Michael Hanscom

Enthusiastic ambivert. Geeky, liberal, friendly, curious, hopepunk; trying to be a good person. (he/him)

Bag’n’Pipe Hoppers

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Bag'n'Pipe HoppersOne of the local street performers I enjoy running into is the Bag’n’Pipe Hoppers. Actually two performers who team up together from time to time — Don P. Scobie on bagpipes* and Jesse Bishop (or Bishnutz) on drums — their combination of traditional Scottish piping and modern hip-hop beats is always fun to stumble across.

Last Friday evening while waiting for the Half-Blood Prince to come out, Prairie and I took a wander and found the Bag’n’Pipe Hoppers playing at the corner of 4th and Pine. Their playing had attracted a small crowd of onlookers, including a few b-boys breakdancing beside them, so I grabbed my camera and recorded a few minutes of video.

May 2010 Update: Though the Bag’n’Pipe Hoppers are no more, Don has gone on to form a new outfit, Nae Regrets. Worth checking out!

  • Prairie’s especially fond of running across Don (a.k.a. “the hot bagpiper guy“), whether or not he’s playing with Jesse. Her only complaint about the performance we saw was that Don wasn’t wearing his kilt. :)

Acid bath

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The front steps of the empty section of the Convention Center that was being used for the temporary Seattle Central Library were being washed off today, sending streams of water running down the sidewalk. As I walked along, I started stepping over the rivulets, not for any sane (if somewhat stupid) reason like not wanting to get my shoes wet…

…but because somewhere, in the back of my brain, I’d decided that it wasn’t really water, but streams of acid running down the street that would eat through the bottom of my shoes and into my feet if I accidentally stepped into one.

Some days, it’s really hard to remember that I’m 32, and not 12.

iTunes “Auzonomous (Hot Tracks)” by Quinn from the album Roadkill 2.1 (1993, 6:23).

Potter potter potter…

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The Box ArrivesOpening the Box
One copy out...Our copies of Book Six
Prairie, Arboretum, Seattle, WAMe, Arboretum, Seattle, WA

And with that, it’s done! Our copies arrived about 11am this morning. After opening the box, we packed up picnic supplies and headed down to the Arboretum, spread out a blanket under the shade of a Madrone tree, and got to reading right about noon. Amusingly, Prairie and I read at almost exactly the same speed, so we were within a page or two of each other the entire time — sometimes one of us would be slightly ahead, sometimes the other, occasionally stealing glances at the other’s page numbers to see whether they were giggling or gasping at something we’d just read, or something we were about to read.

Five hours later, we were both within a few chapters of the end, but our bodies had finally started to complain about having been camped out on the ground for the entire day. So, quite reluctantly, we marked our places, came home…and dived right back in.

By 7pm, we were done. Prairie closed her copy just a couple minutes before I closed mine, and waited for me to finish. A few minutes of talk about the final events in the book, and then — after our long, stressful day of lying around in the shade reading — it was time for a nap.

And now, a long, long wait for book seven to arrive…

iTunes “Who Do You Want to Be” by Oingo Boingo from the album Best o’ Boingo (1983, 3:21).

Everything old is new again

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A random comment on a Flickr photo led me to do some digging, and after reading this summary of Seattle transportation efforts, all of a sudden it’s no surprise that we’ve seen such ridiculous controversy over our (finally under construction) light rail and (eternally beleaguered) monorail plans.

The essay is replete with examples of ideas, controversy, failed starts, cost overruns, tax packages…any of this sound familiar? From the look of it, it’s amazing that Seattle has anything at all to support those of us who — for whatever reason — eschew automobiles for other forms of transportation.

Completely randomly, another discovery I made: did you know that Seattle has its own flag? I didn’t, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it flying anywhere.

Phrase Origins

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Mom forwarded this to me today. I can’t personally vouch for the accuracy of everything in here, but it all sounds pretty reasonable to me, and there’s some fun tidbits in here.

Update: I really should have thought to check the Urban Legends Reference Pages first (seriously…I know better!). Status: False. Thanks to Ryan for pointing that out.

The next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water temperature isn’t just how you like it, think about how things used to be.

Here are some facts about the 1500s:

These are interesting…

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and still smelled pretty good by June. However, they were starting to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the saying, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.”

Read more

Twelve hours to go…

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Potter Fully Processed…or a bit more than twelve hours, actually, for Prairie and me. Since we pre-ordered our copies (yup — one for each of us) through Amazon, they’ll show up sometime tomorrow.

Our entire plan for the weekend is to spend it Pottering: stopping by the release party at the Barnes and Noble near my apartment tonight, then once our copies show up, we’ll camp out somewhere (at a park if the weather’s good, here at home otherwise) and get reading.

Silly? Not in our world — for us, this should be a perfect weekend.

(Originally uploaded by michaelkpate.)

Playing with MT 3.2 Beta

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I’m spending a little bit of time playing with the just-released public beta version of Movable Type 3.2 on a separate weblog. While I was tempted to just jump straight into upgrading this weblog straight away, I figured that it would be best to wait for a bit when I saw the list of already known bugs that still need to be squashed.

Still, I’m quite impressed with what I’ve seen so far, and it’s nice to have something of a ‘test bed’ to play with while work progresses towards the final version. Feel free to stop by and say hi if you’re curious.

iTunes “Dream Induction” by Emergency Broadcast Network from the album Telecommunication Breakdown (1995, 3:20).

Movable Type 3.2 is coming…

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Okay, sure, to a certain extent, it’s all propaganda. I’ve got to admit, though — Six Apart‘s Pronet series “Our 32 Favorite Features in Movable Type 3.2” is doing a bang-up job of getting me looking forward to MT’s next release.

They’re a bit shy of halfway through the series now (12 down, 20 to go), and while I don’t really know, I’m guessing that the new version will debut right about the time the series is done or soon thereafter. If you’re an MT user and haven’t been following the posts as they appear, it’s worth checking them out. Some nice goodies coming our way soon!

Update: The beta is out — all related news is at the beta blog.

Update: I’ve got a (very bare-bones at the moment) beta testing blog set up. Just a playground for the moment.

iTunes “Symphony of Destruction (Gristle)” by Megadeth from the album Foreclosure of a Dream (1992, 9:55).

Podcast 05: A Fine Day’s Mix

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The fifth of my old collection of mix sessions that I’m putting up for download and podcast. This one is another “theme” idea I had, and depending on how much you like the base song, could be either enjoyable or excruciating, as it strings together four versions of the same theme into one 22-minute track. I actually like it…kind of dreamy background music.

Standard disclaimer: All the mixes I’m posting were mixed ‘live’ — running a Pioneer dual CD mixer directly into my computer and recording straight to .mp3 — and have had no post-mix editing done in the computer. As such, they’re not flawless, but they’re not bad, either, if I do say so myself.

Here’s the link: A Fine Day’s Mix (22m 51s, 26.16Mb). Tracks included are:

  1. Opus III “It’s A Fine Day”
  2. Orbital “Halcyon & On & On”
  3. Orbital “Halcyon (Hot Tracks)”
  4. Miss Jane “It’s a Fine Day (Exit)”