Rewind Time

METAL HEADS: Lots of playing catch up in this blog post. We've been a little busy around these parts. ... 

Last Tuesday, CJ and Christian attended a 'death metal' concert featuring . (Annabelle and I chose to sit this one out.)

CJ can tell you more about the experience.

On an annual basis since 2012, Decibel Magazine (a magazine focused on hard rock and heavy metal music) hosts the Decibel Magazine Tour, a tour which features various death metal (an extreme form of heavy metal music focused on dissonance, deep, growled lyrics, and over-the-top gory lyrics) bands stopping at various stops across North America. For most Decibel Magazine Tours, there are three bands: One major band (usually not from this millennium), and two up-and-coming bands. This year, however, the Decibel Magazine Tour features four bands, in order of performance (at least at our local stop): Blood Incantation, Necrot, Morbid Angel, and Cannibal Corpse.

The Decibel Magazine Tour's Seattle-area stop was at the Showbox Market, in downtown. After being dropped off there with my father, we entered the building to be greeted with a dark, noisy interior. We presented our tickets, and made our way to the left wall of the Showbox.Pretty early on, it became clear that my father and I were outliers in the crowd. Most of the other concertgoers were wearing jean jackets, with patches representing various bands and albums sewn on. It was pretty obvious that for most of the attendees, this was not their first metal concert.Blood Incantation, the first band to play, played for a half-hour, most of which was filled with one, overlong, bizarre song (there may have technically have been different songs, but they mas as well have been one.) The last of the half hour was occupied by what sounded like a dragging, dreary rendition of Slayer's Black Magic.

After Blood Incantation departed, Necrot took the stage, and turned out to be a colossal improvement over Blood Incantation. Necrot, in contrast to the previous band, played songs of a more conventional length, albeit ones that often sounded similar to each other. Necrot's musicianship and songwriting was among the best seen at the show.While Blood Incantation and Necrot only got to play for a half-hour each, the latter two bands got to play for a full hour each. Morbid Angel, the penultimate band, was the oldest at the show, having formed in 1983. While there were certainly songs from their more recent output, Morbid Angel also played several songs only heard on demos from the 1980s, which didn't seem to bother the metalheads in the crowd.

Last, but not least, came Cannibal Corpse, arguably the most popular death metal band in existence (and, to the extent of my knowledge, the only one of the bands at the show to have at least one album on the Billboard 200). Cannibal Corpse's songs were very over-the-top, on a both musical and lyrical level. Lead "singer" George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher would often talk to the audience in humorous ways. For example, in one break between songs, he threw water bottles out to the audience, and promised prizes to those who could catch the bottles. After people in the crowd caught the bottles, Corpsegrinder informed them that he would give them "The most brutal prize of all: Nothing!", with the last word growled in Corpsegrinder's usual fashion. Before the penultimate song on their setlist, Corpsegrinder challenged the metalheads to headbang at an equal or greater speed that he could. Perhaps needless to say, I didn't see anybody beat him.

In short, the concert was very enjoyable, if a bit loud.

TOTE-ALLY: Last Monday afternoon we headed to the Burien library for a "crafternoon." The project of the day was crafting a tote bag out of an old t-shirt. Sounded like fun to us, so off we went.

CJ can tell you more about it. ...

I recently learned that it is possible to create tote bags using t-shirts in a simple, ten-minute craft project. I engaged in a t-shirt tote project at the Burien Public Library, following these steps:

First, I cut the sleeves off of the shirt, followed by the neckline. 

After turning the shirt inside-out, I can use an object (such as a book) to determine how deep I want the bag to be by drawing a line where I want the bottom of the bag to be. Then, I cut slits (about 3/4 to 1 inch apart) from the bottom of the shirt to where I want the bottom of the bag to be. 

This is followed by tying the right-strands from the slits to the left-strands of the slits to the right, continued all the way to the opposite side of the shirt. After doing this correctly, I pulled the strands to be tight, turned the shirt inside-out again, and voila! A tote bag!

A slightly more wordy version of these instructions, with pictures, can be found here.

ABUZZ: We're still working our way through a curriculum about bees from . Some of the things we've learned lately include the fact that there are well over 20,000 known species of bees, and that number continues to grow as more are discovered. Apinae is a sub-family of bees, containing 5,750 members, including the honey bee.

A new-to-us word is "haplodiploidy," which is a reproductive system where males develop from unfertilized eggs, referred to as haploid. 

We also learned about buzz pollination, which is a special technique for dislodging pollen from certain types of plants. Bumble bees are among the few species of bee capable of buzz pollination. Here's a cool video of that process, from the Smithsonian's YouTube channel:

Another fascinating fact we learned is that some bees can determine the type of flower by its electrical charge.  It turns out that flowers hold a positive charge and some bees can detect a minute electrical field. According to Science magazine, when they locate a type of flower that is rich in nectar, they can remember the electrical “footprint” of that flower.