Starscape 2008

Another year, another awesome Starscape. But what did you miss by not attending?

Photos by High-Rezolution

Well, as I summarized in an email to the Mini-football (a.k.a. Charlie, George's brother):

The Cat in the Hat, by Dr. Douche:

Candy Kids:

Rave Creature:

Electronic Musician BT:

Disco Mom:

Tanning Whore:

And Most Important: Sweaty Mess (me) and his sidekick, Corey:

Previous: Starscape 2006

Liveblogging: Billiam Clinton @ Mason

Joey and Corey joined me in the Johnson Center at George Mason for Bill Clinton's pre-Potomac Primary rally for his cyborg proto-spouse.

8:53 - left class early for the 9:00pm "start". Wait, didn't Bill make 50 nations wait to get food at McDonald's?
8:58 - Billary's staff: HOMELY
9:08 - found a spot to watch, too bad 1,000 sociopathic Asians think it's Chinese New Year, but instead it's ADA and VIPs only
9:15 - speech from campus democrats about how awesome they are for organizing this awesome event in this not-so-awesome venue. The Patriot Center worked for the final four, but not so much for Clinton.
9:43 - somewhere, the 42nd President is loose, and fat coeds are not safe.
9:50 - **cheers** Blah blah Clinton.
9:56 - "my case for Hillary": cute face, chubby waist, thick legs in shape

9:58 - "signing up poor Hispanics to vote"
9:59 - dumb whore falls off chair she's standing on. crowd cheers.
10:00 - "blah blah" something about Israel

10:01 - "you may remember"...no you don't, you were 8 when it happened
10:02 - "you may think NY is a Democratic state"...
10:04 - "last year she passed the student loan blah blah bill"
10:05 - "mortgage meltdown, recession" -- unbelievable!
10:06 - "90 day mortgage review" -- keep the munthly on ma house. booyah!
10:09 - "raise your hand if you know someone without health care", "the only major nation in world without health care". we know, we can buy the congressional health plan. we know 15 million won't want it. they don't have to. PARETO PRINCIPLE!!! everybody must be covered.
10:15 - "we were poorest first family in 20th century", but the booty calls were amazing
10:17 - vote for Hillary. xoxo
10:18 - "number 2 education. free pre-k, death to no child left behind", even though my wife voted for it.

10:18 - how does NCLB work? MORE TESTS FOR EVERYONE!
10:19 - "our kids are smart". amazing considering facebook.
10:20 - "the tests are a wink and a nod", like my marriage. ;) save the music, arts, and other nerd activities. "we are not good at replicating excellence". "5 tests solve nothing", even though my starbucks franchise example makes no sense (they don't franchise).
10:23 - "make college accessible to all. raise pell grants raise hope scholarship. give young people more opportunities through americorps". direct lending.

10:25 - work in a clinic, loans repaid. AIDS pays. hooray.
10:26 - is it happy hour yet?
10:27 - who can we convince to cut their greenhouse gas? green collar high school dropouts. clean -- green -- snogans.
10:29 - bill [hearts] iphone price cuts.
10:30 - other countries hate us? but...but foreign policy?
10:31 - two new nukes for every boy...except iran. nah nah nah nah nah nah!
10:33 - iraq...yawn. it's hot and crowd is thinning. i need Billary pictures.
10:34 - oh dear, big girl panty line. gross.
10:35 - "suppose your neighbors house burned down", wait that doesn't work. let's discuss how used the military is right now. more marines in afghanistan, if i hd them to send.
10:36 - Hil 4 prez == America is BACK! I have a name for my new facebook group.
10:37 - wrapping up, yawn.

JJ & Smooth @ Buzz

[Photos from High Rezolution]

As a duo, JJ Flores and Steve Smooth have produced a half-dozen of the biggest club hits in the past several years. You may not recognize their names, but DJ's like Bad Boy Bill and Jon Carpenter spin Get Naked, Deep Inside These Walls, Freak You, Release, and Time for Love.

JJ and Smooth, however, didn't really drop any of their own hits during their Buzz set, they just spun gay house.




But as you can see, they had a lot of fun doing.

Corey and Tammy joined me on this trip, but the only horrible photos seems to be of me (natch).

TCM @ Buzz

Not since 2006's Summer of Electronic have I seen The Crystal Method live. They did play a show at 930 Club, but I didn't think it could compare to their last performance at Nation.

Until TCM @ Buzz @ Fur !!!

Photos from High Rezolution



Hi, I'm half the DJ ensemble known as "The Crystal Method". Would you like me to spin you a tune?!?!



Look, it's Kristin!



If you look very closely, you'll find a blog author wearing a brown dress shirt. Banana Republic made 5,000 of them, and the other 4,999 are buried in the closets of Persians all over the US.


In addition to Kristin, both Charlie (George's brother, a.k.a. "Mini-football") and Corey came along. We did run into the gorgeous ladies of Winchester (who now live in Silver Spring). Pregame involved too much vodka and too little cranberry, but somehow we all survived.

wh00t!

Emoti-whut?

Via SMS:

Corey: i can't -- no
theAlphaJohn: :-@
Corey: ?
theAlphaJohn: !
Corey: What does :-@ mean?
theAlphaJohn: I think that is a wide agape mouth sticking its steven tyler tongue out
theAlphaJohn: LOVE IN AN ELEVATOR!

Williamsburg, VA

Back when I was a Madrigal Singer in April of 1996, we performed at Bruton Parish Church in Colonial Williamsburg.



Since I couldn't get a hotel in NYC at the last minute I had not been there in years, I decided to spend Columbus Day Weekend there.

Friday

---

• Stayed at Crowne Plaza, which allows pets. Too bad I don't have a puppy.


• Dinner at The Trellis, one of the best meals I've ever eaten


• I sent text messages to all the former W&M alum I could think of to find out where the best night spot was in Williamsburg. Billy's answer: Paul's. Despite getting a Guinness in a plastic cup (and a single pour), this college bar provided lots of wonderful young flesh to gawk at.

Saturday

---

• Lunch at The Sportsman Grille. Service: D-, Food: D+


• Drank tasty Pumpkin Ale at The Tap House Grill At Ghent in Norfolk, VA


• Hooray bar-hopping trannies! Took photographs of Corey with said trannies

(Miss Angel on the left, Corey and his goatee in center, and Miss Diana on the right):


Sunday

---

• Breakfast at a random pancake house. Hit the spot.


• Went to Busch Gardens, which is running their Howl-o-Scream...whatever it is.



• While in line and being attacked from teenage werewolves, I see my new hero: Daddy Juice Pig:
  
  Daddy Juice Pig was there with his little (maybe 8 years old) son. Complete with b-acne and swollen forehead, he proved that it's never to early to show your children how important performance enhancing drugs can be.


• Dinner and drinks at Paul's (Yum!)

Monday

---

• Another pancake house breakfast


• Visited Jamestown, took pictures, and most-of-all: sweated. Everything there is basically a 100 year old recreation of its former, 400 year old self.

Restful, relaxing, and out of my system.

Is There a Nobel Prize for Food?

I had a very late dinner/very early breakfast at IHOP with Corey. I could not decide what I wanted to eat, and struggled with the menu for a good 15 minutes. I finally ordered pancakes and eggs, and long after the waiter had put in our order, I spyed table tents across the way.

...?...

We didn't have a table tent.

What was on it, you ask? Pumpkin pancakes.

!!! xoxo !!!

I sulked the entire time we waited for our food, and kept sulking after I'd eaten every bite. I finally asked the waiter for a short stack of pumpkin pancakes, and they were delicious!

My only suggestion (and I emailed this to IHOP.com), is to either (1) whip some cream cheese up with whipped cream to make a cream cheese spread, or (2) just use the cream cheese filling from the crepes. Either way, a light, sweet, cream cheese frosting on their pumpkin pancakes would easily win an entire season of Top Chef.

Me thinks it's time to eat a bullet

With apologies to Jim Norton for the post title.

It is 2:20am, and I've been working on a single chapter of Finance homework for most of the day; I have three due at 11:59pm on Sunday. The entire day has been about 10 practice problems, and knowing that I have #10 completely fucked up, I emailed it off to my professor asking wtf I did wrong:

theAlphaJohn: ok this problem is driving me nuts. it makes no sense
Corey: try me
theAlphaJohn: Project Evaluation

Aguilera Acoustics (AAI), Inc., projects unit sales for a new 7-octave voice emulation implant as follows:

Year Unit Sales
1 105,400
2 121,520
3 131,440
4 141,360
5 115,320

Production of the implants will require $1,860,000 in net working capital to start and additional net working capital investments each year equal to 11 percent of the projected sales increase for the following year. Total fixed costs are $1,116,000 per year, variable production costs are $297 per unit, and the units are priced at $403 each. The equipment needed to begin production has an installed cost of $26,040,000.
theAlphaJohn: so NWC increases each year by 11% of the sales increase, which is the number of units * price (403$)
theAlphaJohn: in year four though, next year's sales are less, and in year five there is no next year
theAlphaJohn: so does NWC stay the same in 4 and 5 as 3? does NWC actually decrease (err increase since it's already an outflow)
theAlphaJohn: and the answer so far is none of the above b/c it doesnt get me the right answer
Corey: ouch...i'm glad i had beer cause my head would be hurting right now
Corey: that kind of computations at 1 am is not an easy thing
theAlphaJohn: i wonder if im going the wrong direction
theAlphaJohn: when sales go up, working capital goes down by 11% of the difference
Corey: yeah
theAlphaJohn: so initially it's -1,860,000
theAlphaJohn: then it's -1,860,000 - (48972650 - 42479200) * .11
theAlphaJohn: but in year 4 it flips over b/c sales decrease
theAlphaJohn: the book makes it look like that's fine, but then when i recover NWC the NPV becomes way, way too small
theAlphaJohn: which means the CF is Y5 is way overstated
theAlphaJohn: and then my brain leaks out my left ear
Corey: well i would first get some ear plugs
Corey: brain all over the desk could be a bit messy
theAlphaJohn: i understand the math, but what it means makes no sense
theAlphaJohn: in year one, you need to lay out 1.8 mil in working capital to get this going. then each year, you increase that by 11% in proportion to how much sales go up
theAlphaJohn: ..
theAlphaJohn: in year 4, when next years sales go down by 30,000 units, you recover 1.15 million dollars
theAlphaJohn: that makes no fucking sense
theAlphaJohn: you wouldnt need to put any more money out to accomodate sales, but you wouldn't get back almost as much as you laid out initially
Corey: hmm...this one seems to be hard without writing down all the calc. in front of me on paper to see the flow
theAlphaJohn: i want to do business in this imaginary world where a 20% drop in sales means a million bucks back in your pocket
Corey: hehehe that would be really nice
theAlphaJohn: it'd be baller
theAlphaJohn: fiddy and i would be racing our gallardos down the road
theAlphaJohn: cause when a huge drop in sales puts a mil in your pocket, daddy goes to lamborghini and buys himself a fresh ride

Homework Manager gives you all 10 practice problems in one group, but the graded assignment doles out problems in two parts. Before calling it a night, I decided to do the graded homework problems for Chapter 10 (even though I'd bomb the one) just so I felt like I accomplished something. Homework Managers allows you to retake the assignment up until it's due and only the highest grade counts.

I logged in and did Chapter 10 Part 1 and the first problem doesn't resemble any of the practice problems: I got 50%!

I have been doing practice problems, reading the book, working in Excel, all god-damned day for 50%?!?!

What kind of noise do you think a giraffe makes when you slit its throat from the bottom all the way up? Maybe I'll track down a tall ladder and run over to National Zoo tonight so I can find out.

Happy Birthday, Aunty Samantha

[Photos from High Rezolution]



This entry is post-dated, because I was a dehydrated disaster on Wednesday.

Corey, Kirsten, and her friend Onseya joined me for a bangin' evening at Firecracker. Corey and I had a brief pre-game in the parking lot, then made our way inside. While I was in line, a lass named Andrea and I discussed DJ Icey's performance a few weeks ago in Chicago, and that she was there to see Starkillers (who I was also excited to see live for the first time).



Apparently there are four DJ booths in Fur, but before Tuesday night I'd only found two. We wandered into the Mafia room so I could catch part of Bob Jong Ill's set. He was spinning what I would call progressive house, which isn't my favorite, but I really enjoyed what I heard.

Kristin and Onsaya finally showed up, so we worked our way into the main room to hear the end of Icey's set. As I've said, I'm not the biggest break-beat fan, but he really pushed that sound system to the edge; I'm glad I wore ear plugs. We worked our way toward the booth and ran into Andrea and her friend Tammy; we ended up dancing together for most of the night.



In talking to Tammy after the show, it turns out we were just a few feet from each other during Paul van Dyk's show.

Andrea and Tammy:



Sweaty Mess:



...

Back to Fur: at one point last night, I got pissed that my shoes kept coming untied, to I kicked them off and danced on the disgusting dance floor without them.

In short: Bob Jong Ill kicked ass, Icey spun a good set, Starkillers rocked the house, and DJ Dan crushed the crowd at the end.

More pics of our crew: