Guitar Hero Rock Legend...

I figure this is the right forum to make my big announcement that I'm officially retiring from Guitar Hero. Oh sure, I'll still play an occasional song for fun, there may be a reunion tour in the works, but my professional career has come to an end. I feel like I accomplished a lot in my career, I started out as lead guitar for the up and coming band "Ben and the Diehls", working my way up to the big time. First we beat all the songs and face-offs on Easy, and then Medium. With some work, we could rip off 5-stars on every song on Medium and Easy, unlocking new characters and guitars at every turn. Then the pressure starts to get to you; they don't call the difficulty level "Hard" for nothing. I didn't turn to Heroin Hero, but I started having nightmares of the last few songs on Hard. I only had three songs left to beat on Hard, but my brain refused to process what appears as a solid series of notes coming towards me rapidly. Thinking about the time required to beat those three songs seemed a bit too daunting, and I took the easy way out. That coupled with a heated naming dispute on whether our band name was really "The Diehls and Ben" was pretty much the end of my run on Guitar Hero.

Given the popularity of Guitar Hero at big events (it took over New Year's and the Wisp ski trip a few weeks ago), I'm sure I'll probably participate at the occasional gathering. However, in general I'm letting the next generation of rock legends take the mantle.

P.S. You have to watch the South Park episode on the same subject. If you can't catch this episode on Comedy Central reruns, check out this link to watch the episode: http://www.southparkzone.com/episodes/1113/Guitar-Queer-o.html

Happy New Year...

After taking an unplanned month and a half sabbatical from blogging (I think my current status is disappointing on Penrock's blog) I find myself in a familiar predicament. Namely, I've got ample topics to write about but most of the events I want to write about are long since passed. I could hope that you haven't checked here in the last month and a half, backdate several entries, and pretend that nothing was amiss. However, I'm going to try a different approach; I'm going to talk about the past today, and dare you to criticize me.

That being said, Happy New Year!

I wanted to share some pictures from our recent New Year's party at our place. It was by no means a huge gathering, but Penrock managed to defy conventional wisdom and stay past midnight(barely). It must have been his stint on the exercise bike that let him go the extra mile:

Note that Yuengling is a key ingredient to any training regiment.

It was a fun evening, we had way too much food and drinks, and the usual shenanigans were afoot, as taking a simple posed picture turned into a challenge:






How did Ben end up in every pic??