vovat | It's All Business

I don't know how

bethje does it. She hardly sleeps at all on weekdays, then makes up for it by sleeping pretty much all day on weekends. If I don't get enough sleep on any one day, that results in my basically walking around in a daze. Sure, I can do things if I've been up long enough, but all I really want to do is go back to bed.

Anyway, I suppose I should talk about the Halloween activity we did on Saturday, which was a ghost walk in Ocean City. When we told Beth's family about it, they were asking whether anyone would jump out at us, but ghost walks aren't like that. What actually happens is that a guide takes the visitors around town and tells ghost stories related to particular places. We'd been on one in Philadelphia some years ago, and I seem to remember that one covering more distance. The Ocean City one really didn't involve that much walking, and occasionally the guide would tell a story about a landmark we weren't even that near, as with the Flanders Hotel. She said we could stop by the hotel after the tour to see a portrait of Emily, the girl who supposedly now haunts the building, but when we tried it there was a wedding going on. The walk was fun, even though we didn't believe any of it. I mean, come on, it's all anecdotal evidence! What's amusing is that there was one couple on the walk that apparently DID believe it all, or at least wanted everyone else to think they did. The guy said they were "paranormal researchers," and put in his own comments at pretty much every stop.

Something I found interesting recently (even though it was actually posted two weeks ago; I'm way behind on my LiveJournal and blog reading) was this entry on the They Might Be Giants community about an upcoming memoir by Brian Doherty, the band's drummer from 1993 to 1996.

The linked excerpt has a mention of how, at a 1993 show, John Flansburgh told the band that Weird Al was coming to the show, and that no one should interact with him, because it would be bad for their image. As someone who actually became interested in TMBG through Weird Al (there's a fair amount of fan overlap online), I was always a little bothered by how the Johns would try to avoid any connection with the weird one. The general consensus (which Brian confirms) is that they don't want to be seen as geeky novelty musicians any more than they already are. Or at least that was the case back in the day. Now that they're making most of their income through children's albums released by Disney, and Al has come to be more accepted by fellow celebrities (I follow him on Twitter, and just about every other famous person on there seems really excited when they get to meet him), perhaps that's not as important these days.

I really couldn't say. I guess I've gotten to the point where I don't really care so much about whether my favorite musicians like each other. I've heard that the Johns like XTC, but Andy Partridge has gone on record of saying he didn't care for any of their songs other than "Birdhouse in Your Soul." (For what it's worth, I don't believe I've seen anything about what Andy thinks of Weird Al.) I guess another part of the issue from a fan's point of view is that I don't want to think of a band as a business. After all, music is fun, and business boring and depressing. On the other hand, if nobody looked at the business end of things, I never would have even heard of the band, so it's kind of a necessary evil. And since most of what I've seen suggests John Linnell has no business acumen whatsoever, it pretty much falls on Flans to be the hard-edged businessman of the group.

Speaking of Weird Al, I had a dream last night that I was walking around singing "Amish Paradise," but I have no clue WHY I was doing that. My mind might also be suffering from the lack of new Simpsons episodes, because I also dreamed about one of them. Bart teamed up with Nelson to get revenge on someone, but that someone turned out to be Bart. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but it made even less once Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs showed up.