Sunday, July 6, 2008

80-35 Music Festival, Plus Mini-Cam Test Run

Sorry for the lack of bike content lately. My recurrent back problem has been flaring up on me, so I spend my days shaped like a question mark. Carla has taken to calling me "The Riddler" as a result.

I did drag my old, achy self to the first-ever 80-35 Music Festival this weekend. Quite an event, and a nice poke in the eye to anyone who thinks that Des Moines lacks in coolness. I've kind of adopted Des Moines as my second hometown, so it warmed the cockles of my upper GI
tract to see so many people spanning so many age/race/subculture/sexual orientation/whatever groups crammed into the western end of our fair city. Two thumbs up to the event organizers and all the bands on the docket. Semi-bicycle-topical note, the festival even provided fenced-off, staffed bike parking, which made me wish I'd been able to ride.

I've been searching for a cheap little digicam so I can illustrate my ride reports, but my insistence on using a Macintosh (since about 1989, which officially makes me older than dirt in computer years) has been my undoing... until now. Found a $15 Spongebob Squarepants kiddie-cam this weekend and used it to document Day 2 of 80-35 as a test.

A band whose name I've forgotten, playing one of the free stages and supporting bike advocacy with a "Share The Road" sign in their stage show (okay, not really, but at least I got bikes in here somehow):




Our "hey, that's cool, let's buy some of their music" discovery of the festival, Kaiser Cartel:



And finally, just to break the monotony of my "distant bands shot on the same free stage" montage, here's yours truly (looking like he smelled something bad) and his much better half in an attempted self-portrait. Note the artistic reflection of the photographer's arm in his subject's sunglasses:


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