Happy anniversary to us... as of today, we've been open for two years. We've now been open for a bit longer than we were closed (in escrow and remodeling.) In that time we have had:

• 382 events;
• 900+ DJs;
• 80+ bands.

The DJ/band numbers aren't exact, but I think they're pretty close. (I only counted each DJ/band once, even if they performed here multiple times.)

DNA Lounge has existed for just under 18 years, and there has been a bar on this site for around 26 years!

You knew that I'd be too compulsive to just leave it at that, didn't you? You were right. I modified my calendar scripts to generate an alphabetical list of all bands and djs who have performed here, with links back to the corresponding dates. Check it out, and let me know if you have any corrections to make (URLs, spelling, etc.)

This, of course, opens the can of worms of the difference between "band" and "dj", since there are lots of folks who are somewhere inbetween. I wasn't very careful with the categorization here, so there may well be "bands" mixed in the with djs; if you think someone is mis-categorized in these lists, feel free to tell me who (and why...)

Incidentally, are any of you using the iCal feed that I added last month? How's that working out? Does it work? Is it useful?

There are some new pictures from Thump.

Photos of the Hanzel und Gretyl / Hate Dept / Voodou show are up. Angela's out of town, so you get to put up with my blurry photography again. I'm really starting to hate my camera: pressing the button and waiting three seconds before it actually takes the pictures is really getting old. This show seemed like it was comparatively well lit, too, and still my pictures came out as dark as always. Though there were a few times when I managed to get a good shot by counting in time with the lightshow strobes, and shooting at just the right time.

Anyway, it was a fantastic show. I really like Voodou (they opened for Thrill Kill Kult in October), and I've been waiting a long time to see Hate Dept again. In fact, I think the last time they played in SF might have been here at DNA, a couple years before we took over... They've been huge favorites since the first time I saw them at House of Usher in... 1994? Ah, nostalgia. Seibold's shtick always used to be to insult the audience as much as possible, and the best line this time was "I see you people are still wearing all black, just like the last time we were here. Anyone watch The Crow lately?" One of my friends commented on the reduced level of hostility by saying "they're more like Friendly Disdain Dept."

Hanzel und Gretyl were great too. I saw them the last time they toured (at the late, lamented Trocadero in 1997), but for some reason I can hardly remember it. They've got this sci-fi Nazi shtick going on now, which was really funny (though I've got to wonder how many people out there are just totally failing to get the joke.) Their show was super-melodramatic: it seemed like any time they changed position, it was from one album-cover pose to another. It was just great.

So, it's a good thing that I enjoyed this show so much, because it was one of those "sliding scale" shows: you know, the kind where it's a $15 ticket, unless your name is "Jamie Zawinski", in which case that ticket costs more like $2000. We expected a lot more people to show up than did, so we lost a bundle on this one.

I told you it was going to be a good show, didn't I, didn't I? Why don't you turkeys ever listen to me.

In sadder news, Georgia's calling it quits: Dulcinea, the restaurant next door, is for sale. She bought it just about a year ago, and opened in October. We're all pretty bummed about that; the food was great, and they got good reviews, but, well, money.

In case you haven't seen it yet, last month the SF Bay Guardian ran an article about life as a club bouncer entitled "These Aren't My Pants!" It's hilarious and you must all go read it now. I'll wait.

Just for laughs, I tried visiting the DNA Lounge web site on the web browser built into my cell phone. This was pure comedy, I'm telling you! We are so totally not living in the future yet...

It started out ok, aside from being insanely slow (I think it might have actually been dialing a separate call for each pixel). I saw the DNA Lounge logo come up right away, but then it sat there and wouldn't let me scroll for several minutes while it loaded the rest of the page. I had plenty of time to meditate on the fact that the text that I could see was overlapping in a classy way.

Then boom! "Insufficient memory." I hit OK, which I assume "restarted my browser", but really what it meant was, now I was able to scroll around in the page.

After scrolling down, I noticed something else odd. The table of future events seemed to only have column 3 visible: the "buy" link and the text of the date didn't show up at all...

Scrolling more, I was able to see the first two of the six thumbnails (the others hadn't loaded.) The text at the bottom of the page was even readable... But something important was missing. The left-side menu wasn't there at all, meaning there was almost no navigation available. Oops. Well, the link to the Calendar was there, so I clicked on it.

404? WTF? (I guess the gag 404 message that I use is strangely appropriate when being viewed on a phone, huh?) Anyway, some digging around shows that the 404 is because the phone's web browser is buggy: it doesn't understand anchors, and when it sees a URL that ends in "07.html#28", instead of loading "07.html" and scrolling to the "28" anchor, it tries to load the file "07.html#28", which of course doesn't exist. This is a seriously rookie move, and I can't imagine how anything works at all in their browser. Oh wait, I forgot: nothing actually does! Silly me.

Anyway, moving right along, I typed in the calendar URL by hand, which only took me about ten minutes. It looked, uh, arty? Certainly somewhat less than completely legible, as you can see. But at least this time I got overlapping text instead of big chunks of text being just totally missing. It's unclear whether that was an improvement.

In conclusion, I have found that my phone does not make a good web browser, and that we are not yet living in the future. Thank you and good night.