lost time

back in the day burger king used to sell watches that were tied into movie promotions. at the time i was really into watches, so i picked one up almost every time they offered them. this particular one was for the movie 'jurassic park: the lost world'. the 'special feature' of this watch was that the face was filled with water and had dino bones floating around in it. wow, quite special! about as lame as the movie itself... i dont think i ever wore it, but i did display it in my room with the rest of my watch collection.

mickey watches

my dad has always loved watches. slowly but surely i grew to enjoy them as well, but i had to be convinced of their coolness. what finally convinced me? mickey mouse. for a long time i would only wear mickey watches, so i accrued quite a collection of them. these four are the only remaining ones that i have. each of them were worn for quite a while- the one on the left even played 'its a small world after all'!
i guess my fascination didnt last very long, because i havent worn a watch, even a mickey one, in about 8 years...

boldly go

now, i must admit something: i was a trekkie. when i was growing up i really loved star trek. my dad enjoyed it, so he would watch it every once in a while, and my friend adam and i were really into it. we actually attended a star trek convention. actually, two of them.
one year my parents surprised me with this watch, they had gotten it out of a catalog, special order! it kept the time, and the seconds were counted out by an enterprise flying around the face of the watch! oh, and the best part: it had a button you could press and it would play the original star trek tv theme! i wore it often.
sorry to break hearts ladies, but i am off the market...

roger, roger.

another thing i collected for a while was watches. this particular one a couple friends and i spotted at the mall and thought it was terribly stupid. its from star wars: the phantom menace, and its the head of a droid. you push a little button at the bottom and the droid head pops up to reveal the time. there were a couple other ones as well, all of them equally retarded. we saw them and laughed about how dumb they were. then we saw that they were price reduced and we laughed again- 'they're so lame, no one would buy them!' we had such fun mocking them that we realized that we would, in fact, have to buy them! they were only like a buck fifty, so we each got them and wore them for the rest of the day, laughing hysterically every time we would ask each other what time it was.

fire and ice commerical

back in college a buddy of mine, joe, and i organized a music festival. strange, i know, but we were involved in the campus radio club, and that lead us to get involved with some strange things... well, we had originally created it to be an event to just get a couple campus bands to play, but it kind of snowballed into a full-out 12 hour festival which included a dozen bands, some of which were on a national tour and stopped by Dordt to perform. our festival was called 'fire and ice', and among the bands that performed were endorphine, the normals (with lead singer andrew osenga), silage, rich young ruler, eric champion, and many more.
at the local radio station they were willing to play a commercial we cut for the music festival. this strange looking thing is an old school loop cartridge. you could pop this thing into the machine and it would run its 30 second spot, and it wouldnt have to be rewound for the next play.

audio a

this is a little cardboard cutout of the band audio adrenaline. back in high school i was really in to this band. actually, this was the band that first got me interested in music! up until this point i mostly just listened to what my parents listened to, not really having much interest in finding bands of my own. at the time my parents listened to country music and i would blindly listen to whatever they had on. the only thing i liked on my own was disney animated soundtracks.
a couple of the guys had gone to see audio adrenaline in concert and came back with one of their cds. they were over at my house and popped it in and i instantly fell in love! it was back when their first cd was out and i loved the fact that they had a couple silly songs like 'dc10'. soon after i convinced my mom to buy me the cd, and i followed them for the following 10 years. i got this foot tall cardboard cut-out at one of their concerts. my friends and i went to go see them as often as possible- i think we ended up seeing them six or seven times!
as their sound changed so did i. they went from silly pop to rock to folk, then back to rock. i stuck with them for most of it, but after underdog i lost interest. they were a band that changed its sound ever album, depending on what was popular. after underdog my tastes in music began to branch away from the popular and so we amicably parted ways. since then they have broken up, but i still look back on those concerts and albums and remember how much they impacted my taste in music and impacted me and my friends. good times...