Catching Up: Another Concert, Las Vegas

We haven't had a chance to update this blog in quite some time, but we have been up to some pretty exciting things.

Two weeks ago, Diana and I went to another concert--but believe it or not, this one wasn't at Largo. Instead, we went out to the El Rey theatre on Wilshire, just a few blocks away from our gym, the La Brea Tar Pits, and LACMA.


The evening's entertainment? The Squirrel Nut Zippers. But actually, the opening band was just as cool. We'd never heard of them, but that didn't stop us from really enjoying the Fishtank Ensemble--a strange, "cross pollinated gypsy" band. Yeah, that's right.


A strange mix of flamenco, Romanian folk, jazz, and ... probably about ten other things I couldn't name. My best way to describe them would be Django Reinhart meets Gogol Bordello. Definitely a lot of fun--check them out.

The main act was the Squirrel Nut Zippers. Some videos--taken by someone else, but at that night's show:

Put a Lid On It


Good Enough for Grandad

The set list for the show was just about perfect. From beginning to end, they played essentially every song I could want--and pretty much none of the songs I don't particularly like. Hot jazz, calypso, blues, American roots music--it was a touch of everything. They played only one song from their final album, but that one confirmed my suspicion that that could have been a good album if produced differently--some of the material was pretty good. Diana and I are both enormous fans of Katherine Whalen's voice, and I, at least, was a bit disappointed by her performance--but that was quite possibly a symptom of my unrealistic expectations.

So, we kicked the week off with the Zippers, and ended it with ZERO-G. Diana and I both drove up to Las Vegas for a half-day training course for coaches on ZERO-G, the parabolic flight company. We're both really looking forward to becoming full-fledged coaches sometime soon! More on that as we hear it--but we're both in the corps now, and that's the key first step.

We didn't have time to do too much in Vegas--we were there for work, after all--but we certainly did have a little fun. The highlight? Dinner at Spago. Oh yeah, and this: