So, as I mentioned before, I went to go see Mates of State tonight. Before tonight, I thought of Mates of State as a very solid band. But their live show is awesome, and I think they've managed to entrench themselves as one of my favorite bands. Perhaps not top 20, but up there. I really dig this stuff.

They opened up with one of my favorite songs, "Whiner's Bio", and played through just about all of their latest album, Team Boo. They played some older material as well. For me, though, the highlight of their set was the closer: an absolutely amazing cover of Nico's "These Days", which is actually one of my favorite songs of all time. Jason sang, no drumming. And Kori's organ was beautiful. That made the whole fucking night.

Mates of State's stage presence is really quite cool. You watch them play, and they're just staring each other down. It's so readily apparent that the two (husband and wife) are in love with each other, and it totally spills over into the music. It's great.

Also of note were the opening bands and the swag I managed to net. I can't say much about the swag until next I see Blake. He missed the show, but I've got a kickass gift for him. :)

The local bands were very good. Summer Melts Faster started out with a pretty rocking set to warm up the crowd. They're sort of a post-punk inflected At The Drive-In. Quite good. The second band really blew me away, though. Ulysses, typically a quartet, was missing their drummer for this show. The result was a much more subdued guitar/synth/synth act that absolutely rocked. Really awesome lyrics, great guitar, and these awesome layered synth sounds. It reminded me of Galaxie 500. But it rocked flat out. And the guys were really cool.

All in all, I had a great night. A lot of fun. The Mates set just left me feeling very positive. I've been in a great mood all night. It's great. Awesome music. Awesome night. It's good.

Walking back from class just now, I had a thought: would it be possible for a language to be purely semantic, that is, with absolutely no syntactic structures? The conclusion I came to was that, yes, it would be possible, but only theoretically. The language would have to have a symbol for every possible expression. That's extremely impractical. But maybe I'm missing something.

Another related question: what is the minimal syntactic structure needed for a language to be (and I'm making this term up) "linguistically complete" (think Turing complete, but for human expression)?

Also of note: I'm going to see the band Mates of State tonight. I rather like the band. They're quite quirky, and their music is fantastic. More when I get back tonight.

Sigh. And apparently Blake Ellis isn't coming. But, as he already knows, I'm going to go anyway. :D

In exciting pseudo-spiritual news, Slashdot reports that the seminal Monty Python movie The Life of Brian is being rereleased in theaters. Woo. BBC story is here.

Yes. "Always look on the bright side of life..." did pop into my head towards the end of The Passion of the Christ, which was otherwise quite a good film. And, yes, I am a terrible person. :)