For the Langerado Collector

Come and get em while they're fresh, this years 2011 limited edition Langerado Is Canceled commemorative posters!!

This is available this year only, notice the fine craftsmanship and the exquisite detailing on the misspelling of the word "canceled". This is a collectors item, truly to be cherished. Add it to your collection, and if you don't already have it you should obviously get your hands on 2009's canceled poster, your collection would not be complete without it.

Notice how they could have simply cut and pasted the original canceled poster, but they didn't. They took the time to make it fresh, and uniquely their own. Here's to another fine year from all of us looking forward to the 2012 "Langerado is canceled" commemorative poster.

The Unofficial Governor Rick Scott Biography (A Political Parody)

----The Following Story is entirely fictional and for entertainment purposes only. Any similarities to any politicians, either living, or deceased (God willing), corrupt, or sincere is entirely coincidental. Nobody was harmed during the writing of this story, unlike during the writing of quite a bit of legislation these days. Reader Discretion is Advised----

     Rick Scott was born with a silver spoon. Unfortunately at some point during childbirth the spoon became dislodged from his mouth and became embedded within a more insidious orifice. This would be an unfortunate beginning to what would eventually become one of the most notorious lives ever lived.
     Rick Scott was born in Illinois, a state renowned for not having ever had any known instances of political corruption, or any kind of economic corruption for that matter either. At a very young age Rick was caught playing “for profit doctor” with another one of his male classmates. His teacher suggested to his parents that they ought to raise him in Missouri, where those sort of things were more acceptable. And so he was uprooted from his humble beginnings, a move that would cause him to hold great disdain for all public school teachers for the remainder of his life.
     It was in Missouri that Scott first became good friends with Satan. While attending high school young Rick was heavily influenced by the popularity of Quaaludes. It would be his fondness for ludes combined with their decreased availability that would later propel him to become involved in the pharmaceutical industry. In order to fuel his constant need for Quaaludes high school Rick Scott would perform special “favors” for the  school janitor Stan Fluerica. One day after particularly sweaty favor session young Rick proclaimed his desire to become the most powerful dark wizard in the world. “If only I had real power, I would show those Muggles” young Rick bemoaned.  It was then that janitor Stan began to undulate more unusual than normal, and as his horns protruded from above his eyes (both the lazy one, as well as the good one) Stan Fluerica revealed his true identity as the prince of Darkness, Satan himself. “Oh powerful Satan” Rick exclaimed “I should have known it was you the whole time, for no mere janitor could have filled such a young lads whimsy as you have, my liege”. “Save your tongue, foul human. For you will need it to weave the most masterful lies this realm has ever seen. One day, your simple utterance of not having recollection of your own actions will have greater power than you could ever imagine!” his voice echoed. “I offer you this simple exchange. I will bestow upon you the most vile being this world has ever seen, but in order to do so you must sacrifice to me the luxurious, bountiful locks of hair frame your head so well”. Young Rick sat, looking quite puzzled for a moment at the proposition at hand. “But my beautiful hair is the only thing that has ever brought me fancy. All charisma I possess would be entirely obliterated”! “You must decide, and the decision must come before your eighteenth birthday. At your simple beckoning I will bestow upon thee what you desire, the choice is yours”.


 TO BE CONTINUED...

House Judiciary Chairman Representative Lamar Smith

So there is a bill circulating in the House of Representatives right now which intends to remove federal penalties from marijuana. In order for the bill to be considered by the house it has to clear its committee assignments, specifically House Judiciary committee. Unfortunately the Chairman of that committee, Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX), will not even place the bill on the committee's agenda for consideration. A campaign was started today to contact him and urge him to consider HR 2306. Within minutes his Facebook page was flooded. Soon after that his page was disabled, only to be up again for a few minutes with the ability to comment removed. Not too long after that the page disappeared completely. It is quite cowardly of an elected official to limit access to him for his consituents simply because he does not agree with their opinions regarding an area of public policy. To simply ignore the will of the people goes against what Democracy is supposed to mean. Please help me in trying to contact Congressman Smith and tell him that he cannot simply ignore the will of the people, and if he doesn't take HR2306 into serious consideration, that  voting him out of office will be OUR serious consideration.
http://lamarsmith.house.gov/
202-225-3951
https://lamarsmith.house.gov/ContactForm/

Update: Congressman Smith has taken any and every measure to insure he doesn't have to have contact with any of his constituency, as he has taken down his Facebook page, blocked his twitter and Youtube accounts from allowing people to post on them, and has redirected his phone lines to an automatic answering service. I also found this video on NORML.org, very poignant.

Bear Creek 2011- Get Excited

 

Can you Read that?

Good?

Enough Said.

Hangout Music Festival Review

     I just finished sleeping 14 hours after returning home from the Hangout Music Festival in Gulf Shores, Alabama. The weekend was amazing and I met a lot of wonderful people. While this was one of the funnest festivals I have ever attended, that is not to say the weekend was without issues. As such I will now offer my version of this weekend, along with my own cheers and criticisms. Perhaps you attended and had a completely different experience, this can always be the case with such a large event. These are simply my opinions based on my experience over the weekend.
      My girlfriend and I drove in from Tallahassee on Thursday night for the weekend, I had a Public Policy exam and she had work, so we ended up leaving around 8. Since the festival was in central time zone we gained and hour on the way there and ended up arriving at Gulf State Park around 11.
     When we arrived the park was already filling up. The people volunteering the front desk were obviously working overtime as I have never seen a park station so busy, let alone at almost midnight. While the woman who checked us in was quite friendly, her friendliness only served to frustrate us as she chatted us up and took 20 minutes to get us a camp site, we had been driving for hours and just wanted to set up and chill out. We ended up with a spot right across the street from the waterway, and right when we pulled up our next door neighbors were busy spinning their new fire hoop.
     The Park has a strict rule that even though you can have up to eight people and 2 cars per site, you are only allowed ONE camping unit, be it trailer, RV, or just a simple tent. Since there were 5 of us and none of us had a tent big enough, nor would we ever need one that size again we opted to buy the biggest tent Walmart had with the strict intention of returning it at the end of the weekend. We put together our "rented" WalMart tent despite the best efforts of the instruction manual authors to keep us from our task, we drank several beers and smoked several items, and laid down for bed.

     On the first morning, Friday we woke up and made breakfast. Afterwards my girlfriend and I unloaded our bikes and began to head down the beach to the festival venue. When we arrived we locked our bikes up to the most clusterfuck of a bike rack we have ever seen, it was simply 4 fence style barricades layed out in a parking lot, the slots in the fence were not wide enough to accomodate a bike tire through, so most people had opted to lift their front tires over the top of the fencing, which made for quite an awkward task. It was at this point that we realized we had to go through two monsterous lines. The first was a completely unorganized box office line where we would exchange our tickets for wristbands. The line was completely just a crowd pushing their way towards the front, eventually forming the loosest sense of the word line when they got towards the front. We stood in that line for over an hour, and when we were 3 people back from the table a lady started yelling "If you only need wristbands they have them at the front gate". Considering we had been there for over and hour we were not going to simply leave now, so we waited a few more minutes and got our wristbands there. Never mind the fact that the line we were in turned out to be for buying tickets, even though the festival had been advertised as "sold out" for the last month.

     We then proceeded to the actual main gate entrance. This line was also highly unorganized, and had absolutely no recognizable end goal. All you could see was people in front of you, there was no entryway actually visible, just hordes of sweaty people. We had brought some water for the line, but we had been told we could not bring water inside, so we had only brought what we thought was sufficient for the line itself so we wouldn't have to pour any out and waste it. Well after our first hour in the second line we had long been out of water, we were wedged in between thousands of people, nearly everyone around us looked just as frustrated and dehydrated as we were at that point, and to make matters worse they hadn't even opened the gates yet, so as the first bands of the day were scheduled to begin playing they would be doing so to an empty venue! After what seemed to be about two hours the line started moving, and when we got to the front we were told "This is the line for wristbands, if you already have  one you need to be in that line". So we were moved into yet a third line, which thankfully moved very quickly, but the point is throughout all three of these lines not one was clearly labeled as to what it was for.

     When we finally made it into the venue we high fived others who seemed just as excited to finally be in as we were and then we saw one of the worst things you could be greeted by at a music festival, a fucking police k-9 unit sniffing everyone as they entered. We ignored this ghastly scare tactic as we set forth to try and find water. On the map of the festival we noticed there was only ONE WATER STATION SET UP TO ACCOMODATE 350000 people, and when we went to look for it it wasn't even where they had labeled it on the map. When we finally did locate it we were shocked to realize it too had almost an hour long line of people waiting to have their bottles filled from a hose coming out of a nearby bath house. We decided to skip this ridiculous crap and simply opted to fill our water bottles out of the sinks in said bath house.
     The first band we saw was Easy Star All Stars, who put on an awesome show, including some of their Dub Side of the Moon Pink Floyd covers as well as their Reggae Radiohead songs. After that we decided to walk across the venue to check out Beats Antique at what would come to be known as one of the worst parts of the whole festival, the Boom Boom Room. I have to say not knowing anything about these guys Beats Antique was one of the highlights of the weekend for me. It was a DJ who mixed crazy ethnic music while also playing violin and keyboards at times, while drummers played in the background and a girl belly danced on stage. Fugging Phenomenal.We ended up taking a short break after this, my girlfriend went into town to look for a new bathing suit top, and I rode my bike around looking for a cheap single serving beer and a burger.

     We got back just in time to catch Bassnectar. It was around this time that I began to realize the Boom Boom Room might not have been as good an idea as they might have conceptualized it to be. The tent was only large enough to fit a couple thousand people, not a lot considering this festival had 35,000 attendees, but many of the artists which had even caused this festival to be so popular were scheduled to play there over the weekend. This tent was also set up nearly catercorner to one of the main stages, the Surf Style stage, thus cutting off a good portion the main thoroughfare and cramping the front area of the Surf Style stage. The crowd for Bassnectar was so thick that you could not find enough room to hula hoop and still be close enough to actually here anything. If you did try to get close you could not get as far as the edge of the tent unless you wanted to be a dick and rack up a bunch of negative karma shoving your way through a whole lot of people.

 Next we made our way over to see Sound Tribe Sector Nine. Now don't get me wrong, I LOVE STS9, but their set at this festival was not as psychedelic as it normally is. They were playing a more jazzy greatest hits type set, presumably to cater to the more family crowd that was there. Never mind that it was also a daytime set (why?). This family friendly set type turned out to be a running theme for the weekend. Anyway I was not feeling them as much as I normally do for this set, so after a few songs we decided to tromp through the sand and check out My Morning Jacket. These guys honestly put on one of the best sets of the festival. I have been at a lot of festivals they have also played at, but never really gotten the chance to check  them out. I was quite blown away by their performance, their songs varied greatly in style, but none were lacking in quality.

     We came to the conclusion that none of us were really interested in seeing Widespread Panic seeing as how they play almost every festival regardless of whether we came to see them or not, so we began our bike ride back to the campground. About half way there we realized my girlfriends bike tire had become nearly flat. Both her tires had not been staying inflated, and I had put that green stuff that is supposed to stop leaks in them before we left. One of the tires still wouldn't stay inflated so I had purchased two new tubes just in case and replaced that one. Now the other one wasn't staying inflated either. If ever there were an anti-endorsement for Slime brand fix your bike tire crap it would come from this experience. We finally made it back to the campsite where I ripped the tube from the tire with my bare hands, replaced it with the fresh one, and then proceeded to inflate it until it blew up in my face. Literally, it exploded. This truly sucked because we had tickets to the Rich Aucoin late night show. Luckily two of our campmates had shuttle passes and were not going to any late night shows so they let us borrow them for the night.

       When we arrived for the late night set another disappointment of organization occurred. There had never been any mention as to where the late night shows would occur, and any inquiry into the matter amongst festival staff was met with confusion and replies of "I'm not really sure". Since the buses only went to and from the main venue we assumed that was where we needed to go. When we arrived we were assured by all staff present that both late night shows would have to go through the same gate, where thousands of people had lined up for Bassnectar. After waiting in this line for almost half an hour we were then told by the staff at the front of the line that the entrance to the Rich Aucoin show was in fact at the other end of the venue, and we had been told to wait in the wrong line. When we then walked across to the other side of the venue they asked to see our tickets, but they had been purchased will call. Nobody working that entrance seemed to know who was charge of will call, but we were told they were letting people in for free anyway, which was pretty frustrating since apparently we spent 15 bucks each on late night tickets even though other people were just getting in for free.   

       Thankfully when we got in Rich Aucoin was worth every cent of that ticket. Rich Aucoin was what my girlfriend liked to call an A.D.D. child's wet dream come true. This guy mixed crazy sing alongs with confetti, squirt guns and silly string. He came out with entire packs of glow sticks electric taped to his arms and he put a giant playground parachute over the crowd and threw beach balls on top, and literally crowd surfed on a giant surf board. If you ever get a chance to go see this guy, definitely do so!

         Another issue that arose late Friday night/Saturday morning came in the form of the shuttle buses. As I said before we had borrowed our friends shuttle passes and been picked up from the campgrounds on the blue line shuttle. When we were leaving to return after the late night show we were informed that all buses in the direction we were headed had been consolidated for the rest of the morning to a single all purpose line. This bus was to stop at all points along the way except for one problem, it proceeded to the last stop first, several miles away from the festival. So even though we were at the camp grounds only a few miles away, the closest possible stop, we had to drive 10 miles down and then back track through every possible stop before we could get off. And when we finally got close to our stop the driver informed us he was told not to leave the main road, and he tried to drop us off at the end of a dark country road to walk back several miles to the actual camp ground we were picked up at. If I had actually paid for those shuttle passes I would be demanding my money back right now.
        Saturday I woke up feeling pretty hung over from Friday's festivities. We decided on an easy breakfast of cereal and bananas instead of cooking anything, as none of us felt making any sincere kind of effort towards anything productive that morning. Since my girlfriend's bike tire had been pretty much rendered useless the night before we opted to drive the car to just outside the festival and pay to park in someones yard. I wish we had done this every day, it was perfect. We were able to fill our car with all necessary essentials and come and go as we pleased for the day, drinking all the beers we could just outside the front gates without having to shell over 6 bucks for them.

     The first act we saw was Medeski Martin and Wood, they put on an awesome funk jam as usual. At this point it was probably the hottest time of the whole weekend, luckily enough  right at this time we found a well hidden water fountain  in a small pagoda that helped us out for the rest of the weekend. We stayed under that pagoda and kept hydrated for the remainder of the MMW set and headed over to the infamous Boom Boom Room to check out Xavier Rudd.

      When I first saw Xavier Rudd several years ago he reminded me of kind of an Australian version of Jack Johnson or Dave Matthews, but this time around he put on a much jammier show, at times playing crazy beats on his trademark didge while playing crazy guitar loops over them. All in all his show was seriously badass, I was quite impressed. You can even download a copy of the set he played for free from BT.Etree.ORG, just search for Xavier Rudd Hangout.
   One act we had been interested in seeing was Ceelo Green. My girlfriend and I had been watching "The Voice" and of course we sang the song "Fuck You" a bunch on the drive up. Unfortunately when we went to where he was supposed to play the stage was empty. After waiting a while the Foo Fighters unexpectedly showed up on stage and said that Ceelo had apparenly said Forget You to us. This was sad as this is the second time I have heard about Ceelo no showing or being late for a festival gig (the first being at Coachella). Luckily the Foo's made it up to us with an early surprise set consisting of covers. Ceelo eventually showed up after about 40 minutes, did 2 songs and then dipped. What a turd.

 I've got to say Primus was one of the highlights of the festival for me. I have been a huge fan since I was young, and I have seen many Claypool shows, but never Primus. They played what could only be described as a greatest hits set. I was 14 again, loved it!!
    There is probably one band that sells festivals for me over and over again, and that band is The Flaming Lips. Now let me make this very clear, Hangout is the ONLY festival I have been to where I was unable to find party favors. You know what I am talking about, so that is all I will say. So needless to say this was my first time seeing the FLips "unhindered". I have heard a lot of people say that they are not as good when you are in such a state, but I say bullshit. My only complaint is whose freaking idea was it to give these guys a daytime show? Poor planning. Luckily the sun set about 30 minutes before the end of their show, so the opening was a sort of toned down set, and then towards the end they fired up the background screen and did the coming out of the digital vagina bit and crowd surfing in a hamster ball. Classic.

  One thing I must say now is that while having a festival on the beach is fun in theory, it is no fun in real life. First of all the sea was fenced off so you couldn't take advantage of it when it go too hot. Second all the stages were so far apart that walking through sand became a chore, not to mention sand got in everywhere and everything. Also the logistics involving trash were horrible. Even though they did spot cleaning countless breezes sent trash flying into the water, and loads more trash became buried under tons of sand only to be unearthed one day in the future to be swept out to sea and kill animals. Pretty lame.

        Sunday we got going late, we missed Matisyahu although we were able to hear him play from a local balcony. At this point we had given up on the shuttle buses altogether, they were unreliable and a rip off. We opted instead to pay a local to allow us to park our car in their yard, where we also retreated to between sets in order to freshen up the party.  Ween was phenomanal. At one point Deaner took issue with a police boat docked near shore and yelled "Hey you, you in the boat, FUUUUCK YOU!!". This was not taken well by some of the family members in the audience, as one woman grabbed her child and told him "did you hear that? That was not nice" as she escorted him away from the show. Fucking A Ween!

     Finally Paul Simon. This for me was a bucket list thing. It was amazing. The only thing that could have made it better is if Garfunkle had suddenly showed up for a guest appearance. Just think about what seeing Paul Simon would be like live. It was like that, only better. I wish I could describe it, but if you could put it to words than the experience wouldn't be as magical. After he finished his set Paul said he would be back next time (doubt it) and then fireworks were set off over the gulf.

         So what can I say about the whole weekend? I saw a lot of good music, and met a lot of great people. It almost felt as if all this happened DESPITE the best efforts of the producers and law enforcement to prevent such things. I know the producers didn't go out of their way to make this festival shoddy, but they certainly didn't go out of their way to alleviate this situation either. This was certainly not what one could call a "Rager" more like a bunch of young urban professionals mixed with middle class, middle aged families who could afford to rent a beach condo for the weekend. More like an expensive vacation with a concert than a festival. I had fun. Would I go again? Quite frankly no. My money is better spent at smaller, more intimate shows where I feel loved and appreciated, not herded and exploited for money.  Bottom line- poorly organized, too many overzealous cops, most of the crowd is not very friendly, trash is handled poorly, accommodations were scarce/expensive/far, but hey the music was awesome!!!

Super Stoked For the Hangout Music Festival!!

     Well it is Saturday, and it is an extremely nice day outside. I want to do something epic but I promised my girlfriend I would hold off until tomorrow when she is not working so we could do whatever it is together. So today I am stuck inside feeling antsy, and I decided the best way to blow off a little time would be to catch up on some blog-a-nating.
     Yesterday was April Fool's Day. Does it count as a holiday? If it does than it is my second favorite holiday next to Halloween. My one big prank yesterday was putting a pretty convincing Facebook post up stating that Bob Weir from the Grateful Dead had died and wondering what that meant for summer festival season. Man if you ever want to freak hippies out just convince them that one of the Dead's dead. So I got a lot of freaked out responses to this, most people saw the humor in it, but some people seemed genuinely hurt by it. I feel bad, but come on its April Fool's day. If there is one day to have your guard up and not believe anything you hear from anyone, that should be the day to do so. Anyway if someone reading this got upset by this than I am truly sorry to have upset you so badly, all of my jokes are done with the intent of everyone involved getting a laugh out of them in the long run.

     Speaking of summer festival season I am getting really excited for the Hangout Music Festival next month in Gulf Shores Alabama on the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico. This is the second year they will be putting this on. The Hangout Festival came out of seemingly nowhere last year to put on what people have said was an amazing inaugural event. I have personally heard artists who played there speaking ecstatically about the event, which is not something that happens too often. It is a three day, beach themed music festival located on the beach! I hear that the water there is still thankfully clean, considering what BP did to the tourism industry in this area it is nice to see someone bringing the Awesome back, and I hope they have great success. Check out their website below!
                                                           CLICK HERE TO CHECK-OUT HANGOUT
     So for their second year they have put together a lineup that would make a festie pimp out his grandmother to go see. Some of my all time favorite artists and bands like: Paul Simon, The Foo Fighters, Primus, The Flaming Lips, Ween, Galactic, Michael Franti and Spearhead, Matisyahu, Sound Tribe Sector 9, Medeski Martin And Wood, Umphreys McGee, and Xavier Rudd will be playing as well as some of my favorite recent newcomers: Pretty Lights, Girl Talk, Bassnectar. Cee-Lo Green(I know he's been around a while, but I never really listened to him until Gnarls Barkley), and the quite appropriately named Big Gigantic!
     Unfortunately it seems that events like this can too often happen like a flash in the pan, think about Rothbury, Langerado when it was in the Everglades, or the Echo Project. They have one or two amazing but small shows and by the time everyone hears about how classic they are it is too late because they either gone, or in some cases like Bonnaroo, they do catch on but then they seem to succumb to their own success and become way too big or commercial. Right now Hangout seems to be in that perfect place where they have been able to capitalize on their last amazing show in order to put on what looks to be an even greater second event. Think AllGood!
     The only issue that even kept me from going the first time was that they don't have on site camping. The reason for this is that the venue is on a public beach in a downtown area. Luckily this year we have rented a camp site at a state park only a mile and a half from the festival, and we plan on bringing bicycles to come and go as we please. Because the festival is located in the middle of the town it unfortunately has a noise curfew which requires the music to end at 11 each night. So to try and make the party last as long as possible the promoters have gone and done what most inner city festivals do these days, which is to book several of the top name bands playing to play extra indoor sets at local clubs. A lot of people on message boards seem to be confused about this concept, but to anyone reading this try to understand- Although you have to pay to go to these late night shows, this does not mean you will not be able to see these artists unless you purchase separate tickets. These late night shows are separate from the festival itself. All of these bands will be playing at the Hangout Festival itself, they will simply ALSO be playing additional late night shows at these clubs. I hope this alleviates any confusion or anger that may be present out there.
     To finally take this whole thing full circle, yesterday I had already been having ridiculously awesome April Fool's day. I came home after turning in one of my last school papers for the semester. I got on my computer and logged on to Facebook, and I was treated to the coolest April Fool's day surprise I could imagine. The Facebook page for the Hangout music festival had decided to feature me as their fan of the week, and in honor of the occasion they had changed their Facebook profile picture to a picture of me with an awesome mustache, a big ass beer, and wearing a Ween shirt my friend made! I had to take a screen shot to immortalize the moment!

In fact as I sit here and type this my picture is still up there as their profile pic. Nice! By the way if any of you actually looked at the google search bar I have in this screen shot you will notice I was searching for "Amy Winehouse". I will just leave you now to contemplate that little tidbit.
Rock On.

Radio Shack WTF!!?

      Before reading any further know that this is going to be an angry rant. So if you don't feel like reading it please don't get mad at me because I warned you before hand.........
      Now with that being said, What the fuck is wrong with Radio Shack? More to the point, what the fuck is wrong with everyone who works at Radio Shack? It just doesn't make sense to me! It seems to me that if you are going to have a job at an amateur electronics hobby store, you might know the slightest thing about amateur electronics.
     I go there sometimes for simple things: switches; stereo wiring and connectors; plug outlets. Simple things.  I cannot even count how many times I have gone in to Radio Shack and been given either completely utterly ridiculous wrong information from the person working there, or simply had them not know one bit what I was talking about or trying to buy. 
     Now I know most of you are going to say "Its just a job; its retail; thats what you get for minimum wage" etc. WRONG. Even if it is just a job, wouldn't you think in their dealing with the subject day in and day out they would have learned SOMETHING about the realm of electronics. Besides you wouldn't expect this kind of shenanigans from any other kind of specialty retailer. You wouldn't go into a sporting goods store and have a guy who doesn't know what a shin guard is. You wouldn't walk into a home improvement store and have somebody who doesn't know what a ratchet is. You wouldn't walk into a furniture store and be given strange looks when asking about a duvet. So why the fuck does the person working at Radio Shack not know what a female DC socket is?
     Their prices are outrageous, just look at what they charge for simple batteries sometime, and while they once were the only place you could go for a lot of items the INTERNET now has them beat as far as prices and selection are concerned bar-none. The worst part about it is they have seemingly no competition. Think about it. Walmart has its Target; Staples has its OfficeMax; Lowes has its Home Depot; McDonalds Has their Burger King. But who is there to challenge the mighty Radio Shack? Do you know why nobody steps up to challenge Radio Shack? I bet you can figure out the answer yourself quite easily if you have ever actually gone to a Radio Shack. Did you see anybody else in there? No? Thats because nobody ever goes there! It seems the only way they are even in business anymore is because they got in on the cell phone craze early and now have contracts with all the major carriers who do business, but I feel like they should have a buttload of competition in that market nowadays.  So it seems the only people who go there anymore are people like me, desperately seeking that one or two dollar part that is all we need to complete our project. And in order to get that part we are forced to go through the miracle that is Radio Shack. WTF!!??

Farm to Family Full Moon Gathering and Music Festival

I was fortunate enough this past weekend to attend the Farm To Family Full Moon Gathering just outside High Springs Florida. The concert is put on by a local resident Don Appelbaum. He has been having gatherings at his farm since I was in high school. For several years he had the farm to family concerts at his residence, but his neighbors began to become annoyed with all the traffic it brought in and he was forced to stop having them at his farm. Recently Don found a new place to have these events, and after a few years hiatus the Farm to Family concerts returned last November. Unfortunately I was about to move and begin at a new school that month, so I was unable to make it, but I was certainly glad to be able to make it to this one.

The land the festival is held on seems to be the framework for what will someday be a suburban neighborhood. When you first drive in it is on a road with several roundabouts, but there are no houses anywhere to be spoken of. The trees almost look like they were specifically planted so as to be spaced far enough apart to one day accommodate roads and houses, but right now it is simply Florida land. There is a small barn and a chicken shack scattered amongst the property.

The show was Friday March 18 through Sunday the 20th. My girlfriend's sister and her boyfriend arrived with several of our friends on Friday evening, but my girlfriend and I had guests from back home staying with us on Friday night, one of whom would be playing at the festival the next night. My girlfriend had to work Saturday morning, so we did not arrive until late Saturday afternoon. Since we were only staying one night we decided not to bring a tent, but to instead sleep in our hammock. When we arrived there were probably about 300-500 people camping there. There were lots of kids, people with their babies. Older folks, people with dogs. People hula hooping, blowing bubbles, and spinning poi.

They had a lot of great vendors, and apparently had no problem with anyone who wanted to come in and vend doing so without paying any kind of fee beyond entry.
 One of my perennial favorite festival vendors was there, The Grilled Cheese wagon. This venture is made up of a lot of friends of mine, and they are quite possibly the hardest working crew on the festival circuit. There are times at festivals where I have gotten little or no sleep, only to see these guys up and operating even more than me. So since this was a smaller festival it was quite shocking to actually be able to see and photograph them closing for the night in an exhibition I call "No More Cheese"

There many diverse bands playing, from Bluegrass to Funk, Rocksteady Ska to Psychadelic. The two headlining bands on Saturday night were the Ska band The Duppies

and  the Jam band Cope, who even played a Dead-On cover of the Tool song "Sober"!!

Of course this is the Farm to Family Full Moon Celebration, and of course this happened to be on the weekend of the perigee-an moon. If you are not familiar, the moon orbits the earth in kind of an elliptical shape, when it is furthest away from the earth it is at its apogee, when it is closest it is at its perigee. The moons orbit does not directly coincide with its cycles, so the last time the moon was full at its perigee was in 18 years ago in 1993. Because of this event the moon appears much larger and brighter, almost as if it were a white sun.

After the music was over Saturday night there were people having small bonfires throughout the camping area. There was a small drum circle, and there was a guitar and banjo picking circle behind the stage as well. Everyone enjoyed themselves into the morning, and we fell asleep just before the sun rose. Right when the sun did rise they began a bluegrass set on the main stage, it was loud enough to enjoy as I drifted in and out of consciousness, but not so loud as to be disturbing.

We awoke around noon and enjoyed a few more hours of bluegrass before we packed up and drove back to Tallahassee for some much needed rest. It was great to get to go to one of these after 2 years, and this one was by far the best one yet! I can not wait for the next one, hope to see everyone there!