The Ides of March...

 

If you said, "The band that did the song Vehicle, 1970," you get 25 bonus points.  If you said, "The song you finally got worked out to be your ringtone," you get 30 bonus points.  If you said, "From the Shakespeare play Julius Caesar: 'Beware the ides of March,' as a soothsayer's warning to Caesar," you get 35 bonus points.  If you said all three of those, you get an additional 10 bonus points, making it a nice round 100 points.

For more information that you don't care to know: the word “Ides” is derived from the Latin word “idus,” which refers to the middle day of any month in the ancient Roman calendar. The Ides are specifically the fifteenth day of the months of March, May, July, or October, and the thirteenth day of the remaining months.

Whew - I feel like Cliff Clavin.  If you said, "Cliff Clavin is the character on the TV series Cheers who knew all kinds of trivia... well, maybe he didn't know it, but he always shared it," you get another 30 bonus points.

I need to get a life.

An image for "Beware the Ides of March"...

(That photo was from my Facebook Memory from 7 years ago... it's been around a while.)

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I got together today with Mark and two of his friends, Ron and Tom, to make some music; at Ron's house, which is near downtown Phoenix.  That meant I-10 all the way there, and the traffic is a big ol' ball of suck.  And Rain.  So, I took the car, not the motorcycle.  I would have needed the car anyway, since most of my gear is at Mark's house, I needed to bring a guitar today.  And Mark had to bring two guitars, a bass, two amps, his pedalboard and a bunch of ancillary gear to support all that.  He and I have it relatively easy when everyone gets together at his house, since we don't have to cart a bunch of gear around.

While helping Mark get gear out to his car, he said to me, "This is almost like the old band days, having to carry all this stuff around."  It's a bit easier, since the amps can be carried with one hand, opposed to the "good ol' days" when it took two young, strong guys to carry just one amp... and there were multiple amps... and a PA... and a drum set... and - well, you get the idea.

Ron had put out some guitars, so the rest of us could try some variety.  One of those guitars is a rarity: a mid-60s Rickenbacker - here's a photo of Mark giving it a try...

A fun afternoon!