WillChatham.com   I am a geek.

The band I’ve been playing with since October finally has a name, and it is The Whappers.

Naturally, we have an official The Whappers web site (set up by yours truly) and the obligatory Myspace page too.

Last, but certainly not least, we will be playing this Saturday in Asheville at the Emerald Lounge on lower Lexington Avenue downtown. Let the face melting begin.

In a previous post I wrote titled Searching For Songs, I lamented about not being able to find a song from an 80’s punk band about a kid getting trapped in a refrigerator. Every few months I would do a Google search to see if anything new had been indexed by that wonderful tool of discovery.

I finally hit the jackpot. Through some amazing eruption of forgotten information from my sub conscience, I recalled a line of the song and was able to locate this post by a guy named Glen Case. The song is called Refigerator Heaven, as it turns out, and the band that recorded it is called The Freeze - an outfit from Boston. Moments later, I had obtained the song from the iTunes music store.

How happy am I to finally be able to hear this song again after 22 years of absence? As happy as a baby Psychlo on a straight diet of Kerbango, dog!

On a side note, Mr. Jeter was able to supply me with the other long lost song I had been searching for. I need Mr. Jeter to contact me with his address so I can send him his LP’s back, along with the digitally converted versions from my USB turntable!!!

On the Dell website, they detail all the cool stuff Michael Dell has in his personal tech arsenal. I was suprised to see his primary laptop runs Ubuntu Linux, Open Office, and Firefox. Guess he’s as fed up with Window as the rest of us!

Speaking of (free) alternatives to (upgrades from) Microsoft products, Thunderbird 2 is out! I have been eagerly waiting for this, as it will introduce some cool new features, such as the ability to tag your messages with keywords. Ooh! I gotta go upgrade now…I’ll let you know how it goes!

I had one of those strange series of coincidences today. This woman from AFLAC was at work today and was taking my information for some insurance crap I was enrolling for (the one where they pay you like $5000 for each finger you lose…hmmm). She was asking me my birthday, and I told her when it was. She said that was her father’s birthday too. A moment later, she asked my address, and she said, “Wow, my mom and dad live on your street”. So the next thing that made it all really weird was when I looked at my watch to see what the date was, and I noticed it as 2:22 on 2/22. Far out, d00d.

Aside from those types of things happening, I went and saw Mastodon at the Orange Peel the other night. I was mostly excited to go out and see a show in the first place, but these guys rocked the jams, which made it even better. I’m not usually into metal, but it was great nonetheless. The only downside was that the sound was not mixed very well at all, and often, it was really hard to distinguish what was going on.

That brings me to my next coincidence, which happened when I first got to the show and was mingling through the crowd trying to find a good spot to stand before the band started. This guy walked up to me and stopped, pointing at me. My first thought was it was someone I knew from Louisville back in the day, but I didn’t think that was very likely, so I dismissed it. I was like, “Dude, who are you?”

It turned out my first impression was correct. It was Andy Tinsley from Louisville, a guy that was part of the Bardstown Road crowd back in the day. I asked him what the heck he was doing there, and it turns out he was the sound engineer for Mastodon. Go figure.

I promise I won’t wait for more strange coincidences to happen before I do some more writing here. I’ve been slack, I know.

Back in August I was in Louisville and got to record some tunes in an airplane hangar with Jeremy. It was too much fun. Check out the free tunes to hear them. Jeremy provides the guitar and bass, while I do the drums and other banging of things. Listen closely on one of the tracks for the jet plane taking off, which cleverly disguises an error in the song we made.

On another note, Jeter completely rocked my world this week by sending me the previously mentioned 7″ recording of Bastro doing My Dad Is Dead’s Nothing Special, a song which is very important to me because of its awesome drumming. Not to mention the fact that it’s just an awesome song, and I have been dying to hear it since 1992. I couldn’t believe it when it showed up in my mail, and my wife and kids looked at me funny when I shouted with glee and jumped onto the coffee table. Thank you, Mr. Jeter. I owe you one. Or 100.

Now, I must go buy a turntable. This 7″ has pushed me into deciding to delve in and get the Ion iTTUSB, which will allow me to start converting my 400+ vinyl albums to digital format. This will take a while to do, but there is so much vinyl I have that never came out on CD that it will be worth it.

Lastly, I’ve decided to start a new band. I’m going to put an ad out soon seeking one guitarist and one bass player to form the power trio from hell. If it doesn’t leave my ears ringing and my knuckles bloody, then I will have to try again. So, who wants to play?

For all you sick weirdos out there, here is the video of my toenail and fingernail licking ceremony. This was submitted by popular demand. One person asked me to do this.