jlegler.com is the blog of Jason Legler, the pasty white geeky guy from Casper Wyoming, not the enterprising badass bull rider from Colorado. Jason likes playing and recording music and breaking computers. He lives in Portland Oregon where he likes to chill with his hot wife and their animals.
I have updated my page to a new brighter color scheme. I chose something orange in honor of my beloved Denver Broncos despite the fact that they will likely suck this year. I truly hope they prove me wrong. The accidentally awesome “cool pictures and video that Jason Legler shot of Radiohead in Auburn WA” post is completely done so feel free to check it out. The pics and video really did turn out dramatically better than I had anticipated. I owe it all to the Canon G9 and its kick ass “auto” mode. I know dick about photography but the camera didn’t care.
Anyway, I am going to keep this short because I am tired and need to go to bed. If you have an xbox 360 and xbox live and you don’t own Braid, you are an idiot. It is the best game I have played in the last 10 years. It is a reason to buy the xbox 360. It is the first video game I have ever played that I would consider art. Read the reviews, other people have said it better than I will be able to right now.
Also, my buddy Jeremy directed me to a site that everyone should check out. It is called indexed and it is awesome. This girl boils down what most blogs blather about for pages in simple drawings on index cards. Sometimes it is funny, other times it is very clever and poignant. Sometimes it is all of those things. Check it out. That is all I have for now so on that note I am off to bed.
Ok, everything I got is online now. I got video for a total of 9 of the 25 songs they played; however, the end of All I Need is chopped because my memory card filled. I really wish I would have got Thom’s screwup and attempt at Faust Arp/Tell Me Why but I wasn’t recording at the time.
Basically, Thom screwed up the lyrics and bailed on the song, half-assedly covered “Tell Me Why” by Neil Young to the laughter of the audience (he didn’t know the words) at which point Phil came out and threw some money down as if Thom were a street performer. Thom and Johnny tried again and screwed up again, Thom yelled “Fuck” and stopped playing again, only to start again from where he screwed up and finish the song. It was really funny. The band was in good spirits for sure. In Limbo was also badass because Nigel came out and played tambourine. It was a fantastic show.
I am posing the set list below with song names in yellow I have video for. They are all on youtube and embeded here. Make sure and check out the videos in high quality mode on youtube so you can hear everything in stereo and see everything more clearly. The actual video I shot is at a pretty decent resolution and youtube doesn’t do it justice; however, I don’t have the bandwidth to post 9 500MB files. Anyway, the show kicked ass. It was the best show I have ever been to. I hope you enjoy the pictures and video.
Here is a slideshow of the pictures I took. If you want to see bigger versions of them go here.
I should probably keep my yap shut. I wrote a long blog entry years ago about Iraq where I advocated going to war because I thought removing Saddam Hussein from power would be good for Iraq. Maybe long-term that logic will prove to be right; however, I doubt if it will be in my lifetime and I doubt it has as much to do with Hussein as a dictator as it does with regional politics and a culture that I will never understand without living there. Basically I opened my trap based on the little bit of data that I had and was completely wrong. That being said, I have an opinion on what is going on in Georgia that I will toss out there because I don’t think our media is responsibly reporting it based on what I am seeing from international media. Someone tell me where I am wrong and where I am right.
As I understand it, a large section of Georgia wants to be Russia (actually, there are several, but Ossetia is just the one getting action right now). Georgia attacked Ossetia to keep that from happening. Russia would love to regain some of the regions it “lost” when the USSR dissolved so they found a reason (dead peacekeepers) to retaliate decisively. Georgian military used the Russian attack as an excuse to do some ethnic cleansing of the people there who want to be Russian (US media is leaving this information out to make it easier to justify supporting Georgia to protect some pipelines). Russia started attacking other sections of Georgia because it wants to win this before it can escalate enough to require cease fires and turn into another Chechnya. US and NATO threaten Russia because Georgia has oil pipelines and militarily strategic locations that benefit the US and NATO.
The history of the region is insane. Like the bulk of that part of the world, it is a history of constant invasion (due to no geographical boundaries that can stop military). Because of that it is difficult to say who is right unless you limit history to certain timeframes and only talk to certain people. The region is in constant flux. The Cliffs Notes history is something like this: Georgia was its own nation with its own royal family. Russia manipulated it politically by not participating in some of Georgia’s wars with neighbors and offering protection during others. Russia somewhat peacefully took it over and exiled its royalty (peacefully) and taxed it and everything went okay for awhile. Then Lenin and Stalin took over and did everything they were known for to Georgia. Then things were quiet for awhile until the USSR dissolved. Georgia was very eager to get out and that eagerness was kind of a slap in the face to Russia. Georgia’s current eagerness to deal with Western nations makes the Russian government very nervous (as it would the US if the US existed in a place where it had a history of constant invasion). Couple that with the fact that many Georgians in the area of conflict want the area to be part of Russia because the president of Georgia is incompitent at best and genocidal at worst and you have what is going on today.
So what should the US be doing in all of this? How about not a fucking thing. This isn’t our fight, it has never been our fight, it should never be our fight. We keep getting into other people’s fights because of pipelines and our ideas of where borders should exist. This is between Russian and Georgia.
What am I missing here? This is a legitimate question posed because it is impossible to know what is going on there without being there. I can only have an opinion based on what I know. It’s easy to blame Russia because that is what Americans do; however, watch this video (provided by Russian Media) and tell me what you think.
