Rock 'n' Roll Holiday Escape! [warning: atrocious midi]

Don't miss your chance to spend a week cruising the Caribbean with 3 of rock's biggest artists: Journey, REO Speedwagon and Styx.

Check out the What's Included page for this awesome perk: 2 complimentary Rock and Roll cocktail parties with open bar and hot and cold hors d'oeuvres. That's right. Hot AND cold hors d'oeuvres.

It just don't rock no harder than that.

I picture a Flying Dutchman scenario, with a ghost-ship crewed by frightening 70s and 80s hair bands. Steve Perry would be clambering up to the crow's nest, a knife clutched in his teeth, still mumbling "Oh Sherrie".

Also, failure to pay an additional fee will result in one or all of the bands showing up at your home and demanding to be housed in your basement.

[via Rory]

The Birds and They Heads

You may remember, if you are of that ilk, that I have a nest on my patio. I am pleased to report that there are now three baby birdheads in said nest, making me a bird grandfather (though not in a biological or legally binding sense).

Panic!
 
The wife just called me and asked in rushed tone: "What's your Social Security Number?" I told her and she said "thanks." and hung up, leaving my "Wait. Why?" hanging in the air.
 
It's a fun project that only married people can participate in (unlike so many other things that only single people get to do, like blowing a paycheck on a big date and still not getting any action): call your spouse and ask them potentially alarming things like that and then just hang up.

For instance:

1. What's your checking account number, mother's maiden name and blood type?
2. What would you like your obituary to say?
3. You were never convicted of a felony, right?
4. What's the major export of Bolivia?
5. Why do owls make owl noises?
 
Maybe it's not that great of an idea, but man, I haven't had very many Great Ideas lately. For a while back there, a few years ago, I was The Idea Man. The Endless Spaghetti Idea, and subsequent Endless Spaghetti Debate and Endless Spaghetti Council of 2002, leading to The Endless Spaghetti Manifesto that paved the way for the subdivision of Pasta Studies known as Endless Spaghetti Theory? That was one of my best.
 
Now, nothing.

Senate Scuttles Gay Marriage Amendment

By a whopping landslide of 50-48. They needed 60 to get it past the Senate.

Here's a handy list where you can see your local senator's vote.

Contractions

We've been dealing with contractors of late. Specifically, cement contractors.

Everyone I talk to about contractors gets this look on their face, like they've just realized what's on their toothbrush isn't toothpaste.

"Contractors," they say. "Oh yeah. We had some work done."

Cement contractors seem to have a certain look to them. They are generally leathery-skinned, kind of like deshelled tortoises, at least here in Southern California, one can only assume from years of basking in the sun, taking people's cash.

We have had about five contractors in, bidding our job. The job is pretty straightforward: we want them to take out the horrendously ugly cement and tile in our atrium, and build a deck in there*. We also want them to take out the horrendously broken concrete that is our patio and replace it with non-horrendous, non-broken concrete.

Pretty simple, right?

But contractors can't just come to your house, take a look at the job, and say something normal like "five grand." No. They have to give you more. They have to deride their competition and make it clear that they are not to be trusted.

First, they try to worm out of you the names of the other contractors that have been there before them. Then, when you say "Well, Western Gutbusters was here, but their quote was a little high..." they get quiet for a moment.

"Kafkaesque," they say conspiratorially, "I don't like to say things about the other guys," and it is clear that there exists a bond among concrete contractors. There is a secret ceremony where they swear allegiance to each other. They go fishing together on weekends. They raise their children in large cement contractor groups on an island somewhere, the location of which can never be known by the common customer. In the darkness, a candle flame burning between them, they pledge to never, ever, say things about the other guys.

"But..." and then it comes out. The dark secrets they don't want to tell you, the very telling of which will damn them to a hideous and eternal punishment.

"Don't get me wrong. Gutbusters are a great operation. But, you know."

"Yes?" I ask.

"They're not licensed. They're not bonded. They hire guys off the street. They hire children off the street. Old ladies. They've got old ladies carrying their cement. I hear they like old ladies a lot, if you know what I mean."

The contractor looks at you as if you are now part of a circle of silence. You cannot tell anyone the knowledge that he has given you, on pain of death.

Or "The guy that runs Gutbusters? He's a great guy. I went school with him. But he changed a little, you know?"

"Yes? Changed how?"

"Remember the Fantastic Four?"

"Oh yeah, The Human Torch, The Thing. He's not The Thing, is he?"

"Don't joke."

"Sorry."

"He's a supervillain. He's like Dr. Doom, the guy that runs Gutbusters. He's fashioning an iron mask, several floors below his home. He means to take over the world with a Doomsday Machine."

"A Doomsday Machine?"

"Something about freezing the world. Look, it doesn't matter. But all he needs is $6500, and he can finish his machine, enslaving the Earth. I know he might undercut my bid, but what I'm saying is that you and your wife and your family will spend the rest of your lives like deer in the winter, snuffling for roots under layers of snow, and eventually, you will succumb to the cold."

"So I shouldn't use him, then?"

"It's up to you. I'm not going to say a word against him."

Another tactic one of the contractors employed was to describe how he was basically a reanimated corpse, willing himself to stay alive only to do my concrete. And I'm not making this part up. The other, Dr. Doom part, I may have embellished.

I had been talking with the guy for all of about two minutes when he came out with "I've only got half a liver."

I was nonplussed.

"Yep. Used to have a problem with the hooch."

First off, I didn't know anyone said "hooch" anymore. This guy was like one of those Stephen King characters that appear in the first hundred pages and sell the protagonist a possessed car or something. I could tell because all during our conversation, he was having an italicized internal monologue.

"I used to have a problem with the hooch"

Why'd you tell him that? Why --

"But I don't touch a drop any more."

You know you touched a drop. You drank an aerosol can of Lemon Pledge this morn--

"No sir, but my medication, it costs a lot. It costs eight thousand dollars a month."

Maybe we should get burgers for lunch. But you always get cheese. I don't like chee--

"And my eyes? They're made of wood."

No cheeseburgers no cheeseburgers no cheeseburg--

He starts to cry. "I got no eyes, man! No eyes!"

And so on.

The crux of the matter is that all these freaks have come to my home and bid on my job. And, really, there's not that much difference in the bids. They give me the bid and they leave, some of them making it clear that their very existence depends on getting this job, intimating that the bid is in fact so low that it will mean that they will spend the rest of their lives on the streets, telling the story of how this one guy with an atrium ripped him off.

And what happened, in each case? They flaked out on me. Every single one. I want to give these people my money, because frankly I'm too pretty and weak to remove cement myself, but they won't take it. I've called them repeatedly, and been assured that they are all ready to go with the job, and then they never call back. I can't figure it out. I want to give them my money.

Why will no-one take my money?

Because they all hate you and you're pretty and weak.

Shut up.




*This is only if they are multi-classed contractors. If they had D&D style character sheets, they would be Cement-Deck Contractors, kind of like Fighter-Magic Users. I don't know what level you have to get to before you can start learning Tensor's Floating Disk as a contractor.

Take Action!
Tell your Senators to Oppose the Discriminatory Federal Marriage Amendment

Lego desk!

[via jedi]

The Nest Menace

Hello everyone, and I hope you enjoyed the unannounced and long-enduring hiatus. What happened was that I went on vacation. Madagascar sure is nice this time of year. But them lemurs pack a punch, I tell you what.

Something unnerving happened here at the Kafkaesque homestead though, while I was cavorting with the lower mammals in "The Land That Time Almost Forgot, But Then Saw a Documentary on Snakes and Was All Like 'Oh Hell! Madagascar!'"

What happened was that the birds made a nest.

The wifely friend and I have an ongoing pitched battle with a pair of morning doves. The previous owners of our house, in a fit of extremely eclectic outdoor decorating sensibility, placed an old empty stereo cabinet in the yard. It fit in nicely with the rusted out hot water heater, I guess. When we viewed the house originally, we noticed that there was a bird's nest on top of this cabinet. In general, I have always been one of those people who say "Aw, a bird's nest!", visions dancing in my head of happy tweeting baby birdies perching on my fingers, and perhaps producing an elegant frock for me to wear to the prince's ball that evening.

But I learned my lesson a few years back, when a very similar bird's nest appeared on our balcony while we were living in an apartment whose main features were the gigantic Paleozoic-era roaches and the downstairs neighbors who a couple of times a week barbecued what I can only refer to as Stinkfish. The wifely friend and I were delighted to see the nest, and had ourselves a little tender moment looking at the mommy bird warming her precious eggs. Onto this little bird mother we projected all the wonderful ideas and hopes we had for future progeny, since neither of us really wanted to mention human children all that much.

The morning dove squatted there for a while, and we would creep out to the balcony every few days and look for the baby birds, fearful that they would end up smashed on the floor in some hideous learning-to-fly episode gone wrong. I don't know if the possiblity of the baby birds squishing themselves or the fact that for about a month I had Pink Floyd's craptacular "Learning to Fly" stuck in my head was worse. It's debatable.

Then, one day, we heard small chirps from outside, and our family had grown. Three little birdies were in the nest, cheeping like there was no tomorrow. In fact, since they had only been alive for that one day, I feel confident in saying they weren't comfortable with the whole "tomorrow" concept, and they had to worry about learning to fly and getting squished and all that, so we let them squawk.

In a few days, they started hopping around our balcony, which was extrememly cute. But they kept hopping around, and as you may have guessed, pooping around. These guys were all over that balcony. All over our chairs. All over our table. All over our plants. All over our rare and expensive collection of gnomes.

And thus, their poop was all over everything.

We began to hate the cute little baby birds. They never shut up. If it wasn't the cheeping of the babies, it was the prrroooo-ing of the mother and father. At least I think he was the father. I didn't perform any Montel Williams style paternity tests. We were afraid to disturb the loud and messy miracle taking place on the balcony, so we didn't go out there very much. In the end of it, we were left with the Empty Nest Syndrome, and also the Poopy Balcony Syndrome.

Just clearing up the nest is no picnic. The guys didn't kindly disassemble their stinky, poop-encrusted domicile, but instead left it to us to demolish the structure. Some gratitude.

So pretty much since we've moved into our house, we've had a pair of morning doves hanging around. A morning ritual established itself, wherein the wifely friend would hear the telltale prooo-ing and leap to her feet, grab a broom from the kitchen, and cavort around the yard shouting invective at the avian interlopers. She despises the morning doves, and seems to take sadistic pleasure in frightening them with new and exciting gesticulations and slurs about the pigeon community as a whole.

But the birds grew wise.

After a few months of them swooping in with twigs and sticks, and attempting to invoke their squatter's rights in our eaves, they would wait until we went to work, and when I came home I would find a primitive beginning of a nest, and a sheepish looking morning dove eyeing me from the roof. I would dismantle the birds' efforts, and plead with them to find somewhere else to raise their family. And, for the last month or so, they've been gone. I thought of them moving next door, to my neighbor's house. Maybe the neighbors are more into having flying poop machines roaming the yard. Across the road is a nice European couple who play piano music at concert hall volume. I'm sure they'd like a nice bird family to provide accompaniment.

But now, they are back. We were gone for eight days, and when we returned I found a complete nest, with the mother sitting nervously atop her little brood of eggs. She's out there right now, fearing that any minute we'll come jumping out and force her away from her potential children. And I don't have the heart to shoo her off. Deep down I still get the "Aw, a bird's nest!" thoughts.

And in a few weeks, we'll have little baby birds hopping around the yard, and I'll start worrying about them falling from the nest. Maybe I'll put a little safety net out there.

Just don't poop on my gnomes.

Bush & Zombie-Reagan 2004!

I want to start this next hiatus off on the right foot, so I give you:

Another Cabbie I Have Known


This guy drove me to the airport to get on a flight to Sacramento. I was there to meet up with friends and drive to Reno. This was a cabbie of the gambler type. I got in his cab at ten to six in the morning, told him I was flying on Southwest, and he instinctively said "Ah...You go to Vegas."

It is true that I was not, in fact, going to Vegas, but it was an inspired guess. I had spotted a Racing Form sitting beside him in the front seat. I have had a lot of cab drivers who are really into gambling. Another guy drove my wife and I to a benefit casino night, and when he found out where we were going, tried unsuccessfully to convince us to let him come along and wipe the floor with all the pathetic, would-be faux gamblers. I'm sure it would have been very enjoyable, as we introduced everyone to our cabbie friend at the benefit. Sadly, we declined his fervent pleas.

This guy was pleased I was going to be gambling and launched into another long and tedious cabbie blather about how he was perhaps the greatest gambler on this or any other planet, but due to the fickle nature of fate and circumstances beyond his control, he was forced to drive a cab for a living.

As I said, it was ten to six in the morning and this guy had been early to pick me up. As a result, I had only been able to drink half of my coffee before leaving, and I mentioned this to him. He said "Coffee..." rather wistfully, and I knew he would expand on the subject if I but held my tongue.

"I can't drink the coffee."

"No?" I asked.

"Coffee ate all my stomach muscles!" he spat bitterly.

Now I know a thing or two about coffee (including this hard learned lesson: do not, under any circumstances, use patterned paper towels when you run out of coffee filters, unless you really enjoy drinking perfumey chemicals) and I had never heard of coffee actually eating your stomach muscles. "You mean it's destroyed your stomach lining, right?" I asked hopefully.

"No! It has eaten all my muscles! I used to drink so much coffee, it just ate all of them!" he rubbed his poor gut, which was estimable if totally atrophied.

I was pretty much at a loss.

We were quiet for a moment, the two of us. We listened to the pre-dawn sounds of the road, the cab bouncing over cat-eyes, and pulled into the airport. The cabbie turned to me and said "You know, when you see these old people, and they're walking on their hands?"

No, I thought, in all my years, I don't think I've ever seen an old person walking on their hands. I thought maybe they would make seal noises.

"They drank too much coffee, these people. Now they have no muscles."

I tipped him, walked into the airport, and got a really awful cup of coffee at Cinnabon. But I didn't get one of the herculean cinnamon buns. Those things really will eat your muscles.

Doubly Avuncular

I hereby end this hiatus, this long dark teatime of the soul, to announce that my sister and her partner have made of me a double uncle. Eleanor was born this weekend (she had to be there for Palace making the Premiership), and weighed in at a quite perfect eight pounds.

I don't want to give you the idea that the Kafkaesque family at large is building some sort of secret army of superhuman cuteness, but my is she cute. And has a full head of hair, I might add. So all you babies out there better get your act together, because Eleanor and my nephew Max are way ahead of you.

To the both of you, and the new baby, you've made me and all of the family very proud.

Going Up



From the who cares but me department, here's to Crystal Palace, my family's local team in England, who beat West Ham 1-0 this weekend to earn promotion to the Premiership. Palace are a gang of lovable ne'er-do-wells who've made it to the top-flight three times, only to be relegated the next season.

Relegation is a concept which might have a future in American sports. What it means is the worst three teams in the league are demoted to the first division (like minor league ball), while the best from the first division are promoted to the top division. Can you imagine if the San Diego Chargers couldn't tank the second half of the year in quest of a draft pick, or end up playing semi-pro ball the next year?

Never happen, I know. But here's to Palace. Hope we stay up.

I'd like to announce that I'm off hiatus for the duration of this post. Then, after the post is done, I will be back on hiatus. I'll be off doing other things. Maybe I'll be having a sandwich.

I just don't want you getting comfortable. Got to keep it edgy, jack.

*ahem*

Cabbies I Have Known

I have been flying around this questionably great land of ours with alarming frequency lately. This allows me to spend quality time with my favorite people: cabbies.

A couple of weeks ago I had the singular experience of being driven around by a clearly insane Thai woman who tried to force me to charge my phone in her cab.

"YOU HAVE PHONE?!" she cried as I stepped into the minivan.

"Yes. Yes I do." I smiled. I thought she was being motherly, trying to make sure that I had brought all the necessary items for a trip.

"WHAT KIND OF PHONE?!" she demanded. Incidentally, I should add that she really spoke all in caps.

"Siemens?" I replied meekly.

"YOU CHARGE YOUR PHONE!" she yelped and began to fumble in the glove box. "I HAVE CHARGER!" She found the charger and thrust it at me menacingly.

"No. No. I've just charged it, you see." I brandished my nine dollar phone.

"CHARGE?" she assayed once again.

"No, really. It's fine."

She stared back at me quizzically, almost woundedly. And gave me a "hmmmm." It could have been a "hmmmmph." I'm not sure. I just hoped it was not a "Hmmm, I think I will drive you into a cement pillar at high velocity, Siemens-phone-charger-rejector!"

I slid the door of the minivan shut and we were on our way to the airport. The airport is about ten minutes from my house, and I go the same way every time. I told her "Go down Williams, left on Sutter." [the names of the streets have been changed in this post to protect the innocent].

She replied "No."

"No?" I repeated, but added a question mark.

"No. We go on Meadow. Faster." I was frankly a little puzzled. Not only was she refusing to take me the way I wanted to go, but she seemed to be saying she wanted to take a road which didn't go through to the airport. It ends about a block away from my house, in an open corridor filled with giant weeds that look like they want to eat small dogs. There are plans to put Meadow through, but unless it was going to take us the better part of two years to drive the block and a half to Meadow, it wasn't going to work.

I started to object but she was on the case. She made it to Meadow and turned right, into the mouth of the open corridor. She was thrown momentarily, evidently trying to decide if she could drive through the open corridor (and a square mile of military base the lay between us and the airport).

I screeched "NO ROAD!"

"Oh!" she said, and swung the van around, apologizing profusely. In fact, she swung the van right back through the intersection, against a red light and through oncoming cars. I emitted a series of small "ah! ah!" sounds as we narrowly missed Focuses and Hondas.

But then, we were on Meadow. Headed in completely the wrong direction.

She recovered her composure. "We take freeway." she said.

"No. Go back and take Williams."

"I don't think soooo," she drummed her fingers on the dash. "Traffic."

I said "Listen, there is no traffic right now. We'll be there in ten minutes."

"You want to bet?" She turned back to me and grinned maniacally. "You miss your flight. What time your flight?!"

"I've got an hour and a half. We'll be there in ten minutes. I promise you."

She made tutting sounds, but gave in and duly drove me to the airport, on Williams, without killing me. And we made it in ten minutes. But I did get to hear lots and lots about the cabbie. I think people become cabbies for the express reason of complaining to strangers about how miserable they are. It must be fun for your passengers to know that you are one missed check away from putting your head in the oven, as you propel them down busy streets at high speeds.

She had been a translator, she said. And a stewardess. She had made lots of money at those occupations, but she said they were boring. Now she was struggling to make ends meet. She told me how much her rent was. How much her cab rental was. Exactly how much money she made. By the end of it I could have filled out a loan application for this woman.

She also told me she was from Thailand. She said something about "in her country", and I asked what country she was from. "THAILAND!" she screamed as if she were at a Thailand High School football game.

"Must be nice there," I said, hoping to distract her from any more suicidal thoughts.

"Thailand is number one," she replied [and I hasten to point out that I am merely describing actual events here, and not trying to stereotype anyone. If you have a problem with the depiction of the Thai cabbie, you can email me and I will seek her out and let you know you are on her side. Maybe there will be a class action suit.] Then she grew serious, looking at me in the rear-view and pulling her Risky Business style Ray Bans down her nose. "Sir, Thailand is number one," as if I had been arguing that no, in fact, Kazakhstan was clearly number one, with Thailand a distant sixth. And then she began to hum.

A little later, she did impressions. She was talking about tips, and which nationalities give the best tips. This led to a long impression of Indian cab-riders giving her thanks and blessings for the safe ride. More likely they were thanking her for not killing them. I made the mistake of giggling confusedly at her Indian passenger impression, so she continued for a good two minutes. It was a stellar impression, of course, and in no way offensive to the Indian people.

Somehow we made it to the airport, and I tipped her, for the impressions more than anything else. I strode into the terminal with the "Man, did I just almost get killed there?" feeling that only a truly insane cabbie can give you.

Hiatus Intermission

Not to disturb the hiatus here, which I think is going really well, but I have to tell you that I saw Lenny Kravitz playing the piano with his ass today.

It wasn't something I was prepared for.

I happened to be flipping the channels, which I do on my lunch hour. I come home from work, make a sandwich, and flip the channels on the teevee. The problem was that there was no soccer to watch, you see. The English season is over, and now my beloved soccer channel shows Australian Rules Football highlights at noon. That's just fine. There was even a period of my life where I considered myself somewhat knoweldgeable on Australian Rules Football.

People would say to me, as so often happens, "Kaf, that Australian Rules Football, I mean what the hell is up with that?"

I don't know why people would question me about Australian Rules Football in this way. It could have been the small pin that I wore on my lapel that said "Ask me about Australian Rules Football, mate."

And I would listen as they complained about how all it is is a bunch of guys jumping around, catching the rubgyish ball and knocking their tender parts against each other with furious anger. I would think to myself "They just don't understand the excitement of Australian Rules Football. They'll never know why you have to bounce the balls every ten steps, or why the little refs by the goalposts wear fish-and-chip-shop outfits." And I would feel sorry for them, a little.

I want to make it clear that my watching of Australian Rules Football was in no way inspired by Paul Hogan or any of the Crocodile Dundee canon. There were no "Put a shrimp on the barbie" tee shirts. And I have even actually been to Australia, but all I really remember about it is that is was insanely hot and there were parrots. I was eight, I think.

But to continue, I don't watch the Australian Rules Football anymore is what I'm saying.

So I was flipping the channels and found myself on MTV just as a video was coming on. "How odd!" I thought. After all, MTV doesn't show videos anymore, do they? That's what all the deathly cool disenfranchised types say now, I believe. "MTV doesn't even show videos anymore!" they seethe, and know that they have spoken a crushing truth, and indicted the kids of today with their cruel incisiveness.

The little video thing in the corner said it was Lenny Kravitz, and I thought "Wow. Lenny Kravitz. Do people listen to Lenny Kravitz?" I mean, I remember him doing that "Are You Gonna Go My Way?" song, which was a big hit, and the kids, they danced, but has there been a transmission from Lennyland since then?

Incidentally, I really like the name Lenny Kravitz, because it reminds me of the big guy from Of Mice And Men, and Spinal Tap, and the neighbor from Bewitched, who may or may not have been called Mrs. Kravitz.

But there was Lenny. The video started out with him getting out of bed with two women. Two women! Lenny Kravitz is obviously getting it on with some regularity, or at least he really wants you to think that he is. And it continued with Lenny and his band living the rockstar life. I think even the keyboard guy was allowed to live the rockstar life in this video. But he wasn't like that weird Prince and the Revolution guy in the medical scrubs, so he fit in OK.

The video went on, and if the words weren't actually "Are You Gonna Go My Way?" they were pretty damn similar, so I am confident in telling you that Mr. Kravitz may be fresh out of ideas. Eventually, Lenny and the band were playing live to an impressive amount of people, so I assume that either they were compensated for their attendance at the video shoot or that people actually do listen to Lenny Kravitz. And Lenny was getting into it. He was yowling and humping the ground and kicking his legs into the air like a demented, greasy Rockette, and just as the music reached its fever pitch, its climactic creschendo, he did it.

He played the piano with his ass.

I appreciate that there are precedents for this rear end revue, this rear end sonata, like Jerry Lee Lewis and maybe Liberace if he had had too much Cold Duck. But it just kind of brought me up short, like maybe everyone in the band and everyone in the crowd, compensated or not, would just fall suddenly silent and say as one "Dude! You're playing the pianno with your ass!"

Because there are only a couple of meanings possible when you break into some cheeky ivory-tickling during a performance:

1. That you've been raised to such a Bacchanalian state of ecstasy by your own performance that clearly the only option is to play the piano with your butt.

or

b. That the music is so bad that it doesn't matter what part of your body you're using. Hell, the drummer could hit the high hat with his nipples for all the difference it would make.

And then the video pretty much ended, with Lenny having a quiet moment that the director probably thought was very Graduate and complex, but which really should have been Mr. Kravitz thinking "I just played the piano with my butt, and they didn't even care. I'm going to sleep with three women tonight, and maybe a koala bear."

At least in Australian Rules Football, they don't play the piano with their butts. No more MTV for me.

What The Hell Kind of Hiatus Is This Anyway?

I'd just like to say to the person who called my cellphone 5 times recently, that I am not Carlos. I don't know much, but I know that.

I should make it clear that from our limited conversations, I wasn't sure whether the caller was Carlos or wanted me to be Carlos. But it was clear that there was some sort of Carlos negotiation taking place.

And I should mention that it was in Spanish too, the talking from the phone. And before the call would come through, there would be a voice in Spanish, which was an operator, I guess, saying something that I'm pretty sure was about alpacas, then this gruff voice would say "Carlos!"

Sometimes he would say "CARLOS!" in a anguished sort of way, that suggested maybe he was in some dire peril, and needed Carlos to extricate him. Maybe someone was after him. Maybe he was in jail. Maybe someone was after him AND he was in jail. But I don't want to think about that. Some poor guy, maybe being chased around a cell by his crazed bunkmate, who had fashioned some crude shiv from bedsprings and skin, and all he can do is stop at the payphone when maybe the cellmate drops his spring-and-skin shiv, and reach out in the darkness to Carlos, hoping against hope that somehow Carlos has got the bail money, perhaps from pawning his CD collection or rare 19th century daguerrotypes.

And here I am on the other end of the phone, distracted from some excruciatingly boring work task, and yelling into the phone "I AM NOT CARLOS!"

So I'm sorry, man. Or Carlos. Either way.

Hiatusing.

I know, I have been hiatusing regularly of late, but you'll just have to find your japery elsewhere for a while.

The Wisdom of Spam

I'd just like to personally thank one Ms. Wilhemina Judi for her thoughtful email, lovingly entitled "U R STUPID DUMBASS IF YOU PAY RETAIL PRICE FOR SOFTWAREZ".

Gosh, Judi, you're right. I m stupid dumbass. It took your insightful subject line to make me see that. If only more people would truly get to know their target demographic before making the sales "pitch". Other recent emails include "Hey jerkoff gET wAReZ", "U R assHole with tEEny bro", and "Molester of livestock, buy my tasty toner cartridges!". OK, I made that last one up. You can tell because the capitalization made a modicum of sense.

But can you imagine if this surefire strategy branched out into other products? Like Best Foods (Hellmann's East of the Rockies, so I'm told) could have a bold new "Jesus Christ why aren't you buying our mayonnaise you malformed freak?!" campaign. Or "Not a soul exists that doesn't find you odious and repellent -- now drink Miller Lite, chump!"

I can only hope.

I just booked a hotel at an alarmingly cheap rate from a shady looking internet travel site. So cheap and shady I called them to make sure it was on the up and up.

It seems to be both up and up, so I can only assume my room will be HAUNTED!, like in all those terrible shows you see on the Travel Channel where charming Bed and Breakfast owners in Georgia give straight-to-camera accounts of the time that someone dressed in a Civil War uniform massaged their inner thigh in the guest bathroom. Then, they make it perfectly clear that you should under no circumstances come to their Bed and Breakfast and give them lots of your money for the privilege of maybe having your inner thigh ectomplasmically massaged or perhaps getting woken up by a clumsy apparition stumbling to the toilet at three in the morning after a heavy bout of otherworldly beer drinking.

I suspect the HAUNTED! hotel thing only lasts til they get you to the hotel. Once you're there, the hotel staff is not going to want to expend the effort of simulating HAUNTING! They're not going to get up all hours of the night and bang pans or moan and wail or stand outside the window and throw frogs at you.

Anyway, I'll let you know if I get sucked into the television set or anything.

Braking Away

I return to you from bizarre car difficulties.

I drove home at lunch a few days ago, parked in my garage, and pulled up the handbrake. S-N-N-K-K-K! It sounded like something broke! I pulled my hand away from the handle and gingerly pressed in the release button on the brake. Nothing! It wouldn't move.

For half an hour I did battle with my handbrake. I wiggled. I jiggled. I even at one point got a rubber mallet and hit the button like a redheaded stepchild. No dice.

Finally, I sucked in my courage and called AAA. A tow truck guy showed up, and I had to explain that my brake was stuck on. He gave me a look that said "We tow truck drivers live for these moments. We yearn to come to your home and do something incredibly simple, perhaps involving a twilliger rod, and make you feel foolish and lame."

He hopped in the car and wiggled. And jiggled. He cursed and talked to me about the bewilderment he felt at waking up one day and realizing he was a "tow guy". He complimented my bouganvilleas. But he could not get the brake off.

"Don't worry," he said "I'll call my mentor".*

While we waited for his mentor, he explained to me that it was not really possible to tow my car to the dealership (where they would relieve me of several paychecks) because the car was parked head-in in the garage, and to tow it out would wreck the transmission. We, of course, could not roll it out of the garage because the brakes were stuck on. He explained a complex procedure involving a flatbed tow truck and applying soap to the rear wheels. I felt it was best not to question him.

His "mentor" showed up. This was the supremo tow guy, who had taught tow guy #1 all he knew. The second guy exploded with derisive laughter and made unkind insinuations about tow guy #1 and his lack of physical prowess. I, as a thirty-two year old man who had called AAA to fix my handbrake, was also referred to as "weak". This new guy, who looked kind of like one of the old circus sideshow strongmen of yore, bald with a handlebar moustache, climbed into the car and began jiggling. He demanded use of my visegrips, which I gladly supplied. **

He gave it a go for another forty minutes, the sweat pouring off him and into my upholstery. He detached things. He bent and deformed things...

But then! The brake was released!
I drove to the car dealership, my handbrake limply hanging. my center panel sadly askew, forever rent asunder.

When I got there, of course, the smarmy service representative lifted his eyebrows in a "I am clearly dealing with an idiot" sort of way when I told him about the problem.

Anyway, long story long, it cost me many, many clams, my car was in the shop for two days and I had to rent the worst car in the world: a bright red Chevy Cavalier, which I believe still holds the title of Official Car of Humility.

At least it said Enterprise on the license plate frame.





* I immediately thought of the old Shazam live action kids' show which for some reason I think of when I hear the word "mentor". Didn't that guy have a "mentor" who used to drive around in an RV or something? He was kind of like the superhero support vehicle, I guess. Maybe he carried spare gold boots in case Shazam lost a heel. Or was it called Captain Marvel? I have got to brush up on this stuff.

** I felt almost manly there for a minute, having visegrips in my toolbox. I didn't mention, of course, that I am terrfiied of the visegrips, and imagine them accidentally vise-gripping on parts of my body, maiming me hideously and leaving me to stagger the darkened streets with visegrips dangling from various body parts, frightening children and maybe becoming the topic of an In Search Of one day.

No man can eat 100 Peeps

Solitary

Things have been lonely and sad in the Kafkaesque household. The wife is out of town for days at a time on business. I eat solitary dinners, chatting with the cat about the 9/11 hearings. I watch movies. I make terrible sounds on the gueetar. I put off the chores.

But something happened this morning that showed me I am truly losing it, that my isolation has turned to some sort of sickness: I was leaving for work and realized that I forgot to drink coffee. That's right. I forgot to grind the beans, get out the filter, heat the water. All that stuff. I mean, if I had just forgot one step, like putting the filter in the little Melitta cone, that would be understandable, but totally missing the entire coffee element of my morning? It's worrying.

It's like forgetting to unzip your pants before going to the bathroom. Or wondering why you're not at work, when you forgot to drive your car there.

I fear for my mind.

Oh, also, and for no reason: Cthulhu v. The Superheroes Lenticular

What are lenticulars? Those crazy plastic thingies that seem to change or move as you look at them from one angle or another. Very popular with religious novelties, as I'm sure you are well aware. Like from one angle Jesus is giving the sermon on the mount or something, and then from the other angle -- Bam! Crucifixion!

On the Loss of Opportunity

We just got a new roof put on our house. That means we are no longer roofless people, as we were for a couple of days there while people who really looked a lot like carnies tore off our shingles. That sounds like a terribly miscalculated budget surgery, doesn't it? "People who look like carnies tore off my shingles!"

I know, gross.

Anyway, we got this new roof, which is very nice and made of steel and isn't thirty years old. Also, It doesn't send shakes flying off every time there's a wind over twenty miles an hour. So that's nice.

But it struck me today, as I was watching these faux-carnies up there wielding nailguns and drinking alarming quantities of Squirt (alarming because where do these guys pee? Are they peeing in my yard? Can I detect that in some way? Is there a pee-sniffing dog I can rent? But then, aren't all dogs really pee-sniffing dogs, when you come right down to it?). These guys are almost done with the job, and I missed out on a great opportunity: if I had paid them just a little bit more, and roofs are already pretty pricey so another few clams wasn't going to make much difference, I wonder if they would have worn big fluffy animal costumes while they worked on my roof.

Can you imagine how great it would be to be driving down a street and see a six foot frog nailing flashing to a skylight? Maybe a giant fluffy raccoon tiptoeing along the patio covering, teetering at the edge of the atrium?

Hindsight is 20-20 I guess.

The End of Days

In high school, a couple of friends and I would stay up all night playing insanely long games of RISK* until, inevitably, fisticuffs would ensue or someone would freak out and ruin the game.

One particularly exciting game featured my friend T massing an army too large to be held by the relatively small confines of Siam. He had not just the Vs, my friends, but the Xs. He must have had seventy armies on Siam.

Another friend, K, had retreated into Australia, perhaps hoping to live out his days peacefully in New Zealand or Western Australia, with his paltry five or ten armies. Maybe they would take up subsistence farming, or film a blockbuster fantasy trilogy with Orlando Bloom there one day in the future.

But T was at the border, with a vast force. And the dice came down in judgment.

You may have read in history books about the battle that day, how ten or so plastic Roman numerals held off the onslaught of far superior numbers, how K again and again rolled sixes to T's fours, threes to his ones, impossibly whittling down the juggernaut force until victory was in sight, and his ragtag band of plastic started to believe they could win the day. T's plastic warriors were strewn about the board, crying "Medic!". And no medic arrived.

But a rumbling began in the skies when T was down to thirty or so Roman numerals.

Every victory for K was rewarded with a punch in the arm. K laughed these glancing blows off and the dice rolling continued. These two gladiators pushed Is, Vs and Xs to their fate, demanded them up and over the trench wall into the face of a rain of bullets and fire. And every turn, K beat T. Again and again.

And the punches came harder now, with more venom. The laughter in return had an edge of ire.

No-one can now say exactly who was ahead when T launched the doomsday attack, for no-one survived that day. Somehow, Roman numerals started again after that, ekeing out an existence on a cardboard world that had seen the visitation of the perfect weapon. But no crops would grow; the land was ruined and diseased.

And in hushed tones, the legend would be passed from grandfather to grandson, that they may remember the past and not repeat its folly: The Day The Board Was Flipped.



* Yes, friends and neighbors. I was not the coolest kid in high school. I know, your illusions are shattered.

No-One Ever Complains About Airlines

I never get the headphones on flights, because the movies are awful.

I remember watching silently some of Pay It Forward. I wished terrible and surprisingly graphic torture on Helen Hunt and Kevin Spacey, my eyes drifting up to the tiny screen as I watched from my tiny chair. I think the airlines should just pull out all the stops and show Beastmaster 2 on every flight.

"Ladies and gentlemen this is your captain speaking...today we'll be cruising at an altitude of 12,000 feet...we'll be serving something hideous for your inflight meal...and after we level out we'll start our feature film...it's a special treat for you today...Akira Kurosawa directs Toshiro Mifune in Rasho-- just kidding! It's Beastmaster 2."

There also seems to be a certain despondency or inappropriateness to some of the film choices. Once, on a transatlantic flight, they showed us a couple of movies, one of which was that awful Anthony Hopkins movie about killing monkeys for fun and profit, and the other was some terrible teevee movie about a single mother dying of breast cancer. It was awful. People were crying in the aisles.

First the monkeys getting turned into ashtrays and wastebaskets, then the single mom languishing away in her hospital bed. Jesus.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we apologize for the incredibly depressing films featured on this flight...now, Beastmaster 2."

I picked up the wifely friend's wedding ring a few days ago from our dubious jeweler. I'll call him Mo (because that's his real name). He's a giant Persian guy who is clearly on a large variety of drugs. We are trusting him for reasons that are unclear even to us to recast a significant amount of platinum into the right size for the wifely friend's dainty finger. The ring has never fit just right in our three years of marriage.

The last time I saw him, he was putting tiny slivers of sapphire into a water-fountain night-light. As he tried to pick up the little jewels, his hand was shaking like it was possessed by Pzuzu and engaged in a little ecstatic dancing. He glanced up at me and his eyes looked like the Man From Atlantis, or at least The Man Who Has Either Been Swimming in a Hyperchlorinated Pool or Has Smoked Large Amount of Pot.

Also, putting sapphires into an intrinsically worthless piece of plastic like a night-light is something that would only occur to somebody who's really, really high.

"Oh wow, man. I just thought of something. What if we took the goo out of a Renuzit air freshener and filled it with 12 year old Scotch?"

That sort of thing.

Anyway, I was thinking it might be fun to ask my wife to marry me several times throughout the course of the day, in really inappropriate places. Like waiting in line at the Subway, at the bus stop or at Hot Dog on a Stick. Maybe stroll into her work with a big bunch of those crappy tinfoil balloons you see at the grocery store checkout stand and a silk rose and loudly proclaim that I want to make an honest woman of her.

As it turned out, I decided not embarrass her in this fashion, as I am embarrassing enough to her in your garden variety ways. I just got down on one knee on our patio and said "You know I love you, right?", causing just the right amount of panic in her eyes as she thought "Oh no, you've killed someone/slept with an animal/broken my precious cat with wings sculpture," and then slipped the ring on her finger.

In the moment of doing that I realized a couple of things.

One, I will never again get that heartsickeningly worried moment of "Will she say yes?"

Two, that it is important to ask her to marry me every couple of years, just to keep her on her toes.

It's so romantic, it might make her forget that I did, in fact, break her "cat with wings" sculpture.

I'm not one to complain about such things (which of course means "I am definitely, unequivocally and irrefutably one to complain about such things, and even some other things that really aren't even all that related to the first thing even in the most tangential way."), but I saw a Hummer commercial today featuring Mojave 3 music. I don't think it's the end of days, but it just seems a little incongruous. Not as bad as Godspeed You! Black Emperor advertising for Raytheon or General Dynamics or anything, but just a little off.

The New Shirt

I wore a new shirt today. It's nice.

Maybe too nice.

All day people have been stopping by my cubicle and saying things like "Wow, silk?" and "That's the kind of shirt I want to get." and "I am no longer feel worthy to be working in the same building as you." I'll be working along happily (in this case happily is a decidedly relative term), when all of a sudden, I'll become aware of a presence off to my left.

I turn quickly and catch the entire engineering staff eyeing my shirt, cautiously tiptoeing closer like squirrels shyly approaching an offered peanut. Their eyes light on the shirt, and just for a moment, they are spirited away from their humdrum existence, lifted up from the soul-crushing banality of AutoCAD. They are given wings and hope by my shirt, freed from the constraints of their lonely and meaningless existences.

In this shirt, they see their destiny. They want to become better than they are. A mere yard of cotton blend has given them a renewed gusto.

Maybe they will take up rock climbing tonight. Or learn the saxophone.

You could ask every single person you meet today what their favorite animal is, and not one of them would say "the shrimp".

The Sizzler Seduction Scenario

Notes for possible short story/novel/rock opera/religious master narrative:

- A man, Julio, lounges by the all-you-can-eat salad bar of a Sizzler, making lurid suggestions to women using a langostino and drawn butter for visual aid.

- possible love scene involving sex on the salad bar, awkward moment with sneeze guard. Could strategically place pickled beets for propriety/ R rating.

- Educational song explaining that chickpeas and garbanzos are essentially the same thing. Note: Make chickpeas represent the struggle of Native Americans in the last century. What rhymes with garbanzo?

- Can one commit suicide by drinking a gallon of Thousand Island Dressing? Must research or final revelation will be meaningless.

- A gang of langostinos save Julio the salad bar Romeo at crucial moment, teaching him about forgiveness and the redeeming power of love.

- Big closing musical number during which the entire cast pelt each other with Texas Bread and cheap steak.

Thanks to the moderate urging of astute and friendly person Waxy, I have added an RSS Feed, which you will see a link to over there on the left somewhere.

God only knows if it works.

Professional Rememberers

A few nights ago as I desultorily flipped channels, desperately seaching for the 90 minute Knife Auction paid program, I came upon the latest in the string of "wasn't that decade great, you know with the things that we all kind of remember?" show. This one was about the 90s. People were reminiscing about such sweet and distant memories as Britney Spears. It seems so long ago now.

I don't mind these shows, really. At least the 70s and 80s ones were understandable. Maybe there would be a sense of community, and that must be what the viewers are searching for in these programs, where they know they are not the only ones that remember Catch That Pigeon or Funky Phantom lunchboxes or something. And then there's that moment of "oh yeah! Those thing were great/shitty/potentially lethal to toddlers." and that's pretty much it. We move on.

When you're flashing back to the 90s, it's just not the same. Like "Oh wow, you remember PlayStation ONE?! I can't believe we were such fools! And what were those things on that show with the creepy babyhead in the sun? Tellybubbles?"

It's all lost now. We were so innocent, in those days of mobile phones that were marginally larger than the ones we have now. Movies were backwards freakshows like Toy Story, as opposed to Finding Nemo. And according to the program, there were animated television icons named Beavis and Butthead.

Who was doing this goldfish-memory reminiscing? That carpenter guy from Trading Spaces, among others. He was the only one I recognized, anyway. What was the carpenter guy doing during the 90s? Learning to lathe? I don't care about this person and his opinion of U2's Zooropa.

Make me a finely detailed coffee table and be quiet, you bastard.

Body found in East River Identified as Spalding Gray

Sad.

I saw Spalding Gray live a couple of times, and he still ranks as the celebrity I have had brushes with the most often. The first time was when I was working at a coffee shop in Northern California. I was about eighteen or twenty I guess, and the coffee shop was catering live performances at an old estate in the hills above town. I made sure I was on hand for Gray's performance of Monster In a Box, having seen Swimming to Cambodia some time before.

I smoked a lot back then. Unfiltered Lucky Strikes. Maybe two packs a day. And if I finished a pack while I was driving, I'd fling the wrapper down in the car. As a result, I had a carpet of empty Lucky Strike packs all over the floor of my car.

Before the show I pulled my car up to the very front of the venue, where I'd be serving coffee before the start of the show and at intermission. I opened the passenger side door and pulled out one of the giant coffee urns I'd be using, took it over to the refreshments area. When I got back to the car to grab the decaf urn, a BMW was parked next to my car, and Spalding Gray was looking in the open passenger door, goggle-eyed.

"Thank goodness!" he said. "I thought you'd died from too many Lucky Strikes!"

"Spalding mon!" I cried in a poor imitation of one of the characters from Swimming to Cambodia "Never too many!"

That was it.

A few years later, the wifely friend and I saw him at UCSC, reading Gray's Anatomy, and the next day he was sitting at the next table at our favorite breakfast place. I remember thinking of walking up and saying hello, maybe mentioning something about the incident with the Lucky Strikes, but of course, he wouldn't have remembered.

So now Spalding Gray has washed up on the river's edge in Mahattan. Maybe there just weren't enough perfect moments, or they were too long in coming.

I didn't know him, but I admired his work. And what else can you say, really?

A ride through the Chernobyl Dead Zone

[via Cardhouse]

Live action Photoshopped Far Side cartoons

[via my friend Durundal, who has no site and thus no link]

I did watch the Oscars last night for the first time in many years, and was glad to see Peter Jackson and The Return of the King get so much recognition.

But the thing I'll remember most from the Oscars is this: actresses are shiny.

Charlize Theron? Super shiny. Sandra Bullock? Extra shiny. Nicole Kidman? Not so shiny, but did look like the Martian commander from Mars Attacks!

I think this is going to be an exciting new trend in actress status, with the more famous expensive actresses trying to outshiny each other, until in the end the greatest actresses will be virtually unfilmable and only viewable through smoked glass, at the risk of severe retinal damage.

Say Hello to My Boring Friend!



I had never seen Scarface before. I had heard for so long how great it is, how groundbreaking and exciting and violent and profane and on and on, so we put it on our NetFlix queue and watched a few days ago.

My conclusion: that was one of the most bejeezusly boring movies I have ever seen. They really could have made about a 90 minute movie and everything would have been fine. The first hour, after all, was entertaining. People said "mang!" a lot, which is a tried and true benefit for so many movies, like Remains of the Day, Witness and Nell.

We got to see lots of cocaine, lots of Al Pacino setting new records in overacting achievement, Michelle Pfeiffer dancing like a sedated outpatient, a guy getting in touch with his inner chainsaw sculptor. All that was well and good. Also, Tony Montana having really miserable luck with the ladies.

But they had to stretch this thing out for over two and a half hours, with pacing that would have tested Jim Jarmusch's patience. I thought of all the young toughs who crow about the greatness of this movie, in much the same way they espouse the benefits of, you know, Red Bull and those tiny tires that stick out the sides of their cars in a touching tribute to legos. I can't believe these gangster wannabes really like this film.

So again, just give us the first hour and then the exciting finale scene. They can just bust right in to the scene where Pacino has coke dripping off his nose. That would be fine. It would save us all a lot of aggravation and pink and green neon.

Incidentally, with a nice name like Tony Montana, I'm sure there were other career paths open to Pacino's character. I mean, look how well Tony Roma has done for himself with that rib thing. Perhaps a used car lot? I don't know, but for god's sake I wouldn't have had to put up with the movie if he had just listened to his career counselor a little more acutely.

Also also, I don't know what gang of lower mammals did the soundtrack for Scarface, but it sounds like someone with a Casio, a built in beat, and little or no imagination.

Oh my, is this addictive

Dyson vacuum cleaner flash game.

Finally, a dog wedding dress we can all be proud of.

...And Here My Troubles Began

I have been deeply embroiled in the sordid world of management training at work, where the heady scent of employee empowerment leaves us breathless and reeling. We are the opium eaters drunk on the sweet ambrosia of efficiency. Lost and giddy, we spin in this dance of regular appraisals, and to our subjects we give what? What? A sense of entitlement! Of belonging to a team that cares about them and doesn't think about sandwiches when they are talking.

And what did I learn in this golden castle in the sky, besides don't eat the puffy cake-like doughnuts?

How to effectively humiliate your employees, that's what. Sure, you may think it's enough to snigger at them for no reason, and constantly remind them how much more money you make than they do, or indeed ever will, but that's just not enough these days. The world is changing. Men are rising in the east and the elves...no, no wait. Let's start that again.

It's not enough these days to make them feel small, alone and friendless. You've got to cut right to the quick. Probe deep for childhood trauma. Did they wet the bed? Were they laughed at ever by members of the opposite sex? Do they have psoriasis? An extra toe? Use that power! Remember, if your employees ever feel good about themselves, they may realize that they're smarter than you, and then everybody might find out!

All She Left Behind - A moving story of man and hairdryer.

[via Cardhouse]

Justly Married - Derek Powazek of San Francisco is raising money for Don't Amend by selling a poster of his photo taken at City Hall.

or, why not

Donate money to buy flowers for a random gay couple waiting to get married?

Walk On the Rice Paper, and Leave No Mark

AH! Oh my dear lord!

Must pre-order...Kung...Fu....

Especially that one where he gets bitten by the scorpion and he's having all those crazy visions and....oh, man. I can't wait.

I love Kung Fu. It was one of my favorite shows when I was a kid, and I don't care if David Carradine doesn't look particularly Asian. That show was really formative for me. It gave me a different view of things than the everyday, inspired my lasting enjoyment of martial arts and westerns both. And resulted in some truly incredible fake-fighting, the level of which is seldom witnessed outside the arena of professional wrestling.

I may have told this story before, but when I toiled away as a bagel shop worker under the steely gaze of Julio the Suicidal Bagel Shop Manager, I burned the holy hell out of my upper arms one day while carrying a tray of fresh bialies through a doorway. What happened was I had just taken the tray out of the gigantic, walk-in size oven and as I went through the doorway to the counter area, the tray caught on the doorframe, pushing it back into my biceps.

This hurt.

But in that moment of burning the crap out of my arms (I would have large repulsive blisters there for a couple of weeks), I saw myself as Kwai Chang Cain, lifting the steaming kettle, branding the dragons into his arms.

Somehow, it's not quite as street-credible when you're carrying bialies in the Capitola mall.

I felt the slowdown coming, like the icy onset of old age. The hourglass staying longer. The sands of time fleeting, serving as a warning.

I should have known. I put graphics in. And the table. Then I was splitting the cells.

Too many splits. Too many cells.

The scrolling slowed. Slowed. Like too many Octoroks moving on the screen at once.

And then, the beautiful moment of extinguishing.

You, Microsoft Word.

You.

Give Until It Hurts, Old Man

Something terrible happened this week.

Of course, terrible things are happening all over the world all the time, especially with this administration in office (Ha! Zing! Pow! Please, tip your server).

No, something terrible. Truly awful. Worse than an Eagles Rock Block. Worse than having the Growing Pains theme song stuck in your head. Marginally worse than going to the store at seven in the morning because you're out of milk for your coffee and buying buttermilk by accident. Or acidophilus, which is frankly a silly word which I promise never again to use in this weblog (or "webl" as the cool kids call it).

What happened was that my university alumni club (UC Santa Cruz, home of the Fighting Banana Slugs, patchouli, and mildew) called me for some dough. That's fine. I can understand how they need the money, what with Arnold Very-Big-Liar as our governor here in California. I have given them donations before, but this time, I opted out by telling the nice young lady on the phone that I would have to wait until my tax return.

This is technically not true. It's just something that came out instead of "I just don't feel like it right now." As a result, they'll call me back in a few months, and I'll have to come up with another excuse.

Then, she sprung it on me: "You know, this would be a great time to get involved with the school again*. Your ten year reunion is coming up."

I had a soap opera moment. I held the receiver away from my ear and looked at the earpiece, as if removing the source of the grim news could somehow pull the memory of the words from my head.

Ten. Year. Reunion.

And not a ten year high school reunion! A ten year college reunion! Jesus Christ. I went to work this morning feeling spry and youthful, and with only a few words, this person had turned me into freaking Methuselah. Should I be thinking of retirement? Moving to Florida? Shaking my cane at gangs of young toughs? Or even, since this how I originally misspelled the last sentence, shaking my can at gangs of young toughs?

How can this be? Have ten years flown by so fast?

OK. I'm done whining about that.

But on the subject of giving, I gave to KCRW for the first time yesterday. I didn't give enough to get any of the "free" gifts that come along with pledging, but they did tell me that I had earned the right to be smug about listening to NPR, so I'll be looking down my nose at people just that much more this year, I can tell you.

Also, I gave them money to help defer the cost of their new Super Duper Studios, so they entered me in a drawing to win a Jaguar. I don't usually enter contests of any sort, but immediately my brain took the thought of me winning this car as a given. "A Jaguar!" I scoffed. "Who the hell would want a Jaguar? They're owned by Ford now, for one thing, and they're starting to resemble some unholy union of a Jaguar and a Taurus. So what am I going to do with my Jaguar? I'll sell it. And I'll buy something cool. Like that Lexus Sport Wagon...Maybe a Volvo."

And then it rang true. I'm thinking of selling my Jag and buying a Volvo.

I'm lucky it's not my twenty-fifth reunion. It's all over. I'll just be over here, in the corner, drinking my acidophilus.






*I was not very involved in the college experience. I transferred in from a community college, lived off campus and graduated after two years, with a BA in Modern Literature, which is great if you're into Henry Miller and semiotics, but not that great if you're into being employed or knowing anything even tangentially useful. My final exam was of the oral variety. I talked about Don Delillo and Dostoyevsky and Faulkner in a satisfactorily vague way until they agreed to give me my degree.

Added a Thelonious Monk show and a Can show to the boot trading list, if you are so inclined.

There has been an ugly trend toward physical fitness in the Kafkaesque household lately.

Yesterday, tennis. Today, a ten mile hike. That's right. Ten miles. It's not enough for us to hike ten miles, either. It was necessary that we hike a trail designed by a cruel sadist, filled with unreasonably steep ascents and populated by mountain bikers intent on forcing us from the trail into patches of cactus.

As a result, my feet have fallen off.

But that's OK, because we made it home just in time for the ultimate couch potato event: the Super Bowl. The game itself was pretty good, and the halftime show lived up to the terrible heights of all Super Bowl halftime shows. The lineup was like an ascending ranking of awfulness: P. Diddy. Fair enough. P. Diddy is awful, but you can just say "OK, it's a halftime show. It's going to suck." And your suspicions are well-founded when you see P. Diddy. But just as you ease into that level of crappiness, out comes Nelly!

Nelly is a new low. You long for the carefree days of only P. Diddy on stage, as the two cavort around on stage and the cheerleaders sing "Oh Mickey", cutely substituting "Diddy" for "Mickey". It is clear that P. Diddy is a musical genius.

But then, there's more! It's Kid Rock! Kid Rock is surely the sign that the bottom has been reached. He's wearing an American Flag poncho of some sort. He's blathering about something and saying his own name a lot. They pay him for this. His appearance is proof positive that anything can be made worse by a Kid Rock number.

Anyway, There was also Janet Jackson. Janet Jackson is par for the course on halftime shows as far as I'm concerned. Janet Jackson is awful, yes, but at least it's not Christina Aguilera. Or that opera-singing cop. And there was Justin Timberlake, and frankly I don't really know who that is.

I'm sure everyone has heard about the super-duper outrageous and in-no-way-planned-for-publicity move in which this Timberlake fellow bared Janet Jackson's boob for the seven people out there who haven't already seen Janet Jackson's boob.

OK, now we've all seen Janet Jackson's boob. We can sleep soundly, safe in the knowledge that Janet Jackson has a boob.

And really, we've got Nelly singing "Take off all your clothes!" to prepubescent teens. How hypocritical is it that when someone actually does take off some clothes, the censors lose it?

That's all the insightful boob commentary I have for you. I have to try to grow some new feet.

I want to party with these guys.

Particularly, Topi.

The business continues.

I have been thinking this site needs livening up a bit. Maybe a wacky sidekick is the way to go. My first choice, "Guy Dressed as Mountain" from the Ricola ads was unavailable, though. My second choice, Slim Goodbody, is too distraught over the recent death of Captain Kangaroo. Where does that leave me?

Sidekickless. That's where.

Maybe I should look into corporate sponsorship. I envision My Life as an American Gladiator brought to you by Tostitos. I would be willing to eat a lot of Tostitos for some big corporate sponsorship payoff, I can tell you. Sure, they'll have to airlift my greasy, bloated corpse out of the house after a month of Tostito bingeing, but it'll be worth it. This site will turn into It's a Small World at Disneyland, which was a lesson for all of us in the evils of corporate sponsorship.

I didn't realize for years that It's a Small World was a big ad for Mastercard. The part at the end where all the multicultural dolls are tossing credit cards back and forth and gleefully signing their life away to credit card debt never hit home, until I got a little older and the horrible truth was revealed to me: sure, the English version of the It's a Small World song is all about living together in peace and harmony until your brain starts to dribble out your nose from the sheer cuteness and repetition of it all. But some of the other versions, they're not so innocuous.

Literally translated, the Burmese version heard on It's a Small World:

Buy buy buy buy
Waste waste waste waste
Leave your debt to your children.
My ox has escaped and savaged the village.
You need seventeen Mastercards.

I'm pretty sure on most of the words, anyway.

Once again, there have been no posts.

It's like some old industrial era Russian film, with two wizened old peasants huddled around a kerosene lantern for warmth. The crone looks up at the old man, the lamp's meager light dancing in her miasmic, cataract-cloudy pupils, and says "When, Aleksei? When will there again be posts?"

Except she says it in the cyrillic alphabet. You know.

And he replies "Olga, my love. There are no more posts. If God is dead, how can posts be?"

The camera pans away, to a black and grey landscape, past trees that will never bear fruit*, past the Mariachi band, and into the distance.

*ahem*

But the truth is I have been busy. Mighty busy. Like twelve hour days at work kind of busy.

Another thing that has kept me busy is that I took a beginning Photoshop class. I have been using Photoshop for years, but never with any sort of rhyme or reason, and I figured it would be worthwhile to start at the beginning and make sure I have the basic knowledge before moving on to the intermediate course. Consequently, I was in a class with some people who were not terribly astute in the computer arena. One particular woman, sitting a few computers away, would screech out at every instruction "What? What?? How do I do that? It's not working! Help!" and that sort of thing.

My favorite thing she blurted out was when she had to configure the program or something and she panicked and shouted "It wants to know what time zone I'm in!" as if her computer had just asked her to recite pi to twenty-seven decimals.

The class went pretty well, and I got to feel really smart as most of my fellow students lobbed rocks at their monitors and claimed that bad juju was emanating from the light-filled devil-boxes.

And the really important thing is that I learned how to use the Clone Stamp tool. So just back off.






* Because they're not fruit trees.

Misterpants is back in business.

Alternately, Misterpants is back in town. Either one, really.

I actually watched a Curling Skins Game on Fox Sports World the other day. It was sponsored by "M and M Meat Shops", which I found entertaining.

Also, the guy that won had a gigantic shiny bald head that looked a lot like a curling stone. I wondered if he had ever glued a handle to his shiny pate for Halloween and gone as a stone. Or if his head had ever been curled by accident by an overenthusiastic curler. Also: are there curling idiots like there are American football idiots and, if so, do they wear some sort of celebratory Curling headgear, a la the Crazy Football Head below?



UPDATE: After a good seven minutes of surfing, I can find no Crazy Curling Heads.

Also, I ventured into Tower Records at lunch, to pick up Arcadia of My Youth on DVD. I should add parenthetically that cartoons featuring Captain Harlock are not geeky in any way, so just cool it.

Anyway, I was waiting in line behind a woman who had a double pram with two baby units in it. That was well and good. Unfortunately, the Tower cashier employed the usual Tower stratagem of not calling anyone else to help her despite the fact that there are seven people in line and she's never seen a traveler's check before in her life ever. Still, I am used to this at Tower, and when I'm in line I find little ways to distract myself, like picturing an elaborate musical comedy with all the main roles played by hermit crabs.

The problem was that the guy behind me in line was RIGHT behind me. Like I could feel him breathing on me. That kind of behind me. It's a strange phenomenon I've noticed in Southern California: people have no concept whatsoever of personal space. I tried moving around a little bit, veering off to the side of the line, and this guy stayed on me like a damn remora. Worse than a remora, really, because he didn't do anything vaguely helpful or symbiotic, like picking mites off my pelt. He just hovered there.

When I was done paying, some ten minutes later*, The guy was blocking my path to get out of the store. I seethed "exCUSE me!" hoping that somehow he would get the message that I don't need any remoras at this stage of my life, but I only succeeded in sounding like kind of a whack job. What would have been the right etiquette in that situation? Damned if I know.


* That's Tower Records Line Time, so I can't be sure how long I was really there. It could have been just a couple of minutes. Maybe I never did get out! Maybe I'm still there, slowly decaying into a small stain on the $2.99 CD stand...right between Gene Loves Jezebel and Herbie Hancock.

I don't have all that much to report right now, although I did have a kind of weird dream last night that involved an HP Lovecraft Diner or Deli of some sort. I don't remember much except that the breakfast menu featured The Cheese Omelet of Unknown Kadath. It probably is not in your best interests to order a foodstuff with the word "Unknown" in the title. There may have been others, like The Hotcake Out of Space or The Croissanwich Horror, but I am uncertain.

On the whole, Cthulhu Mythos-related breakfasts are to be avoided.

The Christmas Report

I am back, back from a land slightly colder and greener, and where people use their turn signals a little more than here in The Southland, as weather personalities call Orange County. Then they go back to Live And Continuous Coverage Of The Storm Of 2003, where they will keep you updated every five minutes about the tree that fell on someone's Lexus, before switching over to more pressing things, like coverage of A Day In The Life of a USC Cheerleader or something.

We have to keep our priorities straight.

Our drive to the Bay Area was long, as expected, with some truly inspirational bouts of bad driving on display. For those unfamiliar with the route from The Southland to the Bay Area of California, I'm here to tell you that it's straight. There is a stretch of about 3 hours that you spend on a road called Interstate 5, where you long for a pothole, a curve, a seven-car pileup, just to break the monotony.

Only a couple of things livened up the proceedings:

1- The Near Death Experience.
I try to nearly kill us every time we make this trip. This time was a little disappointing as the Near Death Experience occurred around the corner from our house before we even got on the freeway. I innocently looked the other way and next thing I knew the wifely friend was shouting something that I think was Swahili for "you are about to have a faceful of Oldsmobile!" and executing the traditional hand-on-the-dashboard maneuver so efficacious in high-speed collisions. Thankfully, I stopped in time and did not get a faceful of Oldsmobile.

Honestly I wasn't going all that fast, and if I had rear-ended the car in front, it would have resulted only in annoyance, but I went ahead and saw a tunnel with light at the end and Jesus and a pissed off goldfish whose water I didn't dechlorinate in the fourth grade, just to be on the safe side. This out-of body experience lasted only long enough for me to bother that John Edward guy and hide a few people's keys, and then I snapped back to my earthbound frame and quickly and vehemently denied there was any possibility I would have hit the car in front.

2- Infinitely Recurring REM
We were terribly excited to try out a new music system on this trip. The wifely friend had recently gotten an iPod as a bonus at work for being exemplary, which is an understatement if ever there was one. My bonus at work was a giftcard for Target and thinly veiled hostility, but I try not to complain. Anyway, we usually just bring along twenty or thirty CDs for the trip, which I select and she has veto power over. The usual process is "What is this white CD? Is it twangy? It's not twangy is it? Is it Nick Drake? We don't want to fall asleep..."

That sort of thing.

I should say that while our musical tastes do overlap in places, she prefers Industrial Dance Music and I prefer depressing music about death. Because we should always remember that we are but a step away from the cold, wormy grave, and frankly it's just irresponsible to go a few moments without a syncopated reminder of the fact.

We braved the mall a little while ago and picked up an iPod FM Transmitter for the car, since I have a CD deck and I couldn't seem to force the iPod through the little slot. Everything was going swimmingly for a time, as we selected our choices and beamed happily. Then, a couple of hours into our drive, we started to notice some distortion. This, we logically assumed, was due to the station we selected to receive the iPod broadcast being overcome by some Mariachi station, which are very, very numerous in this neck of the woods. Undaunted, we reset the iPod to another station, but with the same result.

A growing fear began to set in as we played tag with the Mariachi stations. Our happy Flaming Lips or, alternately, Russian Industrial Dance Music, would get all fuzzy and and soon would be pretty much unlistenable fuzz. There's nothing quite like the irritation of driving at night in heavy traffic at high speeds, with white noise blaring from your speakers.

Luckily, I had a CD along. It was an REM compilation which is actually really good, and relieves you of the inevitably lackluster five songs in the middle of every REM album ever. The problem was that we still had over four hours left on our drive, maybe five with the traffic the way it was, and after two times through the same CD, I was ready to fling that bad boy out the window.

OK, I thought, if I hear "Driver Eight, Take a break" one more freaking time, I can't be held responsible for my actions, and we were reduced to messing with the iPod again, until it was determined to be all my fault since I had been using the backlight too much and wearing down the battery. Then, all of a sudden, we figured out that we had the volume jacked all the way up on the iPod, and when we turned it down, the distortion disappeared.

All was once again happiness, and Michael Stipe no longer had to fear that I would find him and kill him.

3- The Christmas Robot
The Christmas Robot is the newest addition to our Christmas tree. He joins his friend Frog Dressed as Cowboy Sheriff as The Ornaments Most Honored.

The great thing about the Christmas Robot, which is frankly really weird and was found at Cost Plus and consequently was probably made by an eight year old in Thailand, is that it wants to kill you even as it wishes you love, peace and harmony. The internal monologue of the Christmas Robot sounds like this:

peace - and - love - and - KILL! HU-MAN! - and - baby - jesus - DEATH! RAY! - SMASH! - peace - on - earth - good - will - to - KILL! KILL!

The Christmas Robot is terribly conflicted.

47- That's All For This Year
It's New Year's Eve. We're planning on staying home and getting quietly crocked. My New Year's Resolution is to come in low and fast, out of the rising sun. And also, to take it to the next level. I hear people saying that a lot these days: "I'm taking it to the next level!" or "Man! That guy really took it to the next level!"

Whatever there is that is currently a level too low, I will endeavor to take that thing to the next level.

And maybe, well, possibly, I'll try to take this here blog to the next level and actually use Movable Type or something. But I can't promise anything. Honestly, it's more that I won't promise anything, but there you go.

We're closing the hatches and going into silent running mode. There will be no stops for the peeing. Use the coffee can. Pour the runoff into the hole in the dashboard, to fuel the urine-powered engine!

Schneller! Schneller!

Yes, it's true. In a couple of hours we will begin our drive to the bay area for Christmas. Traffic will be hideous. I estimate a 2am arrival. Oh, and it's raining. Did I mention it's raining?

And just to complain about something else here, at work today, people scampered around like freaks handing out little Christmas gifts that, frankly, suck. I got a snowman beanie baby and some candy canes and a giant pencil, none of which I want even a little. The giant pencil fills me with rage. What is it about me that says I want a giant pencil? And now what am I going to do with it? Do you want me to take it into meetings and take notes with my giant pencil, Crazy HR Lady? Is that what you want?

Why do people feel compelled to give gifts to the office at the holidays? When you're giving out these little wastes you're really saying "I bought these in bulk because I worry that I'll be the only person not giving out really awful gifts at work. By the way, I don't really know or like you. Here's a giant pencil."


Anyway, that's enough bitterness. I hope all seven of you have a great Christmas. I'll be spending it with my various families, who I don't get to see enough. Peace to you.

Things are gettting a little wacky at the National Weather Service:

"Unusually hot weather has entered the region for December ... as the Earth has left its orbit and is hurtling towards the sun," read the message, posted on the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration's Web site. "Unusually hot weather will occur for at least the next several days as the Earth draws ever nearer to the sun. Therefore, an excessive heat watch has been posted."

I don't know where it all went wrong.

At first I told the guy that he better start working a little harder, show a little more enthusiasm. No real change.

I tried suggesting a "sense of urgency". This was met with a sneer.

Finally I put it this way: "I want to see you working like a hungry baboon is chasing you!"

I don't think he thought I would follow through.

Upholstery cleaner. I need upholstery cleaner.

This shirt, it's just not quite right. It's kind of long, but I can't really tuck it in, because it has short sleeves. Is that right? Should I be thinking that? Do people tuck in short sleeve shirts? I think I saw someone doing that once. That's like an ice-cream man kind of look. I don't want to look like an ice-cream man. For a start, I have no ice cream and I'd hate to disappoint all those children. So I'd probably have to buy ice cream in bulk to give out to all the kids who'd be hassling me for fudgsicles. But I don't really have the kind of dough to be shelling out for bulk fudgsicles, so I'd end up buying some cheap crappy ice cream that would give all the kids some hideous trachea disease or goiters or something. How cheap does ice cream have to be to cause goiters?

Probably pretty cheap. Like that ice milk stuff that comes in a plastic bucket. Hell, their slogan might as well be "Ice Milk: It's Goiterrific!"

But the point is that I am unsure about this shirt. There's an odd small-stripe pattern going on, as a result of which I look kind of like an engineer. Not the geek variety of engineer, but the lovable but gruff "Engineer Bob" variety of engineer, who chugs his pufferbelly down to the roundhouse and gets coal-soot in his whiskers.*

What I'm really getting at here is that the wife bought me this shirt, so the only conclusion I can draw is that she wants me to look like an engineer. What sinister and nefarious plan is she hatching? Will it end with me in overalls and one of those puffy train hats?

I fear.




*That sentence, incidentally, was not about sex.

Nerrrrrrds!

Blunder No. 3: “When Arwen and Frodo are being chased on horseback by the Ringwraiths, the soundtrack to the scene is a cantering horse. A canter is three beats, whereas a gallop—which is what the horses on screen are doing—is four very fast beats that often sound like a single beat.”
Jackson: I should’ve—well, it’s too late to fire anyone. The damage has been done.

Nitpicking the Lord of the Rings

I'm sorry. I know no-one wants to hear about my cat.

"Oh shit," I hear you cry. "He's posting about his cat. Get the kids, honey. Let's go. No! Leave the doll! You can't take the doll! GET IN THE CAR NOW!"

My cat's new thing is Eat the Feet. Eat the Feet is a fun game which is taking place every morning in my bedroom. The cat sleeps peacefully all night, nestled dangerously close to our posteriors, claiming all the warmth he can. Kick-off is anywhere from 5:30 AM to about 7. Without warning, the cat will leap on our feet, bite our toes and apply the patented jackrabbit kick move which you can only get by rotating the D-pad in a deft and quick semi-circle and pressing the X, Y and L buttons simultaneously.

This is a lot of fun for the cat. I imagine he thinks my feet under the covers are some deathly bed-shark or perhaps He Who Walks Behind the Rows from Children of the Corn.

One of the problems with Eat the Feet is that when I am sleeping, I can't be reponsible for my actions. If some little fanged quadruped is going to leap on my soft flesh, he can't expect not to be flung across the room. Of course, he doesn't care. For him, it's his own little Monday Night Football with Hank Williams Jr. blathering "Are you ready for some Eat the Feet?!"

And he is. He's ready for some Eat the Feet.

My nephew, who as has been previously stated, is two, is terribly into Bob the Builder. Bob the Builder is a little stop-motion foreign homunculus who you can imagine crawling around your house and assaulting you with a tiny crescent wrench in the middle of the night. He hangs out with talking bulldozers and scarecrows and various other possibly psychotropically inspired chums. All that is, of course, just fine.

Bob the Builder and anything featuring large earth-moving machinery drives him into what can only be described as near-religious ecstasy, of the type experienced by the saints, or monks who have been at the sacrament wine.

I was driving to work today and was minorly delayed by a giant crane type doohickey spelunking in the road for no apparently good reason. I watched the giant maw of the beast descend to the asphalt and pick out big chunks, belching pollution into the already non-pristine air of Orange County, and I thought to myself "My nephew is right. Giant digging and destruction machines are great!"

Of course, my more rational side demanded I retract that statement. After all, I rail against pollution, SUVs, jetskis. You name it, I'll rail against it. But I have to admit, the sight of these giant metal beasts lifting thousands of pounds, is just freaking cool.

So I guess it's OK for the little guy to be into all the polluting, dehumanizing technology, but I figure I'll balance him out. I'll get him a Koyaanisqatsi "Life Out of Balance" Playset for Christmas this year. Sure, he can watch videos of buildings falling down and tungsten-carbide drills hollowing out the Earth, but he can follow it up with some conceptual dioramas of little ant-like drones enslaved by the soul-killing bulldozers that lift man too high, too high, always too high.

And if you press a button, you get choral music.

I don't know if there's a name for this condition, but I have a terrible desire to attach binder clips to my fingers.

I'm afraid if I start doing that, though, I won't be able to stop. In the end, they'll come into my cube and I'll be curled fetal in the corner, a human binder clip porcupine, covered from toe to scalp in binder clips, shivering and making little "guhhhh" sounds in the back of my throat, rendered insensible by the binder clip hanging from my tonsils. Think of them clinging to my nose, my eyebrows! It would be beautiful!



Maybe not.

Two Somewhat Unrelated Pictures

Since the output here lately hasn't been of the "vast and unstoppable torrent that crushes you beneath its awesome grandeur and weight" variety lately, I'll post a couple of pictures.



I took this one in Buttonwillow, a little "nothin but a wide spot in the road" kind of town about halfway between Orange County and San Jose. Being halfway between makes Buttonwillow the ideal place to stop for a pee on the drive up Interstate 5. Last time we made the drive, I had spotted this place with lots of hideous lawn wildlife on the way up, so we stopped on the way back.

We were greeted by the kind of welcome that only a ten foot long "BEEF JERKY" sign can provide. This buoyed our spirits somewhat, as we are devotees of jerky when trapped in the car for six hours, and we walked into the courtyard in the front of the place, where this picture was snapped.

There were tables and tables of badly painted plaster lawn ornaments. You can see the pleasing donkeys and even a pokemon in the picture, but there was so much more, all dusty, chipped and just weird. There were frogs in bikinis next to fairly bloody Crucifixion scenes. A monkey dentist reclined with a flock of mallards. Power Rangers passed the time with buffalo.

We spotted the confederate flags and Nazi paraphernalia almost exactly at the same time the owner of the place came out, his shirt stained from painting this gang of plaster masterpieces. I'd say the gentleman represented the Spray Cheese demographic, and was a few teeth short of whatever you get for having all of your teeth. If his name wasn't Clem, I feel confident he knew at least one Clem.

"Half price on everything!" he declared, and I wondered, just for a second, if there was anyone locked in his basement.

Anyway. If you're ever in Buttonwillow, stop by. And let me out of the basement.





This somewhat poor photo was taken at Irvine Regional Park, the first weekend of the big fires down here in Southern California. You can get a sense of the air quality by the even-more-than-usual brown tinge to the air. We didn't know anything about the fires until we got to the park, because we pay no attention to anything ever. As a result we were somewhat surprised by the clouds of ash drifting down like snow.

The fall-out storm cut our visit somewhat short, but we did stay long enough to ride the train with my two year old nephew, and stop for a moment by the pony rides. There's something kind of poignant about the pony rides. You're putting your kid on an animal who clearly has not made the best career choices, and now has to walk around in a circle like Conan the Barbarian when he was pushing that wheel thing at the beginning of the movie. Incidentally, what the hell was he doing out there anyway? Grinding flour?

It's no wonder they want to bite anyone they can get their teeth on. I say more power to the ponies.

Today is World AIDS Day