Silencio!

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And here begins a 48-hour-ish period of self-imposed exile from the ‘net. Due to time’s slow march around the globe, Muggles across the world are already diving into the final year of adventures at Hogwarts, and while Prairie and I will be receiving our copies tomorrow (thanks to the express owls dispatched from Amazon), due to a prior engagement (a wedding that I’m assisting with photography duties for), we won’t actually be able to read them until Sunday (as Prairie is being kind enough to wait until we can read our copies — one for each of us — together).

So — while we may check e-mail accounts — all else is off limits, to prevent any possible spoiler trolls sneaking past and ruining the fun.

Until we’re done, then…

Dance Off 2007 is Coming!

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Dance Off 2007Last year, entirely on a whim, Prairie and I went to Dance Off 2006 and had an absolute blast. During the show, I took a few photos, and sent the link off to the Dance Off crew. Turns out they liked them…in fact, they liked them so much that this year, I’m one of two official photographers for the event!

This year’s Dance Off is coming soon — just two weeks away! This year it’ll be held at the Crocodile on August 2nd at 8pm, and it’d be a good idea to buy your tickets now, as last year’s show sold out.

Dance Off is an annual dance battle for those who have the heart and soul of a dancer, but lack the training and talent of a dancer.

Each summer, teams of dancers band together and choreograph awesomely bad routines with which to enter the battle realm. They perform these routines for a drunken audience who determine the best of the worst for that year.

After the votes are tallied, a winner is crowned and an insane dance party rages into the night.

Does this sound like fun to you? Then be prepared each August for Dance Off to rock your face!

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

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Prairie and I went out to see the latest Potter movie last Sunday, and quite enjoyed it — in fact, this may be our current favorite (with number two battling for the prime spot in Prairie’s eyes). While many people have found it a bit rushed, I was impressed with how well they were able to compress such a long book into the span of just over a couple hours. To me, it felt fast, but not necessarily rushed. As Prairie and I have spent a couple days thinking back on it, we’re both pretty satisfied with this latest entry, and what few issues we have with the film fall pretty solidly into the realm of nitpicking, rather than actual issues.

Nitpicks (good things and bad, actually) under the cut (spoilers and all)…

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Not Exactly Lushes

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As I put a six-pack of Smirnoff Ice (Raspberry Blast) into the shopping cart next to Prairie’s bottle of wine, I turned to her and asked, “So when did we last buy alcohol?”

She paused, then held up a hand and started counting backwards on her fingers. “Seven, eight…nine months?”

Not exactly doing our part to keep the booze flowin’, are we?

Club Blacklight’s Last Hurrah

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Geisha vs. Ninja, Fetish Night, Club Blacklight

A few shots from the Blacklight’s final weekend. Most are from Friday night, which featured a few performances by a local fetish group…and as such, range from mildly NSFW (near-nudity with pasties) to extremely NSFW (bondage, domination, and simulated lesbian strap-on sex). Flickr members should have access to the entire set (depending on your individual settings, as the more potentially offensive photos are designated as either ‘moderate’ or ‘restricted’), non-Flickr members can use this Guest Pass link to view the full, uncensored set — or simply click through the photo above or use the standard link for the worksafe version.

Heat Wave

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Today's Forecast...

75 degrees already, and it’s only 8:30 in the morning.

An expected record-setting high of 96 degrees.

Y’know, I thought I moved to Seattle…who snuck up on me and shipped me to southern California (or the midwest, or south, or East coast…I wanted someplace warmer than Alaska when I left, but there’s a reason I stayed in the Pacific Northwest!)?

Ah, well. We’re coping the best we can: fans all over the apartment, daily dunks in the pool, occasional cool showers, spritzers of cool water by the bed, and so on. We keep daydreaming about A/C, but given Seattle, we’d only need it for maybe one week out of the year, so it’s really not worth spending money on. Better to just be wusses and whine our way through the occasional heat wave.

Boy in the Pool

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Boy in the Pool

Boy in the Pool, originally uploaded by Prairie Brown.

Prairie took a bunch of pictures of me dorking around in the pool with my snorkel equipment the other day.

Since today’s heading up into the 80’s, we’re thinking heading back to the pool sounds like a really good idea….

Live Free or Die Hard

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In short: as far as summer blockbuster entertainment goes, Live Free or Die Hard was everything that Transformers should have been. Big, loud, funny, and — and this is a key point — believable in its implausibility. I’m honestly not sure how exactly they do it (though I’ve got a few guesses, and right at the top of the list are three things: decent screenwriting, decent direction, and a reliance on good old-fashioned physical stuntwork instead of a constant barrage of CGI), but no matter how silly the stunts get…and they do get silly…LFoDH manages to sell them and keep them just believable enough to hold onto the audience.

Prairie and I both came out of LFoDH with big grins, having thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. This one’s worth seeing.

Transformers

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So last night, giving in to our inner 12-year-olds, Rick and I went out to see Transformers, Michael Bay‘s latest assault on good moviemaking, good taste, and childhood memories.

Mini-review number one: It was glorious, incredible, over-the-top, in-your-face, enjoyably bad.

Mini-review number two: Moments of “holy shit, that was cool,” buried in a whole mess of, “what the fuck?”

In other words, it was exactly what I was afraid it might end up being: a bizarre combination of seeing the coolest toys from my childhood on screen as if they’d been ripped right out of my prepubescent imagination, and Michael Bay’s crack-addict-on-a-caffeine-IV approach to moviemaking. The man is such a hack, but he’s just so good at it that you end up walking out hating yourself for actually enjoying the dreck that he puts on screen.

More thoughts (some quite possibly spoileriffic) after the jump….

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