And the beat goes on

Friday Night’s Karaoke setlist was as follows:

  • Stacy’s Mom — Fountains of Wayne
  • Fuel — Metallica
  • Hero — Chad Kroeger and Josey Scott*
  • Adrenaline — Gavin Rosedale
  • Grapefruit Diet — Weird Al Yankovic
  • Walking in Memphis — Cher?
  • The Pretender — Foo Fighters

*since some people don’t know this, that’s the Spiderman theme song from the 2002 film. Despite popular didn’t-do-their-research belief it wasn’t actually done by Nickelback, but by a great collection of guys apparently thrown together just for that one piece, featuring two members of Nickelback and members of four or five other bands, one of whom (that would be Josey Scott) co-wrote the song..

I should explain about Stacy’s Mom. It’s not so much that I love the song as that the show’s hostess, Melissa, loves me singing it, so it ends up here a lot more often than other songs I like more. Audience reactions are usually pretty amusing if it’s the first time they’ve heard it tho. I’m also pretty confident about it, so it makes a good warm-up.

This was a first time for Adrenaline, and the first time in a long time for Hero (which was too hard for me the last time I tried it, probably four or five years ago.) Both went well. I did Hero with a guy who goes by the moniker Juice. Seems like a nice enough guy, decent singer, drinks too much. He was pretty sober at this point and we actually worked fairly well together, a rarity (IME, YMMV) for a Karaoke show.

Walking in Memphis was a rescue attempt and went better than you’d think. Juice was a lot more drunk by this point and apparently inadvertently picked a reworked cover by a female artist, which I noticed only after he invited me up to save him from floundering on stage, so to speak. Fortunately, I know the song well enough and was able to work around it. Juice wasn’t cooperating so well by this point, though, so it wasn’t better than an average run.

The Pretender was also a first time for me, and proved too much for me at the end of the night. I can usually do Foo Fighters, but that one’s pretty intense and would probably push me a bit if my voice was fresh. As it was, my voice gave out somewhere around the first chorus. I actually had to walk off stage without finishing. I think that’s only the second time I’ve done that in more than eight years.

Grapefruit Diet was a Weird Al Rule, which my Dad invokes just to screw with me. It’s not a good version, actually dropping a whole bit from the original song, so I don’t really enjoy doing that. Also, I somewhat resemble that remark.

At this point, I can probably go ahead and elaborate that the big news in EVE was that Ethereal Dawn has left the Reach. We have few if any remaining assets there after a shockingly orderly evacuation and we’re beginnning a new adventure up in Curse.

After over two years (and, for BLHI, dropping two outposts) in the Reach, I was very sad to see it go. We’ve also lost some more corps, and each of those is some friends who are now going to be uncolored (or maybe even red) when I see them in local. It’s a crappy situation, the kind you expect to happen when you lose a big war. Still, I think I have few regrets. I wish I’d been more active with alliance from the beginning, but we got to do real endgame play in the Reach and when we went down, it took half the game, four grueling months, and some of the big boys to put us down. Even then, we didn’t break. We didn’t dissolve. We almost won, and I’m proud enough to say we put up a [i]hell[/i] of a fight. I’m actually closer to a lot of my alliance-mates than I was when this whole thing started. It’s been — educational, if not exactly fun and not in any way useful from an AFK perspective.

 

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