dark chocolate peanut m&m's

My first question was why they put artificial flavors in the chocolate. Not what I want to be eating, but I guess the answer is obvious - because they want them to taste better so more people buy them.

My second question was why "peanuts" is an ingredient to the chocolate.

snow and things

That was a heavy shovel, and my ass hurts.

Umm...

We had about three inches of heavy, wet snow on the driveway. I did all of the lifting with my legs, so my glutes are really stiff today. I'm sure it made matters worse to come inside and spend the rest of the day sitting on said ass.

I made a spreadsheet of all the CDs we own. I did that last weekend. I did a spreadsheet so I could sort it. First by artist, and then by release date so albums by an artist show up in the order they were released. So this weekend, I entered dates. It took longer than I expected. Making the list was easy - just bring in a stack of CDs, and type their names. It's harder to find the dates on the releases, so I looked everything up online. Wikipedia, mostly. I think I worked on it from 4:00 to 1:00am. Although, once I got the list sorted, I was able to start looking for duplicates, mis-alphabetization, misspellings and such. So that took up some time. And time out for dinner. And when there was no article on Wikipedia, so I wrote it myself. That took almost half an hour.

But still, I sat in a chair for nine hours, after shoveling for two.

concert venues

Milwaukee is a big city. Not big like NYC, Atlanta, Seattle, whatever, but big enough to host the biggest of the big bands. Bands like The Stones and U2 don't play here every tour, but often enough. But Milwaukee has a problem in being situated too close to Chicago. Many bands will skip Milwaukee, and just do Chicago and Minneapolis. They figure that Milwaukeeans can see them in Chicago. That's true, since it's less than a two hour drive away, but the problem is that they don't advertise up here for Chicago shows, because they'll sell out anyway. You really have to be on top of things to find out about the shows. You have to be following the news on your favorite bands, or have some line on what's going on down there. That's a lot easier than it used to be, with the internet. You can subscribe to services, or just have a folder of bookmarks to check periodically.

I was reminded of this problem, when I was reading about a David Bowie tour tonight. A conversation from the time: "Did you hear David Bowie's on tour?" *Not extremely interested* "Yeah?" "He's touring with Nine Inch Nails." *freaks out* "OMG! No way! Where? When? How much are tickets?" "Chicago. They're sold out." *ack*

I'm a casual fan of David Bowie. I've never followed him very closely, and my favorite record of his is a compilation (or maybe Tin Machine), but hearing that he was touring with NIN just seemed right for him, and of course I was a big NIN fan.

Here's what I read earlier tonight:

In September of 1995, Bowie began the Outside Tour, with Reeves Gabrels joining him as his live band's guitarist. In a move that was equally lauded and ridiculed by Bowie fans and critics, Bowie chose Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails as his US tour partner. NIN & Bowie (as well as Kevin McMahon's Prick, Trent's fellow Nothing Records industrial artist and friend) toured as a co-headlining act: NIN appeared on stage first, always playing an equal amount of stage time as Bowie. As the crew changed sets behind a large backdrop, NIN would play several Bowie compositions ("Subterraneans", "Hallo Spaceboy", and "Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)"), followed by two NIN songs with Bowie ("Reptile" and "Hurt"). This arrangement was an effort to keep young concert goers interested in staying for Bowie, though in each city few of the younger crowd stayed for the Bowie set.

That sounds like an amazing show. I would love to have heard the two artists performing each other's songs together. That in itself is extremely cool. And Prick was there too. One of the few shows that I'm perpetually disappointed to have missed.