Control Geek

I went to the Decemberists "Lottery" show last night:

And there was a strange sight: Crowd surfing sound engineers.

Sorry for the crappy camera phone pic

At this show, John Wesley Harding acted as MC, and picked balls from a raffle drum, each ball containing either the name of a Decemberist song, or the name of something else that the band, or, apparently, its crew, should do.  Harding picked a ball that said that the sound engineers should crowd surf while the band played a waltz, so they did (and the engineers did a great job--the sound was just a bit loud but very clear and well mixed).  Another ball said that Colin should write a song on the spot, which he did.  All in all, a fantastic show, all left to chance.

The other strange sight came while we were hanging out at the Terminal 5 roof lounge before the show.  I looked up and saw a very strange, cone-like light in the sky. I had heard from my friend Mary Sue that NASA was launching a science mission from their Wallops island facility (which I visited as a kid) and I checked their twitter feed on my phone and it turned out it was the Charged Aerosol Release Experiment. It happened too fast for me to get it with my camera phone, but it was seen up and down the east coast, and I found a picture here.