After being on the air for two years, Good Grief! has run its course.  A million thanks to anyone who has ever read, commented, or e-mailed–you made the endeavor worthwhile and fun.  Until the next project, so long, and thanks for all the fish!

And there are absolutely some broken eggs (and permalinks). Good Grief! has moved to a new home, and there is some residual weirdness like missing pictures and boring templates. Do not e-mail me about missing favicons and banner images, or I will ban you, and then you will be sorry. Sadly, I shut off several of the old feeds before announcing the new one, so probably no one is reading this anyway. But just in case, the new RSS feed for Good Grief is here: http://doesthisblogmakemybuttlookbig.com/feed/

Big thanks to Scott of Blankbaby fame for helping me find a host and introducing me to Wordpress. And now, business as usual.

Blogging about blogging is sooooo tedious. Therefore, I will not blog about blogging. Instead this blog is about how I am not blogging about blogging and in fact am not blogging much at all because of a blog project that is keeping me too busy to blog. When the super-secret blog project is over, there will, by necessity, be one of those much-dreaded meta-blogging posts.

In the meantime, if you link here using the goodgrief.typepad.com link, could you update to doesthisblogmakemybuttlookbig.com? Pretty please? If you already use the butt link, carry on.

Please accept this most awesome mp3 (courtesy of Mr. Wade Bloggs) as an apology for all of the blawg nonsense.

Image courtesy of muppetcentral.com.

Have I mentioned lately how great it is that the Lititz Record Express is online (and RSS-ified) after all these years? Some recent commentary:

While walking home from the linear park this week I nearly collided headlong with a discarded, individually wrapped pat of butter. This innocent little representative of dairy grandeur had been violently slammed against the cold and unforgiving concrete sidewalk that borders Lititz United Methodist Church…Apparently, someone was very angry, and as a result, a promising pat’s life was snuffed out in brutal fashion.

Cart is a charming, unassuming BYO that offers little in the way of interior design, but bags of potato chips clipped to its industrial-nuevo structure provide a splash of color. The menu features many comfort food standards, such as a meatball sub and a meatball sub with cheese. American cheese is .25 cents more than its parmesan cousin, but it’s worth the expenditure

Everyone was at Fergies on Saturday, along with Strolling Luna and her creepy x-ray camera.

True, I wouldn’t mind losing that holiday weight, but I was thinking more like a few inches off the hips. Though I suppose that being transparent has its advantages (such as the ability to render the great Blankbaby speechless).

Last week’s BR-549 show at the TLA was pretty much what you’d expect from a concert performed by an aging hillbilly band. Much of their material is formulaic, but that’s not so bad if you like the formula. A fun night out, though I wouldn’t follow them around on tour or even buy any more of their records (and I only bought that last one because it was $2.99 in AKA’s used CD bin).

The best part of the evening by far was The Avett Brothers, who opened. It was the Avett Brothers, not BR-549, who got the show a City Paper mention, and deservedly so. The Avett Brothers lead singer had the bandanna-and-long-hair Willie Nelson (not dead!) look going on, the bass player, dressed in khakis and a white button-down shirt, looked like he was in the wrong band, and the other guy filled the role of required shaggy-looking dude. Together they played some original, energetic twang–the best kind. The band’s website has some mp3s, and you can keep an eye on their tour schedule here.

It’s a good winter for twang here in Philly. On February 12th the Asylum Street Spankers will be at World Cafe Live. The Spankers are hard to describe:

The magnificently indefinable Asylum Street Spankers began in 1994 at a booze and hallucinogen-fueled party at the Dabbs Hotel in Llano, Texas. There Christina Marrs and Guy Forsyth met Wammo. During a night spent singing and playing along the banks of the Llano River they made a pact to keep the all-night-sing-along-anything-goes spirit of that party alive.
[snip]
Since the departure of Forsyth in 1998 the band began venturing out into the wider world. Since then Christina and Wammo have pushed their ever-evolving troupe from simple country-blues revivalism toward smart, challenging music of boundless variety, sophisticated arrangements, stunning showmanship and determined inventiveness.

Not only that, but some of the band members have blogs. And they have a myspace thing (I’m still not sure what a myspace is, exactly). The Asylum Street Spankers are most entertaining, and on this tour they’re rejoined by Guy Forsyth, who is helping to promote the Re-Assembly DVD.

Finally, Fred Eaglesmith is playing the Tin Angel on Friday, February 10th. I’m not an official Fredhead, but this Canadian twang-ish singer/songwriter puts on such a fun show that I’m thinking about braving the dreaded Tin Angel to see him again.

The new Good Grief! mix of the week celebrates all of these happenings:

1. Avett Brothers - Kind of in Love
2. Fred Eaglesmith - I Like Trains
3. BR-549 - Georgia on a Fast Train
4. Avett Brothers - Moving
5. BR-549 - Out of Habit
6. Asylum Street Spankers - Trippin’ Over You
7. Fred Eaglesmith - Steel Guitar

Last week, Whitebait tagged me for the “meme of four” that’s been going around. It’s a dilemma. As someone who was always picked last for the kickball team, I appreciate getting tagged; however, I’m not big on memes. Therefore, I present a consolidated meme, narrowed down to one question: name four jobs you’ve had in your life.

1. Bus person at the General Sutter Inn in Lititz, PA
2. Monorail operator, train driver, and general all-around ride jockey at Lancaster’s Dutch Wonderland
3. Inspector #71 and clothes scanner at the QVC returns warehouse in Lancaster, PA
4. Evening proofreader at a printing company in Lancaster, PA

I applied for the General Sutter job at the request of my high school friend Loopey J, who thought it would be totally cool if we, like, worked together. Without informing my parents, I walked down to Lititz’s oldest fine dining establishment, filled out an application, and was immediately offered a job by Drunky and Uptight V, the couple who then owned the restaurant/inn.

Drunky V had some serious alcohol issues. He started each dinner shift reasonably sober but usually had a stumble to his step by the time we were resetting the last table. Unfortunately, his impaired gait wasn’t the only clue that he’d spent too much time up at the bar; by nine or ten o’clock he would begin standing extremely and uncomfortably close to any female staff unfortunate enough to cross his path, and the smell of booze was unmistakable, even to someone as naive as I was. But the worst part about Drunky J at the end of the night was his habit of walking the birds.

Uptight V loved birds. She decorated the Inn’s coffee shop with empty birdcages and bird wallpaper that featured huge, terrifying–possibly carnivorous–indigo birds with eyes that followed innocent buspeople all around the room as we folded napkins and prepared for the dinner crowd. Three steps above the coffee shop was the Inn’s main lobby, which also featured birdcages. Except that the lobby’s birdcages contained real birds. Loud, squawking, dirty little monsters who lived disturbingly close to the main dining room. The only hope they had for a change of scenery was at the end of each evening, when Drunky V grabbed one from among their ranks, perched the chosen creature on his shoulder, and paced from the lobby to the bus station to the bar to the kitchen and then back again, over and over. By the third or fourth loop of this ritual, the back of Drunky V’s jacket was invariably covered with bird excrement.

Despite the escapades of Drunky V, it was a good year at the General Sutter Inn. As Loopey J predicted, it was totally cool to work together. We snuck downstairs and bought Benson and Hedges from the cigarette machine, hiding them in a doggie bag that read “Becky and J’s–DO NOT TOUCH.” Naturally, the head busperson found our stash, even though we’d hidden it on top of the coffee machine, and laughed her ass off at two silly high school juniors who smoked Benson and Hedges on the sly. On slow nights we went out back to hang with the cooks, who sat on the hood of an El Camino and alternated between treating us as comrades in the war against Drunky V and threatening to dunk us head-first into the fat barrel. Luckily, Unstoppable B, the shrewd and streetwise senior server and fifteen-year General Sutter veteran, was usually there to defend us against cooks, head buspeople, and inebriated proprietors.

Thanks, Whitebait, for inspiring this walk down memory lane. Those who did not like this walk down memory lane should feel free to e-mail complaints to Whitebait.

I should also mention that Drunky and Uptight V sold the General Sutter Inn many years ago. The birds are gone.

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