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Yes, it’s been a while since much of anything happened here, but more importantly it’s been a long whiles since we’ve had any updates on the Monkey Revolution.

To help remedy this sad state of affairs, I have set up a new Twitter account: @simianista. On this, I shall endeavor to post short updates whenever a notice suspicious activity from our tree-born cousins.

Then the robots come in:

In theory, I have it set up so that a daily digest of @simianista activity will appear right here in this blog. Which will, again in theory, update my own @jakesutton Twitter account, which might even update my Facebook wall.

It’s all terribly complex, you wouldn’t understand. Just trust in the fact that I am here to help you stay aware in the latest developments in the rising primate insurgency.

Stay alert and hide your bananas.

Upgraded the site to the latest install of the old bloggin’ software and switched the theme around to something fairly nice that somebody else spent time on (see links in the footer).

I might get around to fiddling with the theme at some point, but don’t hold your breath or anything.

If you’re lucky, I might actually post once in a while. We’ve had a big stressor removed lately, but I still have lots of other things I either should be doing or would rather be doing. Follow my Twitter or hook up to my Facebook if you’re that interested in things. In fact, I may have rigged it so that new posts here end up in both of those places (yet to be proven, mind you).

And yeah… You look great today. So nice to see you!

We’ve also got new tattoos and new hobbies and things of that nature.

What we don’t have is complaints, so that’s good.

Hope the three of you who check this thing are all well and happy. We are.

Love & hugs.
- Jake

More views are available on Flickr for the curious.

Perhaps because I work in the technology realm where everything needs to be new and shiny, I have an affinity for old things and old ways of doing things. I like wood and stone for building materials. I like cooking with cast iron. I enjoy working with my chef’s knife for hours much more than buzzing food to a pulp in a food processor. I love Zippo lighters even though I’m no longer a smoker. I melt at the sight of a beautiful fountain pen even though I write maybe 100 words by hand a week. Even my motorcycle, which features a modern engine and brakes, etc. still looks basically like the old Bonnevilles that Steve McQueen loved to ride.

Combine this with my mildly obsessive nature and I tend to start odd collections. It starts off with something I actually use but then moves rapidly into the categories of “special” and “precious”.

Fountain pens are a great example. I started with a plastic Lamy that you can still get for next to nothing and isn’t really much to write home about. Then I started getting pens from Levenger that were a bit more fancy, but that I still used occasionally. Then I got a couple gorgeous and expensive pens that came in massive wooden boxes and have barely even seen the light of day, much less a bottle of ink. Those are the “collectibles”. Those are the ones that make me feel like an idiot who may as well be lighting money on fire.

I’m going to try really hard to avoid that end with this new thing with which I’ve fallen in love.

So what is it? Well, straight razors.

Some of you are probably cringing or at least giving your screen a solid “WTF?” look right now. Straight razors creep some people out a whole bunch. I’ve always felt they are dead sexy.

I’m a knife guy, but somehow I’ve avoided my collector compulsion when it comes to knives. I have more knives than the average Joe does, to be sure, but I don’t have any knives that are so precious to me that I would refuse to use them to actually *cut something*. This is the key distinction, and one of the reasons I feel OK going into this razor thing.

You see, I actually want to try shaving with a straight razor. I love ritualizing the act of shaving. I will happily take half an hour or more to shave on a weekend day, and that’s just with a Mach III cartridge razor. I think a straight razor shave fits perfectly into this mindset.

I first thought about getting a straight razor several years ago, but the idea that you had to strop and eventually hone the blade threw me off. For a knife guy, I’m pretty bad at blade maintenance, so I worried that I’d make a mess of things and ruin the whole deal. I downgraded my hopes to an old-fashioned Merkur double-edged safety razor, but I ended up never pulling the trigger on that, either.

Then in March, Cool Hunting posted about Max Sprecher (with a re-post by Joel Johnson on BoingBoing Gadgets, which tells me I’m not alone as the “geek who loves old-fashioned stuff”). Max does two things that intrigued me greatly. First, he restores vintage razors to unbelievably gorgeous condition and sells them at surprisingly affordable prices. Second, he offers expert honing service for twenty bucks. This told me that I could get a razor that is probably better than a new stock unit available on the online stores for a lower price and that I could get it fixed relatively cheaply if I managed to screw it up.

Eureka! Sign me up!

Sadly, I didn’t whip out the wallet when I first found out about Max’s razors. Now he’s all sold out and a bunch more people (like myself) know about him, so it’s going to be hard to get one of his razors in the future, I think.

The switch was flipped, though, so I went in search and started doing some research. I found Straight Razor Designs, which has what I’ve found to be the best prices on new-stock Dovo razors. This is one of the main new-stock brands and the company offered lower prices and complimentary “shave-ready” honing, which usually costs an extra $15-20, so it seemed like a real bargain.

As I read around, though, I found suggestions that newbies would be better off shopping the classified ads at the Straight Razor Place forums where a vintage, shave-ready razor could be had for a much lower price. Lower initial investment for possibly better performance sounded good to me, so I went. And I bought a razor. It’s called a Dubl Duck Special #1, and it set me back a reasonably painless $60 — almost a third of the price I was almost ready to lay down on a new Dovo. It’s not as pretty as the Dovo I wanted to get, but “pretty” is what tends get me in trouble.

Here’s where it gets a little scary, though… After I bought that razor, I kept looking. And wanting.

Then I started reading about the restoration projects performed my Max (who is an active member at SRP) and others. It actually doesn’t sound impossible. I watched a slew of YouTube videos on honing razors. That doesn’t seem so scary, either. So I saw another Dubl Duck like the one I’d just bought for half the price but needing some honing before it would be shave-ready, and I bought it! Gah!

Now this flight of fancy about old fashioned grooming pleasures has turned into a potential hobby. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it, either, but I figure as long as I can keep my spending below the “recreational” level, it won’t be a bad thing.It actually turns out the honing gear will cost me more than most of the razors I lust after, but if i actually develop that skill, it will be worth it in my mind.

If the resoration hobby gets to be a hassle, I can always cut the cord and send failed project razors to someone like Max to have them turned into decent (if not showpiece) razors.

We’ll just have to see where it goes. Right now, I’m having lots of fun lurking on the SRP forum and learning a lot of new esoteric knowledge.

Updates will probably follow as appropriate, I suppose…

At any rate, I have three items for you:

1. The first, titled “Spider monkey goes ape at Fruitland Park flea market” not only goes for the obvious pun, but also uses the best spider monkey pic on the web.
2. Next, did you know gorillas get totally pixelated on bamboo juice occasionally? Seriously. I mean wasted!
3. Even more surprising, monkeys in Thailand have better dental habits than I do (with video!).

So, to sum up: spider monkeys (still) can’t be trusted, Thai monkeys have great gums, and silverbacks need designated drivers.

Ain’t nature grand?

Well, not so fast. Turns out you’re not the only one to have that idea, and there’s some insane competition for those jobs:

Over a wonderful bottle of Borolo, my chef friend and I discussed the grand deluge of people looking for restaurant jobs. He’s the chef of a restaurant group, so he oversees a few different spots. His sports bar needed a bartender.

So he posted an ad for a bartender on Craigslist. An hour later, he received nearly four hundred responses from wannabe bartenders.

So, maybe you want to come up with a different backup plan. Food service is back-breaking work anyway, right?

So yeah… This week is going to finish well for li’l ol’ pseudo-hipster me.

Fact of the matter is I’m so excited for Andrew Bird that I’ve barely given a thought to Modest Mouse aside from the fact that the show is on CU campus, which is bound to make my skin crawl. When I do make myself think about it, though, I’m pretty darned excited to see them, too.

I’ve seen Andrew Bird before… long, long ago when he played with and along side of the Squirrel Nut Zippers — just as he was launching his Bowl of Fire. Since then he has matured and ventured in some really interesting directions musically. NPR’s All Songs Considered posted a live show of his (including the opener, Loney, Dear on a separate recording) and that positively blew me a way. Based on this and and on giving his latest music heavy rotation on my ipod I’m as giddy as a little girl.

Modest Mouse hasn’t released anything since their 2007 title “We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank“, which I enjoyed quite a bit, though maybe a tiny smidge less than their previous two records. Nevertheless, their show at the University of Colorado’s football stadium fieldhouse is likely to be packed and rocking. I’m hopeful they might preview some new material while they’re at it.

Next on the list is a band from Portland, OR that is really high on my list right now. Blitzen Trapper’s indie-folk story song “Furr” from the album of the same name kills me. It’s truly one of my favorite songs of 2008. They are playing a small club in Denver, so I’m excited to see them in close quarters.

Beyond that are people you’ve all heard about, so I won’t go into them before I see them.

As for stuff not on the list… Laura Gibson is coming to town on a Sunday in April, so there’s a slight chance we might venture out for that. Her latest is really good. Also, I’m cautiously hopeful that I might get a chance to see Leonard Cohen. I will totally brave Red Rocks for him.

Oh, and yes, I’d like to post more often, but I’m a little busy these days…

The instructions are: “Tag your friends and discover new music!”

1. Name a band or singer that you can’t believe you used to love when you were young:

I was a big Top 40 fan until I went to college, so yeah… How about Milli Vanilli – I dug them for realz.

2. Name a band or singer that you hated when you were younger but now love:

AC/DC – There was one school bus that the driver let the kids in the back play AC/DC on a boombox every morning. I hated that bus then, but now I *love* those songs.

3. Now name one that truly stands the test of time, whether they still make music today or not:

How about a couple that come to mind because they do still make music today and they keep making really good stuff: Van Morrison and Tom Waits.

4. Name a song that you can’t resist tapping your feet or fingers to whenever you hear it:

There have to be a million…. I’ll pick Morphine’s “Honey White” since they’ve been on my mind lately.

5. Name an album where you love listening to every single track:

The main example from recent times has to be Green Day’s “American Idiot”. Holy crap is that album good front to back!

I also actually love Jethro Tull’s “Thick as a Brick”. You should read about it on Wikipedia.

6. Band or singer you are so sick of that you wish you would never have to hear them again:

Madonna for personality reasons. Her music is actually fairly OK most of the time, but she’s obnoxious.

7. Name a band or singer that your significant other/family loves, but you can’t stand:

Probably something obscure from the 80s. Generally she just likes some things (Gwen Stefani) A LOT that I only like a little.

8. Your favorite cover song:

I’m a bit of a cover song freak – I even have an iTunes playlist of covers. Bill Janovitz (from my favorite 90s Boston band, Buffalo Tom) is doing an awesome series of covers on his blog. He does some great ones.

For favorite, though, I’ll say the Arctic Monkeys doing Amy Winehouse’s “You Know That I’m No Good”. That’s just killer.

9. Your favorite song or band, right this second:

I’m still stuck on the Avett Brothers and I just discovered Alice Russell.

10. If you’ve got a Pandora station to share with your friends, paste the URL here (Click on station name, go to “Edit Station Details” and grab the address from the top of the page). Or link to your fave music podcast:

I guess I can point you to my last.fm profile, if you do that sort of thing:
http://www.last.fm/user/JakeSutton

For podcast, Bob Boilen’s “All Songs Considered” podcast is responsible for me finding all kinds of new music:
http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=37&agg=1