Spending the week at Summerfest

The Zippo Stage at Summerfest 08

I am just about up with my week at Summerfest and getting ready to come on on this Tuesday and I have to say this is the coolest music festival I have ever had the pleasure of attending. So far over 200 bands have played on the various stages in the festival park, and a lot fo the bands are top-notch bands. I have seen Sevendust, The Old 97s, Katie Todd, Theory of a Deadman, and a boat-load more that are just on the Zippo stage which we are facing the 12 hours we are there every day. The days are long, and my dogs are barkin' by the end of it but it is a blast and I enjoy just about every minute of it.

As with any concert, part of the attraction is always people watching – and this is no exception. the crowd of folks ranges from young to old, yuppie to redneck, and often includes a variety of drunkards from every stage in between. The only thing that really tends to get meworked up is the selfish jack-witts who bring their 6 month old babies to a music festival where my ears are ringing when I leave evry day. I make the choice to go and endager my eardrums – a baby doesn't have that choice and these folks are screwing with the hearing of very small children and doing far worse damage to their ears than have been done to mine over the 2 decades and hundreds of concerts that have put the hurtin' on my ears. If it were my festival, I would make it so that kids would have to be a certain age – and be made to wear hearing protection – infants do not belong at a death-metal concert.

I have met a ton of cool people, rocked out to some cool bands (of course some not-so-cool bands too), and shot around 12 gb of images over the course of the last few days. It's going to take me a while to sort through them, but since I was posting – I put together this panaramic using DoubleTake. Milwaukee is a really cool town too – makes me miss the city as it reminds me quite a bit of Portland. There is a river running right through the middle of the city – the Root River in fact. As I was walking down to the park on Friday, I ran across a stray Catfish just sitting on the sidewalk. It looked like it could have just jumped right out of the river and landed on the sidewalk, except for the fact that it was 300 meters from the water…. Random. I wish I had more time to roam around and see the city, but alas I am here to work – and I only get 1 day off.

See ya when I get home….

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