initial ramp up period. We’re sitting on seven bloggers at this moment. Fill out an application if you’re interested in blogging about the “Athens of the South.” We’d love to have you.

Tags: Athens of the South, Blog, Metroblogging, Nashville

Did anyone else notice that the US Ski Team hired Hulk Hogan to be their start gate yeller? Each team seems to have one coach dedicated to hollering at their skiers right before they take off down the mountain. I swear the US mens ski team had the Hulkster on top of Sestriere. I kept waiting “Hogan” to spout off something about the 24-inch pythons, or all the little Hulkamaniacs out there whenever Bode Miller or Daron Rahlves would start a race. It’s sad when listening to the “Inspiration” Coach was more entertaining than watching any of the US men ski. They all sucked a big, hard one.

I wish I could find an audio snippet to post here. I’ll look around and see what comes up.

Tags: Bode Miller, Daron Rahlves, Hulk Hogan, Hulkamaniacs, disappointment, US Ski Team

You know, I’ve tried to give the movie industry the benefit of the doubt. But it’s no wonder attendance and movie ticket sales are down. They keep serving up rehashed dog shit. I might start going to the theater again once all of the big studios decide to start creating new/original ideas and stories.

Here are the two main examples being force fed down our throats on TV right now.

For some reason, these seem similar.
Another example of unoriginality.

MPAA, please contact me once you get a clue.

Tags: Eighties, Movies, Splash, Tom Hanks

One of my favorite video game series of all time turned 20 years old today. That’s pretty amazing to me. For the majority of my life, I’ve been playing video games of some sort. Some of my fondest memories of my childhood revolve around the little gray box hooked into my television. Celebrate well, young Link! I’m sure Ganon is out there waiting to seize the Triforce of Power once again.

Technorati Tags: Gamecube, Legend of Zelda, Link, N64, NES, Nintendo, SNES

Wow, a spectacularly impressive snowstorm blew through Nashville last night.

The above statement is a lie. There was no snow in Nashville last night. After 2 solid days of meteorologist hype, the citizens of Nashville woke up thoroughly disappointed. Every weatherperson on every local station seemed to be using the same TelePrompTer. They were all claiming we’d see snowfall amounts in the range of 2-4 inches. Well, as you can see if you live in Nashville proper, we now know these “experts” don’t have a clue.

Now, some of the surrounding areas (White House, Portland, Clarksville) did see fairly significant snowfall amounts. I’m glad to they’re able to experience winter to the fullest. I wish I could say the same for us here in Nashvegas. All of those people who made the stereotypical run on Kroger are probably feeling a bit overloaded with groceries now. I feel worse for all the kids who’s parents ran out to buy them a sled or toboggan in anticipation. Lisa Spencer, Leeland Statom and Lisa Patton should have to drive around from home to home to apologize to all the children who were undoubtedly upset when they woke up this morning.

Tags: Local News, Nashville, Snow, Weather, Winter, WKRN, WSMV, WTVF

It looks like the 2007 Tour de France is going to start in London. This just seems to rub me the wrong way. I know the route currently meanders into some of the other countries adjacent to France. I can see where that’s allowable since I always think of countries in Europe in relation to other states here in the US. I think the organizers of the Tour are going a bit far in allowing the race to start all the way across the English Channel.

Maybe US cycling fans can rally up enough money and support to have the 2008 Tour start in New York City. I hear the organizers can be bought. We could probably get them to rename the race from the Tour de France to the Tour de Monde if we can get enough worldwide support.

Tags: Cycling, Sellouts, Tour de France

In case you haven’t heard (what, do you live on Saturn?), Apple released their new Intel based iMacs and MacBook Pros. Now I won’t burden you with a rant on how shitty the name MacBook is. You can probably read that elsewhere. I will tell you that two listings for G5 iMacs popped up on the Nashville Craigslist site within an hour of the Stevenote. I don’t doubt for a second that these won’t be last to pop up there either. I think now is a good time to buy a G5 iMac. You should be able to get something for a very good value that will last at least 3 years.

Tags: Apple, Craigslist, G5, Intel, Mac, MacBook

My wife and I have been planning on driving down to Atlanta to buy some more of our bedroom furniture from IKEA. Luckily we picked a good time to go. We both received nice sums of cash for Christmas from our respective families, and my wife lucked out in our first ever trip to the Bingo Hall in Blue Ridge, GA. She wasn’t the big winner for the night ($500), but she was the only Bingo for the game she won. Now we have a little extra fundage for our upstairs. That makes this an even better holiday season.

Tags: Bingo, Christmas, IKEA, Luck

I am now the proud owner of a PowerBook. It may be an old, long in the tooth PowerBook G3, but it’s still a PowerBook dammit. There are some people who consider this model to be one of Apple’s best in terms of industrial design and usability.

The reason I’m now part of the PowerBook in-crowd is because my aunt just purchased a new iBook after she ran into some problems with this machine. The so called “Mac Genius” who waited on her at the Apple Store in Nashville told her she would need to buy a new hard drive and reinstall OS 9 to get the PowerBook running again. She didn’t feel like going through that process. I told her I could help her out with the upgrades and reinstall—she offered it to me instead.

After picking up this machine from her house last week, I powered this sucker on to see if I could diagnose the problem. It seemed to boot up fine, which led me to believe that the hard drive was intact. It was only after the Finder tried to load that this PowerBook locked up. I promptly looked the error message up in Google to see if there were any answers out on the Interweb. Lucky for me the first result that popped up offered a solution. So after about 15 minutes of work I had this laptop back up and running. Who’s the “Mac Genius” now?

After getting the PB running again, I decided to do a little research on installing Tiger and setting up wireless networking with it. It seems that these Powerbook G3’s run Tiger just fine. I did go out and buy a new 512MB ram stick from MacAuthority here in town. I knew 64MB just wasn’t going to cut it. I also found this article on “Pismos” at LowEndMac which mentioned this Belkin 802.11g wireless card as being compatible with AirPort. The only thing left is to upgrade the hard drive once I buy a new one for my Mac mini.

I’m pretty excited about this new PowerBook (well, new to me at least). I’ve never owned a laptop, let alone one that had wireless Internet access. I think this will allow me to post more to my blog now that I don’t have to tied down to my desktop. It’s also going to come in handy for traveling and to use as a portable workstation. It may not be super powerful, but it’ll be enough for what I want to get out of a portable machine.

Tags: Apple, Mac, PowerBook