Happy New Year

To all who have touched my life and made it richer, I wish a very Happy New Year filled with more joy than sorrow, more peace than strife, and more love than enmity.

Also, the big move to Tennessee is kicking into high gear in the next two days and there probably won't be much time for me to post anything until after the move is over (approximately January 25). I'll be taking plenty of pictures of the move-in-progress and will post some of those as well as some thoughts on smoking that second "very special cigar" when I get a chance...and someday I'll try to get around to finishing my series on the Big Smoke, too!!! :)

Have a great one!

Two Very Special Cigars

The picture at the left shows the two very special cigars that I picked up in Las Vegas while at the Big Smoke. They are a pair of Casa Fuente Churchills, measuring about 7" long by about 48 to 50 ring. If you aren't aware of these cigars already, you should know that they are very good and very hard to get. The blend is said to be a variation of the Opus X blend of filler and binder, with a Cameroon wrapper instead of the Opus' Dominican wrapper. These cigars are reportedly only available at the Casa Fuente store and bar in Las Vegas (in Caesar's Palace's Palace Shops), although I have seen them advertised at a website--and they wanted a very large amount of money for even one stick. I paid about $25 each for these two; much more than I am usually willing to part with for a cigar, but these are "special occasion" cigars.

The first of these two will be smoked tonight, December 26, 2008. This evening, only 4 and a half hours from now, as a matter of fact, will be the final time I will ever host "The Tiki Bar" at my home in Southern California. A week from today a PODS container will be dropped in my driveway and my wife and I will begin the long process of packing that container, boxing up the rest of the house and getting it ready to shove into a moving truck that we will get a while later. On Saturday, January 17, we will roll down the street here in La Mirada for the final time and set the GPS for Dayton, Tennessee. Four weeks from today we will be very busy unloading that same PODS container and moving boxes into our house there. Sometime that evening or the next, I will take a break on the front porch swing. There I will light up the second of these two very special cigars--the first cigar that I ever smoke at our new home. I will think of the guys--Keith, Vern, Jim, Clint, Paul, Ray, and all the others that have moved in, out, and around my life over the past few years. Some of them I expect to be friends with until we die; some I may never see again. All of them have been special to me and I will remember them fondly as my wife and I start this new chapter in our lives.

Dave's Playlist: Tuesday, December 9, 2008

'Tis the season...for hard rock!!! So, when you think of Christmas, you may not automatically think of Guns N Roses, but it was quite the gift that Axl Rose and his colleagues (hard to call them a band at this point) put forward for this holiday season...Chinese Democracy. This album was something like 14 years in the making, so the obvious first question is "Was it worth the wait?" The answer is a qualified "Yes."

I said several times before this monster came out that there's no way it could live up to the hype created by its absence all these long years since the Use Your Illusion albums, and I stick by that assessment. This is undoubtedly a great album, but there's no way it justifies 14 years of production time (unless Axl wanted to give new meaning to the song "14 Years" from Use Your Illusion II). I personally like all of the "studio" albums of new material that GNR has put out; GNR Lies was an interesting aside and The Spaghetti Incident was a waste of time, so I won't even consider them in this list. So, out of 4 albums (counting the Use Your Illusion project as two separate albums), I rate them in this order (best to worst): Appetite For Destruction, UYI II, Chinese Democracy, and UYI I. That being said, I think all of their albums are great overall, so this 3rd place ranking shouldn't be seen as a slight against the latest release.

One way you can tell if an album is gaining points in your head is if you wake up in the middle of the night thinking of a particular song. That happened in the last week with "Scraped" and it's not even close to my favorite song on this collection. The title track is gets the whole party off to a rockin' start that is accelerated by "Shackler's Revenge." Things slow down for "Better" and then we get into the Meatloaf-esque "Street of Dreams." Other favorites are "Catcher in the Rye," "I.R.S.," "This I Love," and "Prostitute" (nothing to do with street-walkers). Bottom line: can't get this album out of my head right now...!!!