I have been a huge fan of “Weird Al” Yankovic for my entire Goddamned life, and I will be seeing him in concert in Indianapolis tomorrow night, at the same venue I saw the Counting Crows at a couple of weeks ago. I would really appreciate it if the world would stop getting worse until the show is over. If the asteroid is coming, that’s fine, but don’t hit us until, like, 11:00 PM. The show should be over by then.
In other news, I’m really glad I’m going to be out of town tomorrow, because I keep getting into deeply stupid little spats online with deeply stupid people, and I need a fucking cleanse badly. I’m driving to Indy and back– my wife has the newer, nicer car at the moment, and so she has inherited long-distance driving responsibilities along with it– but I need to not be on my phone in the car, so I’m going to do the driving.
I was about to explain one of the spats, but Christ, you don’t need it. I was hoping to share some of the stupid with you so you could appreciate it from afar, but instead, I’m not going to make your world dumber. I’m a Goddamned saint.
In other other news, IU just cut my major, because the governor told them to, and I’ve spent a significant amount of my non-online time in the last 48 hours trying to decide how I’m going to handle it when they announce they’re building an ICE concentration camp in Elkhart. There was talk of one going in during the last time this pigfucker was in office, and it ended up not happening, but I’m pretty sure it’s inevitable now. This is gonna be the start of my supervillain arc, or at least my “tries to sabotage something, fails, and is arrested immediately” arc.
Mental note: delete that paragraph before doing anything.
My son and I are having a movie day for Father’s Day, and I’m finally getting him to watch the Lord of the Rings movies, en route to eventually conning him into reading the books. So I’m going to make this quick; I assume you can find it within yourselves to forgive me.
Dinner was at the Bosphorous Cafe, and dinner made the trip worth it all by itself. The damn show could have been rained out and driving down just for Turkish food would have been completely fine. I had Lamb Mediterranean, along with a pile of other stuff. Absolutely delicious. And the first things I noticed when we walked in was a relative lack of white people and a table or two speaking Arabic, which is always a good sign in any restaurant featuring non-American cuisine.
We had really good seats:
That’s without any kind of zoom happening, and there were huge screens on either side of the stage, so … yeah, great seats. And we’ll be back in a few weeks for Weird Al, and we have better seats for that show.
The openers, the Gaslight Anthem, weren’t bad at all, and they played a deep Pearl Jam/Mother Love Bone cut called Chloe Dancer, which … well, I figured out who my people in the crowd were really fast.
The Crows hit the stage at 9:03. Here’s the set list, if you’re a fan. They did four songs from the new album, all of the ones I wanted to hear except for one– they didn’t play Bobby and the Rat Kings, which is one of my favorites. We got an acoustic set and a few piano songs over nearly a two hour show. Adam had to stop a song because he sneezed. And the crowd got really into the show:
… assuming, that is, that the Indianapolis police department doesn’t decide to turn the protests violent. I’m only a teeny bit worried about it; I bought the concert tickets well before the No Kings protests were a thing, and I’ll be traveling right during when most of them are going on, but I assume that particularly in a city the size of Indianapolis nobody’s gonna be super concerned with the official start and end time. I’ve never seen the Crows live, but I’ve downloaded a bunch of their shows and I’m expecting a really good show. And I’m planning on hitting the Lego store on the way home on Sunday, so Father’s Day is gonna be lit.
Last night I texted my wife and said that I wanted to go to an Italian place called Carrabba’s for dinner tonight. It’s a chain but they’re not exactly ubiquitous, so if you haven’t heard of them don’t worry about it. What you need to know is I didn’t actually want one of their entrees– they do a ridiculous carrot cake and I actually wanted some of that. Bek agreed and so the three of us headed off for Italian after she got home from work.
We walked in and immediately something felt off. We were seated immediately and made a sort of half-confused eye contact on the way to our table, then after being at the table for a moment she leaned over to me and asked if the place had seriously remodeled since we’d been in there last. I remembered the decor, but it wasn’t matching with what I had in my head. Then we got the menus and that’s when I realized it– we were in the wrong damn restaurant. So I’d said I wanted to go to Carrabba’s, and we’d gone to Carrabba’s, but what I actually wanted was Papa Vino’s, which is a much more local place (only three locations total, all within an hour of each other) that was a block away. The really ridiculous thing is that my wife was also thinking of Papa Vino’s, and had made the exact same mistake I’d had– when I said Carrabba’s, she heard that, and drove to that place, all the while expecting it to be Papa Vino’s when we walked in.
Anyway, we’re cowards, so once we’d been seated the notion of getting up and leaving was unimaginable, and it turns out the lobster ravioli at Carrabba’s is pretty good, but I didn’t get my God damned carrot cake. I mean, come on. Look at this:
So, yeah, we have to have Italian again next week, I guess.
… but I did have a slice of abso-damn-lutely delicious carrot cake for dessert that I grabbed from our local grocery on a whim, and I’m so sugared up right now that I might die, and that’s fine, and if you’re one of those people who doesn’t like carrot cake you may have a regular carrot and find an alternate use for it. Carrot cake is Goddamned awesome and I have it maybe once a year, and tonight decided to be the night.
And I think I’m going to leave it at that, because I just found out that the Post Office is cutting 10,000 jobs and anything else I have to say is going to attract the attention of the FBI. The Indianapolis post office distribution hub may already be the most fucked place in the country— I’ve had a package sitting there for two weeks with no information at all– and … yeah. I’mma stop there.
Sometimes I think about how I thought I hated George W. Bush, and how that doesn’t even vaguely compare to the quality and quantity of hatred that continues to blacken my soul every fucking day in 2025. So I’m going to go back to thinking about the rest of that carrot cake, because otherwise I start wondering about what a regular civilian normal person might be able to do to damage someone who owns a private jet, and that seems like a bad idea.
I’m going to be in Booth 1213 on the vendor floor at the Indianapolis Convention Center, sharing a booth with Michelle Wern, who may not be aware of just how much fun it is going to be to be crammed into an 8′ x 10′ booth with me and all of my con shit for three entire days. It is eight o’clock in the morning and I am halfway through my morning coffee. I have approximately six thousand and ten things to do (including mowing the goddamn yard and taking the dog to be boarded at the vet, which is eight thousand miles away) between now and my wife getting home from work at noon, so I probably ought to finish the coffee and stop mucking about on the Internet.
But mucking about on the Internet is fun, so here we are. I didn’t do IndyPopCon last year, but it was a hell of a lot of fun in 2016 and I’m really looking forward to this show. This will be the first con I’ve done twice, so we’ll see if anybody remembers me from last time.
Speaking of boarding the dog, I can see the toxic-ass fart she just dropped, so it’s definitely time to make her go away and I ought to start accomplishing things. Photos to come!
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