First and foremost: when I was seven or so, I liked cartoons. And every morning, the USA television network would show good cartoons. Not like that crappy Nickelodeon, which just pumped out game shows back then. No, USA had the proverbial goods. And just before each show, they would play a little short called "In A Minute" spotlighting activism of children around the country. I would try to get up early just to see In A Minute... it never worked, of course, because I've been a chronic oversleeper since perhaps before I was born, but I tried. I remember this so vividly now... it's strange.

Perhaps it's seeing a television laying outside of my front door that brought these memories so vividly to the surface. When I was seven or so, my parents bought a brand new Toshiba nineteen-inch television, and I utilized it in my watching of cartoons. It has rested in the living room ever since... until tonight, when I found the aged Toshiba sitting on the concrete outside the steps leading down from the portal. I thought for a minute that perhaps my parents were finally breaking the bonds of the television, that they were determined to bring my sister up free of its curse!
But there in the living room sat the television from my parents' bedroom. Oh well. I guess the old activists' cry of "Kill Your TV!" is redundant when the TV has lost its will to live.

Anyway, on to more salient events: I Am The World Trade Center is a very good live group. So very, very good. I'm still not sure how they found themselves driving eleven hours to play to a sixteen people in a big, empty retirement center dining hall in South Dakota, but there it was, and there they were. Thirty minutes of solid beats and upbeat fun -- inspired by some newly-tweaked choreographing; I noticed a notebook full of it on a chair -- was ended awkwardly with the words, "Well, thanks for coming out here. We hope it was as weird for you as it was for us."

And so it was. The cover band, Cleavage, didn't show, forcing the other "cover band"--two kids with a Yamaha synthesizer and a microphone--to waste two hours by going through all of the rhythm presets on the box, one by one. They seemed to take it rather well, though, given the circumstances.

Bottom lines: I Am The World Trade Center has upgraded their equipment since cutting their last recording and improved rather well. My speech in class was apparently a failure, as none of them showed up. And now I go back to work for the tourists in the Ice Cream Mines of Keystone.

VERY IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: My SPOON is TOO BIG!