My 4th of July weekend was a lot of fun. Nathan and i walked down to Des Moines’s second-annual 80/35 music festival, so named for the intersection of those two major interstates in the city. There were three stages, two of them free to the public and the main stage requiring tickets, lots of food vendors, street performers, and a fireworks display at the end on Saturday night.
Here are some photos of my favorite performances:
Tilly & The Wall, photo by Matt Sorensen for Rock Iowa
Girl In A Coma, photo by Laura Lou09
The Envy Corps, photo by britrockatthetop
In all, we saw:
Tilly And The Wall
Modern Skirts
Maps And Atlases
Girl In A Coma
Man Man (Nathan loved this one 
)
Wild Sweet Orange (disappointing)
Margo and the Nuclear So-And-Sos
Broken Social Scene (I was most looking forward to this one – pretty sweet)
The Envy Corps
Ben Harper (from afar)
Girl In A Coma took me by surprise. They’ve got a punk-y*/’90s alternative sound that i loved, and a lead vocalist with such a great voice.
To say nothing of the rain, the festival was full of people so colorful that for a moment i felt like i was back in Eugene, Oregon. There was a booth selling tie-dye, an all-vegetarian food vendor from whom i bought the most delightful coffee frappe, and a bunch of girls walking around wearing nothing but denim shorts and paint. These “painted ladies” were meant, as the artist herself said, to be “living decorations”, which i found to be terribly demeaning, but i guess it takes all kinds.
It rained lightly all day Friday and continued to be overcast on Independence Day, but by the end of The Envy Corps’s set all the dreariness had been chased away. That band never disappoints me. The crowd really got into it at this show, which can be partly attributed to the fact that by 8pm when they played, most patrons were half-saturated with Old Main beer. They put a few bars of “I Want You Back” into “Story Time” in honor, of course, of Michael Jackson, and that made me pretty happy. The fireworks display after Ben Harper was decent, and a vast improvement over the blunder last year which caused me to miss all fireworks displays altogether on the 4th.
*BTW – by “punk” i mean the original genre which arose underground in the eighties and all that sort of thing, not the whiny bands who flaunt too much eyeliner and feign a damn-the-man attitude while selling records on major RIAA-controlled labels which some people for whatever reason use the term to refer to. 
So last week there was the whole incident where Yahoo! put my little post about the Tropicana redesign two clicks from their homepage, resulting in a lot of traffic to the site. This much, in fact:
This is a graph of how many visitors my site gets each day, and on July 2nd, last Thursday, you can see there’s a giant spike where it goes up to 32,301 visitors. Previously i’d been getting eight or twelve people a day, maybe. The total number of comments on the Tropicana post is over 150 now, and the Sierra Mist post has another 25.
Alas, i have zero new subscribers, so the number of visitors has gone pretty much right back down. Ah well, it was fun while it lasted!
I took this photo of our new hatchlings over the weekend. By now all five have hatched and are growing fuzzier every day, but they don’t have a lot of energy so i haven’t been able to get a good photo of all five yet. Aren’t they so ugly??
Here is a screen capture of today’s Yahoo! Home page:
…and here’s what you see when you click “find more on the Tropicana redesign”:
My blog post is the first hit! Needless to say, i’ve been getting a LOT of new comments on the Tropicana redesign post. I just want to extend a warm welcome to all the new visitors to the site, and apologize for not doing a redesign of my own before you all came to visit. I had no idea that i should be expecting a crowd. 