it looks like all our prayers have been answered:
The tour will take in the USA, Britain, Germany, Spain, China, Australia, South Africa and Argentina. To register for tickets go to www.thespicegirls.com
Straddling Christmas, the tour will begin in Posh Spice Victoria Beckham’s new home Los Angeles on December 7, before visiting Las Vegas, New York City, London, Cologne, Madrid, Beijing, Hong Kong, Sydney, Cape Town and Buenos Aires.
They will appear in London on December 15. Extra dates may be added.
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At a packed press conference at London’s 02 arena, formerly the Millennium Dome, the band were introduced by “Old Spice” Richard E Grant, who promised that the Spice Girls would “bring some colour back to your lives.”
In a typically tongue-in-cheek half hour of banter with the press, the band promised a tour featuring “five girls, lights, dancing, the dark side of the Spice Girls and topless dancing”.
The group stressed that unlike Take That, their comeback tour show will be truly international.
“The thing that was different about the Spice Girls is that we were truly global” said Chisholm.
i’ve been driving on my new east bay commute for more than a month now, and people ask me, “so how is it?”
crap-a-licious.
the short answer is that it takes a little bit longer but there’s a lot more stop and go, which really aggravates you as opposed to being able to fly down the peninsula at 80mph for most of the way. on the other hand, it’s not as bad as i thought it would be. perhaps my expectations are so incredibly low that i get less angry because i’m already more resigned to plod along.
i’m a little disappointed that my commute didn’t make the 10 worst commutes in the bay area, which tells me that perhaps i’m not trying hard enough. or at least i’m not going to work early enough— if i need to get there at 9 or 8 i need to give myself at two hours just in case, whereas later i can usually make it there in one.
the rare times i’m forced to drive in high rush hour, i find myself experiencing a little bit of prius envy. which strictly speaking is not prius envy, but more specifically HOV sticker envy. chip and i have carpooled to day-long meetings, and the difference is phenomenal. just the thought of being able to whip by that 880-237 interchange makes my pants all tingly.
it’s getting bad enough that 1. priuses (prii?) don’t even look ugly to me anymore and 2. i’m seriously considering buying a used prius with an HOV sticker instead of a mini (gasp!). yes, that would mean that my dream car would never come true, but then again, i might save a good hour or so a day every time i need to drive down to sunnyvale.
from a baby perspective, hmc says it doesn’t matter to her what i get, but i will need to get something that will hold more than just two people, since we do have that half-person coming up. however, she’s looking at it more from a safety perspective: are minis less safe than priuses? i did some poking around for crash test results, and as it turns out, minis are actually safer than the early priuses, scoring well on the crash tests, although the ‘04, ‘05, and ‘07 priuses are outstanding.
as for mileage, of course the prius is going to win out. but is that worth the $4k+ uplift for an HOV sticker? the mini already is a big win over my current car. now with all the stop and go, roo and i came up with a new term for my commute: hypomiling.
muahaha! saved by outdated technology!
it turns out that you can make the tivo use an external modem through the serial connection to make your daily calls. one $5 14.4 modem off of craigslist and one $3 db9-db25 connector (i can’t believe i had to buy this— i must have chucked three of these when i moved) later, and we’re back in business.
now it can get back to recording episodes of top chef, rescue me, and flight of the conchords that i’ll never get around to watching. whew!
so like i said, the tivo’s on the fritz as well. it was working great, but for the past couple of weeks, it hasn’t successfully made a call home to download guide data to know what’s playing when. i tried fussing around with it, thinking that it was maybe the fax interfering now that i finally got all of my landlines wired correctly, but i’m pretty sure that it’s the internal modem on the tivo that’s dead.
what are my options?
maybe it doesn’t matter so much. i rarely have time to watch tv anyway. hell, i didn’t get around to watching the season finale of lost until last night. maybe i should stick to books. or javanese shadow puppets?
finally, some breathing space.
why so busy? having baby + buying house + moving + leading an andc = busy busy busy.
but now that’s all over, and i can get some stuff done. phew! oh wait, did we have that baby yet? shoot. the baby we did have was the andc that w and i co-lead on friday. it was all fracked up, man. but in a good way. basically we just tried to break everything so we could put it back together all funny. everything was darker, moody, with lots of art and different kinds of music, and things unexpected. and no one died.
as an added bonus paula came up from lost angels and even roo came out from chicago to come see our hijinks!
it was great having them out to visit us and the new house, which roo helped shape up even further: the kitchen is now (mostly) vanquished! she had me bring up the shelves out of the office and use them to solve the liquor/cookbook/microwave problem. now the spices are up back in their rack instead of in a box in the floor. and no more pile-‘o-knives™!
as for the rest of the house, it’s sloowly coming together. boxes everywhere, but they haven’t spread back into the “clean” rooms. we’re determined to not put in any ugly furniture in our new house. however, that leaves us with more things than storage. thus, things remain in boxes. and it occurs to me that we’ve got 2½ months to figure this out.
i do wish that things could just STOP BREAKING for a while. i’ve already got my big list of things that i need to fix/install already, so i would appreciate it if the things that are already working would NOT DIE on me. at least just yet. for example, in the last month i’ve lost the roku soundbridge music server, hmc’s car cd player, and the clothes washer (which seems to be trying to eat our clothes). and now just this weekend the modem on the tivo died (are you kidding?). and then toilet exploded. almost literally. well, the fill valve inside the toilet tank, anyway. just when i figured out how to fix that, the toilet tank gasket chose that exact moment to also disintegrate before my very eyes. which was sort of weird and creepy, because it caused blue water to drip everywhere. why blue? WHY INDEED. i finally figured out that the gasket it was probably dyed deep blue from years of hockey puck toilet bowl cleaners, turning the water blue and staining my bathroom tile. thanks!
i can now say that i more or less completely understand how to fix a toilet. i can also now say that my hands are dyed deep blue like thing one (or thing two).
weeks and weeks have gone by. and yet things are still piled up in boxes.
however, the kitchen is mostly unpacked. the large island of boxes in the middle is now gone, and everything that will fit is now in the cabinets. it’s sensible enough that we can even make meals again. which is a good thing, since we have NO IDEA where to get food around here. oh emmy’s, how do i miss you so…
which is not to say there aren’t still issues:
somewhere, we’re still trying to figure out if we need to get a rolling island in the middle to store more stuff, freeing up room for the baking pan rack which is currently on the floor next to the recycling. alternatively, maybe the answer is this:
who would have thought i would ever considered a china hutch an answer to what ails me?
lordy.
don’t let the lack of basketball talk deceive you. i have watched, and i have mourned. the finals start tonight, yet for detroit the year is already over. a tragedy.
yet i can’t disagree with everyone who claims they are delighted that the lebron and the cavelites are going instead of the pistons— not that they are going, but for the reasons that detroit are not going: they became too complacent, they felt too deserving, they stopped playing on the edge with desire and instead started playing to the refs. they stopped kicking ass and started getting kicked in it.
ultimately, they lost because they played like crap for six games straight.
aside from rip, who showed up? mr. big shot had perhaps his worst series since ‘03. sheed had a good game, but blew up two others. dice barely got his shot back. maxiell barely saw the court. i don’t even know if cwebb even made it to the stadium. and strangely, tay either crumbled under all the pressure, or tired so much from covering lebron so he couldn’t make a layup.
now we’re left with a finals with my three most hated players: manu, bowen, and sideshow bob. all i’m waiting for is the inevitable manu drive in the lane, sideshow stepping in to defend, and then they both GO SPRAWLING BACKWARDS as if a neutron bomb has gone off between them.
ultimately, i blame darko (again). if he hadn’t been proclaimed as the serbian basketball jesus, we could have ended up with melo or wade or bosh. and yes, there’s good doubt to say we might not have won it all in ‘04 if that had happened, but we sure would be better off now.
all i know now is: snapper jones now has a zero percent chance to be named tayshaun.
yeah, i know, no tv for smushers until they’re 3, but on the third birthday, i’m showing snapper jones this: do the right thing reenacted by fisher price sesame street characters:
