whoa dude. not cool coincidences.

Last week here in town, a woman's body was found burning at a local trail head. It was found out to be an 87 year old local woman. She wasn't your typical 87 yr old granny. She was still very active and enjoyed things like facebook, which she was on a lot.

Anywho, it seems it was a burglary gone awry. (well, i guess her death may have been planned, i have no idea yet.) It looks like a random burglary because houses next to hers were found to have been tried to get broken into. There were screens removed and windows tried with no luck. For 87 yr old Kit Grazioli, her window was found accessible. Using fingerprints the police found on scene, they went and picked up 21 year old suspect, Marcus Allen Smith.

Here's where the coincidences get a little weird ...
---> The victim's house was reported as in the "1100 block of Samuel Point Drive".
~ Our great grandmother lived just down the street, but had moved right before her passing.
~ We know the owner of one of the tried-to-but-couldn't-get-in houses.
~ We have friends who know the victim quite well. One of our closer friends just attended a meeting and the victim sat right next to her and they chatted throughout the meeting.

---> The suspect was reported to have been picked up on the "1300 block of Suncrest Way"
~ Our great grandmother, mentioned above, moved out of her home on Samuel Point and moved in with her daughter (our Aunt) into a house at 1345 Suncrest Way (they recently moved, which is why I'm not worried about giving out such details).
~ Our Aunt's next door neighbor, at 1353 Suncrest Way, had a son of the same age as the suspect.
~ The police were called multiple times by concerned neighbors when the father of the boy living at 1353 would presumably "beat on" the son and the mother.
~ The suspect's name is Marcus Allen Smith. Using the public property search for the homes neighboring our Aunt's house. The house immediately next door is said to be owned by "Allen Smith".

It all really sucks.

(In)Fertility statistics.

I was watching GWLBWLB tonight and I heard one girl say "25% of couples will get pregnant on their first try".

And after rolling my eyes, I tried to access my infertility stats section of my memory vault and realized that someone had broken in and stole everything of value.

There are a TON of general and very detailed statistics out there regarding fertility and infertility. Help me out and comment with any you happen to remember.

Please?

i like big butts and i cannot lie

and I know you other brothers can't deny.

quick blog post here. I'm on a vinyl kick and running through my collections. It's not a ~huge~ selection, but let's say is isn't a tiny bit either. I have a couple of hundred records - lp and 7".

My comment today is - there isn't really any great vinyl selection here in my town. It used to be stinkweeks and eastside records, but not anymore. (heh - I still have my Tower Records badge with my name filled out as "bubbles". All I now have to chose from is the locally owned record store which only carries one aisle of new records and only 2 tiny bins for their 7"s.

I know i can buy anything off the internet, but half the fun was going on my weekly mission to the record store and slowly flip through each record. On more than a few outtings I would buy a record that just looked good. Or maybe came from a label I was familiar with the types of bands they signed.

It makes me sad. Does anyone else out there shop for vinyl? Any recomendations on searching in the absence of a good record store? Or am I denstined to make trips to the big cities for a ~real~ record store?

11 years old. Whoa. And have you seen francis bean?

I've been playing some really old music lately, delving into a lot of things I grew up listening to. The violent femmes, as you can tell from my last post, is one of those bands. I was at a stop light, looking at the cd itself. And then I saw it. 1983. Holy shit. I was ELEVEN. That's a long time ago for me, I'm not a spring chicken. Although I didn't listen to them until I was 14. I distinctly remember sharing the headphones of Cindy's walkman (so cool!) in typing class. (yes, typing. i sucked at it at the time. I used to wait until someone was done with their assignment and then I'd take their paper to the library on a "bathroom break" and photocopy it, slap my name on top and turn it in.) Anywho - I was enthralled by "add it up". It was the very first time I heard the f bomb in music. It changed my life. I scraped together some money and went and bought the tape myself.

What I think is crazy is it is almost 28 years old and I don't think it sounds that old. Like it could still be played, as is, on any 'alternative' radio station. Or am I just getting old too? Does it sound like classic (punk)rock to a 20 year old today?

Nirvana too. Nevermind is fucking 20 years old. And it IS played on regular rotation by many of the rock radio stations. Are they just that immortal? (ouch.)

I'm a huge nirvana fan. Always was. I got bleach in 1989, not long after it was released. I saw them in a handful of shows - starting with a tiny bar in 91 when i had my fake id (the real reason i had one was to get into shows when my favorite bands were playing in bars) for $5. Saw them play at another very small bar when word leaked out they were showing up for a non advertised show when one of the bands they were friends with from the northwest was playing (the melvins? or mudhoney? I think the latter) the same night they were playing the arizona state fair. And then he killed himself. It broke my heart so much that I stopped listening to nirvana all together for years and years. It broke my heart to play anything. It still does.

Tangent here ... I finally got over my questions about why he killed himself. This is just my own conclusion, but it's one I can accept. Kurt Cobain was a tortured soul all of his life. And then he got ~everything~ the average artist could ever want handed to him on a platinum platter in the space of just a few years. Fame. Money. Adoration. A wife. A daughter. I think he tried to appreciated it and tried to be happy but his own mentality wouldn't join in. He was ~still~ tortured. Could you imagine how horrific it would be to you if you came to the conclusion that even after getting ~everything~ you could ever imagine to hope to get, your brain STILL kept you tortured? That realization would drive me to suicide. To find out no matter what you did, no matter what the world gave you in return, you would NEVER gain happiness? And then to fear your unhappiness would touch upon his beautiful daughter, frances bean? I understand how he must felt. And I understand his decision to go. Am I glad he did it? No. Have I made peace with the "why"? yes. yes i have.

Tangent 2 here ... Have you seen that recent photo session with francis bean cobain? Holy shit. She. is. gorgeous. She looks so much like her mom and so much like her dad at the same time. It's got to be hard to live your life under the shadow of her father's career and her mother's nuttiness. Which, by the way, I love courtney love. She'd fucking bat shit crazy - yes. But that's what I love about her.

Circling back to my music choices, just a few more things to say. I bought some old albums I was nosalgic over listening to in my formative years. One album was Public Image Limited. You know, Johnny Rotten's post sex pistols band? I used to LOVE this one album. So I listened to it. And I'll never listen to it ever again. It's just plain terrible. The next one was Pop Will Eat Itself. How do i even describe it? A electronic/techno/alternative/'rap' style? It's like nine inch nails and the beastie boys has a bastard son.