maxonemillion » Random

One On The Books For October…

Max Sidman — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 03:34:03 +0000

Last year I didn’t post to this blog for an entire month (May, to be exact), so there’s a giant, soul-sucking 30+ day hole in this site’s archive, and I promised myself I would never let that happen again because…well… I have no idea why, but I keep coming back to the words of Lord Finesse: “Me take a loss? That shit don’t even look right.” (I know, totally not applicable here, but whatever…)

I’m actually working on a handful of other things, and a couple of them are actually pretty close to being done, but given my current schedule there’s just no guarantee they’ll hit in the calendar month. So, just in case, in the interest of avoiding another post-less month, I give you Sasha Grey, hilariously not fucking some guy…

The View from Up Here

Max Sidman — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 20:27:43 +0000

I’ve been busy lately. Busier than usual. In addition to everything else I’m wrapped up in — which essentially boils down to working and being a father to my daughter — I went back to school, which has turned out to be sort of time consuming…I know, shocker.

Got a few other things in the works, including a new musical project (think low and slow) and a return to a semi-regular mix / podcast thing (maybe). More on those soon. In the meantime, click that picture up there to see a goddamn big ass version of the view from near the top of Tilden Park over Berkeley / Oakland. It’s one of best views in, and of, the Bay Area.

The panorama is a composite of four photos taken with my Canon S90 and stitched together.

Photos: July 11, 2010

Max Sidman — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 05:12:35 +0000

All photos taken at Joaquin Miller Park in Oakland, CA, with Motorla Droid & Canon S90.

Photos: July 1, 2010

Max Sidman — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 05:10:44 +0000

Photos: June 27, 2010

Max Sidman — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 03:15:43 +0000

All these photos were taken with a Motorla Droid, using the FxCamera app’s Toy Camera & Poloroid settings.

Photos: June 19, 2010

Max Sidman — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 00:24:30 +0000

What $1.75mil Gets You in Oakland, CA

Max Sidman — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 04:15:36 +0000

Even though I’m not balling anywhere near this level, we stopped by this open house on the Oakland / Piedmont border today, just because we drive by this place pretty much every day, and hardly any of the house is visible from the street. So we took our shot at a rare look-see. One of the realtors on site said the place is currently owned by a “rock star” but wouldn’t say who. Could be anyone. Shit, Tay Zonday is considered a rock star by some…though I don’t think he’s balling this hard either.

See, Hear…

Max Sidman — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 06:34:03 +0000

Over the last year or so I’ve been going back and forth with the hipster blog grotto known as Tumblr. I was trying to make something fly over there, and I finally realized that don’t really like it, and the last thing I need these days is the further fracturing of my attention on yet another online time-suck. Besides, what I ended up with was a pathetic placeholder of a blog that was basically an auto-feed of stuff I did on this site and LastFM. Lame.

I started this blog almost two years ago specifically with the intent of paying attention to it — unlike previous blogs, which were supposedly “about something” and which have all met a slow withering demise like so many untended house plants — and I don’t really need some other shit that I have to worry about populating with content. I mostly like this blog and have spent a considerable amount of time, effort, and even a little money to set up and maintain it.

My initial idea for the Tumblr thing was to do less writing and concentrate more on just images and music with little-to-no explanation; no fuss, no long-winded points of purpose, just audio and visual content (my own and others’) I find interesting for whatever reason. But why can’t I do that here? I mean, I can, so…

Here’s the deal: I take a fair amount of photos — with my mobile and my proper camera — that end up going into my Flickr stream (and sometimes get pushed to my Twitter stream as well), and they’re going to start appearing here regularly. I also see a fair amount of cool images online, so I’ll post up some of that from time to to time as well (appropriately credited, of course). I also like the idea of posting songs just for the hell of it (I’ve started using Swift.FM to play half-assed DJ on Twitter occasionally) so I’m going to start posting that kind of stuff to this site as well. I’ll try to put up something basic and image- or sound-related at least a few times a week, in addition to my once- or twice-a-month posts that have a bunch of words in them. There will be some redundancy between this initiative, and my Flickr and Twitter feeds, but whatever.

I’ll retain the Tumblr account, just so I can keep up on the handful of blogs that I like over there, but I figure this site is my main home on the interwebs, and I might as well treat it that way. And to that point — while I plan to populate it as much as possible with posts containing either just a single image or a song — here are a bunch of photos I’ve snapped with my mobile over the last week or so, as well as a couple of related songs…

Dock Ellis & The LSD-Fueled No-Hitter

Max Sidman — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 22:45:57 +0000

Pittsburgh Pirates’ pitcher Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter on acid.

I’ve heard this story a million times, but always as MLB lore, never from an official of the league, never from a television sports historian, and never from another professional player. So I always thought that, despite the plausibility of the tale, there was a chance it was an urban legend.

But sure enough, it’s true, proven beyond doubt by No-Mas, which posted the animated version of the story, narrated by Ellis himself. Priceless…

Whisky Fest ’09

Max Sidman — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 06:07:13 +0000

I don’t get out much these days (though this month certainly seems like an exception to that rule) but that doesn’t mean I don’t maintain a couple of innocuous vices. I like to take a drink in the evenings, and since I live so far away from my favorite darkned bar, and because I’m trying to avoid the empty calories of beer (admittedly, with mixed results; getting older is a bitch like that), I find myself gravitating more and more to whiskey. I’ve been a whiskey drinker for years, and in that time I’ve pretty much always stuck with Jameson because it tastes good and it’s affordable. In the last five years or so, however, I’ve started to really dig into the various types of hooch that represent the whiskey (or “whisky” without the “e” if you’re Scottish, Canadian or Japanese) family.

In my whiskey travels I’ve found that I don’t care for Rye in general, nor do I like whiskeys that deliver a big, overly powerful hit of peat flavor. I like clean, smooth blends, single malts and single casks, mostly older Scotch and Irish whiskies, and refined Southern American bourbons. But those are just generalities. I’m always experimenting, and I’m often surprised by whiskey that I didn’t expected to like. Despite my interest in whiskey, however, I’m still very much a novice, and obviously still learning about the variety, depth and breadth of the product and the culture that surrounds it.

Which is why I enjoy attending WhiskyFest in San Francisco. This three-year-old event is one of two annual whiskey-themed events in the city, and it is by far the superior of the two (I attended the other, the Whiskies Of the World Expo, the first time it was held, and was not impressed with the setup, the distilleries on hand, or the clientele…though I will say that they killed it on the food element). I was at the first annual Whisky Fest and had a blast; I skipped the second one and really regretted it; and last Friday, October 16, I attended the third Whisky Fest with a couple of friends, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Here’s a little photo recap of the action (you can see the whole set in all its full-sized glory over at Flickr)…

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