WHICHEVER ONE YOU CHOOSE WITH FUN. SO JUST GIVE US A CALL AND LET US KNOW WHAT KIND OF LADY YOUR LOOKING FOR. I'M SURE WE HAVE SOMEONE TO SUIT YOURS NEEDS. SO NOW YOUR ABOUT TO ENTER THE WORLD OF ELEGANTS AND CLASS.
thank you, Jonno. thank you.
Happy Pride Weekend, and Best Wishes!
In my dream last night, I heard 20 rat traps snapping in the attic.
I was pretty sure the rats scampered free, but they set off all the traps.
I had a dream last night that I was the tour manager for this band (it was James Hetfield and my old friend Kimba), playing some art space in some unknown town. An old lady in the audience offered us her house for the night, or as long as we wanted to stay.
We showed up in the wee hours, and the house was dark, empty, shuttered but with the front door hanging open. A cyclone fence surrounded it. We went in, since the invitation seemed friendly enough, and immediately noticed "Hey, this place is haunted! Cool!"
The boys took off into rooms on the first level, and I started climbing the stairs. Each room had something happening in it, and the scenes I stumbled upon had increasing senses of urgency. I got to a room that was like a diner, and the old lady was setting a table for me to sit at while I waited for someone, but I didn't want to wait and besides some used napkins kept floating back onto the table. This wasn't my place, whatever was about to happen here was going to be ugly and not for me. I went to the next room, and Siouxsie Sioux was getting ready to die there, so I left her to it and realized "whatever I'm supposed to do here, it'd be easier if I was a ghost." So I shivered into ghostliness and floated up through a wall, then found Brendan and we helped each other climb up and push through the ceiling. It was really hard. It made me really anxious, it felt wrong, pushing, so I helped him through another ceiling then remembered there were a bunch of kids in the basement, and felt I should speed down their and patrol or something. The kids weren't very aware, and didn't see me. They were like on a field trip, and were damaging the stuff in the room. They were annoying, but all I could do was watch. I shuddered back into normal reality.
Fin.
complex, astounding, and as time consuming as you want it to be, it's another brilliant ramble at a gray box with words inside
We suffered a blackout today, in Berkeley.
Either one of those squirrels nibbled a power line and got fried, or everyone seeking respite from this ungodly heat fried the substation. Either way, at about 2ish this afternoon, psssssheeeeewwwt. It's kind of hard to tell if the whole block is out, or just you, under the midday sun, so I paced around outside for a while, then inside, then outside, then called PG&E after like 7 minutes of fruitless pacing. And I was the first person to report what turned out to be an at-least-a-couple-blocks-long outtage. After reporting it I wandered back outside, to find all our neighbors sort of milling around: "power out?" "yup..." "what are we gonna do?"
Um. Well, calling and alerting the power company is a good start. "Hey, good idea! If we all call, it'll only take them 7 hrs as opposed to the 15hr it took last time." "Alright, then. See you later."
Got back inside, and Brendan and I looked at each other and said FIRST POST!
BTVS Interviews, with conceptual spoilage:
our heartthrob James Marsters,
our father figure Anthony Stewart Head,
and the girl who has our job, Sarah Michelle Gellar
I get all patriotic about the separation of church and state, as a citizen of a country that was founded as an extension of empire by people trying to elude religious tithing by submiting instead to extortion from tobacco companies. Public school kids should not be made to declare that any particular god is the boss of them; that's what First Communion is for, not first grade. It's not like this is a holdover of some quaint but backwards tradition - "under God" was stuck in the mouths of kids in 1954, when my mom had already been reciting the purely political pledge for two school years - but a brand new quaint but backwards practice.
So what's the deal with this AP reporter?
The ruling, if allowed to stand, means schoolchildren can no longer recite the pledge...
But maybe kids aren't really so worried about it, and sitting down two words sooner would be cool with them.
"Well, for these brown skinned heathens, here, it would be!"
I mean. WTF is with that photo?
11:11 p.m. We may assume the somewhat flattened ex-opossum
at Seventh and K streets would've sucked at Frogger.
Haiku for dollars pounds!
Bush, not elected
Demands Arafat must go
And then you, George? No?
Dear Tommy:
I know the 80s were a blur, but surely you learned to blend your frickin' makeup so your face is the same color as your neck. Sigh... and take that stud out of your lip; it just looks silly.
We should establish abolish God Bless America Day before a bad nickname sticks.
We need to get Landover Baptist Church on the case.
Peace, Love, and Microflies
Cruel and Unusual: Hypersonic Screaming Babies
A new sonic weapon being developed for the Pentagon makes use of one of the most fearsome sounds known to humans: a baby crying. The "hypersonic sound system" beams sound along two ultrasonic signals to produce noise only when they hit the target. The weapon’s user doesn’t hear a thing.
It's (re)animation day in the Yahoo headlines:
Elvis Staying Relevant Among Young
Sitarist Ravi Shankar Like Old, Good Car
How did you celebrate Call A Truce In Your War Of Wits So That You And Your Arch Enemy Can (ahem) Day?
Feral Living gives good hiatus
The Philosophy of Kissing: Wittgensteinian Kiss
the important thing about this type of kiss is that it refers only to the symbol (our internal mental representation we associate with the experience of the kiss--which must necessarilly also be differentiated from the act itself for obvious reasons and which need not be by any means the same or even similar for the different people experiencing the act) rather than the act itself and, as such, one must be careful not to make unwarranted generalizations about the act itself or the experience thereof based merely on our manipulation of the symbology therefor.
Hooray, Brendan is back to saving the world through fine UI design!
But before resuming that adventure, he helped recode a lot of sites derived from bad CSS templates. He's boiled down those efforts into a compendium of CSS guidelines: the Spasmodic CSS Primer
"a moveable beast is" a new daily stop for me. What an awesome domain name. It's run by a woman named Peggy, who came out to the world with her name recently.
I've never understood the whole need for anonymity by bloggers. Is it like multiple skins - pick the identity you want me to have? Is it assumed celebrity / stalker paranoia? Boss fear?
It's not like folks aren't sharing intimate protein-packed details of their lives with their readership. What's a name when you've told your hopes and fears and dreams and realities and loves and loathes and jobs and in-laws and surgeries and extracurricular affairs? You're busted to anyone who knows you, they know you're writing about them even if under a pseudonym. A mask doesn't help: you can still get divorced or shunned or fired for it.
Like most brands of shyness (I've learned in real life), it comes off as conceit.
People post email addresses, AIM handles, and even phone numbers, but wear an alias-as-veil. I'd understand if you were a phone sex operator, really I would, but you're not. At least I hope that's not what it's equivalent to, 'cause damn, baby, that sounded real.
And also DUH:
Menstrual Cycle Influences Migraine Pain, Severity
I know when the the moon will be full (today), because the week leading up to it likely find me suffering from a migraine. Unless I take a lot of feverfew, and pretty regularly that week. Which I almost always forget to do until the onset, so I suffer mildly, only requiring total quiet and darkness for part of one day.
You'd think I'd start marking my calendar or something...
File under DUH:
Earth Can't Meet Human Demand for Resources
Crossing Swaziland right off my list of places to visit.
SonyStyle USA
New branding scheme, going after the furry stoner alien market.
courtesy of the Cardhouse Robot uh huh
Essence of peacedividend, for sale on eBay.
The the Kensington Ladies' Erotica Society came together in the wild 1970s in Berkeley, when founder Sedgewick was librarian in charge of the erotic literature collection of Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.
Well my heavens. I had no idea. I wonder what the Bancroft's handling rules say about that genre.
We spent yesterday at the Redwood Valley Railway
I took lots of pictures.
I had this funky dream this morning...
homage to Michele of the Memes
Jessica is so cool.
Jessica is worth the frustration.
Jessica is a tremendous catalyst.
Jessica is at the middleware level.
Jessica is the bestest person in the world.
Jessica is a rocket ship headed for the stratosphere.
Jessica is FUN!!! Jessica is a SUPER babe!! Jessica is SUPREME!!!
Jessica is the toughest and spunkiest of the monkeys.
Jessica is the person who grounds me in a time of crisis or emotional or spiritual distress.
Jessica is not a substitute for counseling, nor a replacement for any kind of medical treatment.
Jessica is a very good actor and she is very pretty i wish i could be more like how she is in the show.
Jessica is the type of player that flourishes in the heat of battle.
Jessica is decidedly uncomfortable with the conversation.
Jessica is certainly long past the need for self promotion.
Jessica is on the verge of being branded.
Jessica is really coming into her own.
Jessica is now a Kitten.
Jessica is currently available for interview.
Jessica is an Emmy Award-winning producer.
Jessica is very gentle and enjoys being groomed.
Jessica is an ideal test-bed to investigate advanced moderators at realistic experimental conditions.
Jessica is creeped out by them.
Jessica is tangled up in children.
Jessica is absurdly sexy.
Jessica is rapture.
Jessica is responsible.
Jessica is a magical child.
Jessica is not a real zombie.
Jessica is no stranger to fame.
Jessica is just warming up.
I got my annual Social Security Statement in the mail the other day. It's an interesting snapshot of one's life as a taxpayer. I've been working since I was 13, so there's a longish history to examine for patterns. Of course my income went up, incrementally, just about every year from the creative anarchist 80s until peaking in the office-bound middle class late 90s. 2000 saw a nice little spike, as I kept very busy even while being laid off twice that year.
Those two layoffs were the kick in the butt I needed to jump off the marketing career ladder and into my bliss, filmmaking. And last year, in which I was busier than ever until Sept 11th, I earned roughly the same amount of money as when I was a sophmore in college.
Most of my friends paid (a lot) more in taxes than I earned last year. Our own joint income tax bill for last year was more than twice what I earned; because of the marriage penalty (and it's really hard to file separately once you've filed jointly), I paid out about half what I earned.
Well, it's nice to know this latent depression has a measurable cause.
We had some people over for dinner tonight, to celebrate summer solstice watching the late sunset from the amazing Thai place up the street. Of course, this being the first day of the rest of the world's summer, it was very cold and foggy. In fact, it's just about raining right now.
Which means my cat is out biting raindrops.
In June.
sigh.
So we have this mystery-plant in our backyard, a sort of jack-in-the-pulpit thing that bears these enormous pealike seeds when the flower wilts away. And we have no idea where it came from - it just burst out of the soil, in a terrifically not-planted-by-any-thinking-person sort of spot, a few months ago. Well. This afternoon, the phantom gardener was caught in the act.
Also a big freaky spider scolded us for washing his tasty kitchen floor. I had to rescue him after many failed attempts at climbing the clean and slippery baseboards.
Bonus sensationalism!
Martinez was eaten alive by the crocodile...
Oh my. I just got an email from a friend who is now working at that place at which I was employed briefly this spring. This person was hired as an editor of math books. S/he needed to know how to calculate the circumference of a circle, given the radius.
Their hiring practices are still remarkable.
Berkeley Ballot to include Fair-Trade Coffee item
This would impact the average Berkeley coffee consumer (and we do like our coffee. oh yes we do) very little. But it would clean the streets of the St*rb**k* plague. Photo (see caption) linked for our English friends.
CORPSE ALERT
Oh my heavens.
This is my first 'first panel' corpse, and I've been waiting since January to see what became of it.
It was worth the wait.
As if the pressure from my mother-in-law wasn't bad enough...
I've always had one big standard for when-I'll-have-a-kid: when I'm done enough with my own life to start someone else's. That doesn't mean adventuring, bacon-earning, identify-honing - I'll do all that with a baby on my hip (and my awesome husband at my side) - it means being fully prepared with a foundation for said child, so that I never ever feel resentful of my situation and by extension him or her. Whatever miserable-childhood stories any of us can tell, for me that's the linchpin: resentment a mom carries which the child takes on.
Everyone tells you you can never plan for babies, they just happen and you adapt and it's the best thing that ever happened. I'm sure that's true, but I'm sticking to my hormonally supplemented guns: I want to own a house. I want a career I can excel at outside of standard business hours. And I think I'll be be a great mother, so I've been working really hard at setting up those circumstances.
Ideally I would like to adopt a passel of family-deprived kids and show them a good time; I'd also like to see what the next step in evolution is from Brendan and me. But I can't do that until I can guarantee their happy survival.
Some people think I'm terrifically selfish for not already having a brood.
Some people think I'm horrifyingly repugnant for wanting to spawn at all.
Many are amused that I'd adopt. Most need to pay more attention to their own lives and stop projecting onto and judging mine. It's people like that (who seem to be in the majority) that make me think twice about bringing a child into the world. War, disease, poverty, ennui - our child would be well equipped to deal with and hopefully make even some impact on these problems, but gossipy narrow-minded know-it-alls? That's a bigger obstacle.
My mom gave me this great book for Christmas a couple years ago, and without cracking the spine I resented it. Turns out the author is so Anti-"Rules," she doesn't even have a vowel in her surname. I opened it a couple months ago, in say month 6 of chronic underemployment, and it totally validated everything I've ever felt about motherhood. Which is like 100 different things, but all of them pretty Darwinian. It bitchslapped the Hewlett perspective.
Thanks for writing the article, Garance; I was so horrified by the Hewlett PR blitz that I pretty much never ever wanted to talk about adult female choices with anyone again. I think I've halfway recovered!
Because it came up in conversation (with a man who owns his feminine side):
Men can breastfeed (as in lactate themselves, not... what you were thinking), at least theoretically.
Hm. This site for women who breastfeed their adoptive children is just not having it.
Sea lions don't kill. Usually.
Sometimes they even help drowning puppies.
Corey Feldman's B-day Bash
get yer tickets here
"Coupling": The Next "Friends"?
NO. Do not Americanize my fourth favorite show!!!
This morning, our landlady came over with her dad and some ladders and tools to patch up the ratty thoroughfares. They did a pretty good job, and I've been hearing scuttling sounds like rats trying to get out. They're up there with their dead friend. Ew.
Just after lunch we heard a terrible racket up there, right where the main nest is believed to be, like a small rodent running with all their might towards the patch. And then we saw something plummet past the window. And heard it SCREEEing. So we went running outside.
And were promptly swarmed by a passel of (is five a passel?) squirrels in a mad mating frenzy.
OK, they didn't swarm us so much as caper in a very hardcore fashion about every stationary object in our vicinity. Our house... a tree... the funky vintage BMW... the power lines... up and down and up and down and back and forth then boooosh through the neighbor's yard to scamper down our driveway where they chased each other over, under, around, and through the wheel wells of my car before pssssheeewing over to the baby plum tree then disappearing.
Except for one, the biggest and perhaps eldest of the squirrels. He was tuckered right out. He was limping a little. He barely galloped past, then crawled up a tree to gnaw on it with thirst. He made me so sad. I wanted to feed and water him, but not on my neighbor's property.
Maybe I'll put some almonds on the deck. With a little water bowl.
Springtime brought with it a big crop of roofrats to the peacedividend homestead, and our landlady recently hired an exterminator to "take care of" them. But she didn't hire a local, or an old roomate of hers, which is the usual happy circumstance.
No, she hired Clark Pest Control.
Clarkserves Berkeley from their Livermore office.
Livermore is as culturally removed from Berkeley as Big Lick, TN, and the one residential exterminator in that office is almost as ill suited to his job as he is to human contact.
This guy is like the ingrown hair on the perineum of Archie Bunker's hated cousin.
On his first visit here, he faked spraying the outside baseboards, pretended to knock off some wasp nests, said something about crawling under the house but never mentioned all the rat traps already in residence there, and laid one (1) trap inside the built-in chest of drawers in our living room*. Also on that first day, he asked to use our bathroom. And it was bad. So bad. So very, very bad.
He blew off his follow up appointments, to check the trap(s), and responded predictably to our calls by showing up early one morning, without calling to schedule, to bitch about our landlady not doing her part to control the rats. But not rebait the one (1) trap he'd laid on that first visit. I reminded him he was hired to exterminate roof rats, and had ignored all my directions to where the next was likely to be found, and he told us he doesn't climb attics. Um.
So our landlady called his boss, who came out the following day to make him climb into our attic. And perhaps actually clean out the wasps nests, and spray, and whatnot. Whatever: personally, I didn't want him in the house ever again. Not even in the neighborhood. Or town. Probably it'd be better if he never left the stinky hole I which imagine he dwells. Probably he'd be better off smoking whatever's left of the rat poison and driting off to a long peaceful slumber. But no: he's the only residential guy in the Livermore shop, and my landlady doesn't want to waste her deposit so we're stuck with him.
As soon as the boss left, Whiny McFlatulent climbed up on a shelf in our closet (where the door to the attic lives) and bounced til it splintered. This was, it seems, in order to 'prove' how unsafe it would be to have him in our attic. He won, and the landlady got him down before testing our liability insurance. He succeded in placing one (1) trap near the door to the attic, before dismounting in a hail of insulation and dust.
Then he trampled my freshly blossomed irises while merely disturbing the wasps enough to piss them off. He didn't remove any of the nests, but oh. my. god. he fucked up the garden. And tomorrow, after yet more complaints, the boss is coming back out with the smelly little man to check the trap(s).
And guess what? They'll find something! Last night, at around 9:30pm, I heard a strange sound right above my desk. It went something like
SNAP!!! Screee! Scree! thumpthumpthump HISS SS SSS SSSS SSS SS SSSS SSS SSSS thump HISSS
It was horrible. It was loud. And it was right next to my desk. And I bet when (if) he finds it, tomorrow morning, he'll scream and fling it across the room and I'll be fighting competing urges to scream and to photograph the rat splat.
For instance, the North Berkeley ground squirrel has developed a tendency to gang up on blonde girlies in Miatas. Photos of this afternoon's carjacking attempt will be up just as soon as I kick this *%#@ migraine.
We won't deny our consciences.
Awesome.
Thanks, Mig.
Since Flat Eric isn't doing his job well, I've just bought a Count Chocula doll.
I really wanted a Count doll, but the ones I've found are not as cool as I'd like them to be.
Well, I'm sure Count Chocula will find goth drag more suitable than Flat Eric.
I finished a very good book last night and went to start the next one in the towering bedside stack. I had to stop: an exploration of martyrdom and how (incredibly graphic and gruesome) tales of such are passed down through cultures is just not bedtime fare. Even if it is good historiography.
I read a nice Will Self novel, instead.
And then I had a very odd dream:
I dreamt I was invited (by the avuncular VP of HR at a favorite client company) to participate in a pageant, as The Princess. I was given a baby blue satin gown, white opera gloves, black stilletto heeled boots with many many hooks, and a headdress. Rehearsal was at 6:00pm, so we got dressed and went to the rehearsal hall and had a blast.
The actual event was the next day, and we realized only 15 minutes beforehand that the pageant began at 3:00pm. We tossed my costume into a bag and rushed to the castle where it was to take place. The procession started at a church, so my friends huddled around me as I changed into my garb in the street outside. I sat down to lace up my boots, and noticed a man and his very young son sitting on the curb watching us. Then I noticed that we were all splashed with brightly colored fruit drink. I got up to shake off the vivid blue sugar water, and my shoelaces snapped. The little boy came toddling up and offered to get me some new laces. His father nodded, generously offering up his son's services. I gave him $10, for two sets of laces - somehow we all agreed I should get two pair, and at 48" they might be pricey.
The little boy toodled down the street, and I sent everyone else up ahead as the big introduction was just starting in the church. Meanwhile I recalled the day before, when a friend of mine was invited to be Queen, and how she was going through an ugly breakup and her girlfriend was sort of trying to sabotage her pageant role. People suggested that I could step in and be Queen if I wanted, but I felt that would be totally wrong. I came back to the present and noticed it was getting dark out: I was really late. There was nothing to do but set off in search of the kid, down at 16th x Mission where the shops were. But this was 16th x Mission of the mid 80s, with black market kiosks set up around the shuttered Walgreens. I found a Russian shoe repair shop and went in, in my satin gown and headdress, and after chatting a while they sold me two pairs of 48" shoelaces. They were $3.67 and $4.98, respectively, but the cashier asked me for $15. I'd already handed her $10, and set my wallet on the counter, and as we argued over the price (and the $5 service fee) my money and wallet disappeared along with the laces. I gave them all a good evil eye and stormed out, really really late now. The corner around the shops was as filthy as it always is, and a guy eating pizza tossed a greasy slice at me, hoping to score points on my dress-as-basket, but I saw it coming and avoided it. The little boy must have been scamming $10 out of me, I realized, and decided not to engage this crap any more and just trucked up the hill at something close to the speed of light in my stilletto heels. I raced up the tower steps, to catch up with the procession, and came to the sanctuary at the top where people were receiving oracular clues, blessings, or confessional-type advice. I scooted into an apse to let a family (who had not yet emerged, but I could feel them) by. The apse was a bathroom - tiny basin, bathtub, and almost in the hallway a toilet. The grandfather of the emerging family handed me a tissue as they passed. Then a voice came from the shadows, a big, warm voice, and said "Rest, child. You shall be reinstated."
I think I know what that refers to. And maybe later I'll tell.
Tiny Cows
"I like them," said Pillard, 30.
This just reinforces what the dotcom bust proved:
except in very rare cases, 30 yr olds are not wise entrepreneurs.
From global warming to dog mauling:what is this world coming to?!?
Most selfish, living-in-denial man on the planet
FINALLY arrested over drug parties featured on HBO
During the party, Meyers' youngest son and his daughter, then 13 and 15, (submit to his coersion and) take Ecstasy on camera. Meyers asks the filmmakers, "I'm not going to get in trouble for this, am I?
Rodney Outlaw Lost his Ass
I couldn't resist.
Judge Orders New Trial on Murder Conviction in Dog Attack
Though Superior Court Judge James Warren said Knoller and Noel are "the most despised couple in this city," he said the evidence did not support a murder conviction because Knoller had no way of knowing her dogs would kill someone when she left her apartment that day.
a "very bizarre crime by this deranged individual."
How to Make the Man Pay for thousands (?) of years of oppression:
1. corral some white folks into an East Village bar
2. shoot the neighboring store owner, and some hostages
3. try to burn the bar patrons alive
4. get your ass kicked two women
Johnson lives in Brooklyn with his 10-year-old son.
Police who searched his home said they found a note taped to a wall that said:
"Tell the boys in blue I won't be easy."
Ugh. Happy Father's Day.
She's 80, she's ornery, her name is Dixie.
And she lives in L.A. You can guess the rest of the story, can't you?
Major Milk Recall in Bay Area
I'm pretty sure I don't want to know why.
Hooray for local organic dairies with cute ad campaigns.
I haven't been able to view my traffic logs for over a month, but finally got around to rebuilding the report today. I only got the last 36 hours accounted for, and, well, I get a lot of traffic from weirdo pr0n sites. Not just Google searches for pr0n terms.
Also I seem to be a hit with the freaky Christian Vampire sects.
But no linky love for them here.
Look how cute Flat Eric is as a Centurion!
You can only imagine how much fun I had with the set dressing.
They're lucky no one broke a tooth.
Judge sentences man to 25 years for beating trick-or-treater
"This defendant is a poster child against the argument for drugs being legalized," Superior Court Judge Stephen Ashworth said. "Not that he's not responsible. But if it wasn't for drugs, this never would have happened."
Hands up, who here has ever done such massive amounts of an Rx that they saw kids as insects? Hm? (You who think kids are insects already can put your hands down.) OK, I did have that one episode on a three-day Doan's Pills bender, but still... The point is that when drugs are decriminalized, the deviance motivation quotient is low to the point of disappearing. Sure, there are people who abuse others' ridalin or percodan prescriptions, but rarely do they get so into it that they make the papers. Yet, there are hosts of newsgroups for people who killed or almost died on Ambien or Prozac or Oxycontin or DepoProvera or FenPhen, which points to the real problem:
Crappy drugs, and the need for better regulation of manufacturing and distribution.
That guy was probably high on baby laxative, which he snorted to offset the Vicodin blues after weeks of sleepless yet Ambien-filled nights which were the result of all the dexatrim he ate the month after he got all bloated on sulpha antibiotics.
Trash Can Heroes
One of my badesst-assed friends is on Junkyard Wars tomorrow night. 10pm, TLC
Tossing the Octopus
Almost as obscene as it sounds.
This makes me so weepy:
...Mister Rogers received his 40th honorary degree - Doctor of Humane Letters - wearing an academic gown that belonged to his father. "So in all that you do, in all of your life, I wish you the strength and the grace to make those choices which will allow you and your neighbor to become the best of whoever you are," Mister Rogers told the grads.
Strength. Grace. Choices. (snaps out of it) Right!
"...judged unfit to speak at an "elite" college like Dartmouth."
I hope that speech didn't fall on deaf ears.
Be the Roach
Or just read his thoughts.
Awesome. But the voiceover really bothered my cat.
All hail The Bug
buy my stuff
You can't have my dragon sleeved arm, but you can have a fabric facsimile!
Brendan has a big interview tomorrow, at Pixar, where I worked most of last year as a freelance production coordinator / script supervisor. It's very exciting, this could be The One. I'd like to go back, myself, but I have to keep waiting; the production side of the studio has had a hiring freeze for like ever.
It's not that hard to wait; the only postings in my HotJobs Agent yesterday were at IHOP. Seriously.
Pixar used to live in a mysterious land called Point Richmond, and now occupies the old Dole cannery site in Emeryville, home of ancient shipyards, disused freight rails, and card clubs. There was a vast empty lot in front of the Pixar campus when I worked there, and I always wondered what it was going to be.
Well, it's finally under construction.
It's gonna be an IHOP.
Total Dopes with that Disgusting Sense of Priveledge Take in the Eclipse
"It's totally underwhelming," said Steve Boland, 30, of San Francicso. "Is there any noticeable darkening of the sky? I don't think so. I saw a total eclipse when I was in the third grade, and this isn't measuring up."
He would prefer, perhaps, some bee faeces.
OK, not everyone sounds like a dopey jaded asshole. Some sound just... dopey:
"The moon is getting in the way of the sun," said Rebecca Jewell, 29. "That rocks."
"I like it a lot, especially after discovering you could look at it through a potato chip bag," said Cheri Clark, 25. "Thank God we're old enough to appreciate it."
Yeah, this kind of stuff is totally wasted on kids.
Now THAT'S an SUV
Con Ganas means With Desire
Father Chickenhawk's phantom charity is back in the news. The reverend's rectory-centered porn business has been in the news for years now, but it's only now that molestation of altar boys is becoming passe that the focus has turned to his vow of poverty problem.
Before you think of a pile of matresses...
Tony Karl, director, defended the association as 'sports entertainment'' and a legitimate fund-raising tool."
Tony's got quite a porn-producer name there, with which to work that tool.
I mean. The jokes just write themselves.
Still Chris refuses to give in. Finally Chris unlocks Ben's grip and flips him over. Chris side slams Ben over his knee and stretches him out for good measure. "Not even a freak show can survive my rack!"
Bad Touch!
...a monkey is not going to think "that's a mobile phone, I'll take it"
Don't be too sure...
There's a Pepperidge Farms goldfish on the floor of my office, near my sandal.
We don't have goldfish in the house. We don't eat them. But the little boys who lives next door do.
And there it is, a single, solitary, lonely little goldfish, lying on the hardwood floor near my desk.
About a foot from the cracked open window.
I can just see the 9yr old walking past the window, doot de dooo (chuck). I wonder if it was him, or his 16 month old brother. Either way, they were busted. A grabby stick with pincers and a squeezy trigger deal at the end was leaning up against the wall, outside, when I got home.
Such a vivid tableau...
Japanese culture is so deeply different than, say, American culture. Here, the employed person is addressed with the suffix "san," and the unemployed "chen." Pretty much everyone is "chen," or "dude," so that's not a killing offence; rather, you may be attacked because some bored loser thinks you might have looked at their cousin. Oh, and we kill each other with bullets, not umbrellas.
I Know Where Bruce Lee Lives rocks so damned hard.
Hey kids! It's the raising hell : a new genre in child-rearing Father's Day Contest!
"Please, please, at any time that you have a flat tire, please pull off the freeway and change your tire," begged Sgt. Mangano. "Don't try and do it on the (emergency shoulder). Common sense will tell you that."
Please, please at any time that you speed ahead of the rest of traffic by driving on the shoulder, killing people who are actually using it, stop put yourself under arrest. You shouldn't have a license: common sense will tell you that.
If you've ever visited the British Museum, you may have noticed that only 1/5 of the place is ever accessible at one time. Staff rotate every few hours to open up or close off various rooms, usually such that you must navigate an ever-shifting maze to get from point A to point B, which may be just beyond a velvet rope The place is crawling with gracious docents, but probably employs something like 12 guards total. That mess just got a lot worse:
British Museum to Close as Staff Votes to Strike
(The director) said a "severe reduction in tourism" was partly to blame for the redundancies. The statement said the museum was aiming to save 6.5 million pounds to make up for fall in visitor numbers due to last year's foot-and-mouth crisis, the costs involved in running the new central court and a cut in government funding.
But... but... but the museum doesn't charge an admission fee. None of the big museums in London do; they have new grants from the city specifically so they won't charge admission, to encourage reticent visitors. That is a new phenomenon and doesn't impact the fall in revenue over the last few years, but still: the slick new courtyard was planned and renovated under the old budget, but opened just recently, under the new budget. It should never have depended on ticket sales for its maintenence budget. Here's an idea: why not send the Elgin Marbles back to Greece and offset your costs by whatever fortune is spent to keep them?
Feh. Makes me love the V&A that much more.
Oh yes: I have found the title of my new mix cd.
Dog Mauling Attorney Argues For a New Trial
During closing arguments the judge ordered Ruiz not to interrupt the prosecutor with objections. The (new) defense said the judge's actions deprived Knoller of a competent defense because he threatened Ruiz.
That's it? Not "that attorney was a certifiable nutbag and therefore we ask for a mistrial?" That would have held about an ounce more water.
After my last layoff, over a year ago, I decided to ignore the dozens of calls from recruiters, to turn down big important Marketing Manager for the Americas type jobs, and make the big sacrifices to get back into film production. It was hard, but I followed my heart instead of doing what was more convenient.
Without editorializing my big studio experience, I can say it was... a big studio experience. I learned, I suffered, I made some good friends and probably a few enemies while being confronting the value of brown nosed politicing over meritorious striving. A slow learner with this one critical lesson, I learned enough to be effective, but maybe not enough to overcome my (go figure) personal humility and force my way into opportunities. Once there, I can carry things off to success, but it might take one more burn before I figure out how to break in without inside help - or even how to marshall that assistance. Argh. Studio filmmaking is not for the heroic loner. It's not even for the eager neophyte with years' academic and corporate experience, in this economy. And I'm not ready to move to L.A.
I am determined to follow my still-fervent bliss. Happily, there haven't been any* "real" jobs to distract me from my path, this whole time. But my unemployment is running out, and my patience for life-without-a-deadline is just about tapped.
I applied to probably ten jobs this week, probably a hundred in the last two months. Office jobs, of a calibre a few rungs lower than the ladder rung from which I'd leapt: senior administrative assistant, executive administrator, marketing associate, sales coordinator, web content manager for a huge quasi-governmental corporation / lobbying group.
For some of them, I even filled out (online) applications.
But I haven't actually followed up on one of them.
I am of the mind, at this point, that it's similar to looking for an apartment - at least the way it was before. See, here you have to pay big bucks to subscribe to services that landlords list their properties with. You scour the listings, filling out like 100 applications with 80 people competing every time; you draft and revise your resume and list of references, you apologize for and glorify your pet or recent short tenures. Eventually you find the perfect place, probably thru word of mouth or some other fluke, but only once you've paid your karmic dues.
So for every crappy low-paying, soul-killing job I consider, I hope I'm racking up points for that (paid) Production Manager or Continuity Supervisor gig that could be my new life.
Today on Ahsk Ahnald: Vampire vs. Werewolf - who wins?
Count Schwarzenegger says Revanants 1, Lupins 0
If being a monster were like being a bodybuilder, I think a werewolf would probably lose a competition like this. First of all, a vampire is a vampire on a daily (or should I say nightly) basis. He has daily goals that he pursues without stopping or giving up. He can't rest or survive without what he needs. Werewolves are only werewolves when the moon is full, and, what's that? Once a month? Forget it! That's no way to be a monster! You have to stay at it everyday to be any good, right? Vampires know what this means.
Pilot who died in plane crash same one involved in helicopter incident day before
After 10 moving violations and a DUI, he built himself a helicopter from a kit. And crashed it into a house. The next day, he circled an intersection in his Cessna for 40 minutes then veered away. And crashed.
Some people should just stick to walking.
BEIJING (Reuters) - Beijing's most popular newspaper republished a bogus story about the U.S. Congress...
The source? America's celebrated spoof tabloid, the Onion.
Shiny Mud Balls: even better than turd toys.
Swimming ban at Stinson Continues after Shark Sighting
"He saw a 12- to 15-inch dorsal fin and part of a tail fin... break the surface, stay on the surface for 6 to 10 seconds and, a few minutes later, saw it surface again. The park is open, you can still get wet. We're just keeping you in at a safe distance. You can do anything you want to do up to knee deep."
It's only when they hit the femoral artery, in your thigh, that the liability insurance runs out.
So: knee deep only! And bring your cameras!
Baby Found Dead in Car
Police received a 911 call at 3 p.m. by frantic family members.
They don't know how long the infant was inside the SUV.
"There's interest for (Osbournes) condoms, slot machines and video games," he said
Well, that's pretty funny. But:
Oh, no. It is so over.
"I didn't mean to jello wrestle, but..."
My friend Kimberly arrived at my doorstep last night with a ticket to see David Cross.
That, right there, is a good friend.
The opening band, Arlo, were a kick. The lyrics were kind of naïve and almost too cute, and the song structure too regular, but they had awesome harmony and a big crunchy rhythm section. Yum. Oh, and their drummer/singer gave me a beer (which I discreetly handed off - to the lady who was buying me a gin & tonic - after flashing my wedding ring).
The second band, Ultrababyfat, were atrocious in the way that makes you whisper Behind The Music scenarios to your pals while you wait for them to get their self-centered, bitchy, battle-of-the-front-woman selves the hell off the stage.
But they did that pretty quickly, and Mr. Cross clambered up on stage - right into what would have been a pool of beer and sweat if they'd rocked - and regaled the crowd with 2 1/2 hours of rambling Chomsky-ish rant with smatterings of taking-acid-in-SF tales. Towards the end of it all, he answered the Three Most Popular Questions of his tour:
1. There is a germ of a plan of a Mr. Show tour.
2. The Mr. Show season 1-2 dvd was released yesterday.
3. Run Ronnie Run isn't going to run after all. At least not while New Line holds the reins.
David Cross' live show is great; he's got a few bits that he ends up at during a stream of consciousness ramble, but it isn't all scripted. He could teach a seminar in How to Deal With Hecklers. Get him onto the topics of "President" Bush, global warming and the oil economy, the first six pages of Genesis, or the Promise Keepers, and he is on fire. Also whenever he says "fuck," which he does a lot, it's funnier than it probably should be. It's very visceral, this utterance, complete with really good miming of the verb itself.
The tour worth checking out if it comes to your town. Plus there are bitchin' t-shirts.
"This is what you have to do when you can't get a real president for your campaign," Jeb Bush's campaign spokesman Todd Harris said, calling U.S. President George. W. Bush an "invaluable" asset to his brother's campaign.
You don't say. Hands up, who would prefer having Martin Sheen speak on their behalf to having the "President" provide distracting comedic malapropisms?
"The fact that Janet Reno is being supported by the Hollywood liberal elite should not come as a surprise to anyone who has studied her record," Harris said.
Can someone decipher that for me?
I guess I can see how he'd be confused.
What are people doing in the water outside London? Brr!
Still, he should pick on someone his own size.
15 hours of searches over two days failed to produce a single sighting.
What's that aphorism about a watched dolphin?
Modern Living
righteous.
It recommends adapting to inevitable changes.
So they're perhaps planning to engineer gills for the people of the Pacific Islands?
That'd require another big policy reversal.
Secret Squirrel is On the Case
But is still not as cool as Danger Mouse.