Here they are.

That’s the inside of what our friends call our “Chester the child molester van,” but what we simply call “big red.” Receding into the distance is the Hyattsville Pepsi bottling plant, where these 4 food-grade barrels came from. Two are 55 gallons, two are 30 gallons. All are intended to go around the edge of my house to be used as rain barrels, though we may end up not making use of them all.

Pepsi charges a nominal $5 per barrel fee to sell them to you, which is a steal compared to what you’d pay a commercial outfit. In fairness, I’m going to have to put on the necessary attachments myself before they can be used, to say nothing about washing out some leftover syrup sludge. Unless you can tell me for sure that tomato plants and daffodils are fans of lemon-lime, that is.

If you’re not quite as cheap & handy as I am (in that order) you can pick up barrels from the Arlington Echo Outdoor Education Center. $60 is more than the $5 plus parts and time I’ll spend, but you won’t have to show up in Hyattsville at 6:30am to be assured of getting one either.

If you like to walk the path less traveled sensible as I do, instructions for making a barrel are provided here by the Maryland Environmental Design Program or you can use the contact link and ask the Fairfax Country Conservation District program to contact you the next time they run a rain barrel construction workshop.

If you’re thinking this sounds a little too hippie-dippy for you, I had some initial qualms about that as well. However I pretty much made up my mind to do it because of two things. One of them is probably unique to me: the previous tenants in our house left behind a number of soaker hoses, so we’d like to make use of them. The other factor I am sure applies to you as well: water is expensive. Since Arlington - and many regions -  base our sewer bill on our water consumption, we don’t just pay the $3.34 for each 1,000 gallons we pour out onto our lawn and garden - we also pay an additional $5.86 to cover the cost of spiriting it away down the drain and off to the stinky water  treatment plant… even though there’s no drain in our vegetable garden.

So if I put all 4 of my barrels to use, that’ll be a combined 170 gallons of water on hand to use rather than the $1.56 worth that comes out of the tap. Not a money saver right out the door, but combined with the lazyness factor of letting the soaker hoses do the work without any accompanying worry about them rupturing and costing me money, I think it’ll be worth it.

Besides, it’s yet another do it yourself project I can add to my overstocked pile. What more could I ask for?

Commuting quiz: It’s rush hour, you’re coming west out of Georgetown, passing by the Key Bridge, and you want to get on the Whitehurst Freeway without making the lengthy trip it would take to turn around and merge on to the Whitehurst ramp from the opposite direction — how can you possibly do that?

Answer: Get a diplomatic plate, like Mr. GD0108 here, come to a stop that gridlocks the intersection behind you, ignore the angry honking, bully your way forward until oncoming traffic stops, cut across, get on to Whitehurst and give an evil laugh as you speed away from the insignificant commoners of your host country.

Bands walk a fine line when trying to add something new to a tried and true formula such as post-rock’s trademark ‘quiet-loud-quiet-loud’ arrangement. The epic scale of the genre allows for plenty of variation and innovation which more often than not results in genius. However as I stood at Rock and Roll Hotel last night watching the opening band Grails doing their thing all I could think was, “Is this how far the genre has come?”

To put it midly, I did not dig Grails’ set. It was obvious that they were trying to cut their own path through post-rock country but the method of transport they chose just didn’t work for me at all. A fan of Grails described them to me as ‘jazzy music for dark cowboys’ … um sure buddy. The band looked like a post-rock band, and they posed like a post-rock band, but what they really were was a hippy-dippy jam band disguised as a post-rock band. I mean I was expecting a sitar solo at any second.

I was trying to get into their set but I kept thinking about how their focus on rhythm over dramatic guitar playing reminded me more of an extended Phish jam than a post-rock show. It got me thinking about post-rock as a genre and how far it has come. It has been about 16 years since Spiderland birthed the genre and in that time bands like Explosions in the Sky have become huge. Now-a-days, since the genre has finally gone big time, everyone and their cousin suddenly has a post-rock band. But are they all really post-rockers or are some just post-college potheads that have retooled their sound to cash-in? While I was thinking that Grails were more like these guys than these guys my fears were confirmed when a guy next to me started to do that pot-head dance (you know the one, the one that your dorm’s tie-dye guy did everytime some one uttered the words ‘kind bud’).

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The first thing I noticed when I walked into The Rock And Roll Hotel for the first time on sunday is that the space reminded me a lot of the old 9:30 Club - which is a plus. I had heard that the idea behind the place was to be like the 9:30 Club. When I heard that I had assumed the owners were talking about the new 9:30 - much to my surprise they meant the original. The main difference between the original sacred music den and this new club is that the auxilliary drinking space is upstairs instead of down and decorated a little nicer.

The Rock And Roll Hotel stage room is a cool space and I hope they can keep it filled with good bands. Good bands like the one I went to see play on sunday - Snog from the land down under.

Snog’s touring set-up is spare - two keyboards, a guitar, and lead-singer/ mastermind David Thrussell. Based on Thrussell’s persona through lyrics I have always assumed the guy lives in a hand-made bunker somewhere underneath the Australian outback writing vitrolic diatribes against the “mainstream” world that exists outside his eutopic hippy-in-a-bombshelter compund.

Seeing Thrussell perform live for the first time I realized that my impression wasn’t that far off the mark. Thrussell looks like anything but the stereotype of an EBM musician. No Matrix outfits, no sunglasses, no patent-leather - Thrussell took the stage looking like a middle-aged roadie for White Snake - only instead of wearing a ‘Jersey Devil’ t-shirt he was wearing one that declared ‘I love Robots’.

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