I went to see Roper in concert tonight. Does everyone remember Five Iron Frenzy? Of course you do. Well, as it turns out, they broke up a while ago (beginning of this year? sounds about right). This Reese Roper kid was the lead singer and he started his own spinoff band called, amazingly, Roper. It was at this venue called The Rock (terrible name. so overused) which has a cool proposition but a bad implementation. It’s a coffee shop/theater/concert joint. The coffee shop is in the back on the top floor and has big plate glass windows that look down over the floor. Unfortunately, the sound system was just horrendous. The quality was unacceptable. The first band, called For Higher, is some local hyper punk thing, they were pretty good I thought, except for their stuff being pumped through the worst speakers produced by mankind. The second band, Mike Harvat and the Perfect Paradox, was not so great. They played sort of, you know, that emo stuff? Inappropriately matched. I almost fell asleep. Fortunately Roper came on and rocked the party, they sound a great deal like FIF but without the horns and slightly harder. They did a cover of FIF’s “Handbook for the Sellout” and it was quite excellent. Roper plays this cheesy keyboard on a bunch of the songs, and he has a rubber chicken attached to it which he boings every now and then. He was chewing gum, and I guess if you’ve ever seen FIF in concert, this guy gets crazy all over the stage? He was jumping around so much he spit his gum like four times across the stage, then ran over to pick it up and put it back in.

On that note, did you know that some team of smart people at some university did some research on the five-second rule for food, and they found out it’s true? Turns out you’re good for like thirty seconds. Google it, I’m sure it’s not hard to find, it’s been in the news a lot lately. I’d give you a link but, you know, my ankles hurt from hammering away in the pit tonight. Fortunately my hair is long enough at this point to give me some credibility when I bounce around.

Also, FYI, there was only one person in costume, and she was behind the counter in the coffee shop. So, no, George, the cool kids were in fact not dressed up. Apparently, the cool kids were also all in middle school because there were an awful lot of them there. This minigoth chick who was next to me was, and this is true, checking me out the whole time, which made me feel pretty good until I realized she was like fourteen.

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