Welcome to a seriously first-person, self-reflexive version of this mess. Apologia! And onward.

UE, Cementland: Unquestionably the worst-kept secret in local UE circles, Cementland is a delightful place to spend the day. Summer. Winter. No matter, it’s always got something to recommend the journey, even when the mud’s up to your knees. Quality UE run, for sure. And did you know it was featured by the New York Times? (Photo by Carrie Z.)

Restaurant, Revival: The place isn’t far from home, the prices are reasonable, the vibe is laid-back, the servers are either unpretentious or personal friends (or both), and the food is… well, the food is amazing. I’ve never had less than an excellent meal at Revival. And, yet, I somehow go there only walk-in every six-to-eight weeks. Peculiar. If only I had some type of artificial reference point to use to stimulate myself to visit more. You know, like a calendar change. Because that fried okra is not to be missed. (By the way, if you sign up for the Revival e-mail newsletter, you get a 20% off discount to Cyrano’s and Boogaloo, as well as Revival. I am obviously fired up about this restaurant.)

Book, “Population: 485“: You ever picked up a book, simply because it was sitting in an unexpected place, clearly there for the grabbing? And, then, it turned out to be a really quality choice, about small-town life in rural Wisconsin? Yeah, me too! Excellent read.

Holistic healing, New Life Therapy Clinic: So, a while back, a good friend suggested that I visit Dr. Thomas Duckworth, a practitioner of traditional Japanese medicine, figuring that he could help me out with some health concerns. I’ll say that his acupuncture treatments have been a real joy, though I’m someone who enjoys the immediate effects of having needles pinned into me for a 20-minute stretch. In fact, I’ve started up a blog for the clinic and can say that anyone within a reasonable drive of the West County offices of NLTC would benefit from the services offered.

Films, “Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains” and “Jubilee“: In my personal history of Netflix use (and abuse, in this case), I can’t recall seeing a less-satisfying piece of cinema than “Jubilee.” Don’t be pulled in, people! Then again, I hated “A Clockwork Orange.” So, you might even like this one. As for the “… Stains,” a dated and a goofy romp through punk rock teen angst at the start of the era. Not bad, not worth a repeat view. And, hey, Diane Lane was awfully young to be doing nude scenes. Yikes.

Lame, New Year’s Eve: At 11:34 on the blessed night, I realized that I was reading a Naomi Klein book (the brilliant downer “No Logo“) and listening to Morrissey (the brilliant downer “Ringleader of the Tormentors”). With a quick trip to a neighbor’s the only form of social interaction, this one enters the Weak NYE list at a modest #8, at worst.

Soccer, springtime!: Last season the STL UFC team started kicking around in late February, the last Sunday of that month, if not mistaken. Which would be a touch less than two months away. Yoinks!

New DJ gig, The Wedge: Starts, like, tonight. And, in theory, continues on the first Fridays of the month from here. We’ll see. What do the Southsiders wanna hear, you think?

Band, Gang Gang Dance: Always late to the party, but glad to be there, just the same. Delightful stuff and thoroughly unclassifiable, though I’m sure some try (and even get close).

TV show, “Lost”: Did a comprehensive job of not knowing anything about this show, past the fact that it involved people on an island, being terrorized by various-and-sundry thing. Managed this through four seasons of the show, successfully blocking out all media messages about the show. Maybe it was the fact that a student wrote about becoming, er, lost in the show during a recent, week-long marathon with the DVDs, but I cracked on New Year’s Day and am now deeply worried about spending huge chunks of the next month immersed in the show. Only four episodes in and I’m hooked. Had to happen eventually, I suppose. But please, friends, don’t give me any more boxed sets of quality TV for the next li’l while.

Quote, from Chuck Klosterman’s “Killing Yourself to Live”: If any minions of Klosterman come across this, please send me a note to remove, if it’s too much in violation of copyright laws. Just don’t sue me. But this chose graf had to be shared. “When you start thinking about what your life was like 10 years ago – and not in general terms, but in highly specific detail – it’s disturbing to realize how certain elements of your being are completely dead. They die long before you do. It’s astonishing to consider all the things from your past that used to happen all the time but (a) never happen anymore, and (b) never even cross your mind. It’s almost like those things didn’t happen. Or maybe it seems like they just happened to someone else. To someone you don’t really know. To someone you just hung out with for one night, and now you can’t even remember her name.”

Radio, The Foxhole: The Kick Ass Award winning radio program, The Foxhole, is no more! The Team 1380 winner, about sports and general oddness, has moved on to programming heaven, as detailed in today’s Post. Luckily, refugess Mo Drummond (on now) and Marti

n Kilcoyne (coming in the spring) will be reunited on the airwaves of 590 The Fan, in just a few months. My listening time between 10 a.m.-noon has opened wide, wide up.

Generation X, an update: A most-amusing read from Salon’s Heather Havrilesky.

And with that… Happy New Year, etc.

DJ and radio updates, yes. So many important messages to spread.

Thursday, December 25: A Christmas present for me, this one, as I get to spin a night’s set with Jim Utz. As J is still a vinyl purist, I’m breaking out only the platters for this one. Who wants to drink on my tab?

Friday, December 27: With the Pale Divine show coming up at the Pageant, I’ll be joined in-studio during Silver Tray by PD/Eyes frontman Michael Schaerer, who’ll be performing some cuts live. This all came together in about five-minutes last night. (Update: got motivated enough to write this up at KDHX’s blog. Clickey.)

Monday, December 29: The gig I’ve discussed here continually of late is back “on,” as I’ll be spinning records at the Halo after: the Nukes, Pale Divine and, then, The Follow in the Halo Bar. Would imagine I’ll start sometime on Tuesday morning, which is a treat, indeed, on a school night. For some reason, I recall the name of The Follow, but cannot place a tune. Soon enough, I suppose, I shall.

Friday, January 2: Silver Tray at noon, with a no-nostalgia-themed show. And, then, at night, a chance to spin at The Wedge. Thanks, Tyson B. Looking at a first Fridays thing there, so no better time to start than in January. Nice.

Friday, January 9: Silver Tray at noon, then… before the Lettucheads play their pitch-perfect pop at the Tap Room, Chris King and I will be playing old-fashioned cassette tapes on a boombox, while presiding over a dead rock band swap meet at Schafly’s home branch. He’s blogged about this extensively and I’ll defer to his notes on the event.

And lastly, a New York Twitter pal noted this about Silver Tray’s most recent episode: “is the musical equivalent of smoking in the rain on your porch.” I think that’s a compliment. And, even if not, I like it and wish to trademark it.

Sure, something like this has been loaded on here before. Sure! But this is a new, clean, lovingly-edited trailer, indeed. Must watch the film on my low-end, third-generation-transfer-from-eBay VHS copy soon.

This Friday, as in tomorrow.

On the radio: 12 – 2 p.m., with Silver Tray on KDHX (www.kdhx.org), featuring what would have been last week’s set, had the albums not been left at home.

In da club: 10 p.m. – 1:30 a.m., @ the Royale, 3132 So. Kingshighway.

Also there for a Christmas night tag-team spin with the inimitable Jim Utz. Ho, ho, ho.

Have you ever been completely stopped-cold on a Tuesday night, thinking back to a 1987 “Saturday Night Live” skit? You have? Then you know my pain yesterday evening, as I checked every video-sharing site out there, the NBC home site and good-ol’ Google, with no luck, searching in vain for Bill Murray as “The Mighty Hercules,” one of the greatest five skits on the show’s long history.

Please NBC! Load this video into the SNL archives!

In the meantime, here’s the full transcript. Get some friends together and read along.

========

Praise be! As noted in the comments below, it’s been found. And is as funny as remembered. Rejoice!

Having coached seven Somali soccer players this past season, this whole Somali Pirate Thing isn’t really that surprising, I gotta tell you.

To keep you up-to-date with the latest, day-to-day disappointments in life – the key, central element to any blog, I think – here are the recent developments.

A possible interview today with Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips – tied to the band’s motion picture, “Christmas on Mars” playing at the Webster U. Film Series this weekend – is not going to happen. For next week’s Silver Tray, it may. But the fact that I’ve typed this almost ensures it not happening.

And my slot DJ-ing after the Pale Divine/Nukes show at the Halo Bar has been scotched, with a live band gigging in the Halo, instead. I’ll still be at show, so I’ll see all you old heads there.

Update: To keep a running rally on the day’s wrinkles, I confess that I left the majority of my Silver Tray set at home this morning, in a neat, tidy stack. Though I live minutes from the station, my 11:52 a.m. arrival there precluded a trip home. Thankfully, there are thousands of CDs to choose from at KDHX, a point no doubt mentioned a time (or a hundred) during pledge drive. Next tiny disaster is on the way, I feel it.

A quick note in relation to the delay of this particular edition, a situation undoubtedly noted by no more (or less) than a half-dozen people. Right. So. After some time apart, I recently became reacquainted with my work ethic, which had been displaced for a series of some months. With this reunion, I was reminded that typing for money is a life’s priority and, thus, the week’s gap in this posting. With my work ethic found, I am now only on the hunt for my iPod (missing about a month) and my good sense with money (missing since birth). All this aside, onto the 13…

Radio show, International Pop Overthrow: While typing this, I’m listening to a “Murmur” special on I.P.O., based on the stone-cold-classic REM album turning 25 this year. It’s a show of such quality, that I’m stuck hovering near my desktop, the only reliable music player in the house these days. Though most shows aren’t as hyper-specialized as this excellent edition, I’m consistently impressed with the depth and breadth of host Annie Z‘s knowledge, which shouldn’t be in question, anyway, as she’s got the best job in town: RFT Music Editor. But this episode, wow. Okay, enough of my programming crush on this show. (WHOA: I’m reading a pre-recorded PSA on-air right now. Mega-meta!)

Footballer, Veded Ibisevic: The legend-in-the-making attended and played for Roosevelt High School. How great is that? I want cable and Gol TV!

Views, back porch of the home of Ann Haubrich and Art Dwyer: What a crib! What a vista! Fantastique!

Proper use of the information superhighway, Wikipedia: The Wikipedia website is very popular, especially this time of year, as students around the country desperately seek to finish term papers and semester projects. It’s also a fine site to reference when you’ve imagined – for, oh, a decade, or more – that there was a cereal called Fruity Wolf. There was not. But there was Fruit Brute. Thanks, Wikipedia!

Store, City Art Supply: Got a chance to finally ramble through this Cherokee emporium over the weekend, with Jeremy and Dana hosting an open house and the print work of Dan Zettwoch. What a great little shop. And as cool as the old Art Parts storefront was as an occasional, underground venue, it’s nicer to see the place with lights on and a total sense of purpose.

Book, “Outliers”: Ah, Malcolm. Thank you. Enjoy this interview. Or this one.

Social network site, Facebook: Though I’ve never put a single thing on the site, I’m sitting pretty at 273 friends. Of which, I’m on speaking terms with, oh, 73 of those good folks, a reasonable percentage. Complete, stalker-only antipathy = my current sociology experiment, in lieu of an ant farm.

Billiken, Osaka: On my list of St. Louis obsessions, the Billiken ranks a solid eighth, with a wintry bullet. We need one of these in Midtown. With all the junk art on the SLU campus, there’s gotta be room for the Osaka Billiken on the Frost Campus. Impressive!

Spin, Halo, Monday, December 29: Yo! I get to close the night in the Halo Bar, on the evening that Pale Divine plays a reunion show at The Pageant, with support from the Nukes. Already doing the mental inventory for the crate: Sisters of Mercy, check; Love and Rockets, check; RevCo, where’d it go? This should be something like fun.

Snack, peanuts and goji berries: Trust me, delicious. Just mix ’em up.

Number 11, open: Don’t got an 11 this month. What you know?

Pizza, The Wedge: Broke down, ate two slices and enjoyed the experience. Life’s too short to boycott good pizza.

YouTube video, “BOO BERRY MOVIE: The Petition for BOO BERRY”: Not sure, but this Ken Siwek mash-up could be genius.

There are those odd days. You wake up without any grand intentions, per se, but they turn into sorta transformative, or transitional slices of time. You have a distinct notion that the currents of your life have changed, in some small sense.

About an hour ago, I sold my drum set.

This will probably mean little to most, but I’d had this now-departed Pearl set since the late ’80s, having bought it at the old Tower Grove Music, after visiting the store multiple times and staring at the shiny, black kit. It was stored about 12-feet off the ground, high above the packed store’s on-floor inventory and it wasn’t until I bought the five-piece, fiberglass set that I actually got to slap some sticks onto the brand-new heads. I loved those drums, back then, and they served me well. A better kit than I, a hack player, deserved.

One semi-serious and several not-at-all-serious bands later, the drums became a sort of albatross. Years would pass without play. One rack tom was lost in a storage shed. Little bits began to disappear. On the kick, a rust ring began to appear. They were hauled from house-to-house, basement-to-basement, on a two-decade odyssey through Webster and South City. The most use they got was during the holiday shows of the Dave Drebes Players, when they’d be carted up the block for the DDP’s revolving set of drummers to play.

Now, they’ll sit in Typewriter Tim’s basement, there for his band- and jam-mates to use, allowing them to not haul their own kits over. Actually, they’ll sit there, sure, but they’ll also be played. Something they haven’t been in a proverbial month of Sundays.

Good for them, I wish ’em well.