Keyboard lust

Tony and I hit up Fry's this afternoon. Just your average Fry's run, with the notable exception that they had a working floor model of the Yamaha DGX-505



Sweet beard of Zeus, what a keyboard. Granted, it's not perfect; it's not hammer action, which essentially means that they keys don't feel like piano keys exactly, and it's only got about 300 voices (as if I'd ever use more than about ten), but the good far outweighs the bad. It's essentially a souped-up version of what we've got at home now; 88 keys (one of about three under $1000 that have this, if the Internet is telling me the truth), a USB jack in the back for easy(?) connectivity with a computer ... this thing has bells and whistles on its bells and whistles. Plus, it sounds really good. It's got essentially the same sound set as the PSR-540 (the keyboard we have now) except the piano sounds are supposedly recorded straight from a grand, and it shows (or rather, it ... hears? I don't know). I've been wanting a full-sized keyboard for a while now; I've been kicking myself for the past year for not keeping up with the piano. So this might just be the one. The downside? The piano itself is $549, and you need to purchase the AC adapter separately. WTF? Thankfully, I just might be able to justify this purchase by telling myself that I make $500 back during job training. Score!

It was certainly a lot of effort to get in front of the floor model at Fry's. This one spiky-haired kid was in front of the damn thing pounding out the opening bar of Fur Elise (but just the opening bar) for seriously 20 minutes. Tony and I kept making loops of the store, always ending at the floor model, always meeting that same spiky-haired punk with his opening bar of Fur Elise. Maybe I'm a horrible person, but I just wanted to sliding tackle that kid. There are very few things that just make me squirm, and grievous abuse of Beethoven is one of them.

After the Fry's run and some Mongolian BBQ (tase-tee) we sat down and watched Bad Santa. I have to admit, it was a lot better than I expected. I was struck by the memorial message for John Ritter at the end; apparently he died before the movie was released. I can imagine that Ritter didn't expect that to be his last movie, in much the same way that Raul Julia didn't expect to go out with the Street Fighter movie. In a side-note, they played Mortal Kombat: Annihilation on TBS (are you surprised?) a couple days ago. I've never been struck by just how unabashedly bad that film was until now. I mean, it didn't even pretend to be decent. You could tell that the actors were just going through the motions, and that alone made the movie entertaining. One long string of increasingly ridiculous fight sequences? Sweet.