Crosswalks to Nowhere

Here are Lisa and Emma by the firepit a couple weeks ago. It was a warm Friday night and we took advantage of the nice weather.

As soon as this nonsensical "spring" weather goes away, we'll do this a lot more often!

This past Saturday night, we saw the band Tributosaurus who, along with many special guests, performed songs from XTC's catalog.

I've been an XTC fan since my college days, and when I saw this video on the XTC fan site Chalkhills a few weeks ago, only a few seconds passed between my learning of the concert and the tickets' showing up in my e-mail.

Tributosaurus refers to themselves as "the Jurassic beast of multiple musical faces, and every month, the beast morphs into a different rock group. The finest musicians from Chicagoland join the core group to sit in…to sing and play songs they’ve wanted to cover all their lives." They pride themselves on their commitment to learn a brand-new set of material, note-for-note, every month.

Their objective is to recreate an artist's music as it appeared on their records, not to give the impression that we were seeing a live performance by the artist. Tributosaurus' dedication to XTC's sound was amazing, and the group very faithfully recreated songs from the band's catalog.

According to Chalkhills and the band's keyboard player, Chris (whom I spoke with after the show), the XTC show is now an annual event for Tributosaurus.

During "Earn Enough For Us," for example, there were at least 8 or 9 people on stage, half of them with guitars, to ensure that jangly sound. On "Dear God" (shown above) they invited a young girl to sing the opening and closing lines, and on "1000 Umbrellas" the team was joined by the "Tributosaurus Strings" who provided the backdrop that matched the original arrangement on the album Skylarking.

The show was conducted almost in the style of a "staged reading," in that the musicians and singers all brought their music with them as they came on stage. All the musical and vocal parts were shared by Tributosaurus and their guests, meaning no single performer took all the "Andy" or "Colin" parts during the show. Every single person who appeared on stage performed wonderfully.

I didn't write down the set list while the show was going on, but someone who saw last year's show posted this set list on the Sound Opinions forum, and it matches the show we saw very closely:

Making Plans For Nigel
Dear God
Earn Enough For Us
Statue of Liberty
Generals and Majors
Burning With Optimism's Flames
Love on a Farmboy's Wages
English Roundabout
Poor Skeleton Steps Out
1000 Umbrellas
Prince of Orange
Science Friction
When You're Near Me I Have Difficulty
One of the Millions
It's Nearly Africa
Mayor of Simpleton
No Thugs in Our House
The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead

"Senses Working Overtime" was the closer.

The show was at the Park West, which is still my absolute favorite place to see live music. (Evidently, this is XTC's Dave Gregory's favorite venue, too).

Tributosaurus plays regularly at Martyr's, and I have a feeling we'll be up there very soon. We suggest you check them out, too!

As mentioned in my previous blog posting, Pepsi has introduced a version their flagship product made with sugar: Pepsi-Cola Throwback.

Now, despite its unfortunate name, the drink actually accomplishes what it set out to do: it tastes a lot like I remember Pepsi tasting when I was a kid. The only thing is that it seems to be a little more watery than I recall the old Pepsi.

Pepsi-Cola Throwback will be available through the end of May. I bought a 12-pack at my local Jewel for about $3.50.

I have a ton of negatives in a box in my crawl space. Most of them are 35mm, but I also have a bunch of 35mm slides and even an envelope full of 110 shots.

Over the years, I've thought about scanning in the prints or even the negatives so I could have them archived digitally, but every time I attempted it I decided it was a ton of work that would take up time I simply didn't have. As a result, I managed to scan in some photos as one-offs, but having everything in my collection in digital form was elusive.

One of Lisa's friends blogged about an online service called ScanCafe, whose prices are reasonable (24¢ per image) and provides scans with excellent quality (3000 dpi). I was intrigued, so I went through my box 'o' negatives and picked a bunch of samples and tried out the service.

Here's how it works: You pick out the negatives you want to have scanned-- they're initially scanned at the negative strip level, not the individual photo level-- and put them in a plastic ziplock bag or an envelope, then pack them in a box. You enter your account information on ScanCafe's site, they give you a UPS shipping label to print out, and you pay for 50% of the images you're sending in.

A few weeks later, you'll receive an email from ScanCafe with a link to thumbnails of the initial scans, then you select the images you want them to scan and put on a DVD for you. Add a few more weeks, and a box shows up at your door with your original negatives and a DVD with your selected photos in digital form.

I chose photos across several years. The shot at the top was taken in 1998, and the one below was a 35mm slide that was shot in my back yard in 1976.

I have to admit the quality is pretty good, better than I could have done with my Epson scanner at home. I had about 120 images scanned, and they all turned out very nice.

The scanning is all done at ScanCafe's facility in Bangalore, India, with the company's California address acting as a dispatch/coordination center. This contributes to the lead times-- in reality, it took about two months from the time I sent in the negatives to the time the DVD showed up.

As I think about my next order, I may choose photos from a certain period-- perhaps two or three years' worth at a time-- and have them scanned so sorting the images at the receiving end is less of a task. Right now, the images jump around from year to year.

If you're looking for a hands-off solution to digitizing your photos, ScanCafe is a service to seriously consider.