This is my second time at trying to post this. I’m at my parents’ for Mother’s Day and his computer is rather twitchy.

What I was trying to say is that over the last couple of weeks I’ve been having Kiwi experiences.

Two weeks ago, I saw Crowded House at the Fillmore (Irving Plaza). It was general admission, so I was close enough to see Neil Finn clearly. He invited the PS 22 Chorus, an elementary school group from Staten Island to open the show. He’d apparently seen a video of them singing one of his songs and he liked it so much that he had them come on stage for the show.

They performed three songs, including Private Universe. Then the band came on stage and did the song with them. YouTube has a video of it.

Because YouTube embedding seems to completely throw off the formatting of my site, here is the link, if you’re interested:

Crowded House and PS 22

It was great. Say what you will, but there is nothing wrong about kids singing. It was a great start to the show.The rest of the show was great as well. I’ve come to like and respect Crowded House over the last year and Neil Finn’s voice is still incredible. They are definitely seasoned veterans on stage, but they also have a bit of a casual approach, ad libbing and playing songs that weren’t on the list. They even invited one of the audience members from the front row up to sing and play with them on one song, a song he apparently performed with them back in August in California.It was a great show.Then, this past week, I went to see Flight of the Conchords. Twice. The New Zealand comedy duo, stars of their own HBO show, winner of the Grammy for best comedy album, Bret and Jemaine, two of my favorite people in the world. Both shows were great and slightly different. On the second night, I helped my brother dispose of his tickets, ending up 8th row center at the Town Theatre. They played almost every song I wanted them to play. With the exception of Leggy Blonde, which I will forgive them for since it’s more a Murray song than anything. I was happy that my seats were better than Susan Sarandon’s and Tim Robbins’ seats, which were about 8 rows behind me.

Both shows were incredible and made me a very happy individual.

Only one way to top this, and that’s a trip to New Zealand. Maybe next year…

P.S. I was in Park Slope yesterday looking at apartments and I saw Mel from the Flight of the Conchords on the street. I had to stop myself from making a noise of excitement.

I am currently at a work meeting, staying in a hotel, and I am continually confounded by the state of internet access in major hotels in major cities. We live in an era where internet access is often vital, where wifi access in portable devices is commonplace and yet I am astounded that the quality of that access is often worse than the rural areas I’ve visited. Not only is wifi still a rarity, but the wired access, in addition to being costly, is just plain awful. Web pages take a minute or more to load. Downloads aren’t even feasible. These are hotels that cater to business crowds. I just don’t understand it. My company is currently paying ridiculous amounts for internet access that is less reliable than the internet I had ten years ago.

And that there is probably the problem. Companies will expense out shitty internet, while the local, non-chain coffee shop in my neighborhood provides decent wifi for free. There’s no need for it in this world.

Is it me or is that backwards?

Some of you reading this know that I am one of the founders of a website called Your Mom’s Basement. YMB, as we affectionately call it, was created to be a source for coverage of the so-called geek culture. We wanted to produce articles about the things were geeked out about – books, comics, games, movies, and more. And we have. For just about three years we’ve done articles and interviews, reviews and parodies, and even the occasional video. And it’s something we’ve been proud of.

But we are all doing this for free, and real life has a way of intruding, and lately there hasn’t been much content.

That is soon about to change. In order to increase our content while decreasing the amount of time it takes to produce it, we are moving to a group blog approach. Think BoingBoing or Engadget. Since we have some great people working with us, we selected seven, and we will be putting up content as we can, covering the same things we did before, but with a bit more of our unique personalities thrown in.

I invite everyone to come take a look at what we have to offer. There’s just the announcement right now to speak of, but there will be more to come. And there’s some previous content from the past three years that is still up and available. We’re looking forward to entering our fourth year and I’m looking forward to increasing our audience. Maybe you’ll want to stick around.

On the subway this morning, I looked across the car and a man was sitting down reading a Marvel Comics Avengers collection. To my left was someone reading a Jonathan Lethem book. To my right was someone playing a videogame on their PSP. At a later stop, someone got on reading a Terry Pratchett novel, and another person came on reading Edgar Rice Burroughs. And I thought to myself, when did the rest of the world start moving closer to me? Has there really been this shift in tastes or was I just not seeing it before?

It was a strangely surreal moment.

Thanks to everyone for both your sympathies and your congratulations. Both are appreciated.

As a quick update, my mother started her chemo treatments. And she has a new puppy, too. With all that cuteness and love around her, she’ll have no choice but to improve.

Thanks again.