MY NEW GUITAR!

This weekend, I bought a Silvertone Sovereign Special Paul Stanley guitar! Check that thing out. What a crazy purchase.

I have been wanting a new electric guitar for a while. I did not want to spend more than $200... I don't play out at all, it's just a toy. For fun. I went out this weekend with the goal of coming home packing ax.

I saw a bunch of very nice Fender guitars (kind of what I wanted), but none were less than $350. That is just too much to spend on what will really be a big old toy.

The guitar you see to the left was in the window. It kind of called to me. I grabbed it, sort of jokingly... "A Paul Stanley guitar! Hee hee!"

This is very important: I am not a Kiss fan. It's not that I don't like them; they can play some rocking tunes! But there is absolutely NO REASON for me to own a Paul Stanley guitar. NONE. I do not now, nor have I EVER owned any music by Kiss. Owning this guitar would be silly.

So I knew pretty quickly it was exactly what would have to happen.

ALSO, the pick guard, and the ornament up by the tuning knobs are MIRRORS. Mirrors! This actually matches my bar, which is covered with shards of glass. (No part of my apartment is child friendly.) The guitar-bar connection certainly helped to seal the deal.

The sticker price: $199.00.

It was way too perfect.

I asked to take it for a test drive... they gave me a cable and an amp which had reverb and distortion built in. I sloppily ran through some warm-up type stuff on this out of tune window model. I played some open chords -- awesome. I played some power chords -- awesome. I played through a punked version of I Ain't Your Steppin' Stone by the Monkees -- AWESOME**. As I played, the new strings fell more out of tune, and the reverb and distortion just enhanced the dissonance.

I was in love.

It's mine.





** (Steppin Stone: play bar/power chords based on E: E - G - A - C for the verse and chorus...each chord is a little higher up the neck... there is a quick E - GAG thing after each chorus that just is super fast and rocking. Awesome.)

Last night I watched Killers From Space...

A simple story		A complicated tale
Seen it before		A fresh perspective
Visually ordinary		Special effects-y

I have this odd attraction towards movies that are so bad that they are good. This movie is perfectly awe-ful (sic). It stars a young Peter Graves as a nuclear scientist observing the first nuclear tests from an airplane. The controls of his plane freeze up over the nuclear test site, and he crash lands. His body is not found, but he is assumed dead.

Soon after, he is found staggering back to the military base. He has no memory of the crash, and he is perfectly healthy, except for an odd scar on his chest.

Eventually, his memory does return, and he begins babbling about some subterranean aliens, breeding giant-sized versions of insects and reptiles, that are plotting to destroy the world! Of course, everyone thinks he's a nut.

Peter Graves is actually pretty good, but my brain kept flashing to him as the pilot in Airplane who asks the little boy "Have you ever seen a a grown man naked?" That was a little distracting. Humorous, but distracting.

The alien makeup was just great. In order to make aliens, they used what look like half ping pong balls with little holes in them to give them bug-out eyes. THAT WAS IT. Hilarious. Sometimes the holes weren't lined up very well, so they looked googly-eyed. OH! AND soon after Peter Graves comes back from the crash, he's having a nightmare where he sees JUST these eyes in front of him. They show this vision of the floating eyes before you ever actually see the aliens, and all I could think during that first vision scene was "Why is Peter Graves imagining a pair of breasts floating in space?"

There is another scene where P.G. encounters the 'giant' animals. I think it goes on for 20 minutes. It is just him in front of a blue screen, where they show animals behind him. The video fills up the screen so that they look huge. Sort of. The effect is pretty poor. I think it's supposed to be terrifying, but it's just kind of funny.

I don't know if Mystery Science Theater ever mocked this one, but they should have.

I highly recommend it.