Plans for NYE; listening habits; sayonara, "Lennie Briscoe".

New Year's Eve is approaching and for the first time ever, I'll be spending it outside of the house. There were two times in the course of my semi-pro cover band days/daze when two different bands I was in were booked to play on New Year's Eve, but neither gig happened... the first time in 1988 for reasons unknown (we were supposed to share the bill with a local hair-metal act), and the second time with the last band I was in, and the gig to my knowledge never happened because I quit the group several weeks beforehand.

What's getting me out of the house is my girlfriend Tara, who will be taking me to the local First Night celebration. One of the attractions is a hair-metal tribute act called Monsters Of Rock. Go ahead and laugh. It's their debut gig. Are they serious? The drummer, who founded the band. claims that they don't intend to play more than two or three times a month. You make the call.

My own listening habits have done an odd turn with the simultaneous acquisition of both my first iPod (a 40GB model) and an Audiovox Sirius Satellite Radio (almost always on either the reggae channel or one of the techno channels, with ESPN thrown in for the Mike And Mike Show). Already I have over 7,000 songs on the iPod including all of my J-Pop (itself including all of my Morning Musume and MiniMoni CDs) and all of my Black Flag and Minutemen/fIREHOSE/Mike Watt discs. My only current regret is that I cannot currently locate my Husker Du CD's, so if you can throw together an MP3 CDR of all of their albums for me, please do not hesitate to e-mail me at minimoniotaku@gmail.com.

Much respect to the memory of Jerry Orbach - very sad to hear of his passing earlier today. Law And Order and its various offshoots are about the only really watchable American television nowadays. Time will tell how this will affect the L&O offshoot he was part of, Trial By Jury. With some of the people I've talked to, the jury is still out on how they feel about Dennis Farina taking Orbach's old spot on the original L&O (haven't been able to catch any new episodes of either that or my favorite spinoff, SVU lately, just whatever repeats I catch on TNT and USA).