Know your Internet, Christmas Edition

So in addition to keeping our country safe from Saddam's voluminous WMD collection, our government takes on the extra duty on Christmas Eve to track Santa's progress around the globe. The site is called NORAD Tracks Santa, and is actually pretty cool, imho. You can go there now and it's not much to see yet, but starting Christmas Eve they update it every hour with a short computer generated video that shows Santa on his sleigh wherever in the world it is currently midnight. You know, Santa circling the pyramids, Santa flying over the Eiffel Tower, that sort of thing. Our girls love it and they keep checking to see where Santa is at the time, so it's a great run-up to Christmas day.

Anyway, Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays! Chappy Chanukah! Krazy Kwanza! Fun Festivus! Pleasant (insert your celebratory event of choice here)!

Better Know an Internet, Cosmic Edition

Today's edition might seem like it would only be for you space geeks out there, but check it out anyway; it just may wow you. Or maybe I'm such a geek that I just think regular people would like it. Either way, I've been hooked on Heavens Above for several years now. And there's no better time to visit the site than when the Space Shuttle is up there cavorting with the International Space Station. If you know where and when to look, you can frequently see the shuttle/space station linked up in orbit, sometimes brighter and larger than a jet in the evening sky. And this site tells you exactly where and when to look.

Just go to the site and tell it your location (you can look up the latitude/longitude of your city on the site). Then you can get a daily chart of most of the brighter satellites wafting over your particular head, and the chart tells you exactly what time, which direction and how high up to look. And for the next week or so, click on the Shuttle Mission STS-116 link to track the shuttle.

Special note to my friends in Seattle. You may have to climb the Space Needle to get your heads above all those clouds, or maybe just wait until summer when the clouds clear up to see all the satellites. Sorry about that!

Yyyyyyyyeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!

Awesome. The Who can still rock. I'm always wary of any arena rock tour because they seem pretty impersonal to me, as opposed to a small club where you can see the whites of the band's eyes from anywhere in the place. But I have to say, they put together an amazing light show befitting of the arena surroundings. And they had lots of big screens so you could usually see close-ups of Pete and Roger doing their things. Roger said he had a bad cold, and he did shy away from the high notes mostly, but that raspy voice was still plenty powerful. And Pete still has plenty of guitar windmills left in him.

They played a good mix of new songs from their latest, Endless Wire, and the old classics. The new stuff was good, and to my surprise I have to say that one of the high points was the very last song of the night, a quiet rendition of Tea & Theatre with only Pete and Roger onstage and Pete playing the acoustic guitar. Townshend played accoustic on several of the newer songs.

But man, the old standbys were a-smokin'! Pinball Wizard was Good, Behind Blue Eyes was Better, the long, long jam in the middle of My Generation was Even Better, and Won't Get Fooled Again proved once and for all that it's the Greatest Rock-n-Roll Song Of All Time: nee nee nee nee NEE NEE NEE NEE ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum ba-dum-dum ba-dum dum YYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!! You get the picture.

And the perfect concert moment of pure joy: When they hit their stride about a third of the way into the show with Baba O'Riley. Something about that flowing synth just makes me happy!

Who?

We are going to see The Who tomorrow night, and I'm pumped! I first saw them 24 years ago in Cedar Falls, Iowa at the UNI-Dome. That was their first farewell tour. I was in high school and I was able to con my folks into letting me camp out all night at the Dome to get tickets, which was good since it sold out in a few hours. (There was no internet back then. Remember?) The show was amazing.

Then in the early nineties KT and I saw them in Kansas City. It was a sold out show at Arrowhead Statium and we had nosebleed seats, but you could still watch the old geezers rock out on the big screen. And it was good.

So now, we'll see. The show didn't sell out this time. I don't expect it to touch the experience I had at my first one back in high school, but I hear the shows have been good so far. And I've been listening to Endless Wire a lot lately to get ready, and I have to say it's pretty damn good.

I'll report on the concert in a few days.