Beasted

Beastie Boys last night, SECC, Glasgow.
Good to see a big show. There’s always that hesitation in heading across to Glasgow to see something – transport back to Edinburgh gets a bit spotty post-midnight. But – Beastie Boys! Cool. And we were not disappointed.
Bonus Maximum Surprise: hadn’t known who support would be, and was stunned to find it was none other than Talib Kweli. Hell, I’d’ve made the trip to Glasgow just for him. Outstanding stuff, turntables manned by someone I’ve never heard of named DJ Chelsea. The real deal. Kweli’s of the mid-90s ‘conscious underground’ in hip-hop, and it was oddly sweet to hear him mixing up serious lyrics about serious stuff with unabashed party-starting crowd-hooping warmup for the main event. He had a good time on stage, that was clear, with some nice freestyling.
Then the Beasties emerged. Mixmaster Mike delivered a stellar scratch set to open, then the Boys themselves bounced out and went right into Super Disco Breakin’, Root Down and Sure Shot. Some of the newer material got a workout in the middle of the set, but the big finish was Intergalactic (delivered from the back of the auditorium) and finally, dedicated to GWB, Sabotage.
It was great. It doesn’t quite crack my top three concerts evar (Portishead in 97 (?), Shihad in ’95 and Spearhead in ’95), but it’s up there.
Then we had to get home. The house lights came up at a surprisingly early 10.45, but we had to spend 45 minutes queueing for the cloakroom, then after arriving in time for the midnight bus had to wait a further two hours at the bus station until one turned up. Two hours in a queue at a bus station sucked. There were people who waited longer, though. It just boggles the mind that transport connections between Edin and Glasgow are so poor – there’s a civic need, there’s a commercial opportunity, there’s resources going to waste. Bizarre.
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Some random stuff:
Finally sat down and read the second half of Rory Stewart’s ‘The Places In Between’, about his walk across post-Taliban Afghanistan. It was a great read, full of detail and insight, and having seen Rory talk at the Book Festival his distinctive voice leapt off the page. Also, I learned a hell of a lot about Afghanistan. Highly recommended. Here’s a taster.
If you haven’t yet found the very-new Muppets web page, go take a look (highspeed connections advisable). New Muppets content, lots of animations and weirdness. Check out the game where you get to mix “coffee” for Beaker. Poor Beaker.
And if you’re not yet reading Teresa Neilsen-Hayden regularly, you should fix that. Read this for an example – it’s a screen or two in length, but it is absolutely top-notch. The truth about the McDonald’s hot coffee spillage case is covered, among other things – and it isn’t what I thought it was.
A link from TNH also stands out for attention: get wise to phishing scams. It drew my attention because I received a phishing email claiming to be from paypal just the other day – some snooping around on the offender’s site revealed it was hosting phishing scam pages for PayPal, Ebay, and a bunch of other less-well-known sites. Also revealed that it wasn’t nearly as secure as it could have been, so I drafted in a friendly hacker to wreak some damage to the site. (Also reported it to Paypal and Ebay, if you were wondering.)
Cal is out doing the shopping. She works near RealFoods, where we do most of our shopping, so really she does most of our shopping. I’m working on getting her doing all the cooking and cleaning too, with some success. Everything is proceeding according to plan.