So I am also "anti-striking" against the whiny whiners who called for a "posting black-out" to protest the end of ad-free Basic accounts. I think it's folks like that, rather than any sort of corporate policies, that are driving people away from LJ. I can think of...at least three people off the top of my head who have either left or are seriously contemplating leaving LJ this year.

The people who call for strikes or bans or whatever remind me of the kids I went to high school with who would call for a "march on the principal's office" or a "walk out" to protest "unfair" administration decisions, like sticking our AP English class with an unpopular teacher or taking corn dogs off the menu or what have you.

Anyway, enough of all that. Tomorrow delicata77 and I will be flying out to Phoenix to visit my brother and niece, then driving on to Santa Fe the next day to spend a week with my parents.

I was born in Santa Fe and lived there for about half my pre-adult life. We relocated permanently back in '91, and I haven't been back for a visit since '99. Last fall my parents finally got out of L.A. (barely) and have been living it up back in New Mexico. So I'm very excited to get a chance to go back again and see the sights and taste the many flavors of the land of my birth. And I get to be a tour guide for Des, who has never been out that way--or that far from a major body of water, come to that.

It should be a lot of fun. The weather this time of year is a bit of a wildcard, but the immediate forecast is for decent temperatures and clear skies. But a few last flurries of snow are not unheard of around Easter. We'll see.

Since I won't be around to do my Monday Night Video Wrap Up, I'll post a few now. Basically, I'm selling off a bunch of CDs (check out my wares at Half.com!) and I got a question about whether a Teen Idols CD I had up for sale had any skips in it. So I dusted it off and gave it a listen last night. Well, hello 1999! Sheesh. Brought back a few memories, that's for sure. So then I went browsing on YouTube for other pop punk favorites from days of yore. And now I will share the bounty.

It was a lot of fun to revisit these old bands, especially in light of the commercialized joke that pop punk became after acts like New Found Glory, Good Charlotte, etc. broke big in the early 2000s. I forgot that pop punk was once much more about the "punk" with only a little flavoring of the "pop", instead of the other way around.

( I got a feeling you been damaged/Whoa-oh-oh-oh! )