Blessed by the Potato

Just got back from seeing JoCo and Paul & Storm in concert. It was a really fun concert, including at least 3 separate songs about mad scientists who are sad, so it was like they were singing right to me. Paul & Storm have a fairly large catalogue of stuff on their site, and I find most of it to be hit-or-miss, but in person (where it’s really just the hits) they were great.

It was an intimate setting with lots of feedback (often hilarious) from the audience of hard-core fans (and really, there are really only three kinds of people: those who have never heard of JoCo (yet), those who are already die-hard fans, and those who aren’t the slightest bit geeky and/or without any sense of humour and thus have heard of JoCo/P&S but aren’t fans). However, the seats in the Enwave theatre were horrendous, they weren’t deep enough to sit fully back on (it’s like when the monster truck radio guy says “you get the whole seat, but you’ll only need the edge” — well they only gave us the edge). They also were connected down the row, so whenever someone would move your seat would shake and twist. At least the venue had good acoustics.

Verdict:
Jonathan Coulton – Awesome.
Paul & Storm – Hella Awesome.
Enwave Seats – NOT awesome.

The funniest part of the concert though was Wayfare. During the Mandelbrot Set she just about lost it laughing (and when I first played the song for her, she laughed for like 15 minutes at the “best line ever in a song”). I’m pretty sure it carried right to the front, but JoCo didn’t seem to mind. Then during the encore, all 3 of them come back out to play a cover of TMBG’s Constantinople, and Paul brings out this weird mouth organ blowy thing, and JoCo and Storm comment on it and make a few jokes. Wayfare grabs my arm, turns to me, and with this really intense expression on her face says “Have you ever seen my mouth organ blowy thing? It’s red.” And partly because of how important she seemed to think it was that it was red, and mostly because of how intensely she said it, I just lost it and started laughing like crazy.

Finally, it was really weird to see so many people in “Skullcrusher Mountain” T-shirts (including me).