in the photobooth

Last night I went with a few friends to see the Greyboy Allstars at the Nokia Theatre. It felt really good to get back in the city after being in Westchester for so long, and the concert was great. It was a pretty cool venue, a lot smaller than most, and the acoustics were great. Their usual drummer wasn't with them, but the guy they had to replace him was pretty damn good. Plus ?uestlove was spinning funk before they played and during the painfully long intermission. We set up the projector and the 360 back at my apartment, so I got to play a little Gears of War before we left for the show.

I've been making my own crackers rather than buying them at the store...it's not hard at all...another under 30 minutes baking treat. Just mix up a cup of flour with a half-teaspoon of salt and 2 tablespoons butter in the food processor...you can add rosemary and garlic at this point, I do...then add a quarter cup milk and whirr it in the processor, add more milk as it's going until it holds together but isn't sticky. Then you roll it out as thin as you can, score it with a knife, put it onto a floured baking sheet, and bake it at 400 for 12 minutes. Easy as pie...pie crust, anyway.

I downloaded Pan's Labyrinth last night while I was at the concert...I'm planning on watching it tonight, if I can figure out how to turn a .bin file into something watchable. It looks like a really incredible movie, sort of a non-animated Spirited Away--one of my favorite movies, incidentally.

I watched the (GRAPHIC) video of Saddam's execution earlier. The ubiquity of cell phone cameras has really changed the nature of reporting in the 21st century, and this is a trend I predict will only go further as the technology becomes more advanced and more accessible to the public. In retrospect, the video also made me wish I had studied Arabic instead of Persian. As much as it would have been a pain to attend an early class freshman year, I think the language gets a lot more use and certainly is spoken by a larger population. Which is not to say that Persian doesn't have its charms, and, given current regional trends, may become more useful for an American to know if we end up invading them too.

So, a merry end of 2006 to you all, and a happy new year!