My 4th of July weekend started off with a bang! Thursday evening we went to Green Gables country club for our now semi-traditional fireworks viewing. Friday morning started immediately at 9:30 with beer chugging contests for the 3rd annual beer olympics. Pictures of last years beer olympics (aquatic version) can be found somewhere around here. This year’s events consisted of:

The girlfriend and I, appropriately name team “Chugs & Kisses”, came in dead last. Though we did come in a very close second on the Blind Man’s Beer event. After the beer olympics I headed home for a nap while went to pick up friends from the airport. We then went to Dutch’s annual 4th Of July party where we celebrated the night away and overstayed our welcome. This is the party where G and I met so it’s sort of an anniversary of sorts for us.

On Saturday we had an all day BBQ at our house with new, old, and out of town friends. It was a good time. I over cooked the turkey burgers and stayed up way too late.

Sunday I slept. A lot.

Pecha Kucha is a mix of local creatives sharing their work in rapid fire format. Denver’s second run at this fun event will be held will be tonight, Monday, July 14th at Buntport Theater (717 Lipan Street), 8 PM. There is a $5 suggested donation and beer will be on hand.

Pecha Kucha is a mix of local creatives sharing their work in rapid fire format. Denver’s second run at this fun event will be held will be tonight, Monday, July 14th at Buntport Theater (717 Lipan Street), 8 PM. There is a $5 suggested donation and beer will be on hand.The Pecha Kucha Denver website has a good rundown of the presenters.

I suggest you check it out. The previous event was a lot of fun.

Well WSP at Redrocks this year was once again amazing. They broke the record with more consecutive sellout shows at redrocks than any other band and the Mayor proclaimed Friday as an official Widespread Panic Day. No, seriously.

Here’s a stream of Saturday’s show.

I had a blast. Great company. Perfect weather. Incredible set list. It’s weird cause it seems like I always get a Talking Heads cover. This year it was “Life during Wartime”. The widespread shows are always one of my favorite parties of the year. Instead of bragging about here on Artifacting (too late?), I’ll do like I did last year and let a bunch of other blogs tell you how amazing the show was:

PKN vol 1 audience / stage right, originally uploaded by INV/ALT.

Last Friday, me and about 150 other folks went to Denver’s first Pecha Kucha Night. Pronounced “P chalk-a-cha”, and Japanese for “Chit Chat”. Pecha Kucha’s are held in cities from Amsterdam and Auckland to Venice and Vienna. The event was organized by locally by Jaime Kopke, Angela Schwab (both of whom have great blogs that are in my feed-reader, are they in yours?), and Brian Colonna.

The rules of the night, as explained on the official Pecha Kucha website, are as such:

Each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds each - giving 6 minutes 40 seconds of fame before the next presenter is up. This keeps presentations concise, the interest level up, and gives more people the chance to show.

It’s a a way for architects, designers, artists, writers, and plain-old, ordinary, people to share their work in a concise and rapid fire format. It’s like show and tell for adults, with beer.

It was such a packed house lots of people had to sit on pillows on the floor. And the despite the overload of hipsters in the audience, the presenters were excellent - some of my favorites being Steve Silber’s “Greeting”, Claire Martin read a series of obituaries about interesting but unsung people, Kent Corbell displayed a knew audio frequency that is supposed to fuck with your chakras and make you all emotional (it kinda worked), Andrew Novick talked about his love for pi, and Scot Lefavor was a no-show, maybe next time.

Speaking of next times, the next Pecha Kucha night will be Monday, July 14th. If you want to share your creative project at the next event shoot an email over to pechakuchadenver@gmail.com

A few things that have recently brought me the Christmas Spirit:

Lots of fun birthday stuff over the past couple of weeks.

The last week in September was the perfect time to go to Elitches. Everybody thinks it’s closed because it only runs on the weekends and none of their Halloween advertising has started yet. Tickets are also extra cheap if you buy them at Safweay. A bunch of us rode roller coasters for five hours in a effort to reclaim our youth. We rode nothing but roller coasters. We rode every single one of them, and most of them twice. We never stood in line for longer than three minutes and always had our choice of carts. I prefer the back. Ride stats are after the jump. Afterwards we hit up Brothers Bar for some birthday drinks and such.

Last weekend I was able to round up a bunch of free tickets to Comedy Works to see Dov Davidoff (youtube link) for another birthday party. He was really funny. His demeanor was a little hard to get used to. He sort of reminded me of my brother with a few cocktails in him. Very funny. And a great evening overall.

I’m a loser. But today I’m a winner.

I’ll start off by telling you about those that made me a winner today. They’re called “Oh Don Piano”. They’re named after this talking cat’s beautiful poetry. Oh Don Piano consists of Liz and Krista (I love the name of her blog). They’re two really funny and cool women here in Denver. They are also currently one of the few remaining survivors in the third annual Ultimate Blogger competition. Good luck girls!

As part of their competition they held a quiz that focused on blog stuff. I entered that contest. I won that contest. I haven’t decided yet if I’m happy or ashamed of my blog trivia prowess. But I do know that today I’m a winner. But I’m not writing this to brag about my winning (or am I?) but to thank Liz and Krista to for actualizing my wininngness with a prize. Yesterday in my mailbox I found this:

Thanks You Oh Don Piano, you have just provided me with an entire weeks worth of television-style entertainment and are indeed too kind. Thanks for making me feel like a star. I’m consistently surprised (oxymoron) at the generosity and well, just general fun, that the internet provides me.