Storms and Sparks

We had some tickets for today and Ernie practiced wearing his earphones to protect his little ears. What could go wrong?

Ern watched the Seattle Storm face off against the Los Angeles Sparks at Climate Pledge Arena.

The headphones didn't last long.

They were getting in the way of all the cheering.

A surprisingly good spot that we keep coming back to is the little restaurant inside Chihuly Garden and Glass.

Vampire Weekend on a Work Day

Ern did some important feather exploration at school. It's good to know the possible weaknesses of birds. You never know when one might strike.

Lydia and I visited the historic Climate Pledge Arena for the Seattle installment of the Vampire Weekend "Only God Was Above Us" Tour.  

Vampire Weekend is now officially the only musical act that I've seen live twice. What an honor.

Apparently now I'm an old person because the last time I saw them was in 2010! My friend Seago introduced me to them. What a guy.

At the end of the show instead of doing a normal encore they took audience requests for just random songs. Not random Vampire Weekend songs. Literally any random ass song someone could come up with. I've never seen anything like it. Understandably they didn't really know a lot of these songs and did a not great job. I understand that they are probably trying to mix things up but I was a little disappointed they skipped some of their own stuff that I was hoping for. I'm a big fan of "Giving Up the Gun" for example. I'll get over it somehow. It was a great show otherwise. Dare I go for three times?

Can't Stop the Feeling

Justin Timberlake came to town pretty close to Lydia's birthday so that was a done deal.

There was some intro DJ stuff for a while as we waited for the show to begin. I think watching a sign language interpreter do "Baby Got Back" was worth the price of admission alone.

This show went pretty hard. There was a lot of giant JT heads in different stages of... maybe like authoritarianism? Like if Big Brother from 1984 could sing and dance.

This giant video cube thing was a costar of the show.

There was nothing it couldn't do.

At one point it tried to drown JT.

We were on the far end of Climate Pledge BUT this multitalented phenom had a little secondary stage that was right up in our face. 

Then the video cube decided that Justin was an angry god emperor. I don't know what we did to anger him but he brought sexy back very aggressively at this point.

Lastly the video cube transformed into a flying carpet and whisked JT back to Olympus.

Normally this would be the end of my expert coverage of this event. But there's a bit of a prologue on this one. About a month and a half later JT got pulled over for alleged drunk driving. Some reporting on the incident:

"We're also told that the cop who pulled Timberlake over "was so young that he didn't even know" who the 10-time Grammy winner was.

"He didn't recognize him or his name," our insider says.

A second source adds, "Justin said under his breath, 'This is going to ruin the tour.' The cop replied, 'What tour?' Justin said, 'The world tour.''"

So of course anytime anything bad happened to either of us the next couple of weeks we would exclaim "this is going to ruin the tour".