Universal Donor

2010-09-06T12:13:00.000-05:00

Sorry my site has been so jacked up over the past few months. Through some vector I don't even really understand, bad code got onto a number of pages throughout my main host site, jeremybroomfield.com, and proliferated like bedbugs at Fort Thunder. Those of you loyal readers who, like, "follow" this blog or who have RSS set up have probably noticed that the blog was migrated to Blogspot, because Blogger said we had to. The URL is ugly, I know. And the lack of content is still maddening, baffling. But here we are.

HEY LOOK A VIDEO
Have I ever asked you for anything? Other than blog topics and dirty polaroids, I mean? No, I never have. Just topics, polaroids, and your undying devotion. Well. Do you remember this video from 2003?

If not, watch it. It's fun. Then come back here.

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NOW COMES THE PLEA
Okay. So that was the video. Here's the request: Please help me by pledging some money to my kickstarter project. I'm only going for $750. So if 75 people give $10 each, I will make more music for you. Also, I will blog more. There, I promised it.

Thanks!

This blog has moved

2010-04-18T02:09:00.001-05:00

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2009-08-25T09:17:00.003-05:00

THE ABSOLUTE LAZIEST AFRICAN INTERNET SCAM I'VE EVER SEEN

from:     astra_turist 
reply-to: tobaccodept09@9.cn
to:       jeremybroomfield@gmail.com
date:     Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 5:16 AM
subject:  Winner

You are a winner of £1,000,000.Reply back with your Name: Occupation: Country: Sex

Really, Africa? This is the best you can do? You have gotten LAZY. I have received so many tantalizing invitations to wealth from the cradle of civilization that I have come to rely on you for inspiration -- for dreams. I don't even HAVE dreams anymore. I just open my inbox and read a fraudulent attempt to prey on my greed. Because really, you give me much more credit for greed than I deserve. You allow my greed to be boundless, totally unrealistic. I used to dream of a modest rockstardom, allowing me a comfortable living, maybe a cool million in pre-tax record sales. A million dollars? That's PATHETIC! You gotta help me see the bigger picture.
This miserable one-line come-on is the absolute worst I've ever seen. Take a cue from Mr. Chen Guangyuan, who spins me an dream with an Asian flavor:

from:     Mr. Chen Guangyuan 
subject:  I am contacting you in reference to an investment opportunity

Dear Friend,

[polite!]



I am a staff of Bank Of China,Hong Kong attached in Private Banking services; I am contacting you in reference to an investment opportunity which I believe would be of significant reward to the parties involved.

[I'm listening...]

 Its about a customer that came to Bank Of China,Hong Kong to engage in Private Banking services. The customer had a financial portfolio of $24,500,000.00

[Holy shit! Wow!] and this I help turned over in the purchase of securities in the capital markets....

Now THAT is a grabber of an opening paragraph. Or would you like a little blasphemy with your fraud? Check this shit out:

from: helenesneddon@canoemail.com
subject: MRS HELENE SNEDDON USE THIS FUND
 
Dearly Beloved in Christ

[oh hai!]


...
I selected you after browsing the Internet for this purpose and prayed over it, for the fact that I always go to God in prayers in situation like this, because He is the Alfa and Omega. I am willing to donate all the money I have in the bank, which is US$15,000,000.00 (Fifteen Million United States Dollars) to you for the development of evangelism and also as aids for the less privileged around you.

Develop my evangelism by giving AIDS to the less privileged? Hell YES! Why didn't I think of that year ago? It's so SIMPLE. And profitable! US$15,000,000.00 is buys a lot of the stuff I like to buy! I'm so excited I can't even remember what I like to buy!!!!

Anyway, my point is: Don't be lazy, Africa. I depend on your for my dreams. I will expect more of you when I am within your borders.

2009-07-31T09:58:00.002-05:00

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 5:09 PM, d12treskey@gmail.com [d12treskey@gmail.com] wrote:

Hi,

How do i get rid of a huge painful zit? Your insight into what would be the best way to proceed would be much appreciated. A little advice would go a long way right now. I really appreciate your help.

Susan

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 11:57 AM, Jeremy Broomfield [jeremybroomfield@gmail.com] wrote:

Susan,

Are you kidding? Do I know you? Why are you asking me? Because your question is music to my ears.

I have a lot of experience in this arena, but the answer will vary depending on the location, severity, and characteristics of the zit.

I see it's been 18 hours since you sent me your email. Has the situation changed? Does it still hurt? have you relieved the pressure?

If it's still hurting, tell me:
where is the zit?
what does it look like? (be as detailed as possible)
how does it hurt?
Hope I can help!

Jeremy

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 4:28 PM, Derek Truskey [d12treskey@gmail.com] wrote:

worse than ever!

The zit is on my cheek and its red all around. There is no head but its very tight where it should be. It is seriously swollen. Please help!

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 10:26 PM, Jeremy Broomfield [jeremybroomfield@gmail.com] wrote:

Here is what I recommend.
Go to a Rite Aid or Duane Reade
Behind the prescription counter, they sell "lancets" for people with diabetes to prick their fingers to draw blood for testing their blood sugar. Get a box of those. They come in boxes of 100, which is wasteful, but they are very cheap.
Also buy some rubbing alcohol if you don't have any.
Take them home.
Soak a washcloth in hot water and, without BURNING yourself, apply the hot washcloth to the zitty thing. Do this for like 3 whole minutes. It will bring badness close to the surface and make it easier to pop.,
Put some rubbing alcohol on the zit, and disinfect your hands while you're at it.
When you are ready, take a lancet, expose its pointy part, and stab it quickly and completely into the place where the head should be.
If stuff comes out, wipe it off!
If you squeeze, squeeze from as deeply as possible, and very gently. Don't just squeeze on the surface or you will push the goodies back in.
Disinfect the area and wash your hands when you are done!
If it seems like nothing is happening, DON'T FORCE IT. Wait a day.
Let me know how that works out for ya!

Jeremy

On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 5:14 PM, klein.mining@gmail.com [klein.mining@gmail.com] wrote:

How to pop painful zits? Since you have experience, I was hoping you could give me some clues as to what you look out for. Any help appreciated. Thank you for your help.

Kind Regards,
Frank

On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 11:32 PM, Jeremy Broomfield [jeremybroomfield@gmail.com] wrote:

It's very simple, Frank.
Turn on your Flamsanger.
Make sure the turnbuckles have been tightened enough that the line thrums when plucked.
Say the "Ave Maria" five times.
Go to Chinatown in your town, wherever it is.
Eat a bowl of dick.
Hope this helps! Enjoy being a fake person!

Love,
Lao Jin-Qiang

On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 9:23 PM, Klein Mining & Industrials [klein.mining@gmail.com] wrote:

Gee wizz. Not very nice answer. I just wanted to get rid these painful zits somehow.

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 10:50 PM, iris.accountants@gmail.com [iris.accountants@gmail.com] wrote:

Why do zits hurt? I don't want to rush into anything so I was hoping you could give me some ideas as to what to avoid. A little advice would go a long way right now. Thank you so much.

Thankyou,
Frank

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 8:49 AM, iris.accountants@gmail.com [iris.accountants@gmail.com] wrote:

Hello,

How to brind a zit to the surface? What should I watch out for? Would you consider giving me a couple pointers? Thank you in advance.

Sincerely,
Larry

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 11:15 AM, Jeremy Broomfield [jeremybroomfield@gmail.com] wrote:

Larry,

To "brind," as you say, a zit to the surface, you will find that a few common kitchen utensils really come in handy! For best results, I recommend a Microplane Zester, but as those are pricey and sometimes hard to find outside metropolitan areas, a common cheese grater will suffice. Here's what you do:
Prep the area with a teaspoon of balsamic vinegar, rubbing in a clockwise motion.
Gripping the microplane zester firmly, shear off your fucking face.
Just shear it right the fuck off.
Collect in a saucepan the giblets of flesh that slurp from your ruined face. You can render them later to make soap!
Continue to apply balsamic as necessary.
Take a sharpening steel and ram it repeatedly into your ass. Experiment with different angles -- your aim is to puncture any wall of muscle you encounter. Have fun with it!
Turn a burner on the stove to high and let it get hot (you will need a gas stove for this).
Bending at the waist using a woodpecker-like motion, bash your face repeatedly into the hot metal burner grate.
Repeat until unconscious.
Hope this helps!

Jeremy

2009-03-17T09:20:00.003-05:00

In a triumphant return to the review page, I explain why I hate Scrabble.
"But UD," you protest, "don't you love games -- and crosswords? You should love Scrabble!"
A common mistake, my child, I assure you. It is precisely because I love games and crosswords that I hate Scrabble so much: it's a shitty game that has nothing in common with crosswords.

It's like saying to a World War II buff, "Hey, you like war, right? You probably love the Iraq war, right?!"

2009-01-23T13:55:00.003-05:00

Q. IS THIS WHAT YOU'VE BEEN REDUCED TO?
After watching Intervention for a while, I got a little obsessed with The Dog Whisperer. After talking incessantly about Cesar Millan, someone told me to watch Supernanny.
     All three of these shows are great, and they're all kind of the same. In each, some person or group of people (a family, parents, dog owners) calls a TV show because they are having trouble with dogs, children, or some kind of addict. In almost every case, the people who make the call think that the TV is going to roll on down and fix the mess by addressing the dog(s), kid(s), or addict. And in each case, they are totally wrong.
     The Supernanny teaches the parents how to provide discipline and structure for their kids -- and unruly behavior seems to melt away. The Interventionist explains to the addict's family and friends that the addict won't seek help as long as the family keeps providing material or emotional support -- in other words, until they change their behavior. And in my favorite of the three, The Dog Whisperer teaches the onwer(s) that they have been totally fucking with their dog's heads.
     You've really got to watch The Dog Whisperer to understand how awesome he is, and to see how many ways he has of helping the dogs by correcting their neurotic owners. But the entire gist of his program is that owners must establish themselves as the pack leader in the eyes of their dog(s), and they way to do that is to project a calm assertive energy, and to reward calm submissive behavior in their dogs. Dogs detect and will not follow a dog -- or a human -- who projects nervous, angry, unstable, or neurotic energy.

Q. SO YOU'RE OBSESSED WITH TV SHOW ABOUT DOGS. WHO CARES? DO YOU EVEN OWN A DOG?
You're right, I don't own a dog, and I've never wanted to -- until I started watching TDW. I walked my neighbors' overly energetic dog last weekend, and applied some of Cesar's techniques to great effect. I also hurt my shoulder. But since I am now obsessed with projecting a calm assertive energy around dogs, I am noticing again (as I do whenever I re-read Keith Johnstone's seminal, must-read, life-changing 1979 book Impro) the status-determining behaviors of humans.
     So here's my theory: In the age of television, Americans elect the presidential candidate who BEST projects calm assertive energy. Just like a pack of fucking dogs looking to be led. The adjective "presidential" is synonymous with "calm assertive."
     I made a stupid table to demonstrate this. Now that I look at it, it doesn't seem like very profound or new information. But, man, watching Obama at the inauguration, he was like a statue -- never moved his head unnecessarily. Very strong. No wonder he won. Policy can suck it.

2008-12-23T11:35:00.004-05:00

WIPING YOUR ASS WITH BABY WIPES IS THE NEW BLACK
A long time ago, a friend of mine came back from India extolling the merits of two poop-related features of that wondrous nation. First of all, she was mad for squat-johns (you should really go look at the wikipedia page right now. I'll wait here). Which I gotta say I'm pretty persuaded by a lot of the pro-squat arguments, but I can't see them getting installed in a lot of American households anytime soon. How fucking precious would those early-adopters be? I picture a Maude Lebowski-type giving a tour of her pied-à-terre:
     "And here's my bathroom, nothing unusual here," flicking on the light and lingering long enough for the guest to get an eyeful.
     "Whoa. Is that a bidet on your floor?"
     "Oh, what? Oh! No, silly! Don't tell me you haven't seen a squat-john before? Oh they're just too too superior! American are such poop-phobic Puritans. I can't believe you've never even seen one! Sigh!"

But anyway. The second thing my friend loved about pooping in India was the lack of toilet paper. She described with approval (but not too much detail) how she washed her dirty bits with water from a bucket provided near the squatty poop-hole (which I'm pretty sure makes it a "rinse," not a "wash," but whatever).
     I don't know what look was on my face when I heard this, but it was probably the look you have when you are trying to calculate the volume of rubbing alcohol you would have to employ to ever feel clean again after putting your hand in a communal butt-water bucket in a pestilent third-world petri dish of a country. (Sorry India!)
     Seeing the paralytic doubt clouding my face, she went on to justify the use of water vs. toilet paper by saying "if you had sticky mud on your leg, you wouldn't use a dry clump of paper to get it off, right? You'd use water." And you know what? I had to agree. Furthermore, I had to admit that if I got actual shit on my leg, I would be much more likely to use water to remove it than toilet paper.
     That was when I truly understood that toilet paper is: retarded. Totally retarded. Wasteful, ineffective, abrasive, indefensible. I don't want to use a butt-water-bucket, but now I don't want to use toilet paper either. What to do?
     Enter the flushable baby wipe. Faithful readers might recall that I've blogged about Kandoo before, and with typical disdain. But after hearing some outdoorsy types talk about the advantages of damp wipery -- and after seeing very macho soldier types using wipes in Generation Kill -- I now believe that Baby Wipes are about to tip.
     All that's needed are some high-profile adherents to provide social proof for the behavior (I'm looking at you, Brangelina), and a better product (a lot of baby wipes are not flushable. WTF? Who wants poopy cloths in their garbage cans?), marketed to adults. I think this is about to explode.
     I don't think toilet paper will ever fully disappear, but within a decade, it will seem, at best, a poor compromise for when baby wipes are unavailable or impractical.

DON'T CALL YOUR EX BEFORE NEW YEAR'S
Many of you will get lonely around New Year's because of the pressure to kiss the nearest person at the stroke of midnight. You may feel strongly tempted to reach out to an ex (or a less significant intimate acquaintance) as a bulwark against a crushing sense of solitude. They weren't that bad, right? Maybe you broke up with them in haste, or in a moment of anger. Maybe they deserve a second chance?
     DON'T DO IT. It's not worth it. Why start the new year by reestablishing a connection that you will just have to sever, full of remorse, when you return to your senses?
     And if the ex has already reached out to you? Same thing. Don't. Play Pictionary with your uncle or something -- the loneliness will pass before you know it. Or, if you can't stomach the deprivation of someone else's saliva, make out with a random person on the street -- a gutter punk or something -- and just walk away.

2008-11-18T12:20:00.004-05:00

AIRLINE TRAVELERS
So on one of my flights back from the Caribbean, I witnessed a bizarre exchange between two passengers. I must have missed the moment that touched off the conflict, but when I tuned in, this French Architect-Looking Guy was placing something into the overhead compartment above the Tweedy Businessman, who looked like a skinnier version of Donald Rumsfeld:

BUSINESSMAN: [unintelligible, but aggressive.]
FRENCH ARCHITECT-LOOKING GUY: I am zorry -- what did I do wrong?
BIZ: It's just courtesy.
FRENCH: I don't understan'.
BIZ: I'm not trying to engage you. Just sit down and behave yourself.
FRENCH: (Momentarily stunned.) I waz be'aving myself.
BIZ: I'm not engaging you. You're engaging me, now.
FRENCH: (Totally baffled, sits down next to his girlfriend, two rows ahead.)

The only logical explanation for what I saw was that Frenchy had, like, touched BizMan's property, up there in the bin. BizMan's stuffy, matter-of-fact rudeness, combined with his totally bizarre verbiage -- "engage"? -- made me want to hurt him. But because hurting people physically is wrong, I felt a seldom-used part of my brain spin up: the part that crafts triumphant, withering monologues that leave foes limp and cause spontaneous applause from onlookers.
I used this skill very often in my teens, mentally lacerating all manner of tormentors. I have never actually spoken one of my mental paragraphs aloud, ever. But for your amusement, here are my two imagined drafts, which were to be given to the Rude Businessman, to punish him for his poor ambassadorship:

THE PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE BUDDHIST VERSION

UD: You are a sad man, with sickness in your soul; a slave to your pride, your possessions, your ego, and your anachronistic, haute-bourgeois notions of courtesy. No matter how you try to convince yourself that you are happy, at some level you know what I say is true. Your soul-sickness poisons everything you touch, and this makes you a very unpleasant person. I could never wish harm on the sick and enslaved, and there is a chance that one day you may awaken from your sleep. Until then, I wish you peace, joy, and freedom from suffering."

THE SPOOK VERSION

UD: (matching BizMan's pace and walking next to him, looking forward.) Hey. I saw you speak to that man on the plane. Now, I can't be sure where you learned to talk that way. But if you learned it where I think you did, you should know better than to speak that way in front of civilians.
BIZMAN: Excuse me?
UD: You will not be warned about this again.
BIZMAN: I don't understand what you're talking about!
UD: (Pauses for three seconds.) This conversation never happened. (Walks away immediately, preferably through a door marked "Restricted Access")

2008-11-14T11:26:00.002-05:00

RAIN IS DUMB
Rain is good for crops, rain is good for the desert, rain is good for Manhattan sidewalks drenched with horrid midsummer dumpster effluvia. Rain is not good for when I'm sitting on a beach with only a towel, a cell phone, and a very big book. Cruel rain, why did you choose this beach to drench? I can see that in your cumulonimbus caprice you spared the neighboring strand. Fie. I could not have run to shelter, for when I run I look common.
I am wet. And worst of all, I will receive no sympathy from my temperate continental readership. "Oh what's that? Did Little Lord Fauntleroy get some wawa on his silken pantaloons? Pray, instruct his governess to fetch a stout rod with which to thrash him, and the jar for collecting his tears."

MILLIONAIRES ARE DUMB
According to this article, a chap named "Baby" (or "Birdman"), who runs the Cash Money record label, gave profitable artist Li'l Wayne a briefcase full of cash for his birthday. $1,000,000 cash, to be specific.
Hey -- Baby Bird Guy? You are a thoughtful and generous person, there can be no doubt. But you know who could really use $1,000,000? How about almost anyone in the world other than Li'l Wayne. Seriously. Pick someone at random from a list of the world's population. The odds you will pick an existing millionaire are lower than your odds of hitting the actual lottery.
This makes me almost exactly as ill as people who rend their garments and empty their piggy-banks over the mistreatment of various animals -- be they livestock or test-subjects -- while seemingly unconcerned about the vicious mistreatment of HUMAN BEINGS in (e.g.) the nearest penitentiary.

HUH?
Was that a weird transition for you too?

INTERVENTION
If you haven't seen the episode of Intervention starring Allison the all-day aerosol-huffer (see some blog I found for a recap), you have not fully bathed in the fecund pool of contemporary reality television. So many shows ensnare feckless B-list celebrities in situations that force them to consider which is more important: 1) a fleeting table-scrap of fame, or 2) whatever threads remain of their shredded dignity. Their decision is obvious from their presence on the airwaves, as I'm sure there is a clause in celebretard reality-show contracts specifically prohibiting dignity, under penalty of law.
A&E's Intervention shows people in the grip of addictions so dehumanizing that dignity is like a long-forgotten gewgaw at the back of the drawer in an attic, and fame a total abstraction. But the moeny-shot is that it often (though I've heard not always) shows an unlikely -- but real -- happy-ending-style return to dignity. Unlike Dancing with the Stars, which always ends like a burst hemorrhoid. Just watch the humanity: YouTube parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

A RETAIL STORE IS A BAD PLACE TO RETAIN THE CAPACITY FOR LOVE
Recently, at more than one big-box retail shithole, a bored, atonal cashier has called me for my turn to consume by saying "May I help the following customer?"
My immediate thought was: who? Shouldn't a name follow that statement? As in "may I help the following customer: Bob Carver" or, for another example, "hobos will be fellated by the following person: Ann Coulter"? The statement should not be succeeded by silence or slack-jawed eye-rolling until I approach.
May I suggest a substitute for "may I help the following customer?"? It's a word with much to recommend it: it's succinct, easily understood, and proven effective over the course of many decades: "next". Try it. Until you do, I'm gonna start shouting it in response to your long-winded nonsense. I will change the world with my curmudgeonly vigilantism.

2008-10-09T14:01:00.006-05:00

THE HISTORY OF THE PAIN
Longtime readers might know that since my early 20s I've suffered from terrible, if intermittent, heartburn. I've used many appealing analogies over the years to communicate the sensation, e.g.:

It feels like I'm being esophageally jabbed with knives of cayenne.
It feels like elves are ice skating in my gut, going around and around like a circus motorcyclist in one of those metal spheres, except the sphere is my stomach.

Here is a picture of the bottom of my esophagus, taken by endoscopy when I was 20: (I warn you: this picture is kinda gross). It depicts proof of Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease (GERD), which just means acid squirting into your esophagus. See, in the picture -- those angry red streaks mean it's working!
     So for years and years and years I either (when I was smart) took a prescription stomach-acid reducer like Prilosec or (when I was dumber) gobbled handfuls of Tums to manage the immediate flare-ups of glass-shard agony. But over the years the problem got worse, and led to a problem called Barrett's Esophagus, which means (to quote Dr. Lexus) my shit's all retarded. Esophageally speaking.

THE UNDERLYING PROBLEM
But that's only part of it! The GERD and Barrett's are both symptoms of a hiatal hernia, which is not quite as gross as it sounds. See, at some point in my life -- we're not sure when -- my stomach attempted to defect from the region of the torso in which it had long resided. It moved upward in a desperate break for freedom, but, as it was attached from below by the pylorus and duodenum and so on, it could not get far, and got wedged in the hole in my diaphragm like a fat man trying to leave by the bathroom window. It petulantly refused to go back where it belongs, and though one time this massage dude stuck his hand under my ribcage and pulled it back into place, it slipped back up after a few days.
     Barrett's (cellular changes to esophageal cells) can lead to esophageal cancer if your cells continue bathing in flamboyant acid fountains for too many years. Surgery is usually indicated to fix the hiatal hernia, and it usually works, too.

THE TESTS THEY DID
Two tests I had were interesting enough to mention briefly because they sound kinda sci-fi:
     1. The Momentary Cyborg Test. They implanted a monitoring capsule into the lining of my esophagus during an esophagoscopy. The capsule measured the amount of acid squirting out of my stomach and transmitted a pH reading to a phone-sized device I wore on my belt. For two days, I had a constant readout of how acidic I was, right there on my belt for all to see. 7! 6.3! 3.5! 2.1 oh my god ouch! Eventually, the capsule just detached and went on its disposable merry way. I gave the receiver to the MD, who was like: oh, look, you have acid squirting into your esophagus in great quantities. UMM YES I KNOW DUDE IT BURNS ME LIKE ANGRY BEES. But thank you for making me a cyborg temporarily, because that was cool.
     1. The Radioactive Breakfast. To check if my stomach processed food at a normal pace, the Medical Establishment fed me RADIOACTIVE EGGS and then had me lean against a gigantic glorified Geiger counter for two hours. The thing looked positively Soviet, as did the technician, whose name was Igor, for real.

THE SURGERY I'M GETTING
So the tests said I'm a go for the surgery, which is laparoscopic (which means done through tiny holes, not giant slashings). Before you click the next link, I will warn you that it's not only gross, it's weird.The procedure I'm getting is called a fundoplication. The weirdly wrapped part of my stomach will keep the whole mess from sliding back up into the Northern part of my torso, and hopefully the gushing pain-fountain will be stilled evermore.

AFTERMATH
The surgery is next Thursday, the 16th of October. I'll be kept overnight to ensure that I don't start hemorrhaging or whatever, and then I'll be released into the arms of a non-sedated adult. I'll be drinking only fluids for two weeks, and then only soft foods for another two. There is a chance I will never be able to swallow gigantic, poorly-masticated hunks of gristly flesh again, but if I puree, finely chop, or just chew my damn food I should be okay.
     Also, there is a chance I may never burp or vomit again. And that's the unkindest cut of all.
     Wish me luck!

POST SURGERY UPDATE:
Here is a picture of my incisions. They made five holes.

2008-09-16T09:15:00.007-05:00

I am always disappointed by my reaction when people die. Even when it's somebody I knew fairly well, I don't usually cry and I don't usually lose sleep. Of my relatives, I've really only experienced the deaths of two grandparents, and those each happened during the callowest of my teenage years. In adulthood, I haven't yet lost anyone close enough to make me cry about it -- at least not until I got swept up in the emotional manipulation of the memorial services: nothing makes me cry more than seeing other people cry. So I worry sometimes that I'm cold, heartless, selfish, uncaring, even though I don't feel that way.
     Usually, when someone dies, I think: "Yes. This is how it is supposed to be." When I think of all the ways it's possible to die, and the effort so many of my friends have put into self-destructive acts, I find it pretty miraculous that any one of us made it past 30. But most of the people I've known since high school are still alive. (I can think of one suicide, one car crash, and one overdose. But I'm probably forgetting some, right?) Still, I hear of death and think: "yes, this happens." Sometimes I even react to news of impending death, whether of the gravely diseased or the self-destructive, with a similar stoicism: "yes, they will die, as will we all." Am I sick, spiritually advanced, or in staggering denial of my own feelings?
     I read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest for the first time back in 1998, starting about week before I graduated from college. The first time I read it, I thought it was one of the funniest books I had ever read. The second time I read it, about a year later, I thought it was one of the saddest. I was right both times. I loved IJ from page one, and I read everything Wallace wrote thereafter. A lot of my writing style was cribbed directly from DFW, and I was so open about my love of his work that many of my friends wrote me notes of condolence on hearing of his death. I was reading Infinite Jest, again, on the day he killed himself.
     My friends knew how upset I'd be before I really began to feel it. But I feel it now. As is probably obvious, I'm not spending too much time crafting this half-assed eulogy, and over time I'll probably understand my grief more. But here's what I think I know so far: I love Wallace's writing style because it mimics with terrifying accuracy the way my own personal mind works. The wild, obsessive digressions, the panicked self-questioning, the endless speculative fantasy-spinning, and the total fascination with the inner walls of my skull. I didn't ape his style because I thought it was cool -- it was more like he showed me 1) it was okay that my mind worked the way it did, 2) it was acceptable to transcribe it a little more faithfully, and 3) here's how you can do it.
     Like many Americans, I feel selfishly, ridiculously entitled to be entertained (this is one of Infinite Jest's major themes), and therefore I feel cheated of his future work in the same way I feel cheated by the untimely deaths of Elliott Smith and Heath Ledger. But this death hits me harder. Even though I'm sure we would have found each other insufferable in person, I feel like I lost a great spiritual teacher and friend. And in keeping with the other great theme of Infinite Jest, I feel the impossibility of communicating how I really feel. It feels like a wad of newspaper in my gut.
     Most writers intuitively understand and accept this impossibility like fish accept water; it's so obvious and all-encompassing that it is unremarkable. And while Wallace understood the fact too, he couldn't keep from flailing against it like those Asian carp that keep jumping into people's boats. I could have watched him flail for years. But now I will just have to try on my own to ensnare the world I see with an endless ribbon of mixed metaphors, braiding sentences around the cotton-candy maypole of life.

2008-08-28T09:56:00.003-05:00

OPERATION KABUKI FACE
Eating my spicy soup at a restaurant on Bedford Ave, I had that old familiar feeling that I got from growing up in Soho: hatred of the bridge and tunnel crowd. In this case, it was a stockbrokery type with his sorority-type girlfriend. He was touching her face a lot -- apparently attracted, moth-like, by the shiny whore-polish she had liberally applied. He was also doing that back of the neck-clamping I-own-this-woman thing that makes me want to learn to castrate someone through telekinesis.
     On good days, I try to sit with my intolerance, to understand its origins deep within my flawed self.
     On other days, I just grimace like a Kabuki or Noh actor, or someone grossly afflicted with a facial tic. Usually, if I make the face, I have the decency or self-control to look away from the person who caused it.
     But now I am thinking that it could be used as a form of social control, to keep the people I don't like from my neighborhood. Obviously, if I do it alone, I will just look like a crazy person, so the participation of like-minded people is essential. When you see a rampaging fucktard in the hood, make a kabuki face.
     I expect this to be more successful than the machete-attacking strategy allegedly employed against bike-riding hipsters by certain residents of the South side of Williamsburg. This is because the hipster population, being mostly composed of spoiled white folk with overblown feelings of entitlement (like me, like me), will respond to physical attacks like Londoners during the Blitz, going about their hip little biz and whistling all the while.

2008-07-21T09:59:00.006-05:00

DISPATCH FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT IN CHINA
(July 20, Qingdao, China)

The Chinese government has declared martial law in Qingdao. But don't worry, it's only for one day: the day of the Olympic torch relay. This is why we have a pregnant Australian woman sleeping on our sofa. Let's call her Yinky, since that's what her parents apparently christened her, although I still have trouble pronouncing it. She'll probably call her own child Numbat or something. Anyway, she is not allowed to return to her hotel, which is in the Relay Zone, until after the relay is finished. It seems they mistook her for some sort of terrorist.
Her husband is in the Zone, but he is not allowed to leave. Fortunately our apartment is just outside the Zone, so we are still free to shelter terrorists. From the window we have a magnificent view of the Sea Wall protecting the Olympic Marina from algae terrorists. In fact, we can see the algae building up outside the Wall -- but like our Australian friend Yinky, it is unable to enter the Zone. The system works.

* * *

At about five past ten Thursday morning, a charming little student named Reginald* -- who I used to teach every Sunday without incident -- attempted to organize a mutiny in my co-worker Don's class. "I'm the teacher now," said Reginald, rising from his seat with real authority, "I'm taking over the crass."
     There was an immediate chorus of "Shut up, Reginald!" from the Siberians. Seeing that he lacked the support of his fellow children, Reginald did the only thing an unsuccessful mutineer could do: he pulled out a life jacket, proceeded to inflate it, and finally put it on, doubling his already ample girth.
     Rendered speechless for a moment, Don finally asked "Reginald, where did you get this?"
     "This? Oh, my palents give to me."
     Apparently Reginald's Mommy and Daddy, protective of their dysfunctional son as only the Chinese can be, had equipped him for literally any eventuality that might befall him at Summer Camp.
     Fortunately, Reginald's very strength is also his greatest weakness. His Attention Deficit Disorder leaves him vulnerable to the paradoxically calming effects of common stimulants like caffeine and amphetamines. Don happened to have a Starbucks Bottled Frappuccino in his pocket.
     "Remember how you like coffee, Reginald?"
     Within minutes he was slumped, barely conscious, on the floor. And since he was still wearing his life jacket, Don was fairly confident no harm would come to the little scamp. The world is safe again -- until tomorrow.
     That is the news from China.

-- Katie Legs, China Bureau Chief and Engrish Teacher

* Some names have been changed to protect our correspondent's cover. But not "Yinky." That shit is for real. -- UD

2008-06-24T11:06:00.008-05:00

BOREDOM HAS MANY PALLIATIVES, BUT NO CURE

PLOY #1: Autodidacticism
...Or as it appears to the cynical: unfocused, yet obsessive, wikipedia surfing. I admit it's not a conscious ploy, it's just how I scroll, baby. To give you a glimpse into my autopedagogical syllabus, here is a list of the wikipedia pages I visited in the span of three attention-deficient months at work: Bear Witness to My Affliction!

PLOY #2: Wikipedia editing
I burned out on this one REAL FAST. Not a great treatment for boredom.

PLOY #3: Deprivation
I am planning to start -- and then abandon halfway through -- a month of systematic abstention from various foods, activities, or behaviors:
     Week 1: no wheat
     Week 2: no meat
     Week 3: no posting to this blog (ha! kidding!)
     Week 3 for real: no more abstention
     Week 3 goddamnit be serious: no... flensing ?
I don't know, man. I guess I really just wanted to stay away from wheat for a week. Why do I hafta make a big honking deal out of everything? BORED BORED BORED.

PLOY #4: Religion
I took the Belief-O-Matic quiz at beliefnet.com, and it told me what religions I am most likely to jibe with:
     1. Theravada Buddhism (100%)
     2. Unitarian Universalism (96%)
     3. Neo-Pagan (83%)
     4. Secular Humanism (81%)
     5. Liberal Quakers (79%)
I will now accept solicitations from these sects, such as they are. That should be fun!

PLOY #5: Pegging
I was reading an article in the Village Voice's Queer Issue about how many straight men are finding that they enjoy getting fucked in the ass. In 2001 Dan Savage had a contest to coin a term for the act of a woman penetrating a man using a strap-on, and "pegging" won. It's a great term, though when someone first asked me if I knew what it meant, I pictured a sex act involving the namesake (and mascot) of my high school.
     I know the Voice hardly counts as mainstream, but my unerring sense of cultural trends (and this) tells me that pegging is about to tip. You're gonna start seeing it mentioned, explored, and deplored everywhere. You heard it here first: 2008 is the Year of the Peg.
     Well! In looking for ways to help accelerate mainstream awareness of this beautiful, loving practice, I considered many options before reaching the eventual solution. Since Lance Armstrong's wonderful LIVESTRONG project has had a really good run, I called them up about transitioning the yellow-rubber-bracelet brand to a new awareness-promoting cause. After having our lawyers work with theirs, it's official. The yellow bracelet has been rebranded. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you: PEGSTRONG!

The purpose of the PEGSTRONG bracelet is to promote awareness of Strapped-On Assfucking. People who love to peg or get pegged can share their affinity through prominent public display of a PEGSTRONG (formerly LIVESTRONG) bracelet. It will be clear to all who see it that you live by the PEGSTRONG motto: "Never be shy -- Let the santorum fly!"
     And now for the best news! You don't even have to buy the PEGSTRONG bracelet -- you may already have one! It will take a while for the official new PEGSTRONG bracelets to be manufactured and distributed to quality retail outlets nationwide. However, due to the special nature of our arrangement with LIVESTRONG, all LIVESTRONG bracelets automatically became PEGSTRONG bracelets as of midnight, June 15, 2008.
     (As you can imagine, the intense legal and administrative work leading up to this event kept me from posting to the blog this last month. And as ever, I appreciate your continued patience.)
     So! When you see someone wearing their LIVESTRONG (now PEGSTRONG) bracelet in public, especially if they are male, remember to congratulate them on their bravery. For a large segment of the straight male population, it's still kind of a big deal to say you take it in the ass -- even if "it" is a rubber or plastic toy worn by a woman. Reward that courage! Call out to them and show your support! Raise your fist and shout with pride: "PEGSTRONG!"

2008-05-14T12:36:00.007-05:00

HEALTH BOOKS BY MY STEPMOTHER
• Attention Deficit Disorder: A Fake Disease For Lazy People Who Won't Try
• Depression? Everyone Gets Sad Sometimes, IT'S NORMAL

CHICKS DIG "CLOSURE"

Note: despite the heterosexist example below, this advice applies equally to any couple that involves a female dumpee.

Or so they say. After a breakup, a girl I know wanted closure. She called and called the boy who broke up with her, unsure of their status, until one day, in a public park, he shouted "I DON'T WANT TO BE WITH YOU ANYMORE." Pow! Closure.
     But was it really closure she was seeking? To just about everyone else, the status of their relationship was clear. I've known a lot of people who chase down seemingly irrational strands of hope far beyond the limits of dignity. Do they really not know it's over? I don't think so. I think they're looking to walk away with a moral victory, albeit a kind of pathetic one.
     What could be worse than a partner who breaks up with you using care, tenderness, love, and grace? THAT'S THE PERFECT PARTNER! Don't say goodbye to me, say hello! Keep saying hello forever! Gah!
     Women recover from breakups by having other women tell them that they were too good for the bastard, anyway. No matter how educated, intelligent, or spiritually advanced a woman is, when she is in pain, she wants to hear this. Madeleine Albright wants to hear this.
     So what do you do with a dude who is kind and loving when he leaves you? Your ladies got no fodder! Well, go make it happen! If you can manipulate him into being a jerk -- or doing something even moderately jerky -- you will gain that precious moral superiority, and you can move on knowing that he had that secret seed of jerkiness inside, and you're glad you found out NOW. Then you can pull that comforter around you a little tighter and sip that Sleepytime Tea in your sweats while your bestest galpals cuddle you in shifts.
     Boys, the "perfect" breakup is a myth. You will always fall short because falling short is what is required. If you are not made into some form of monster, it hurts too much. And if you don't step up and provide sympathy fodder, she'll have to make shit up, cobble something together from old suspicions and petty gripes, and her fabrications will forever taint her moral victory! Is that what you want? If you ever loved her, you will do this. You probably don't have to shout humiliating things at her in public, but give her SOMETHING. Break up with her via text message! Fuck her sister! Slash her tires! Your kindness is KILLING her.

2008-04-23T14:41:00.009-05:00

WHY I LOVE MY NEW DENTIST
I've had bad luck finding a great dentist who still takes my bottom-shelf dental insurance. My old one wasn't great, but he didn't even tell me he had stopped taking my insurance until I got hit with big copays.
Well clouds and linings, my friends, because my new dentist is hilarious. She is constantly joking around, but it's a little nervewracking because a) her "jokes" are very dark, b) she always says them while holding a sharp or high-RPM implement in her hand, and c) she's Russian.
I thought my old dentist was unprofessional because he'd always complain about how expensive his equipment was. I had no idea how unprofessional a dentist could be. Feast your eyes on these pearls from my new dentist, culled from only three magical sessions, and remember to imagine all of these quotes in a THICK Russian accent:

"I am so tired today. I just don't want to work. I don't know why I came in."
After I said her new haircut, with bangs, looked nice: "Oh yes?" (pulls mask down) "Do I look younger? Am I stunningly gorgeous or what?"
"I've been reading a lot of self-help books."
"I think I hate being a dentist. Did you know dentists have the highest suicide rate of any profession?" Her hygienist then quipped back, also in Russian accent: "No, I think it is dental hygienists."
"I had a date last night, and it did not go well. I don't know what's wrong with me. My mother says... (words obscured by drilling)... so I will never be happy."
"I am sore today from surgery, so I will do the procedure standing up. Don't freak out just because you're so high up, okay?" I say something non-probing, like "Okay." She says: "Well I had to have something done in my abdomen, and while they were there, I thought: why not? So I had a little other work done." I ask if there's a lot of pain, still. She says: "YES. It is terrible. But I'm on narcotics, so it's not nearly as bad as it could be." (drill spins up)

COMMUNICATE MY WISHES IF I'M TOO LAZY TO MAKE A WILL
RockemStockem: also, I don't want to be buried
RockemStockem: cremate all the way
Universal Donor: yeah, obviously
Universal Donor: me too
Universal Donor: i don't want to rise up and eat brains
Universal Donor: NO THANK YOU
RockemStockem: tots
RockemStockem: also I want my ashes to be divided up and distributed amoungst my friends
RockemStockem: -- NOT spread or scattered --
RockemStockem: and put into small urns made out of hand painted eggshells
RockemStockem: in order to burden as many people as possible
Universal Donor: haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
RockemStockem: can you just imagine? for the rest of your life,
RockemStockem: everytime you move apts or whatever,
RockemStockem: you have to walk this precious thing
RockemStockem: and totally make sure it doesn't break

BIOLOGY CLASS
RockemStockem: so when you're really pregnant, don't you worry that the baby is just gonna fall out of your vagina?
Universal Donor: Um, not unless you are giving birth to a snakebaby
RockemStockem: OMG! Like on V?
Universal Donor: for example.
RockemStockem: what if I thought I was having a human baby, but instead just as I gave birth it was a snake
RockemStockem: and nobody knew,
RockemStockem: and I was pushing and then an evil snake monster just slithered out of my vagina
Universal Donor: you're making me hungry

BUG UPDATE
On my way into the office bathroom, I see a ghostly skittering presence retreat from the opening door, weirdly ghosting around a corner. It looked like a waterbug, but somehow... different. Mammalian, almost. I rounded the corner to confront this nightmare beast and it was clearly a waterbug, but of a color I had never seen before: greyish, glisteny, mottled. I smashed it with my foot and smeared it around a bit. It is also possible that I yelped a bit in uncontrolled limbic dismay.
     My report to the receptionist goes like this.
     Still shaken, I say: "I just killed the weirdest waterbug. It was like albino sort of, grayish. It was awful."
     "Oh my god, another one?"
     "Yeah."
     "Where was it?" she asks, narrowing her eyes.
     "In the men's room."
     "Hmmmmm..." she says.
     "What?"
     "Yesterday there was one in the women's."
     "Gross. Did you kill it?" I ask.
     "Yeah. We sprayed it with white furniture polish."
     "WHAT?" I gasp. "But... but... but THEN what did you do?"
     "It looked dead." She mews.
     "Did you smash it?"
     "You know I don't like going near bugs."
     "So what, you polished it and hoped for the best?"
     "No! Joe flushed it. He picked it up with a flyswatter and flushed it," she says.
     "So you put the wounded WATERbug back into the lifegiving WATER that is its very element?!?!?! Why didn't you smash it?? YOU MUST SMASH WHILE YOU CAN. What are you, a James Bond movie villain? You'd probably try to drown Popeye in a vat of spinach! Fuck. Well. I killed your zombie bug this time. Please don't ever make me do that again. "

I mean come on now!

2008-04-04T11:26:00.004-05:00

All right, I know it's shitty not to write for almost two months. What if I said there were a LiveJournal-style "friends-only" section of the blog to which you weren't invited, and to which I've been posting weekly, and hilariously? Would you feel better? Or worse?
What if I said I was writing a novel, in exactly the same style as this blog? "How could that possibly work?" you might ask. It would be a source of concern among my editors, I assure you. They would also be concerned with the fact that I am implying that ALL of the advance money was gone even though they have yet to see sample chapters, not even one. "UD," they would whine, "we already let you borrow the jet to go to Monte Carlo for 'baccarat research' and instead you flew back and forth five times from LaGuardia to Newark, just to make the poor airports feel better because you always fly out of JFK and wanted to show that you still cared about the other two. Our accountants don't like it, and it's bad for our corporate carbon footprint. Deliver our sample chapters, and stop prank calling Karl Lagerfeld on the company dime. PLEASE."
See? Pathetic. Just a bunch of words. Consider this an enema. The next post will be fresh and clean, and probably appear sometime in July.

NEWS FLASH
I don't trust men in hats, and neither should you.

I DREAMED THEY ADAPTED NINE INCH NAILS'S "CLOSER" FOR USE ON AMERICAN IDOL
I want to love you like an animal
I want to feel you with my whole heart
I want to love you like an animal!
you've got such humongous paws
I want to wrap you in gauze!

AT A LOSS
I am this close to soliciting pictures of your boobs. This close to suggesting that perhaps what this blog needs, to kickstart it out of slumberation, is a collage consisting of dirty pictures of its readership. For the good of blogkind, you understand. A show of good faith, people! A little upload for years of download!

2008-03-04T10:32:00.005-05:00

Well, there really isn't more to the puking in the airport story. I landed, I moaned and sweated for 15 hours, and it was over.

PROMISES I NEVER MADE
I never promised not to eat at Hooters. But, people: it happened. I wanted chicken wings. And they said, there on St. Thomas, they said: "they have wings at Hooters." And suddenly I was eating there, among the tawdry hot-panted awfulness.
     I did not find it necessary to not utter the phrase "I will never eat at Hooters," because frankly, it was never on my radar as even a remote possibility. Here are some other things I have never promised not to do:
     • I never promised not to stab the moon with Excalibur.
     • I never promised I wouldn't go back in time and hire one of Santa's reindeer to assassinate Pol Pot.

THE CONCIERGE WANTS ME TO KNOW THE DETAILS
     The concierge at the reception desk of UD's office building sees UD walking into the building with a cup of coffee from Au Bon Pain.
CONCIERGE: Hey [UD], how ya doin.
UD: Fine thanks, [Concierge]. You?
CONCIERGE: Good. You ever have coffee from McDonald's?
UD: I guess so, but only on road trips.
     UD steps into the elevator. CONCIERGE holds the door, which tries to close repeatedly, and fails.
UD: (thinks to self) Please tell me what you think of McDonald's coffee and also please the exact circumstances -- spatial, temporal and emotional -- under which you reached that opinion.
CONCIERGE: Yeah. It's pretty good, actually. Today on the way to work I got off the train over near Times Square and you know they got that McDonald's over there, and I figured, ahhh, I'd try it, why not? Sometimes the line at the deli across the street here is long, right? And I was already a little late, and I hadn't had any coffee earlier because I stayed at my girlfriend's house last night
     (smiles and nudges UD without slowing down speech at all)
and so I went in and I got a coffee and you know what? It's pretty good! I drank it on the way over here. Have you ever had it? You should try it. Did you hear that Starbucks closed the other day for a bunch of hours, nationwide, every store? Yeah apparently it was some kind of training but who knows? Maybe they're going out of business, or they're in trouble, huh? Nahhh, probably not Starbucks. You gonna see that movie with the Saber-tooth Tigers?
UD: (blinks)

CAR HORNS ARE STUPID AND HERE'S WHY
     1) They're too cheap. Chris Rock has a classic bit about how, if bullets cost $5,000, people wouldn't get shot accidentally; only people who really deserved it would get shot. Well I feel kinda similarly about car horns. If they cost money to use, then people might not be so fucking jolly about toot-tootling their way through my life, reserving their honkings for emergencies -- which, for what it's worth, is what they're for. Obviously, though, a cash-per-honk policy would discriminate against the poor, with possibly fatal consequences -- but that's a great way to get Republicans to vote for it.
     2) They're too low-bandwidth. The only real way to modulate your honk is by controlling the duration and the number of repetitions. Since you can't modulate the volume or the tone or anything else (including, in crowded places, the intended recipient), a single honk could mean any of the following things:
     • "Oh looky! I see a friend of mine on the street! Hello friend!"
     • "The light has changed to green, sir; perhaps you did not notice!"
     • "Move it you fucking fucktard before I bash your nuts with a bat!"
     • "Your car is spraying gasoline everywhere, get out before it explodes!"
     • "Please get out of my way because my wife is having a baby in the backseat!"
So all you are really able to communicate is "hey! I'm trying to communicate with somebody." But you probably assume that when you honk, people know which message you intend. And even more ridiculously, you probably don't believe that you ever misinterpret the honks of others. You always know which honk you're hearing, right? Ah, the fucking curse of low-bandwidth communication rears its ugly, unnecessary head. Go write your emotionally charged text messages and emails. I can't save you.

2008-02-14T10:21:00.003-05:00

It's not fun to have a fever on an airplane. That much is true. But is it less fun than being healthy on an airplane? I'm not entirely sure. Air travel is so different from normal life, but in such a way that it difficult to pinpoint the exact ways it's different. Just like a slowly-brewing fever, or like waiting for hallucinogens which may or may not be bunk to kick in.
     I got nauseous almost as soon as I got into my cab to the airport, but I chalked that up to the fact that I ate a bowl of yogurt and a brownie for breakfast. In the cab, I had the Phildickian experience of finding a counterfeit $10 bill in my wallet, which had clearly come out of the ATM at my local deli (which is the only ATM I know of that dispenses $10 bills: also weird). It was a pretty good fake, I guess, except that I spotted it immediately: two pieces of color laserprint glued back-to-back on cottony paper. I showed it to the cabbie, who was glad I had not tried to pay him with it, and then I tore it up. Subsequently, two people have expressed exasperation with me for destroying the ersatz cash because they wanted to seeeeee it, but I figured a good time to divest yourself of WILDLY ILLEGAL THINGS is right before you get mandatorily searched by agents of a notoriously humorless federal agency. Blerg.
     Wandering through the sad excuse for a terminal that US Airways operates out of LGA, I thought maybe if I threw some more food on top of my nausea it would go away. I opted for an egg & cheese on a roll made by the surliest family of Indian women I had ever seen making airport breakfast food at 7am. It was not a good idea.
     (Side note: I don't know if I've ever mentioned the foibles of the service industry down here on St. Thomas. One of the amusing quirks of the locals is that they have zero interest in serving you. ZERO. But it's hard to be anything but amazed, because they employ that disinterest so heroically that you are forced to posit the existence of TIME-SLOWING or WORK-DESTROYING devices behind the counter. I have seen two employees of a Subway sandwich shop take twenty minutes to prepare a sub. It was the only thing they were doing, and they never visibly stopped doing it. It was not larger, or more complicated, than a normal North American-made Subway sub. But it took twenty minutes. I know this sounds hyperbolic, but you seriously have to see this. Oh! And it is widely reported by non-locals that if you comment on this phenomenon -- or in any way attempt to counteract it, say by mentioning that you are in a hurry -- the service will slow down even further. As a result of all this, there was much jolly consternation in the non-local community down here when it was announced that a branch of Hooters would open on the island. Since business models based on speed, friendliness, efficiency, etc, cannot seem to run on local power, almost all the staff had to be imported from the mainland U.S.)
     Anyway. My first plane ride was only 1.5 hours of tightly cramped nausea, crushed between the curvature of the plane and a 300lb neighbor. I got off the plane for my hourlong layover, and realized that I would have to puke pretty soon. I wondered where to go. Excuse me, ma'am, I'm going to be violently ill in less than five minutes; do you have some sort of vomit accommodations in this terminal, or shall I just use a bathroom stall? Oh and while I'm here, can I have a seat with legroom?
     So I puked in a stall of a crowded bathroom, with the stalls on either side of me occupied with horrified travelers wishing only to void their bowels in peace and keep their loafers free of acidic spatter. Wow, this got gross fast. I'm gonna stop here, and see if there are a lot of votes for continuation of this narrative. If not, I'll just let it fade away like the memory of a headache.

2008-01-28T15:43:00.000-05:00

I was pawing through my gmail account, because sometimes I get a little irked by the parenthetical reminder in the little menu that says Inbox (552) -- which means, I suppose, that I have over 500 unread messages. Well I can't tackle this problem in one afternoon, can I? No. So here's something I found while browsing old email in search of something to read/delete.

AN EMAIL EXCHANGE WITH A FAN, MARCH 2006

To: UD
From: [redacted],

Hi, i read a part in your site about bugs..and it's obvious you have a fear of them lol. But i noticed in it that you said the only way to really kill a bug is to stomp it..but, did you know that most bugs can actually survive being stomped on? lol if it's still alive, it could come back to bite you for trying to kill it...i mean, that's why it's not a good idea to stomp on a bug anyway. You should try it yourself if you have to one day and you'll see. [everything sic]

Dear [redacted]

It's clear that you are just trying to freak me the fuck out with your little "bugs don't die if you stomp on them" gambit, and it was a nice try. But in the end, your scare tactic lacks credibility.

We may have different definitions of the word "stomp." When I say that a good "stomp" will kill a bug, I am describing an action involving my foot and a bug that results in the death of the bug (usually via a 10-fold increase in the area taken up by the bug, and a drastic (90-100%) reduction in its height.)

What I don't do: Put on a silk slipper, gently stroke my foot over the bug's carapace, and run into another room, hoping for the best.

No, a Universal Donor stomp is usually a multistep process, as follows:
(as an example, we'll use an american cockroach, known in New York as a "waterbug": usually 1" - 1.5" in length and tall enough to cast a visible shadow.)

Use heightened senses to detect a bug from over 20 feet away.
If waterbug is flying, run far away, making another person deal with it.
Otherwise, approach bug with caution but also speed.
Attempt to cut off escape routes.
If a spray bottle of soapy water is around, spray bug with soap just to stun it a bit.
Raise leg to waist height, bring down with all due haste and force. Do not miss.
Once it is clear that bug is under shoe, grind bug into ground with a pivoting motion.
Smear bug around with side-to-side motions.
Carefully check the ground/floor around shoe for signs of buggy trauma: smeared guts, detached antennae or limbs.
If step 9 reveals no evidence of dead bug, repeat steps 7-9.
When it is clear bug is dead, stomp is complete.

smooches,
UD

2008-01-07T13:25:00.000-05:00

I'm a little obsessed with TLC's tattoo-shop reality shows (L.A. Ink, London Ink, Miami Ink). My DVR has started bumping off my old, cherished episodes of 30 Rock and Flight of the Conchords because TLC just ran a marathon of the entire first season of L.A. Ink, and I must watch them all.
Now the staff of L.A. Ink are pretty unbelievable artists, and the show would be fantastic if all they did was show the process and the results. But the producers press the tattooees pretty hard to provide some sort of explanation for their new ink, because they sell the dramatic backstory angle to get me emotionally involved (Whatever, dudes: you had me at tattoo). But sometimes people just get tattoos because they look cool. The main result of this tomfoolery is that I get peeved at a TV show, again.

MY PEEVES ABOUT THE TATTOO SHOWS
(all quotes are pastiche, but realistic)

Bogus tattoo "meanings" - If you push people to justify purely aesthetic choices, you will get some fucktarded answers. Seriously, people just make shit up, like:

"I wanted to get cherry blossoms? Because, like, they're alive? And you have to life one day at a time, but you also you have to live life to the fullest? So that's why I want cherry blossoms."

Non-sequitur "dedications" - Some people are just crazy.

"This is in honor of my mother... She had to struggle though hard times to raise me, and make sacrifices? So I'm getting this image of a wolf eating the brains of a zombie prostitute. Because my mom is so strong."

Tattoo as "gift" - Some people seem to need to justify their selfish desire to get a tattoo by claiming that it's "for someone else." Why, people? What's the big deal about getting a tattoo for your ownself? This just seems unnecessarily delusional. Like:

"This giant dragon ass tattoo is a gift for my newborn son, so that whenever he looks at my ass, he'll know that I love him."

Celebrating Identity - I guess I don't have a beef with tattoos celebrating identity so much as I have a problem with identity itself. "I'm getting a tattoo of the flag of Pbbbpt to celebrate my pride in my Pbbbptian heritage." Flarf. Yeah. That and a metrocard will get you on the subway, punk. I just hate this shit. Identity = the enemy. I guess I should create a separate post about this at some point, but here's my basic drift on the ish: celebrating identity is about celebrating the ways we differentiate ourselves from others, and though diversity leads to much great variety, our perceived -- or rather, meticulously constructed and nurtured -- differences are the source of most of the world's suffering.^{[citation needed]} So identity's pro/con calculation results in a net loss for humankind. MORE LATER.

Jenna Jameson, Entrepreneur -- All right, people. This is just totally disingenuous. Porn star Jenna Jameson comes on the show for a tattoo, and the caption calls her an entrepreneur. What's the deal? I don't think there's anything wrong with being a porn star, and I kinda doubt she does either. So why the weird caption-y grab for respectability? Yes, she owns her own multi-million dollar production company. But it's like calling Donald Trump a "TV Personality" -- true, but not exactly the whole story. Or like calling Bono a "blood donor," or George Bush a "breakfast eater." Right?

2007-12-19T10:30:00.001-05:00

Thanks for all your topic suggestions, people! They were, for the most part, completely useless -- scatological, juvenile, pandering, nonsensical, attention-seeky, whatever! I see now that you were trying to teach me a lesson about taking responsibility for, and pride in, my work. Thank you for that. (Boobs, indeed. As if!)

L.A. VOICE
There is a particular kind of gravelly party-girl voice specific to LA that drives me up the fucking wall. I assume it is caused by dry desert conditions and atmospheric pollution in conjunction with smoking-related cell damage and alcohol-related dehydration; add on top of that a regional accent that encourages speaking with the teeth and lips constantly apart, as if the speaker way too fucking cool, high, or chill to close her mouth, and you get L.A Voice, demonstrated ably in this video by Kat von D. (Which, Kat, if you're reading this -- you know I've got no beef with you personally! Make fun of my regional diction anytime!)

THE MOST POTENT ATTACK IN A NEW YORKER'S ARSENAL
Sometimes people piss me off -- yes, even perennially unflappable UD. Usually it's a stranger, usually on the street, and usually they are not worth the time it would take to explain to them why they are worthless space-wasters whose greatest accomplishment will be their decomposition.
     Sometimes, though, you've just got to let the people know that they are human garbage. So when faced with some monstrous pedestrian idiot, shout the following: "Go back to Jersey, you fuck!"
     The potency of this barb is greatly diminished if the target actually is from New Jersey, because they will just ignore you for the bigot you are. That's okay, they're not your real demographic here.
     Similarly, people from all over the world (other than NY and NJ) know to be offended by the remark, even if they don't know exactly why, so you can use this on Germans or Ugandans with equal effectiveness, but that effect is still just mediocre, provoking nothing more than half-hearted ethnic or regional variations of "fuck you too, buddy!"
     But! The effect on New Yorkers -- especially native New Yorkers -- is atomic. Picture the stuttering red-faced apoplexy of a shackled Bill O'Reilly getting a forced lapdance from a naked Magic Johnson, and you're close. In one stroke, you have robbed any New Yorker victims of the one fact that internally proves their moral superiority, regardless of the outerborough scumpond they hail from: the pedigree that gives them license to lord it over the whole fucking world. Now, if they start to protest that they are from Brooklyn, or Hell's Kitchen, they will just sound like whiny sore losers, especially when you say "yeaaaah whatever, Newark breath! Suck my Seacaucus!"

THE GAME OF SHOULD I DATE THIS PERSON?
You may remember The Game of What You Like from a few months ago, one of the most linked-to posts on the blog, which helped you figure out what qualities you ACTUALLY seek out in a partner vs what you THINK you are looking for.
     So here's the new game, to help you figure out if you should pursue a relationship with the person that you are really really hot for.
     So you've got this prospect, right? And they seem really neat, and you're having a hard time finding their faults -- they seem to be too good to be true! Well that's because they are, twitball. Your horny biological programming (id) wants you to fuck that person, and you are getting flooded with positive hormones and neurotransmitters when you're near them, and your ego starts automatically justifying the idea, because that's what it does. You cannot trust your judgment.
     The solution is difficult to put into practice, but theoretically sound:
     1) ask them to describe in detail why their last 5 relationships ended;
     2) contact each of those exes and ask for their version of the story;
     3) compare the explanations.

WRITER'S STRIKE 101
I heard some businessy douchenozzle on CNBC say something about the writer's strike with a smirking implication that the writers were holding up the global economy with their petulant demands. I've heard other people say "they really picked a bad time to strike." A physical therapist once told me, while gooshing his ham-hands into my musculature, "I don't know about unions; they were important at one time, but I think they've really outgrown their usefulness." And it was all I could do to keep from saying "why don't you stick to what you know, you freaking oaf? Because I know you are just parroting a prepackaged sound-bite you heard somewhere on the AM dial, which had been prepared for people just like you who want to sound like the know what they are talking about when they should be FIXING MY SPINE instead of KILLING ME WITH IGNORANCE."
     I was a little angrier back then.
     How do people not understand strikes? The procedure for determining who is right goes like this: 1) look at the two sides in a strike, 2) management is wrong. THAT'S IT. And since I cannot believe that anyone who reads this blog thinks otherwise, I will not belabor the point.

2007-12-12T15:16:00.001-05:00

IT'S OKAY, BABY. IT HAPPENS TO A LOT OF BLOGGERS...
I have officially run out of ideas for blogging. But don't worry! I don't think it's a permanent condition, and I'm not giving up. I'm just asking for help.
Use the comments section of this post to suggest topics for the next post. Use a format like "TOPIC: _______ " and fill in that blank with anything you like.

2007-11-30T02:20:00.000-05:00

I'M MAKING A DOCUMENTARY
I'm making a documentary about informal food-sharing practices in social groups. Are you gonna eat those fries?

DREAM #1
I had some crazy stupid dreams in St. Thomas. The first was a dream that death was not, as we tend to think of it, a condition universally characterized by the same objective measurements of body function. I recently read about how emotions are largely constructed culturally, and cannot just be understood as collections of physical responses; for example, various cultures have words for, and experience, emotions that simply have no correlates in our culture. Weird!
So in my dream it turns out that death, like so many things, must be considered in its cultural context -- that different cultures have different conditions to pronounce someone dead, and that ours is not, as we might like to think, the pinnacle of reason and truth, but simply one way of looking at it. The upshot being that Maori or Mongolian (or whatever) EMTs would have very different vital-sign checklists from ours, involving... who knows what? Could we even understand their death tests?

DREAM #2
I became convinced in my second dream that it is a perfectly normal, natural, and healthy expression of friendship to watch your friends have sex with each other. People are so weird and repressed, it seemed to me! Why don't they ask to watch their friends fuck more often? It wouldn't be awkward. It's so natural and beautiful! You love your friends, right? Why wouldn't you want to see them love each other? So if you asked a couple you knew if you could watch, it's not like you're trying to fuck them (now that could get weird!), you just want to watch. How could it do anything but strengthen your friendship? It couldn't.

NOTES ON SHARING DREAM STORIES IN REAL LIFE
Sometimes, if you tell someone about a dream you had, you will realize that one of two things has happened. You have either:
1. bored your listener with a rambling narrative involving people they don't know; or
2. confused your listener with something vague and un-picturable.
...Or maybe a combination of the two. So here a few ringers to rescue your boring or confusing story by horrifying your listener with something "unintentionally" revealing. Once you realize you have lost your listener's attention, tack one of the following onto the end of your narrative:
MEN: "And then I slaughtered the evil she-monster with my sword made of penises."
WOMEN: "And then I ate 30 hot dogs and had a cup of cock soda."

REDUX
Re: dream #2 above, it occurs to me that that in any group of friends, there is a couple you would be most likely to approach with a voyeuristic overture. Think of who it is in your group of friends. Imagine yourself asking if you could watch them do it. Now jump ahead and imagine them doing it, and you watching. Imagine they are a little nervous, so you have to tell them what to do; direct them a little. Imagine! I Have a dream!

(Geez? How did this get so dirty? I am clearly in some sort of strange zone; enjoy it while it lasts, because it doesn't happen often. I might delete half of this post in the cold light of day.)

2007-11-16T00:53:00.000-05:00

I know this is dumb, because I never post anyway, but I thought that I would once again supply you with a special (and spacial) reason for my continuing nonparticipation in the consensual hallucination of this blog: I am once again going to St. Thomas, this time until the 28th. There are many fine things about STT, but no one there has invented the internet yet, so there is no way for me to share my up-to-the-minute tropical observations about sand, iguanas, non-aerosol sunscreen, and laid-back Caribbean approaches to infrastructure maintenance. Please continue your patient vigilance.

2007-10-17T12:48:00.000-05:00

BED THEORY
Still working on this, but the idea is:

It takes n days to get used to a bed, for your body to experience it as your "Home Bed."
Once a bed reaches Home Bed status, sleep quality for that bed is optimized.
Every bed/person combination has its own optimal sleep quality rating.
The quality of sleep you initially get on any "Away Bed" is 20-50% lower than Home Bed sleep.
This is true regardless of the softness, plushness, fanciness, etc., of the Away Bed.
So obviously 10 hours on an Away Bed may not feel as restful as 6 on your Home Bed.
The presence of another person in your Home Bed is tantamount to sleeping in an Away Bed, and it may take n days to regain optimal Sleep Quality.

HALLOWEEN COSTUME IDEAS
I dressed as a bee for three of the last six Halloweens. One year I was the Unabomber, and one or two I skipped completely. I am not the biggest fan of Halloween, mostly because I'm scared of what I am capable of when I'm wearing a mask. One time I went to a party as Pol Pot and I liquidated all of the intellectuals present. It was messy.

Christopher Columbus - For this costume I would dress as Christopher in the normal way, adding deaths-head facepaint and skellington gloves. Also, I will have washcloths with biohazard symbols on them to represent smallpox blankets, which I will hand out to anyone dressed as a Native American.

Ninja - I won't go to any parties. Then, when people say "why didn't you come to my kickass Halloween party?" I'll say "Oh I was there," and they'll say "but I didn't see you" and I'll say "that's because I was dressed as a ninja. I'm glad my costume worked." If they express doubt I will put a fucking throwing star in their neck.

Slutty Ninja - Same as above, only slutty.

Myself - I will dress in white from head to toe, with a Polaroid camera and extra packs of film, and perhaps a fanny pack. My white t-shirt will have written on it, in Sharpie: "LATER ON I'M GOING TO ASK IF I CAN TAKE A PICTURE OF YOUR BOOBS."

Earlicker - I will wear a shirt that says "Earlicker" on it. If anyone asks me what my costume is, I will say "It's a secret. I have to whisper it. Please, come closer...."

2007-09-24T16:35:00.000-05:00

FASHION BLUNDERS OF 2007
Fashion is a really weird phenomenon to me, because it looks like a competition wherein women try to prove (to other women) their a) individuality (by dressing like everyone else), b) hottness (by wearing things that only other women think are flattering), and c) value (by showing how much money they can spend). Maybe because male attention is so easy to get, some women don't get enough validation from it, and are forced to find validation in self-defeating hierarchies of superficiality. I say it's self-defeating because in the end, superficiality will always lead to misery; even if you "win" in fashion, you lose. If you doubt this, ask Anna Wintour, the happiest woman in the world. Gah, you probably don't need me to tell you this. Hell, I don't even want to think about it anymore. I've been trying to write this paragraph for four days -- I must've deleted five judgmental drafty pages by now. If I go on I'll just sound grumpier.
So: I admire hipster fashion in theory because like punk, it stems from a rejection of classic assumptions of attractiveness (like the notion that clothes should be clean, fit you, and not cause seizures in epileptics). But in practice I find it hard to keep my food down, sometimes.
I will ignore the biblical plague of ass-flattening stretch jeans, because I am too baffled to even talk about them. But here are some other looks cluttering Brooklyn lately that make me want to hide indoors so I won't feel the agony that accompanies being so goddamn judgmental:

Swampfoot™
When I see a girl wearing boots in the summer (especially Uggs, or cowboy boots without apparent socks), I can't think anything but "wow, your feet must be a swampy, stanky mess right now." Calf-hugging boots in the winter: sexy. Thigh-high go-go boots in winter: acceptable, though perhaps trying a little hard. Combat boots (with (cotton) socks): always awesome. But you, Swampfoot, look like you can't take care of yourself. I want to treat you to a spa pedicure, during which I will take your boots and hide them until November.
Hipster Greg Allman
I can't find a good image for this abhorrent look, so send a link if you know of one, but I think the name says it all. Imagine Cisco Adler, except dirtier, with skintight pants, no trucker hat, and wearing Mischa's sunglasses. You might be asking "if you were griping above about women's fashion, why is there a dude here?" Simple: Hipster Greg Allman is almost always some hipster chick's accessory. Ten points if you spot one alone in the wild.
Garbage Bag Dresses
Oh, hi! You look like a bag of garbage. And you know how some of your friends tell you that empire waists are flattering, minimizing of big hips or an ample ass? Do not talk to those friends anymore, because they are trying to make you look bad so that they look better in comparison. The problems with garbage bag dresses: a) they actually don't minimize anything, b) they call attention to the fact that you think your parts need minimizing, and c) you look like you're wearing a Hefty Cinch Sak.
Kicky Little Fedoras
You are wearing a fedora. Read that sentence again. Fedora. Fedora. Fedora. If you have to ask what's wrong with that, YOU WILL NEVER KNOW.*
Big Stupid Sunglasses
All right, ladies. I am sorry to tell you this, but: your treasured giant sunglasses make you look cheap, stupid, like a piece of meat. The other day my pal T told me over the phone that she felt like dudes were being particularly gross: "I'm not wearing slutty clothes or anything unusual today, but men are ogling me like crazy. It's nasty." I asked if she was wearing big dark sunglasses, and she awarded me a prize for awesomeness, saying "how the fuck did you know that?"
Simple: when you shield your eyes from other people, they cannot engage in a visual communication with you. Once their brain has ruled you out as a peer, a human being, they will look at your body. The quickest path to feeling like an object is to disqualify yourself as a subject. Does that make sense? I feel like this is going to need clarification.**

* Okay: I know one person who manages to rock a little pinstriped fedora without looking like an abominable tardbag, but she's so adorable that you could wrap her in a tinfoil sweatsuit and you'd still go "awww...."

** I expect comments about "not wanting to engage with gross dudes" or "feeling safe in sunglasses" or whatever. I'm not saying that you should be making soulful eye contact with every dude on the street. Just that your shades objectify you in a way you might not expect, as opposed to like scoop necks or whale tails, with which you expect and encourage the objectification. Take off the shades and you will feel better. Try it. Try it before you say I'm crazy.
OH AND DON'T TALK TO ME ABOUT "SHADING YOUR EYES FROM THE SUN" EITHER. BULLSHIT!

2007-09-18T16:11:00.000-05:00

VARIOUS METALS THAT DOCTORS MADE ME INGEST IN THE LAST MONTH
• Iron Sulfate
• Magnesium citrate
• Barium sulfate
• Sodium chloride
• Sodium bicarbonate
• Potassium chloride
You can't make me bionic by making me eat metals -- you're a doctor and you should know that. I don't care if you call them "salts" or "electrolytes" or whatever. I know what you're up to. QUIT IT.

I HAVE STUPID DREAMS
Five of these are real dreams I had in the last two weeks. Find the fake one.

I dreamed that I made a minor edit to a wikipedia page but rebelliously refused to leave an explanation in the "edit summary" field.
I dreamed that I created an online survey to ask my friends to describe any recent gastrointestinal issues they might have had.
I dreamed I was about to have sex with an improbably hot woman but stopped because I did not have a condom, saying "oh well."
I dreamed I found a very rare book about an animal so unusual that it is the sole member of its own phylum.
I dreamed I forgot to lock the door on the way out of my house and I felt bad because I know my roommate hates that.
I dreamed I had a nice warm bowl of pudding.

I CALL BULLSHIT ON "STAYING TOGETHER FOR THE SAKE OF THE CHILDREN"
Unhappy parents who postpone divorce "for the sake of the children" are fearful and selfish. Terrible damage is done to children by being raised by loveless, joyless parents. I am not suggesting that divorce is a once-way ticket to bliss -- just that an unhappy marriage is a bleeding wound, and divorce/separation is often the band-aid that lets healing begin. LET HEALING BEGIN PEOPLE.
     I also hate the idea, implicit in the "stay together" philosophy, that children are too daft to apprehend the misery of their parents just because they can't relate in the most literal sense.
     Here's a nice post from a group blog that illustrates my point in such a poignant way that my alter ego left an uncharacteristically breathless comment in response.

AND CARL EVERETT STILL DOESN'T BELIEVE IN DINOSAURS, EITHER
Televised, high-paid ignorance does not surprise me, even in the extreme form in this clip you might've seen from The View. But I can see that it kind of infuriates Whoopi, Joy, and even Barbara that they are forced to sit at a table with such stampeding, unrepentant stupidity. It seems clear that idiocy is tolerated from certain personalties simply because they look nice on TV and are more well-spoken or friendly than your more mainstream yokels. We reflexively give attractive people the benefit of the doubt, and we hesitate to criticize those who seem genuinely nice. But yokels is yokels, folks, whether pretty, educated, or just fucking bonkers. (Sorry for all the links.)

EVIL THINGS YOU SHOULD NOT DO
     1. Walk up to a pair of beautiful, high-maintenance women in a fancy NY nightspot and ask the slightly less attractive of the two: "is it hard for your friendship that you're hotter than your friend here?" Watch their faces as they close ranks against you, offended at the suggestion that there is any hottmess differential between them. But then watch the actual hotter one bristle a bit at your misjudgment. Watch the less hot one notice or ignore that. Back away slowly.
     2. Put puppies in a bag and hit it with a mallet until it stops barking/moving.
     3. Throw an empty condom wrapper (of an odd brand) behind the dresser or under the bed of a happily married couple. It may take weeks or years to be discovered, but when it is... show them this post before they get divorced (for the sake of the children) so they will believe it was you. (Also, actual cheaters who get caught can point to this post as the probable source for the condom wrapper you failed to clean up after your real tryst. You're welcome.)

2007-09-05T10:36:00.000-05:00

BUZZKILLARY CLINTON
So I think Hillary '68 looks cute in the pic at the top of this this Times article. Yes, a little serious, perhaps self-important, but I remember feeling the same way in college over a minor censorship incident -- whereas Hill was looking serious in 1968, when shit actually was serious, f'reals.
     I know it's shitty to say of a female presidential candidate "aww, look, how cute," and I definitely wouldn't say it about Fred Thompson, though not because he's a man -- he seriously looked like a 70s-style serial killer in the 70s and now he just looks... like this. With Hillary, I'm not being patriarchically indulgent of her whimsical (and probably menses-induced) executive aspirations; I'm just grasping for signs of a real person under that frosty-coiffed and pantsuited exterior.
     So, searching for signs of humanity, I see this old picture of '68 Hillary and I say she looks cute, but you know what? It really only works when I imagine '68 Hillary doing things that a presidential candidate would never admit to or talk about. Then she seems cute. I will spare you the details here. (For details, send $2 via PayPal; ask for "Late Nite in the Law Library with The Student Body Prez")
     The article says she never used drugs. How did someone AVOID using drugs on campus in 1968? She must have been a serious buzzkill.* Even forty years into the future, I feel judged by her past self. Screw you, Hill! LIGHTEN UP.

THEY'RE ALL GETTING MARRIED
Congrats to my pal Lindsey -- you know you're cool when the news of your wedding is broken by Perez Hilton. Well, either you're cool, or you're in serious trouble.

AND I'M GETTING OLD
I just noticed that I am hairier than I was the last time I noticed how hairy I was. Do girls really like hairy wrists? I'm like Teen Wolf over here. Bristly. What's happening to me?
     My theory: I'm getting older. My teeth have turned into magnets for food particles, I guess, and they are decaying faster than the dentist can bash them out of my jaw. My spleen is in a glass by my bed, my walker needs oiling, and my croup is acting up.
     OMG, JK, SRSLY. I am at the height of my powers. I'm awesome. Your very existence is a fart in the hurricane of my destiny. I destroy galaxies with a thought.

------------

* You know, like that cryptofundamentalist Residence Coordinator down the hall
(CFRC: Hey, gang, what are you up to tonight? Any wild parties going down?
ALL: Fuck off, narc!),
or that girl with who refused to huff even one freaking Whip-It because she had "epilepsy."

2007-08-15T12:30:00.000-05:00

NOTES FROM SAN FRANCISCO
(Preliminary notes: I'm pretty sure that people from San Francisco really hate it when people call their town "Frisco.")

So! I went to Frisco. I went for business. I experienced some pleasure, in the following forms: a movie, a cookie, an omelette, dinner with friends, and a lovely day and night with Fuzzysquid, who let me play with his Wii. It's Frisco, after all.
Being in San Francisco made me realize that no matter how much I hate L.A., I would still rather be there than in Frisco. Why all the hateration?

It is retarded to have four separate public transit systems.
I have never seen so many drug addicts, deep in the throes of their respective addictions, so unabashedly, flamboyantly fucked up on the street. Just walking around, buying groceries, applying informally for my financial assistance, resplendent. And dirty.
In fact, Friscans in general don't seem all that concerned with washing their clothes, or their bodies. This is not actually a complaint, just an observation. I tend to think Americans could stand to be a little less fastidious.
Most importantly: For me, cities are vessels only as valuable as their contents, and the only contents I care about are people. Austin's great you say? Yeah? Who do I know who lives there?
Almost everybody I know (and therefore everybody worth knowing) who used to live in Frisco has since moved to (or back to) New York. Living in Frisco feels like an adolescent phase, something you grow out of, and look back on with mild embarrassment (like fedoras, magic tricks, the debate team, virginity). The stragglers I know in Frisco are like anti-pioneers, afraid of their Northeastern destiny, but they'll figure it out soon enough. Then, all that will remain in Frisco are the real Friscans, who actually belong there. KEEP 'EM.

AND NOW A LITTLE SOMETHING... FOR THE LADIES
So I was in this meeting in the first morning of the conference, and the room was totally freezing. Like ICE cold. Literally. So I left the meeting and went out to buy a jacket. The first five stores, I was like: no way. I went to Macy's, and they told me to go to the segregated "Men's Macy's." Sigh. We Shall Overcome Someday, I guess. Anyway so I looked around and asked a dude named Robert about a jacket, for cheap, and he pointed me towards some that were on sale for like 50% off, and they were perfect. So he was like "that's probably about $50" and I was like "I'll take it." But when he rang it up? THIRTY DOLLARS. "I'll still take it!" I bubbled. I skipped back to the meeting, floating on that transactional high. I'm like a shopping hermaphrodite: the speed and focus of a man combined with the bargain-maximization of a woman. I AM ÜBERSHOPPER.

SOMETHING NEAT I FIGURED OUT IN FRISCO
Have you ever lost a cell phone charger while traveling? Fear not, dreamwalker, you're not the only one. Your replacement is close at hand, provided you are wily, cheap, and have flexible morals.

Go to a large hotel in the center of town.
Ask someone where to find the house phone.
Use the house phone Housekeeping and ask what floor they are on.
Go there (you may need to find a service elevator).
Tell the hard-working immigrant lady that you left your cell phone charger in room 1512 yesterday, and did they find it?
When she looks sheepish and shrugs, ask to see the box of lost chargers so you can look for yours.
Select a compatible charger from the box of HUNDREDS of lost chargers.
Tip the lady, you tightwad.
Whistle an innocent tune as you walk away.

AND DON'T FORGET THE WINTER VARIANT
Go to a Museum; ask for the lost and found; say "I lost a pair of black gloves;" leave with warm hands.

AND HERE IS THE LEAST FUN GAME EVER CREATED
Guess who has IBD?

2007-08-02T15:10:00.000-05:00

The Times had an article about a study that explored the reasons people had sex. The study did a survey that came up with 237 distinct reasons (examples: It just happened. I was bored. Someone dared me. The person was famous and I wanted to be able to say I had sex with him/her.) WHATEVER.
The scientists who did the study are now doing a study about the reasons people choose to NOT have sex. You can participate here, like I did. Here are a few of my answers to their question:

REASONS I DID NOT HAVE SEX
Please list all the reasons you can think of for why you, or someone you have known, have chosen NOT to engage in sexual intercourse in the past.

I was tired.
I wanted to withhold sex in retaliation for a perceived slight.
I did not have any condoms.
I did not want to deal with the emotional consequences of sex.
The other person was drunk.
The other person was on drugs.
I was on drugs.
I was afraid I smelled bad.
I knew I would never see the person again.
They did this thing with their mouth that really creeped me out.
I didn't want to get a reputation.
I had just had sex with somebody else.
I didn't feel like cleaning up the mess created by her copious female ejaculate again.
There were other people in the room.
The other person had just had sex with somebody else.
The other person appeared too needy.
The other person was too young.
The other person was too gossipy.
The other person was too married.
The other person was emotionally unstable.
The other person had vomit in their hair.
I felt that the other person only wanted to have sex with me to hurt someone else.
Too much mud.
Not enough mud.
I did not like the other person.
I was no longer in love with the other person.
I was planning on breaking up with the person.
I fell asleep.
The other person fell asleep.
My parents were nearby.
The other person's parents were nearby.
I was irritated by the other person’s sense of entitlement.
There were too many people coming in and out of the restroom.
We did not want to make a mess in the car.
There was no suitable place to have sex.
The alley was not as private as we had thought.
We got arrested before we could have sex.
There was not enough time.
It was too hot.
It was too cold.
I had a fever.
My back hurt too much.
The other person smelled like they had bathed in patchouli.
I had had sex too many times that day.
I never wanted to see the person again.
The other person looked like a Muppet.
I found the other person's political views abhorrent.
I was worried it would change the nature of our friendship.
I wanted to preserve sexual tension indefinitely.
I got a phone call from my future self warning me not to.
I chose to sleep with a different person that night.
A friend of mine had a crush on the person.
I wanted to be the only guy who had never tried to have sex with with the other person.
I value platonic friendship.
I don't have sex with hippies.
Just knowing the other person would have sex with me is good enough.
There was a wedding taking place in the church at the time.
Pants too complicated to remove.
The drugs ran out and we needed to get more.
The drugs wore off and sex no longer seemed like such a good idea.
I was running late for a movie.

2007-07-25T14:09:00.001-05:00

WHET THY WHISTLE
I had a sandwich with onions on it for lunch, and didja ever notice how you can't get the smell of onions off your fingers, no matter how much you wash? Same thing with the stench of a hobo's nutsack. Hard to shake. Unlike a loud, attention-seeking baby, which is easy to shake. [Textual appetizer complete. Proceed to entree.]

TAKE A LOOK DEEP INSIDE ME
I had an esophagogastroduodenoscopy last week, which means a doctor put a camera into my belly and recorded the journey for posterity. Before you get all excited and start sending jellybeans, painkillers, or samplers cross-stitched with homilies of wellness, let me hip you to the routine and non-exciting nature of the procedure. (While Acid Reflux is a badass screen name for your futuristic online role-playing game character, it is also a medical condition which, while under control now, might have done some damage to my GI tract during the years it was only nominally controlled by the nonstop ingestion of Tums.) So they took a little look-see, a little fucking peekaboo.
So after the procedure, they handed my sedative-addled, drooling self a sheet of paper and shoved me into traffic. I didn't look at it until today. Turns out it was my "Discharge Instructions" (which: heh), and at the bottom was the following admonition:

If you received any sedative or anesthetic drugs today, you should not drive nor make any major decisions for at least 24 hours.

NOW they tell me. Sheesh. I'm supposed to read instructions while sedated? Well shit. Umm....

MAJOR DECISIONS I MADE WHILE SEDATED
     • Sold all my Google stock; used money to buy lizard chow
     • Started an all Ho-Ho diet
     • Donated 1.5 kidneys (I was already in the hospital, see)
     • Shaved eyebrows, thighs
     • Began living the principle

But the fuckery of the warning continues:

If you have had an anesthetic you may experience drowsiness, difficulty in concentrating, and general uneasiness for the next one or two days.

Dude. Fuck the next one or two days -- you just described my entire fucking life. Whose cute idea was it to smear transdermal sedatives onto my pillowcase since I was like thirteen? I AM LOOKING IN YOUR DIRECTION, FATHER. NOT FUNNY.

2007-07-10T10:24:00.000-05:00

WAYS TO MESS WITH NEW PARENTS
I have this terrible urge building up in my heart, and I must let it out so that I do not act on my urge. A friend of mine just had a baby, and though it's got nothing to do with the friend in particular, here's what I wanted to do. I call it:

THE PROPHECY
The first time you see the baby, get excited and lean in close. Stare intently and slowly let all the mirth leave your face. If you can go pale at will, do it. Let a cup, or a toy, fall dramatically from your hands. Grasp the mother firmly by the upper arms, look in her eyes with a shell-shocked look on your face, and whisper:
     "Listen to me very carefully. Don't EVER tell him this... but your child is going to save the entire human race."
     Then roll your eyes back into your head and fall to the floor. Later, deny any memory of the event. OR you can laugh it off unconvincingly, blaming "bad oysters" or something, and rubbing your tummy like a mime.

2007-06-29T22:23:00.000-05:00

STALKER RECIPE
Some people are just crazy wacked-out freakazoid stalkers out of the womb, but that's rare. Far more commonly, regular people are pushed into stalkery shenanigans by circumstance. Under the right conditions, anyone can be turned into a stalker, so take responsibility for your goddman actions, you heartbreakers, you love-takers! Remember that sometimes, when a monster appears, you just might be the Frankenstein.

Here's a basic recipe for creating a stalker:

Go on a date, or hang out with someone at a social gathering.
Establish rapport through a combination of flirting, physical proximity, and alcohol.
Form a strong bond by demonstrating common interests, values, and experience.
Kiss, make out with, or fuck that person soon after forging the bond.
Reinforce the bond with statements like "that was amazing," "I feel like I've been looking for you my whole life," or "you really get me."
Express sincere and enthusiastic interest in hanging out again, and part with a lingering kiss, underscored by a small moan or a sigh.
Turn off your cell phone for 14 days.

Now, There is much room for improvisation here, so have fun with it, people. You don't have to turn off your phone, you can just block or ignore calls from the subject. Try logging onto MySpace constantly, so they can see the little "online now!" icon.

2007-06-27T15:14:00.000-05:00

Tina Turner asks, in her 1984 chart-topper What's Love Got to Do with It:

What's love got to do, got to do with it?
What's love but a second hand emotion?

So. When Tina calls love a "second hand emotion" ...
    a) does she mean "second-hand" as in shabby, used, cheap, pre-owned? If so, does that make any sense?
    b) does she really mean "second-class emotion"?
    c) does she mean "second hand" in the sense of "moment-to-moment"? Like as opposed to a "minute hand" emotion?
    d) does she really mean "Master Blaster runs Bartertown!"

2007-06-18T13:29:00.000-05:00

THE KNIFE-FIGHTING BLURB WAS A RED HERRING YOU FOOLS
I post today out of a sense of bloggy duty, not because I am dripping with ire or oozing insight. In fact, I may be repeating myself a bit. Having disclaimed any responsibility to be original, I grant you permission to read further at your own nauseous risk.

RIGHTNESS
I don't think I'm right about everything. I just tend to think I'm right about the stuff I've thought about; the reason I think I'm right about a lot of things is that I have actually thought about a lot of things. Important things. Whereas you think a lot about things like whether ScarJo gave Pete Wentz a hummer at the VMAs.
     Apart from celebrity gossip, your "beliefs" and "opinions," such as they are, are mostly received wisdom from your parents, teachers, or peers, or perhaps your psychic friend. Don't beat yourself up about this -- that's how everybody starts!
     The good news is that you can replace received wisdom with, like, earned wisdom by just thinking about things. The bad news is that if you may still end up wrong. Figuring out whether this is the fault of your flawed education, shitty role models, inborn stupidity, or inherent badness is possible, but not particularly useful. If you can't seem to earn wisdom no matter how hard you think, don't despair: the shortcut to rightness is to improve the wisdom you receive. How? By listening to ME. Yay! Call for pricing.

DISAGREEMENT
I believe that if someone doesn't agree with me about something, there are two possible explanations:
     1) a miscommunication has occurred, or
     2) we have an irreconcilably fundamental disagreement.
This is why I argue passionately (insistently, obnoxiously): If I don't think there is a fundamental disagreement, I want to find and eradicate the source of the miscommunication. However, if there is a fundamental disagreement, let's locate it, then change the subject and talk about cake instead. Do you like red velvet cake? OMG me too.

IF PUNS ARE THE LOWEST FORM OF HUMOR I MUST HAVE A WORM IN MY HEAD, AND IT SHAT THIS OUT:
Handing the keys to the naked shrimp who was in a hurry, the Hertz agent said: "you may proceed to your car apace." OH BARF KILL ME NOW

THE GAME OF WHAT YOU LIKE
So here's the game I made up yesterday.
     1) Write down all the qualities that you are looking for in a BF/GF/partner/mate or whatever. Did you put humor, talent, good looks, moral character? Stuff like that? A list of traits you respect? FANTASTIC.
     2) Now make a list of your exes, and come up with a really honest list of their attributes.
     3) Circle the traits that most often occur in your exes.
     4) Make a new, clean list of the attributes shared by your exes. Burn the rest of your work festively.
     OKAY SO. You may think you are simply holding proof of the compromises required to navigate the Sargasso of dating until you reach the promised land of coupled bliss. But this unburned list is what you actually seek out, as opposed to what you think you seek out. Maybe you see traits like emotionally unavailable, alcoholic, distracted, unambitious, borderline sociopathic. This list is your history, but it doesn't have to be your destiny.
     If your lists from steps 1 and 4 vary drastically, it seems like you are either lying to yourself about what you want, or your partner-picking instincts are VERY BAD. You may want to change your selection process. Here are a few quick tips that should be helpful for my readership in particular:
     1) Try not to fuck people you have only experienced while intoxicated.
     2) Try not to fuck people within 24 hours of meeting them.
     3) If you can't manage that, then try not to start DATING people just because you've fucked them, while drunk, the night you met them.

2007-05-29T21:28:00.000-05:00

RULES EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY I SAID GODDAMN!

ON YOUR BIRTHDAY, YOU ANSWER YOUR PHONE
I don't care if you "don't like the phone," or you "don't feel like getting into a long conversation," or you're "trapped under a fallen pillar" -- you answer the fucking phone on your birthday. It's one day out of the fuckitysuck year. You people are selfish.
     Why? Because I want to complete this transaction. I went to all this trouble to REMEMBER your SPECIAL DAY. And now I have to sing "Happy Birthday" onto your voicemail? What do I get out of that? I want to hear you squeal with joy at how AWESOME I am. The value of your birthday really lies in how SPECIAL it makes ME look in comparison to the rest of your worthless friends. You're not gonna call me back today, I know that. It would be way lame and desperate to call me back for birthday wishes, like "oh, did you call me earlier, tee hee?" No, you're too busy eating cake or having dirty birthday fucksex in some juke-joint bathroom in the Tenderloin. So I gotta call AGAIN. When I could be having a fucking donut. DON'T FUCK WITH MY DONUT HOUR, PEOPLE. I don't have much left to hold on to, so I will fight like a cornered mongoose to defend it.

DON'T BE ALL SEXY AROUND ME IN THE SPRINGTIME
Oh, you say you can't help it, huh? "I'm just as god made me," you insist. I call bullshit, you hot sexy thing you. Get off my subway! It would be one thing if you were just wearing normal-person clothes like a normal person, but you are wearing some filmy and spare construction of breatheable, meshy hoo-hah. Or you're blinding me with periodic reflections off your glistening clavicle. Or you are absent-mindedly probing your navel while I'm trying to read, over here. Or you have a tattoo somewhere compellingly dewy that begs to be examined. Or you are female, between the ages of 20 and 40, and not completely deformed. NOW I REMEMBER WHY I HATE HAVING A SEX DRIVE OH MY GOD.
     I have a friend who I am pretty sure feels this way all the time, and I have to say: Dude, I had no idea. I am so, so sorry. This explains so much. Your life must be... well, I've only been feeling this way for like three WEEKS and chemical castration is looking like an attractive option.

SELECT YOUR NEW RINGTONE IN THE PRIVACY OF NOT MY FACE
Certain activities are entertaining to those enmeshed in them, but unfailingly irritating to those on the periphery. For example: finger-drumming fancy polyrhythms onto a tabletop along with your iPod is not fun for anyone but you, the drummer. Your little ping that says you've got a new instant message -- over and over again? -- well, HOORAY FOR YOU, YOU HAVE FRIENDS JUST AS LAZY AS YOU, but no one wants to hear it. (Ditto for the blockrocking two-foot penis-compensating bass speakers in your car. Boring AND a cliché.)
     Furthermore, certain sounds are designed to get your attention: sirens, alarms, bells, whistles, and so on through the rattle, buzzer, and klaxon families. Cellphone ringtones, the heirs of this noble ancestry, usually combine the restraint of the paparazzi the the subtlety of a crowbar pimpslap.
     You know what the most annoying thing in the world is? When you try out all your cellphone ringtones in public. I know the variety is a source of mind-hobbling bliss for you, the selector, and I know you are OH SO EAGER to give EVERY POSSIBLE TONE a fair shake before you pick the winner, but everyone and I mean EVERYONE around you -- including that nice old Chinese lady and those Mormon missionaries -- wants to a) scramble your eyeballs with a screwdriver, b) pack feces into your bloody eyesockets, and then c) stomp on your neck real hard. Now, would you like that? DO THAT AT HOME, DOUCHEBAGGUS SUPERMAXIMUS.

2007-05-24T14:24:00.000-05:00

Dear Man talking on Cell Phone in Bathroom Stall,
     You are in a stall in the men's room, talking on your cell phone. While apparently pooping. What gives?
       — UD in the Men's Room

Dear Men's Room UD,
     Don't be afraid -- I'm not dangerously clueless. I just got an important, career-defining call that filled me with pants-shitting fear, so I took my bizniz to the crapper for extraspecial precaution. Sometimes I call people who intimidate me from in here because I imagine I am defecating on their power over me. What's that Mr Big? SPLOOSH is what! Ya heard? BOO-YAA!
       — Mr. Busypoops

Dear Cute Girl with Platter of Half-Sandwiches on the Street,
     Thank you for that half egg-salad wrap.
       — UD on the Street

Dear Street UD,
     No problem! Thank YOU for taking it off my hands! I was wondering: "what am I going to do with these sandwiches?!" because I just came from this meeting? And there were like all these sandwiches which were totally gonna be thrown out, and I was like "THAT'S wasteful!" so I asked them if I could take them, and my coworkers were like rolling their eyes like "there she goes again miss recycle" ha ha because I'm always yelling at people like "you! gotta! recycle!" ha ha and so they were like "don't you want to wrap them up?" and I was like "no I'll just take that platter, it's disposable anyway," like what a waste, but anyway they were like "are you gonna eat them? ha ha" and I was like no but maybe some homeless person will, and they were like "homeless people don't want your garbage sandwiches they want money for booze and drugs" and I was like "well I'll take them anyway you poverty bigots" and now here YOU are, not homeless -- unless... you're not homeless, right? Ha ha so anyway I KNEW someone would —

Dear God,
     Would you PLEASE make this girl shut up?
       — UD with his Mouth Full

Dear Ungrateful Dumbshit,
     No YOU shut up.
       — God

2007-05-10T14:09:00.000-05:00

Some of the discussion around my previous post about pornography recapitulated a commonly held belief about the effect of media on society, and one that I find -- as I stated in the post -- to be emotionally satisfying but intellectually adolescent (see for a perfect e.g. this paper by somebody I really hope was in high school). Now for some mythbusting.

MYTH #1: People imitate behaviors observed in fictional media.
Nope. Not important ones, they don't. Let's repeat this: We do not not learn how to behave by emulating FICTION.

Q. Really, UD? That's odd. So how do we really learn to behave, if not from fictional media?
A. We learn behavior by watching real people, IN PERSON, whose behavior we emulate -- consciously or not -- out of respect, admiration, envy, peer pressure, or whatever. This mechanism, Social Proof(1), is programmed into us by millions of years of evolution. We learn from family, schoolmates, community members, teammates, coworkers, etc.
Barring illness or psychopathology, people learn to ______ by watching other people around them ______.

Q. Why is this myth so convincing, or pervasive?
A. Several reasons:

Because we see serious, bad behaviors in life that mirror things we've seen in media -- and we get the causation exactly backwards. Media will reflect life back at us, not the other way around.
Because sometimes we try out in real life the behaviors we observe in media. But it's still the reactions of our peers (social proof) that determine whether the behavior is accepted. In fact, we usually only test behaviors that we think have a pretty good chance will be accepted, because rejection is wicked painful. For example! We might see a cool character smoking in a movie, and we might think we started smoking as a direct result -- but smoking still falls within the accepted behavior of some subset of our community.
Because sometimes, for shock value, we emulate behaviors we know will be rejected. But those behaviors are still instinctively calibrated to the values of the community in which we exhibit them. The SUPERFICIAL aspects of the behavior (getting face piercings, wearing stockings on your arms) are imitated, but the underlying rebellion is not transmitted through media. Nor will rebellion die without a media-approved mode of expression.
Because parents worry about kids, and it's easier to place blame for undesirable behavior on what seems like a FIXABLE cause. But no matter what you do to the media, children will continue to smoke, drink, fuck, and use drugs, just as they always have. Some kids will die as a result of these behaviors. Acknowledging the real causes of these behaviors (biology; assertion of independence; boredom; social proof from family, peers, and community) is a painful admission of powerlessness.
Because those EXTREMELY RARE occasions when people have obviously copied something awful depicted in media provide extra-vivid, though statistically insignificant, evidence. But violent anti-social behavior is usually caused by mental illness, extreme stress, or trauma. Not media.
Because our tendency toward Excessive Self-Regard(2) makes us assume other people are stupider, weaker, or more suggestible than we are. The most fascinating thing about this whole concept is that nobody, and I mean NOBODY, seems to think that they personally are susceptible to the effects they are so worried about. It is always some "other," some fantastical hypersuggestible victim, who is the subject of concern. Think about this, because it is straight-up retarded, people. If you still don't get it, try this illustrative little test:
Do you feel that you are you more likely to...
• ...backstab your friends after watching Melrose Place?
• ...discriminate against (or torture) Arabs after watching 24?
• ...commit suicide after watching Heathers?
• ...murder someone after seeing Man Bites Dog?
• ...try heroin after watching Trainspotting?
If not, why do you think other people will be?

MYTH #2: People become "desensitized" to real-life violence after exposure to violence in media.
Wrong. Our reaction to images of violence is almost entirely dependent on whether we believe the violence is or REAL or FICTIONAL. We can watch a hundred grisly murders in a movie without even flinching, because our brains are not easily fooled into thinking fictional images are real. But images of non-consensual or criminal acts of violence often produce strong visceral reactions of disgust, anger, and fear.
Violence in REAL life is so upsetting that we instinctively act to stop it. What prevents people from intervening (other than basic fear of personal harm) is almost always behavior learned through more Social Proof (see Kitty Genovese, or the way kids learn not to intervene in schoolyard fights by watching the slightly older kids scream "fight! fight!").

Q. Why is this myth so convincing, or pervasive?
A. Two reasons:

Because people DO become desensitized, after exposure to violence in media, to violence in media. That is, depictions of extreme acts don't change what is acceptable in real life; they change what is acceptable in future depictions.
Because people DO become desensitized to real-life violence after exposure to real-life violence. This happens to people in situations of imprisonment, wartime, extreme poverty, pervasive abuse, etc. Another example: real crime scene investigators get desensitized to violence through exposure to it. But no amount of watching C.S.I. will prepare you for the shock of seeing a real dead body.

MYTH #3: Pornography teaches men to disrespect, abuse, or objectify women.
False. The social proof that causes such behavior is not cued by sight and sound alone. It's a feedback loop that occurs in real space and time. The brain is not so easily fooled into mistaking fictional actions -- no matter how realistic -- for real social proof.
     People learn to disrespect, abuse, or objectify women from their families, communities, teammates, co-workers, or frat brothers.

MYTH #4: Images in media create unrealistic standards that are harmful.
True! Standards of beauty, wealth, happiness, and success in media show us unattainable ideals and create powerful feelings of inadequacy and failure. That for sure is true.
     Seeing skinny women in media doesn't change women's behavior, or else every woman in America would be skinny and wear the same clothes as celebrities (in general, women dress like, and have body fat indices similar to, the women around them). Media standards just make us feel terrible about ourselves most of the time. Which, I'll grant, is still a pretty bad effect.

MYTH #5: Images of sex and violence in the media are responsible for the decline of morality in this country.
Wrong. The much lamented "decline of morality" is caused by the fact the loudest contemporary proponents of "morality" are filled with obvious misery, judgment, anger, and fear. Who wants to emulate behavior that leads to that?
     "Morality" has become synonymous with prudery through association with these people. This has not always been the case. I wish those people would shut up so that people could learn that ACTUAL morality leads to love, acceptance, and happiness.

----------------------
(1) Read that Charlie Munger article I keep talking about.
(2) I said READ IT, I said!

2007-05-01T10:49:00.000-05:00

Okay, I know I don't usually delve into serious social topics without injecting laffs, but I wrote the following as a response to a blog post that I read which, like so many discussions of pornography, I felt missed the point. Read that blog post here, and check the comments, then read my response below after you clean the barf off your shirtfront.
(NB: all the theories below are the result of extensive anthropological research; I, personally, do not have any sexual urges whatever. I live suspended in a giant harness made of neoprene, fed an intravenous mixture of nutrients and morphine.)

-------------------------------------------------------------

1. Girls are just as horny as guys. The biological imperative is the same for both genders: MAKE MORE COPIES OF YOURSELF. That imperative is expressed differently due to the nature of sexual reproduction:
     MALE: impregnate as many females as possible.
     FEMALE: get pregnant NOW.
     (Homosexuality inconveniently complicates this reductive formula, so I will just ignore it for the time being, though I invite comments that address the gay side of this issue.)
     As I think both sexes can attest, these urges are almost always there to some degree. BUT -- YAY! We have learned to transcend our basest urges in daily life. Men can control their desire to fuck (or even ogle) every pretty girl who passes, just as women can control their desire to get impregnated.

2. "Porn teaches men to feel ____ about women" arguments sound to me like "violent video games cause violence" (i.e. emotionally satisfying but intellectually lazy)

HERE'S WHAT SOME WOMEN DON'T SEEM TO UNDERSTAND ABOUT PORN AND YET MEN NEVER SEEM TO BE ABLE TO ARTICULATE:
     What a man likes in porn does not necessarily have any relation to what he likes in real life. Pornography is not ENJOYED by most men, but merely USED to achieve orgasm.* Ask guys if they keep watching or reading porn after they come -- only the rare connoisseur will say he does anything besides turn away in vague disgust.
     Therefore, porn is often chosen for gaudy visual stimulation, taboo violation, extremity, or whatever. Guys over thirty who look at, for example, "teen" porn rarely want to fuck actual teenagers, and almost never want to be in a relationship with one. (That is gross. Have you seen teenagers? They're so young.)
     Since, one hopes, a man considers his sexual partners to be more than just ejaculation facilitators, one can see that what is valued in a partner is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from what is valued in porn.

In my experience, women feel threatened by pornography when they incorrectly think that:
     a) men desire in a real-life partner the physical characteristics they prefer in porn,
     b) men desire in a real-life partner the behaviors exhibited in porn,
     c) men want to treat a real-life partner with the disrespect that is a hallmark of a lot of porn.
     What can I say? THESE THINGS ARE USUALLY NOT TRUE. If you really think your boyfriend/lover/spouse would rather date a porn star, or fuck a teenager, or abuse you, or poop on your chest, or WHATEVER, maybe it's time to MOVE ON. But if your relationship seems solid in every respect, maybe try to remember what you've read here and don't fret so much about the porn.

---------------------------------------------
* This is important because guys who are horny become almost completely useless, and tend to make TERRIBLE decisions. This is true for women too, but men build up to uselessness in approximately three days after the last ejaculation, whereas woman vary greatly in their level of uselessness and the time it takes to get there.

2007-04-26T16:04:00.000-05:00

UNIVERSAL DONOR'S RULE OF CO-WORKER TOLERANCE
Assuming you can evaluate any worker according to the following character axes:

DILIGENT < - - -|- - - > LAZY
NICE < - - -|- - - > MEAN
SMART < - - -|- - - > STUPID

... a workplace will tolerate a worker who falls on the negative side of any TWO of these axes, but not THREE.

That is, a workplace will tolerate (in descending order of the level of tolerance) a worker who is:
     • STUPID and LAZY, as long as they are NICE;
     • STUPID and MEAN, as long as they are HARD-WORKING;
     • LAZY and MEAN, as long as they are SMART.

But a co-worker who is LAZY, MEAN, and STUPID will dangerously lower the morale of the workplace.

2007-04-24T09:22:00.000-05:00

This time I didn't tell you I was going to St. Thomas before I went, to spare you the agony of knowing I was in puh-puh-puh-paradise. But you figured it out, didn't you, my little Sherlocklings? How was it without me? Was every day a razor, and every night a shot of lemon juice? I never meant to make you suffer, my babies. I heard there was a widdle wainstorm on the mainwand wast week. Did babies get wet?
     Harumph. People wear pajamas when they travel. What the fuck? I understand why, but it's still shocking. People want to be comfortable, and they are separated from anyone they know who might judge them for their disastrous sartorial decision-making. This leads to grave, grave errors.
     First of all, every girl under the age of twenty looks like she thinks the WHOLE FUCKING WORLD is some giant open-call slumber-party porn audition. I have more intimate knowledge of people in the security screening line with me than of some people I've had actual sex with. And you, lady: I can see your entire ass. I can make out your boyfriend's teeth marks. I swear, if I went to the airport with an armload of Mardi Gras beads and I screamed "show us your tits" loudly and at no one in particular, I am sure that a number of terryclothed barbies would reflexively lift up their shirts, screaming "wooooo!"
     More soon. I am a little grumpy.

2007-04-03T21:49:00.001-05:00

Al Gore has a problem that he will never be able to overcome. If you hear about all he's done, you may very well admire the man. You might agree with every position he holds. You might even think he would make a great president. But once you see him on TV, you find yourself a little less psyched. The man has Anti-Charisma. Every second you spend listening to a recording of his voice, you will like him a little less. Every moment you see him on screen, you will like him a lot less, and wish Bill Clinton were on screen instead (say what you want about his policies, but I would raptly watch Bill Clinton read VCR instructions aloud). It is a testament to the power of Gore's actual words that the people don't rise up and drive him to the city limits with pitchforks and torches. (NB: I haven't seen An Inconvenient Truth, so if he comes off all dapper-dan and charmtastic [sic], let me know. My theory is that he doesn't, but he's in a professorial role, and we don't really care if our professors have charisma.)

Not to be dramatic or anything, but reading Charlie Munger's Psychology of Human Misjudgment just might change your life. He's pretty folksy for a billionaire, but his subject -- the reasons people make bad decisions -- is completely fascinating. It drips with the kind of simple truth that cannot be ignored.

I like blintzes!

My roommate just went to Paris for eight days, and she left behind a germ bomb of tainted Häagen-Dazs. A sudden case of laryngitis made her throat so sore and scratchy that I started whispering while talking to her out of unconscious sympathy, and yet she blithely ate this ice cream -- which, admittedly, was hers -- straight from the pint with a goddamn spoon. So unless I want my throat to be scratchier than Fergie's crotch, I cannot partake. Maybe I should pour a thin layer of Zippo fluid on the top of the ice cream and sterilize it. Sigh. It's like David Ben-Gurion said: "Life is full of infected pints of Strawberry Häagen-Dazs; we must not partake lest our dessert-based mistakes be the last ones ever made."

2007-03-22T13:10:00.000-05:00

SHORT INTERNET QUIZZES

Are You Bleeding?
1. Is your blood seeping, dripping, streaming, or spurting OUT of your body?

If you answered "yes," you are bleeding.

Are You Asleep?
1. Hey. Hey you. Hey. HEY! Are you asleep?

If you answered "yes" or "no," you are not asleep.

Are You a Christian?
1. Do you support the death penalty?

If you answered "yes," you are not a Christian.

Are You on Fire?
1. Is any part of you (or your clothing) smoking, smoldering, or covered in flame?

If you answered "yes," you are on fire.

Are You a Zombie?
1. Are you doing anything unrelated to the consumption of live human flesh?

If you can participate in online quizzes, you are not a zombie.

Are You a Medical Doctor?
1. Does your license plate have the letters "MD" on it?

If you answered "yes," you are either a medical doctor or a car thief.

Are You a Rocket Scientist?
1. What term describes how far a rocket is pointing away from its direction of travel due to rotation about its vertical axis?

If you answered "yaw," you are probably a rocket scientist.

BONUS!! FUN FACTS YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW!
• Rhodium is a rare silvery-white transition metal.
• The Outerbridge Crossing, a bridge from Staten Island to New Jersey, was named for Eugenius H. Outerbridge.
• Twice as many people die of lung cancer each year than from car accidents and gun-related injuries combined.
• I had sexual intercourse with your mother.
• She told me she is interested in engaging in similar activities (with me) in the near future, and with great frequency.

2007-03-20T17:11:00.001-05:00

In order to sink successfully into this blogmire, I must cultivate, at least for a short period of time, an attitude of frustration, judgment, superiority, and anger. That was easy as microwave dinner when I felt that way all the time, but when I find myself at relative peace with the world -- which, bizarrely enough, I do, right now -- it seems like a chore at best and downright dangerous at worst.
     If you want to monkey-wrench a good mood for the sake of blogging, I recommend trying to buy something from a store staffed entirely by idiots. It won't be hard to find one if you look! I got sullen at the Duane Reade that they haven't gotten the memo about how separate lines for multiple registers may be more convenient for DR Management or whatever but are UNIVERSALLY UNFAIR and morally wrong. I call them Hitler lines. Give us a fucking Tensabarrier labyrinth and feed us flowingly into a stream of constant commerce, dammnit!
     Then I almost had a tantrum/meltdown at the Au Bon Pain when the general manager displayed fairly typical ignorance of the economic nuances inherent in a promotion. In short, I got mad because she wouldn't give me a free cup. A FREE CUP GODDAMNIT. What is my problem?
     On a positive note, I got a vibrating watch in a fit of Uncontrollable Shopping Impulsivity, and I must say it is the coolest thing ever, impulsive or not. I set it to vibrate every 23 minutes (O my fucking Schumacher!) to remind me to CHILL THE FUCK OUT. I am in love with it. It buzzes and it's like a little voice in my head is saying "stop thinking those awful thoughts," or "untense those shoulders," or "put down the machete and untie the prostitute."
     However, I'm experiencing a variation of the "man with a hammer" syndrome (which states that, to a man with a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail); I'm starting to view the world's problems as solvable through the employment of vibrating watches. Think you have a problem that you can't fix? Bring it, and I will bring two vibrating alarms, a vibrating stopwatch, and a vibrating countdown timer, and we'll see what we come up with.

FOR EXTRA CREDIT:
1. Is the above serious?
2. If so, how much of it?
3. Is it all a failed experiment as outlined in the first sentence?
4. Why would anyone care either way?
5. Where the fuck are my goddamn shoes?

2007-02-20T11:06:00.000-05:00

My grandmother used to enjoy making this tired quip about Boston's capricious climate:

If you don't like the weather in New England, wait a minute!

I would adapt this for St Thomas in several ways:

If you don't like the weather in St. Thomas... you should leave, because it's always the same.

If you don't like the speed at which you receive service in a restaurant in St. Thomas... wait an hour!

After a week in STT, my skin is rich and buttery, like shortbread. STT is warm and moist, and the slight wintry angling of the Earth away from the sun means that you don't get an immediate sunburn just from having your skin exposed for a few minutes, unlike in September, when everything is constantly on fire. My elbows are usually the primary North American storage site for NATO's Strategic Dead Skin Cell Reserves, but after ten tropical days they feel like, well, normal skin. WEIRD.
I monitored the progress of hermit crabs through the jungle that surrounded the idyllic cabin I stayed in. Hermit crabs were climbing uphill, away from the ocean, over steep and rocky terrain. What the fuck are they doing that for? Hermit crabs live in discarded shells, and in order to grow larger they have to find bigger shells, which you would think they'd be more likely to find in the fucking water. But according to the Wikipedia (which if I had to give up either ice cream or the Wikipedia, I would say goodbye to ice cream in a heartbeat):

Fierce shell fights can occur if the shell supply is not adequate. The loser often dies since many hermit crabs will not release their grip on their shell until they are torn apart. The loss of limbs in shell fights is common, but may not result in death especially since the hermit crab can choose to drop (autotomize) a limb to disengage from the conflict.

I heard one of those fights. It sounded like two blackboards fucking.

Nerds wish they could autotomize their underpants when jocks give them wedgies.

One reason I like being in STT is because it gives me an opportunity to float face down (aided by a snorkel) in a clear blue ocean, which is my favorite way to float. (On my back I'm always getting water in my mouth, and evertime I exhale I sink into the abyss.) Snorkeling is an extremely meditative activity, if you're into that kind of thing, because it's really hard to stay stressed out about your job, relationship, bills, or whatever, while buoyed in a warm liquid medium and staring at, for example, thirty sea urchins as big as bowling balls.

--------------------------

BONUS: A Joke Workshopping Clinic with Rock'emStock'em
(Highlight the hidden text to see the answers)

Version 1 (typical fare):
     Q: What has a hundred balls and fucks old ladies?
     A: The lottery.

Version 2 (better...):
     Q: What has two hundred balls and fucks old ladies?
     A: The Senate.

Version 3 (bingo!):
     Q: What has a hundred balls and rapes old ladies?
     A: The DaVinci Code.

2007-02-05T13:07:00.000-05:00

So apparently I've got a new pattern of bloggery: I'll post hasty and unpolished agglomerations of random thoughts once every 15 days or so and then post a hurried and apolgetic note about ANOTHER GODDAMN TROPICAL VACATION.
Guess which kind of post this is.
Back on February 19th, kids.

Things You Can't Really Explain to Your Grandparents Because They (Your Grandparents) Are Fundamentally Incapable of Comprehending the All-Encompassing Meaninglessness of Postpostmodern Life
• ironic mustaches
• GoogleTalk status message "wars"
• "cat macros"
• MySpace

Things You Will Not be Able to Explain to Your Grandchildren
• The Bush Presidency
• Las Vegas
• The Winfrey Presidency
• MySpace
• Cigarettes

2007-01-10T12:21:00.000-05:00

I saw a dude on the train reading a book called Sudoku for Dummies which seemed only marginally more retarded to me than a book called Word-Search for Dummies, which for all I know is a real title. I hate this series of books, partly because it seems such an obvious mockery-target, with obvious jokes built so obviously into its title. Here are some obvious jokes:

Fake "...for Dummies" Book Titles for Dummies
• Jeopardy! for Dummies
• Mensa for Dummies
• Graduating from M.I.T. with Honors for Dummies
• The Numerals 1 through 5 for Dummies
• The Color Red for Dummies
• Ditchdigging for Dummies
• Encouraging Negative Self-Image in Your Readership for Dummies
• Attainment of Complete and Instantaneous Spiritual Enlightenment for Dummies
• Self-Immolation for Dummies
• Being Mute for Dummies
• Accidental Bunny-Killing for Dummies

Things That Make Me Uncomfortable Because They Remind Me of the Holocaust
• hollow logs
• Costco
• encaustic
• concentration

Popular Musicians that Make Me Mad (how mad; why)
• Ying Yang Twins (very mad; they are gross. also: that honking sound. also: "ying"?)
• Gwen Stefani (occasionally mad; the perception that she has a good fashion sense)

Finally, you know that I don't link to things higglety-pigglety. I try not to lean on the linking to fluff up otherwise spare posts. And I recognize in myself a tendency to get hysterical over certain faddish elements of pop culture in a way I find embarrassing after the fact. Still, I can't help but proclaim the following song, by Liam Sullivan's valley girl character Kelly, the BEST THING EVER: Shoes.

2007-01-05T14:40:00.000-05:00

If another fucktard waggles their eyebrows heavenward at the unseasonably warm weather and chuckles "Global Warming" to me AS IF IT'S THE FUNNIEST JOKE EVAH I will take a running jump and ram my umbrella into their sternum MK FATALITY STYLE and then I will toss their body onto the pile with the corpses of people who said the word "tryptophan" to me on Thanksgiving. Other quotes that earn you a place on the deathpile:

"Pigs are actually very smart!" who cares? THEY'RE PIGS
"looks like we caught a local!" goddamn elevator-riding fargbarglers
"Eskimos have n words for snow" gaah shut up I have 100 words for KILL YOU
"Why don't they make the whole plane out of black box?" OK GENIUS Why don't I make your whole face out of BRUISES and PAIN?
on phone: "Okay, I'll let you go now!" gee thanks DON'T DO ME ANY FAVORS don't go I'm so lonely.
"Don't take this the wrong way..." or "Promise you won't get mad..." JUST STOP RIGHT THERE.

2006-12-26T16:41:00.000-05:00

I COULD WRITE LISTS ALL DAY EVERY DAY SO DON'T TEMPT ME

What Girls are Wearing at the Wal-Mart in Hackettstown, NJ
• makeup
• hoodies
• pajama bottoms

Things I Hate About Wal-Mart
• exploitation
• convenience
• the people in the Wal-Mart, including:
     • employees
     • customers
     • people who think it's okay to wear pajamas in public
     • old people
• low prices

What Old People are Doing at the Wal-Mart in Hackettstown, NJ
• smiling
• dying

Things I Don't Want to Eat
• Bic Macs
• Nutty Ho-Hos
• the flesh of the living (see below for exceptions)
• hobo cocks

Things I Do Want to Eat, but Shouldn't
• Girl Scout Cookies
• Palace Fried Chicken (Greenpoint, Brooklyn)
• that Ben & Jerry's with the oatmeal cookies in it
• the fingers and toes of infants

My Resolutions for 2007 (the A-list)
• To be as honest as possible at all times
• Not to stuff my stupid face with food when I'm bored
• Not to blog passive-aggressively at my friends
• To drink more water

Things I Think Other People Should Resolve to Do
• Stop talking about the genitals of celebrities
• Stop wearing terrycloth in public
• Calm the fuck down
• Shut the fuck up
• Eat a bowl of dick

Rejected Potential Resolutions that Didn't Make the Cut
• To charge my phone more
• To be less judgmental of those who are cavalier about recycling
• To use the word "immanent" in conversation
• To punch/kick first, ask questions later

What to Type in an IM to Suggest that You are Vomiting
• BARRRUF
• oog
• HA-WHALLLLLLFFF
• cough cough HURK
• HURKLE
• hurmp---
• FLLLLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRPPP!!!

Lists that Didn't Make the Cut for this Post
• My Coolest Relatives
• Ugly Things I Saw You Wearing but Said I Liked at the Time
• Super Stars of the 60s Who I Bet Probably Slept with Grace Slick
• Things Your Face Looks Like (That Aren't Faces)
• Favorite Windows Keyboard Shortcuts
• Things in Your Room that I Put My
• um, never mind

2006-12-19T16:05:00.000-05:00

20 Minutes in Unmedicated Head of Universal Donor
The way I wanted to write this post was that I would set a timer to go off every, say, two minutes, and I would stop writing whatever I was writing and start a new bulleted "thought." But that didn't work, because I didn't have the attention span to find a way to time it. The stupid plans of me oft eat a cock.

• Why is it that the people most all-consumingly ruled by their emotions always seem to be the least willing to admit that fact? Is that even true? Why did I think that? Sometimes it seems like the more irrational a request or opinion, the more people try to justify it with "facts."
     Or I hate how people bring up facts that dispute their positions only to ignore them completely, as if acknowledging the truth in passing is enough: "I know that there's a lot of evidence to support the idea of global warming, but I just don't buy it."
     I hate when people make up statistics to support their emotional beliefs, usually hyperbolizing above the 90th percentile to really hit it out of the park: "Hitchhiking is totally unsafe. 92% of people who pick up hitchhikers are sex offenders." SHUT UP. YOU ARE A LIAR.
     I do this too, of course. See any page of archives for examples. I frequently say "New York City has the cleanest tap water in the world" without any citable reference for this belief. I hate myself for doing this.

• Behold an a capella version of one of my favorite songs: 17 Years. It's too bad this was executed so poorly and recorded so shittily by such a bunch of ugly hippies. Because I was so excited about the idea. Now all I want to do is arrange and record my own a capella cover of it. BUT THAT WOULD MAKE ME BOBBY MCFERRIN.

• If you think it's possible that I might have read The DaVinci Code, you misunderstand something deep and basic about me.

• The guys from American Chopper made a bike for the movie Eragon. How can they look at themselves in the mirror?

• I don't care how "talented" Beyoncé is supposed to be: I hate her stupid face. She is Estupit. I have never heard her say a single thing that was worth the tape it was recorded onto. I hate how everyone pretends she's like this great role-model for young girls just because she isn't anorexic and because she sings songs about being "a survivor" or an "independent woman." She is clearly neither of those things. Why can't people just enjoy her music without having to elevate her to the status of "good person"? I wouldn't be irritated by her inauthenticity if authenticity weren't such a big part of her image.
     But really? She just rubs me the wrong way. I love that "Dip It Pop It Twerk It Stop It" song, or at least I did until I saw the video, the one where Hype Williams just texted his 3rd unit director and said "just bring some chairs, a strong fan, and a bolt of fabric, and tell the girls to loosen up by pretending to be hookers; secretly shoot that rehearsal and you can call it a day. I'll be cruising sorority mixers with Li'l Wayne if you need me."

• I like to laugh!

• GRAMMAR UPDATE: Prepositions are an okay thing to end a sentence with. Also, it's okay to really split the fuck out of an infinitive.

• People who think Saturday Night Live was funnier in the 70s than it is now don't know anything about comedy, or simply don't like comedy. I defy you to find a complete sketch from the 70s that is as funny the whole way through as the best sketches from the last ten years -- hell, from the last three years.
     SNL has always had three major problems: 1) an inexplicably fanatical reliance on celebrity impersonation and current events for skit material; 2) recurring character- and catchphrase-based comedy; and 3) not knowing how or when to end sketches. They still have these problems. But they are much more committed to character-based (i.e. REAL) comedy these days (as opposed to impersonation). They've recently started to end sketches before the tumbleweed moment of total joke-death. (Though I'm still mystified as to why they think sketches need ends; Monty Python's Flying Circus, Mr. Show, and even Robot Chicken make it clear that some ideas are best expressed in ten seconds, and that forcing every idea into a three-to-five minute chunk will result in some bad comedy. Maybe it's about commercials?
     The slightly less major -- but still major -- problems are that the musical performances almost always suck and seem like an old-fogey anachronism from the variety-show days, and that the runtime is too long. Those remain unaddressed.

• I don't know what use anonymous phone number forwarding would be to you, but that's your bidniz.

• Joanna Newsom is a genius. You may never like her voice, and I feel bad for you. Because she is AWESOMEPANTS. Everyone who loves music should love her.

• RULES FOR A HAPPY LIFE (continued): All things being equal, adding strippers to the equation will never make things better.

2006-11-30T01:58:00.000-05:00

Some friends of mine have been dating in a manner that I can only describe as frantic. Dating is not something you should do frantically -- at least, not if your goal is, like, satisfaction. I've never heard of someone meeting the love of their life through speed dating. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, just that it's a low-percentage outcome, like successful home amputation. I can see how going on a date a day might sound like a really great way to meet a whole bunch of potential mates in a short time, but... actually, no, I can't. It just seems retarded to me. Desperation smells from a mile off, and only predators are attracted to it. By which I don't mean child-preying pedophiles, just people who are looking for sex and not much else. Are you looking for lots of casual sex? By all means, visit Nerve.com and clever yourself up a hipster-baiting fucktrap of a profile. IT'S EASY. But it's not satisfying.
You are not getting old so fast that your time is running out. Your best days need not be behind you. You will not explode if you do not provide the world with babies in the next ten minutes, and neither will your parents die from a lack of grandchildren. Marriage should not be a goal, it should be a side effect of a meaningful relationship.
Then again, since everybody who reads this is probably sexually compulsive, socially inept, or (jackpot!) both, maybe I should shut my sunshiny advice-hole. You have my blessings! Chase that eHarmony with eAbandon, eFucktards!

ACTIVITIES YOU CAN DO FRANTICALLY
experiencing an earthquake
fleeing a school shooting
N*Sync fandom
drowning

ACTIVITIES YOU SHOULD NOT DO FRANTICALLY
dating
antiquing
deer hunting
scrimshaw
Matlock fandom
rock tumbling
Driver's Ed
needlepoint
gene splicing

2006-11-28T13:56:00.000-05:00

J.Ro
you were all "pay attention to me"
but you ignore me

UD
i'm back
i was on a writing assignment for a friend

J.Ro
what were you writing?

UD
my friend katie
has a sister

J.Ro
katie?

UD
who is playing in a "celebrity dreidel" competition
as part of her job
you don't know katie
but so she needed a humorous player description
and i wrote one

J.Ro
way to make me feel bad
because I don't know your stupid friend Katie
I don't want to know her
I think she's a bitch
and her sister's a slut

UD
i will tell her you said so

J.Ro
Go ahead

2006-11-09T15:07:00.000-05:00

I'm going on vacation again -- as New York reaches a rare moment of light-jacket respite between the ball-sweaty summer and the no-exposed-skin howling death-angel winter, I'm going back to a place where ballsweat is a 24-hour reality, where dampness always rules. Can't you just smell the leisure? You bet you can! Take a fucking whiff!
See you before T'giving!

2006-10-30T12:49:00.000-05:00

LIKE MAKING BLOG OUT OF NOTHING AT ALL

I just bought Lady Sovereign's album at a store. What can I say? She told me to support her in her song, and when I saw in the Times (!) that "[a Hot 97 program director] said it would be hard for her to succeed where male British rappers like Mike Skinner, aka The Streets, have failed," (and I'm like, The Streets failed? Shit, bitch! What does it take to succeed in this context? I hate the music business!) it seemed appropriate to put my nonexistent money where my "Downloading Doesn't Hurt Sales Because I still Buy CDs" mouth is. It's fucking great.

* * *

The biggest tragedy in losing my cell phone would not be losing my phone numbers, although that would suck hobo cock. The real loss to the community of people who use my phone would be all the words that I have added to the T9 word-recognizion software's custom dictionary. I can't express myself properly without words like: plumper, boo, ungh, enh, fucktard, fuck, shit, niggaz, sheezy, magrizzle, narc, riddim, awoogah, and foofaraw.

* * *

Walking around on Halloween in lower Manhattan is terrifying. Everyone looked they had been invited to a biiig theme party, to which I had NOT been invited, called The Whores and Douchebags Party.

* * *

I got so mad the other day at a broken chopstick that came with my lunch. I was like GODDAMN IT NOW THIS and I felt utterly incapable of eating my lunch with anything but chopsticks. In retrospect I probably could have managed it with a fork. But instead, I repaired the broken chopstick with scotch tape and wolfed down my food in blind rage, with sticks.

* * *

JAMAICAN CO-WORKER: Do you think they 'ave ribs in 'eaven? I'm a eat ribs alla TIME in heaven.
UD: Ribs? You're gonna eat ribs all the time? That's heaven?
JC-W: (gets faraway look in eyes) Oh yes.
UD: Well if you eat ribs all the time, will you have to go to the bathroom in heaven too?
(long pause)
JC-W: Shit! [UD]! You just blew my MIN'.... Me nevva tink about de TAILET! I'm just workin' so 'ard to get into 'eaven I want to know wha's on the menu! BUT I NEVVA TINK ABOUT THE FACILITIES.

* * *

Cedric Bixler-Zavala, singer of The Mars Volta, does not just have a fake name -- he is a fake person. I do not believe that his voice is real. He's a vatgrown cyborg spawned from Robert Plant and a Moog synthesizer.
     If I had a fake name of my own, it would be one that would be hard to understand or spell, so that when I was giving my name to the hostess of a fancy restaurant, she'd have to ask me to repeat it.
     For this purpose I like the fakeronym "Gay Schechter," which could be plausibly pronounced "Gayish Hector" at first, but then, when said slowly, would still seem wrong. And then if they're like "can you spell the last name" I say "S-C-H-E-C-H-T-E-R" really fast and get all exasperated if they don't get it, and then I can go "Schechter! Like the Philosopher!" just to fuck with their confidence even further.
     And of course if they ask for the first name I get to shout "GAY" at them really loud.

Other names to give to snooty Hostesses or Maitres-D':
• Guy Gretsch-Harmon, pronounced "ghee-gret sharmin"
• Tiger Ganger, which is just funny no matter what
• King Hungry VIII

2006-10-18T16:38:00.000-05:00

UD: OMG. Look what Fuzzysquid just sent me:

UD: YES THEY PUT A SHRIMP ON A TREADMILL

CLM: OWE MY EFFING GODD

UD: I think there's something in Revelation about this

CLM: "And all the creatures that creepeth upon the ground, lo, shall creepeth, but advance not; for man shall have made for the creatures a path, upon which no one can advance."

UD: HAAAAAAAAAAAA

2006-10-16T15:48:00.000-05:00

I went to a doctor today, and the receptionist put me in the exam room to wait. While there, she complained about the quaint computer in the exam room into which, apparently, the doctor enters patient notes. Then she left, but left my like patient visit note document up on the screen. It read, in part:

GENERAL APPEARANCE: Well-developed, well-nourished 31-year-old male.

and then:

ORIENTATION: Well-oriented, mature, cooperative 31-year-old Male.

Now I don't really know what to make of it, because either the receptionist/nurse/assistant wrote that assessment today based on my five minutes in the waiting room, or the doctor wrote it at the time of my last visit, a year ago. I have to suspect the first option is more likely, because I cannot imagine that I looked "well-nourished" or "well-oriented" (whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean) a year ago. I believe that I was cooperative, because I didn't get wrestled to the ground by any muscular orderlies. But who, I want to know, judged me "mature"? I don't mind, I'm just wondering what criteria could possibly have been used to make such a determination. I guess I balance my checkbook kinda often, just like Old Cousin Grandpa. And I have a bowl of hard candies in the foyer. And I need the afghan for my legs, there's a draft in here! But how did they know that?
Maybe they have a machine.

2006-10-11T15:32:00.000-05:00

So now drinking water is supposed to be good for me? I'm not supposed to drink only coffee? Coffee has water in it. I prefer water with just about ANYTHING in it to water sans serif. Water that pays no attention to my needs is reflexively denied entry to my arid gastrointestinal byways. My tongue just won't let it through, waggling all here and there like "nuh-uh, water!" Lately I've been putting this Airborne crap into my water because it makes it fizzy for about 5 minutes, makes it taste vaguely like a pink grapefruit, and it leaves a chicken-fat-like scum all over my cup. Oh yeah, and it was created by a second grade school teacher. Why do they say that? Why do they hype the fuck out of that dubiously beneficial fact all over the package and website? Am I supposed to trust a school teacher with my health over, say, a health professional? Perhaps -- Josef Mengele was a doctor, after all.
If I had a point when I started that paragraph, it was going to be that I don't like this whole "drink more water" health plan for the same reasons I don't like the "eat healthy" plan or the "exercize regularly" plan or the "get more than 3 hours sleep a night" plan: It just seems like it could get out of hand. Not only do people seem to be suggesting that I drink more water today, it seems they are recommending that I continue to do so essentially FOREVER. That just seems stupid. And I have to tell you, I think I eliminate most of the water I drink through urination, often within an hour of drinking it. To me this is like taking a pill that falls from your mouth directly down a tube and out of your ass onto the floor. What can the point be? What can the benefit be? Why am I wasting my PRECIOUS PRECIOUS TIME putting this clear liquid in me? Won't my liver, or my kidneys, OR WHATEVER MAKES PEE get out of shape if I coddle it so? What will happen if I drink something poisonous?

Can we all stop pretending, as a society, that Crocs are fit for humans to wear in public? I simply do not understand how people can be so glaringly clueless. I am not exactly a fashion plate, and like many men, I think nothing of buying a pair of sneakers and wearing them until they fall off. But I don't wear fucking traffic cones on my feet and go out for the night like it's no biggie. It's a fucking biggie, people. Has somebody already said that they look like Fischer Price's My First Flip Flop, with enclosed toes and safety straps for retarded children? Because they do. You look like you just stepped in a big steaming pile of Toys 'R' Us.

2006-09-28T14:20:00.001-05:00

I figured out why New Pope makes me so uncomfortable. Imagine him saying the following to you at a party:

"Of course we've met before. At your house.
Don't you remember? In fact...
...
I'm there right now."

eep

2006-09-25T16:08:00.000-05:00

Oh man. Why do people keep making good TV when I was absolutely convinced that TV was, like, over? Deadwood, Battlestar Galactica, and Thief have all been universally praised, and I guess I like Rescue Me, too. The first two episodes of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip were great in a deliciously familiar way: imagine that god used a giant whack-a-mole mallet to flatten The West Wing, but its essential elements just blorped up in L.A. instead of D.C.
     But I'm really into The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman on IFC. Hoo boy. I love shows that make fun of Los Angeles, and I like Laura Kightlinger, but I am mesmerized by Nicholle Tom. I never saw The Nanny, so it's not like I've been harboring some weird crush since adolescence. But apparently the creator of the Unofficial Nicholle Tom Homepage has. Man, the Netherlands is a weird place. That poor man is SO ANGRY about the non-support of other fake-ass SO-CALLED Nicholle Tom fans. Please read his front page tirade, it's such a perfect encapsulation of fanboyism -- like you really needed one. I envy his passion, if not his rampant, galloping pedophilia.

Say, when did they remove pseudoephedrine from every single product in the world? I'm not trying to manufacture any crank over here, I've just got a head full of hot yellow snot. I feel like a flan machine. So why does this DayQuil have a dubious decongestant called phenylephrine in it? I don't have time to investigate this substance, so if any of you want to Wik it up for me, I guess I'd be interested.
     I hate how DayQuil looks like it's gonna last forever, but each dayglo dose is like half a horseload of viscous alien blood, so the bottle empties faster than a horny horse's seminal vesicles (as for instance in Jackass: Number Two, which by the way I haven't laughed so hard in a movie theater since I saw the first Jackass movie.)

In UD vacation-related news: Either my old watch had greatly exaggerated its resistance to water, or I don't know how to read simple pictograms. Apparently the image of blue waves on my watchface, combined with "30m" meant "do not bring this watch within 30 meters of water." Whatever, Timex. I guess I'll give you one more chance, because I can't resist a company whose slogan once had the word "Licking" in it. And because I am cheap.
     I already started my watch-buying errand today before I remembered that I had another watch at home, but I wore that one during the hottest parts of the summer, so it got barnacularly encrusted with sweat-salt, and its band made my wrist smell like baloney. Anyway so I decided to set a budget for my purchase in light of the fact that it was essentially unnecessary: $20 tops. Well. If you think you can't get a kickass watch on your lunch hour in midtown for less than twenty bucks, I'm pleased to disabuse you of such defeatist fucktardation. For only $10.80 I got the toughest watch evah. You think your crazy G-shock commando chronometer is tough? I got bad news for you vis-a-vis the toughness of your stupid watch: my new watch has a fucking fighter jet for a second hand. My watch bombs your watch.

2006-09-15T13:59:00.000-05:00

So I'm going on vacation to the Caribbean during hurricane season. So I won't post for at least ten days (but you're used to being ignored, aren't you, Dovey? Aww c'mere, you lug. Who loves ya?).
If, however, I don't post for twelve days, break into my house, divide up my belongings amongst yourselves, and let your screams of ceaseless grief echo through the aluminum-sided valley of Lorimer Street, speaking of my charm, wit, balls, and grace. And balls. Oh, and by "balls," I don't mean "courage" or "moxie" or whatever. I mean my testicles, enclosed by my nutsack. Sing of my balls.

2006-09-12T16:19:00.000-05:00

There are several kinds of liquids that I would normally bring on a plane without even thinking about it that now I have to actually ponder whether it's worth the attempted totage if they're just going to get confiscated by overzealous, overliteral, underpaid, and (in my experience, almost always) overweight airline security forces. I'm not going shed any tears over a bottle of Mountain Dew: Code Red* if it gets routed to the thirsty workers' loot dumpster. But what about my expensive creams, lotions, and salves? Are balms liquid? Carmex, for example. It can seem pretty solid in the right temperatures, but it can also get a little runny if you like to rock with a cynlinder in your pants pocket. At what temperature are they judging the state of various substances? And have they published restrictions for gases? I like to travel with mylar bladdersful of my favorite gases. Okay maybe I don't, but DO YOU DARE ME TO?
I do travel with a number of things that contain liquid. I typically carry, in my toiletry kit, face lotion, eyedrops, india ink, rubbing alcohol, shaving cream (foam? liquid?), Robitussin, an Albuterol inhaler, tincture of Opium, Bonny Johnny brand aftershave, glycerin, hand sanitizer, aerosol Ubik, Soylent Blue, Soma, Soap, and the blood of Christian babies. Oh, and silver polish. Is lipstick solid? What about my gel insoles? Or my moods, which are mutable as the tides?

* Rejected alternate names for Mountain Dew: Code Red
Mountain Dew: Code Crimson
Mountain Dew: Code Chill-ain
Mountain Dew: Co-Children
Mountain Dew: Code Ruby Starfruit
Mountain Dew: Kode Krimzon Ekztreem
Mountain Dew: Kode Kremlin
Mountain Dew: KKKode Killun
Mountain Dew: Code Redneck Blood

2006-08-30T14:23:00.000-05:00

I stopped taking my Ritalin, and I'm afraid that you, notional readers, will suffer the most for it. I can barely have two consecutive thoughts that relate to each other, so writing two sentences on the same subject is like forget about it. One solution would seem to be the construction of huge sentences, but my brain is not fooled by such amateur ployage, you smartass punk. So I'm back to unconnected grab-baggy accretions of thought vomit. Like today's post!
     It's even worse at work, where I seem incapable of completing a task that takes longer than... is a femtosecond longer or shorter than a nanosecond? I could never use the word "nanosecond" in a punchline, but using a substitute prefix like "femto-" instead practically screams "I WAS GONNA SAY NANOSECOND BUT DIDN'T BECAUSE IT'S OVERUSED BY UNFUNNY PEOPLE AND ALL I COULD COME UP WITH WAS FUCKING FEMTO, BITCHES. EAT HOTT COXX."
     The only way I can write this post is if I make distraction-derailing rules like "no masturbating until you finish."

J.Ro sent me a link to a MySpace page advertising a retarded event called the Central Park Makeout, which is an event where a bunch of people are supposedly going to meet in the Sheep Meadow and kiss each other like a bunch of fucking high schoolers. Can you imagine the scene? Can you imagine the stench of wine coolers and flopsweat? Can you imagine all the people cruising by the Sheep Meadow all innocently like "oh, now what's this event here, a kissing party you say? How droll! Why not give it a whirl, eh chaps?" as if they weren't there to scope out potential mackees in the first fucking place? Such people will be easy to spot, because they will smell like MySpace (which, no surprise, smells just like sweaty taint). This event is so awful that I could talk about it for hours, like an episode of Survivor: All-Stars. But I won't, because it will just seem like I really want to go. Trust me, I don't. I've already got Herpes times a billion, thanks, because for years my social circle enacted the functional equivalent of a Central Park Makeout every weekend.
     In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if this event was actually created by Herpes itself, or Hep C, somehow acting through a human agent. I like this idea. I told J.Ro that I would only go if I could wear sweatpants, a corporate giveaway t-shirt, and a bright green Legal Observer hat. She wasn't familiar with this last accessory, so I showed her and she went blind. Then we had these IM exchanges:
UD: Google the phrase "sexy legal observer"
J.Ro: I got nothing.
UD: ...
J.Ro: Is that your point?
UD: WAH HA HA
     -----
J.Ro: I am making awesome iron ons right now
UD: I bet. But nothing could be as awesome as a legal-observer-green jumpsuit
J.Ro: if you ironed these onto it, it might vault into the over-awesome, and become invisible.

I love this image that I swiped from the FAA website, because the control tower and the two planes talk like they're in a Winsor McKay comic from like 1912.

2006-08-23T12:07:00.000-05:00

Being a superfamous A-list celebrity requires so many traits in combination -- talent, ambition, focus, emotional fortitude, charisma, looks, etc -- that I think it's impossible to make someone into a star who isn't already multiply gifted in a predestined kinda way. The myths of "luck" and "the big break" are somewhere between anecdotal and irrelevant, and serve mostly to contribute to the delusions of people who ain't got it and never will (otherwise known as "waiters"). The looks part is important but standards change over time, so your looks have to resonate with the public at the moment of your potential fame. AND bigtime film stardom requires the biggest stars to look "good" from the most possible angles (do you have a "good side"? some people just don't) and in the largest variety of clothes, and often without clothes (good here just meaning that you fit within specific margins of acceptable weight, proportion, etc etc etc). I'm saying that N*Sync may have been "created," but really the process of making a boy band involves seeking out kids with the Fame Qualities and jamming the five best ones together and crossing your fingers. (Do you remember how popular New Kids on the Block were at their height? Sheeit.) Good songwriting helps, but if your stars ain't got it, your good song can too easily become the One-Hit Wonder's one hit.
     N*Sync might have culled the kids with the highest FQ (Fame Quotient) at the time of their selection, but only one of them looks to have staying power. It's not the one whose name is funny if you say it "Fat One" instead of "Fa-Tone." So the FQ is always in flux, maybe, or maybe emotional fortitude only gets revealed over time, or the public's taste for your look abates, or you focus on things other than fame, like, I dunno, family, or life, or whatever. Then your fame is fucked. Which: congratulations! Fame is for chumps!
     (Reality shows illustrate the doom of a lopsided FQ really clearly. The main requirements for participation in your typical reality show are ambition, extroversion, and volatility. Ambition is one of the key elements of fame, but alone it is NEVER enough. Extroversion is unnecessary and volatility is a liability. Some shows focus on a specific aspect of the quotient, like looks for America's Next Top Model, or talent (I guess) for Project Runway or American Idol, but really. The lopsided FQ will prevent any aspirant from achieveing a-list fame; as an exercise, you can try to name five people who got famous through reality TV who will still be relevant in five years. Meet me by the statue of Garibaldi in Washington Square Park in 2011 and we can see how you did.)
     Anyway, who cares. I feel like I could go on about this forever, but I'd get super depressed.

LINKS YOU'VE PROBABLY SEEN BY NOW BUT FUCK IT:
• The Top 10 Will Ferrell SNL skits ever. Neil Diamond and Harry Caray are just unbelievable. Also, it seems that WF relies a lot on shouting for his comedy, and on the phrase "smack you in the mouth."

• Check out this artist description from AllMusic of mostly forgotten but Wu-sampled girl grouper Wendy Rene. The second paragraph is the best Easter egg I've ever seen on AllMusic. Read it before they delete it.

• Pitchfork's Top 100 Albums of the 1990s is a three year old feature that I'd never seen before. What's my problem? The album images are all missing, but the list is still captivating if you're into music and you came of musical age in the 90s. Don't skip ahead to the end, either, it's really cool if you count down with them in order. I kept on thinking of albums that I thought should be there, and I'd scroll all slowly like "is it... is it... no.... is it..." and every time one I loved was there I jizzed in my jeans. Also, one of my favorites made #11 and I totally didn't think anybody else even liked it. Only one album that I think should have been there was completely forgotten, but I'M SURE IT WAS AN OVERSIGHT. Lists can be reductive and irritating, but they can also be really helpful and satisfying, and my favorite thing about this one is that it makes a hell of a lot more sense to make "Best Album" lists for short chunks of time than for, like, Ever.

2006-08-12T14:36:00.000-05:00

Sometimes it seems so goddamn impossible to write a post, but the fact is that if I sit and try to write, thirty parpagraphs will spill out of me at once. I spend most of my lengthy posting process deleting text. I'm sorry for huge delays, but sometimes I just want to look at Wikipedia pages all day (So! Much! Information! Erich Honecker! Pancho Gonzales! The Free State of Fiume! A fucking hole in the ground!) Also, sometimes the shit that I write is just not appropriate for public consumption. I don't mean pornographic Battlestar Galactica fanfic or like that. I mean I was about to write -- or rather I half wrote and then stopped -- a rant about how a passive agressive acquaintance is driving me crazy, when I realized how unbelievably passive aggressive it would be to complain about her behavior on the fucking internet instead of talking to her about it. What the fuck? So instead I will tell you about something my dad said the other night that made me want to chew nails. I can bitch about my dad.
     I was talking to him about how I get really stressed when the driver of a car I'm in doesn't use their turn signal before they turn. He knows that I feel this way because we've spoken about it in the past. My feeling on the matter is summed up easily with the following point: a) use your fucking turn signal. Gah.
     I realize there are probably some of you who don't like signaling every time you turn or whatever. Maybe you like to decide on a situation-by-situation basis. Maybe you think signaling when you can't see a car behind you is stupid. Well hurrah for you! You're awesome! Wheee! Let's all punch babies! I don't care.
     Whatever your reasons for making a choice out of something that would be automatic if it could be (viz the way some new cars turn on the headlights if you turn on the wipers) they can't compare to the following arguments my dad has used to defend his non-use of the turn signal in situations where (for starters) the law requires it:
ARGUMENT #1: (abandoned years ago, but vividly recalled by me) "They make car parts to certain specifications, and certain parts are designed to break after a certain amount of time. I had a friend who was an engineer who said that he designed a door handle for a car company, and they told him that it was too sturdy. It broke after 500,000 uses. They wanted one that broke after 100,000. So I'm just saving wear and tear on the signal. It may be designed to snap off in my hands, but I can delay that day if I don't overuse it."
ARGUMENT #2: "At least I'm not as bad as some people, like [name withheld], who, if she forgets to signal a certain amount of time before a her exit comes, won't make the turn at all, because god forbid she makes a turn without signaling. Or she'll signal late and turn late as a result, sometimes too fast, which is dangerous."
ARGUMENT #3: "If you always use your signal, you might expect the same kind of behavior from everyone else, and that could create a very dangerous situation; some people don't signal before changing lanes, or before turning, or -- worst of all -- they signal right and go left! If you're not ready for that, you could easily get killed."

     Oh yes he did.

     So I waited briefly for the "just kidding" that I knew wasn't coming, took a deep breath, and said something to the effect of: "I understand the desire to use the tools and language of reason to justify one's emotions, because god knows I do it too, but an important part of that is mentally testing one's arguments before speaking them aloud to make sure they are not UTTERLY FUCKING INSANE. Simply mimicking the structures and cadences of logic is not sufficient.
     "Allow me to summarize the meaty parts of your two latter points:

#2: I may not always use the turn signal, but I know people who use the signal in a really retarded way! I don't seem so bad now, do I?
#3: You shouldn't do the right thing because it might train you to expect the same from others.

     "Can you really not see how FUCKED FUCKED FUCKED up those are?
     "Now let me anaolgize them in a hyperbolic but hopefully illustrative way. The first is like saying "I may be a rapist, but at least I'm not a murderer!" The second is like saying "You shouldn't go around not killing people because it might train you to expect people not to kill you, and you won't be ready if someone does."
     I'm not entirely sure how I stopped ranting at him, but it something to do with futility and a sense that he had tuned out as soon as he detected a note of criticism coming his way. Or maybe he tuned out when I screamed "FUCKED FUCKED FUCKED" at him. Or when I called him insane. Hmmmm. So I never got to say the next part, which was going to be something like "You are not a special magic man who doesn't need to use your turn signal, just as you are not a special magic man who doesn't need a seat belt, or who can decide for himself whether it's safe to talk on the cell phone while driving. When your wife and tweenage daughter are in the car, your responsibility is to more than your petty rebellions. You can be a goddamn authority-flouting brat when you aren't hurtling down the road at somewhere between 10 and 20mph over the speed limit. You cannot overcome the physical reality of the world through sheer will alone."

Glaarrgle, people. Fucking gllllaaargle.

2006-08-07T16:02:00.000-05:00

I saw a story in Metro (one of two free morning newspapers that appeared in NYC sometime in the last couple of years) that reminded me why I hate crappy newspapers. It's not Metro's fault, they were picking up a wire story, and I kind of like the fact that the story is all about a lady complaining about how she has been portrayed in newspapers. Anyway, a story in some paper called her the "Skull Stripper." I was understandably horrified at that sensationalist moniker, but it was all a sham. Turns out she is a stripper who has some skulls in her house. Skulls she got from a mail-order catalog. Not, as I felt the name suggested, a lady who strips the skin from the skulls of her victims, probably while they are still alive and screaming.
Shiiiiit, man. That's like if they arrested a prostitute for having skulls in her house and the papers called her the "Skull Fucker." Tabloid crapsacks.

I saw The Descent this weekend, and I thought a lot about critics and reviews. I thought about horror as a genre. Then I thought that it would be funny if there were a small independent movie out at the same time called The Docent. I pictured staffers at a multiplex theater deliberately misdirecting customers to The Docent, pretending they read their tickets wrong. Meatheads going "who is this fucking old lady and why is she walking around the MoMA? Where are the hot chicks and CHUDs and shit? Fuck!" Then I laughed myself to sleep.

2006-07-21T14:41:00.000-05:00

NOTES FROM NEW ENGLAND, Part I
I do a really good Maine accent. I could do an audio post to prove it to you, but unfortunately I'm not gay, so that won't happen. But I beg your trust: the Mainers kept on saying "you do the accent better than most Mainers" -- which is a perfect Mainer statement if I ever heard one -- so all the Californians who were like "your Maine accent suxx!" can eat hott coxx with the joxx, because they knew not of which they spoke, and were mad jealous of my skills.

So Thursday June 29 around 7:30pm I get picked up after work by my pal Andy (I'm not gonna waste time trying to come up with temporary pseudonyms for anybody who doesn't already have an established nickname or internet identity). Immediately he apologizes for the lack of AC in the car, explaining that he bought the '98 Saab from a friend for exactly nothing, so it's a little dodgy. Wires of all color and gauge poke from orifices in the dash. I lean back all cool and say "Andy, the thing about driving with me is that I don't give a fuck. I don't care how fast we get there, I don't care if shit doesn't work exactly right, and if we end up lost on the side of the road at 4am, that's cool too. I'm just happy to be riding with you." Andy says something like "Okay then," and we hit the road, North from 44th street on Madison. Wooo! Look out, Kennebunk! Here we come!
     We hit a small snag at the on-ramp for the FDR at 61st Street when the dashboard lights get all flickery, which Andy counters by revving the engine in neutral every time we stop in the outgoing holiday traffic. He pulls to the side of the ramp and takes a quick gander under the hood, which is not so ridiculous because he actually knows something about cars. And whatever he sees makes him decide to get off the FDR at the next exit, and he hands me a Saab repair manual -- a well-worn repair manual that exhibited characteristics of frequent and recent use -- and says with disarming nonchalance "see if you can find anything under 'alternator'."
     We stall at the next exit and do that fun thing where you open the doors like wings and push your car and then jump in like bobsledders and pop the clutch. We fill the radiator from a Slurpee cup at the Shell on 96th or somefuckingwhere and after getting very rained on and told to move by a grumpy tanker truck driver, we hit the road, North on whatever avenue is right there. Woooo!
     As dusk falls on the Merritt Parkway it becomes clear that our headlights are dimmer than our hopes for America's future, and all the dials on the dash have fallen defeatedly to zero. It's always bad when that happens in a plane in a movie, but it's okay in a Saab in Connecticut. We get off at the next exit and when the car dies we just roll and roll and roll until we see a completely deserted area with no street signs or identifying markers at all. Which is maybe not the best plan, in retrospect.
     BUT ANYWAY there we are, an hour out of New York after three hours on the road. The place is deserted except for passing cars that pay us exactly zero mind, but we call AAA and devise a plan. A tow truck will be here in half an hour. I take out my guitar and put on some long pants, and I start playing some songs. Andy pokes at the engine again, but he wants to play music too, so he opens his trunk and pulls out a fucking tuba. It's some kind of magical tuba that fits in the trunk of a hatchback, so maybe it was actually a Sousaphone or something, but he brought a tuba to Maine for a wedding, just in case, you see. Heh. But that's Andy. After five minutes of assembly and flarty sounds and valve-oiling, we're faking our way through some Daniel Johnston, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Joanna Newsom. We feel very cool because we're not panicking like SOME folks might in a similar situation. No indeed: LOOK AT HOW MUCH WE DON'T GIVE A FUCK! WE'RE JUST MUSICIANS AND TRAVELERS fucking TROUBADORS DAMMIT GLLLARRGLE!
     After about five minutes we silently realize that we were much more into the idea of whipping out instruments like we didn't give a fuck than we were into the buggy and humid reality of the situation. We're packing up a little sheepishly as the tow trucker arrives like oh fuck lookit these goddamn clowny faggot fucks.
So we hit the road (Woooo!) and it's tow tow tow, McDonald's (which: barrruf), tow tow tow, 58 miles to the Saab dealership in Hartford. It's a noisy windy ride, and the driver clearly has no sense of direction AT ALL. He's working from point-to-point directions he got from AAA, and as always, point-to-point directions are fine until you fuck up. He pulls off the highway North of Hartford to ask a gas station for directions, at which point we discovered a book with tons of detailed local maps in it that was crisp and minty from never being used. (I should point out that nothing else in the cab of his truck could be described as "crisp" or "minty." Except for, I suppose, the Kools the driver chain-smoked all the way to the destination.) Anyway we weren't lost at all, and he was just a dude who had no business driving people around for a living. But he got us to the Saab dealership, where we ditched the expired Saab and got a $40 cab to the airport Avis rental place, where we rented a slammin' cream-colored Taurus, hit the road (Woo!) and cruised to Boston without incident, waking our pals in Cambridge at 3:30am for a quick game of mumbledy-peg before going to bed.
     To summarize: eight hours and four vehicles to get from New York to Cambridge. Somewhere in there Andy observed that he was glad I wasn't full of shit when I said that stuff about being a good traveling companion. I felt cool when he said that.

At the rehearsal dinner, they had a seafood buffet that included watermelon slices for dessert. Because I am a super fucking megagenius, I took some lemon wedges from the fish platter and squeezed it all over my watermelon, creating fucking AWESOME GENIUS WATERMELON. I made people taste it, and the sequence was always the same:
     1. "Why are you shoving watermelon in my face?"
     2. "Okay fine, calm down, I'll take a bite. Jeez."
     3. Munch munch.
     4. Eyes open wide.
     5. "HOLY FUCK THAT'S AMAZING."
That's right, bitches. It spread across the room like Ebola. Because I'm a super genius, and NOBODY HAS EVER DONE THIS BEFORE. People were all walking up to me like "Are you [U.D.]? The guy who made watermelon awesome? Such is my gratitude that I wish to cradle your genitals in my hands."

That same dinner featured one of my favorite events from the entire vacation. It starred Mary, who is generally a very excitable and cheer-filled gal, and it went like this:
MARY: Oh! I can't believe how good this seafood chowder is! Mmmmm! I can't get enough! Waagh! This is like my third bowl! I LOVE IT.
ZORGOT: Yeah, that's because it's got bacon in it.
MARY: What?
ZORGOT: Bacon. That's why it tastes so good.
MARY: But... I'm a vegetarian....
A pause. A hush falls over the table.
MARY: Or at least, I WAS. That tastes AMAZING. Holy shit! I love bacon! Why did I ever stop eating bacon? OH MY GOD. BAY-CONNNN!!!
ALL: Hooray!

2006-07-14T16:46:00.000-05:00

I've been trying to do one of my travelogue emails about my trip to Maine and Massachussets and all but I have to tell you about something first. I saw a pill-dispensing robot at the CVS near my doctor's office and it was FUCKING HOTT. I hate CVS, but there it was, looking capable, which I know is a lie but I was in a hurry to get back to work. So I walked in, asked them if they a) had my drug in stock and b) could fill it sometime this century. Then I totally rolled my eyes. At the end of the roll, my eyes fell on a Willy Wonka-looking machine that once a minute disgorged a pill bottle. I got all giddy. There was a window in the side of the thing with a bunch of drawer-like hoppers. I was like "ooh ooh ooh" at the pharmacy assistant like a kindergartner who needs to pee. She was like "yes?" and I was all "oh my god does that machine fill prescriptions all by itself? Does it have like the top 100 drugs in it?" and she replied "No, it has the 100 most frequently prescribed drugs in it" as if I hadn't just said that, but whatever, and I was like "and so it puts on the label and picks the right bottle size and counts the pills and puts warning stickers on it too?" and she begrudgingly admitted that that was the case, adding finally, with a hint of a grin: "we just got it." And I said a little too loudly "WELL I THINK THAT'S AWESOME." She stared at me a sec. And then told me that in fact she couldn't fill my script this century but I could come back when the next ice age began and I was all "later for that noize bitches" but secretly I didn't care because that pill robot was the motherfucking shiznit.

2006-06-29T15:15:00.000-05:00

Before leaving you postless for at least 10 days, I thought I'd give you something to do. A project. I made a MySpace page that features four of my songs. I know some of you out there are totally gay for MySpace, so go to the page and make me your friend. I won't refuse. Then tell influential trendsetting street-teamers to spread the fucking gospel of John Barleycorn's MySpace page. Oh and after this post has fallen below the fold, you can find the link over on the left, there. Please drink responsibly in my absence.

2006-06-27T12:25:00.000-05:00

I'm leaving for Maine on Thursday night and I'll be gone for over a week. I'll be going to Zorgot's wedding, my second of the season. Weddings often make me tired, but this one will be awesome. Heh. What doesn't make me tired? I get tired taking a shower. All that scrubbing wears me the fuck out.
     Parties wear me out too. Here's something that's messing with my head: part of this wedding situation involves a bachelor party. Buh-buh-bachelor Party. I want to vomit just typing the words. I've never been to an actual bachelor party, and the one that I'm attending this weekend will not resemble a typical BP in any way, except in the even ratio of X to Y chromosomes among the attendees and the consumption of inadvisable amounts of alcohol. My friends couldn't throw a real BP if they tried, which is of course why I love them. Because without having ever been to a real BP, I know that I hate everything about them. Just like I know that I don't want to camp out in a rainforest. Or eat scrapple. Or go to Las Vegas. Or get a sloppy drunken lapdance from a goddamn stripper. Fuck!
     I've avoided bachelor parties thus far for a number of reasons: 1) most of my friends are girls, so when I go to their weddings, I don't get invited out by their grooms; 2) my friends haven't gotten all that married yet; 3) as I said, the kind of people I hang out with wouldn't have a bachelor party anyhoo. Does this mean that I think you're lame if you've attended, enjoyed, or thrown a bachelor party? Yep. I sure do. I hate the entire concept. I hate the idea that someone who is about to get married agrees with the notion that the eve of his wedding is his "last night of freedom" -- why the fuck are you getting married, Chachi? Tax Purposes? Sheesh.
     I tend to avoid situations where there are no women present, because boys can be fucking disgusting when there are no chicks around. Not me, of course -- I'm exactly the same no matter what. I enjoyed The 40-Year-Old Virgin but found many of the characters repulsive and I was glad that they resembled nobody I knew. If anyone ever pointed at a girl and asked me if I intended to "hit that shit" I think I would blush, mumble something noncommittal, and vow silent vengeance. That's right. Silent vengeance, muhfucker!
     All right. I could go on about that but I actually find it really boring to explain why bachelor parties are lame. If you have to ask, you'll never know.

Um. Did you know I was really good at pinball? It's true. My two favorite tables are the Indiana Jones trilogy table and The Creature from the Black Lagoon table. I was giddily ecstatic to see the latter machine in Lars von Trier's living room while watching The Five Obstructions. All geeked out.

2006-06-21T23:11:00.000-05:00

Know this, ye bloggers and livejournalers¹ and movable-typists and diarylanders: your words are public. Some useful tips if you're new at the game:

Don't write anything that reveals how small-minded, ignorant or bigoted you are -- it will come back and bite you on the ass if you ever pursue a career in politics. You have two options for your racist diatribes:
- Write stuff like that in a special pink diary with a heart-shaped golden clasp that you can lock with a special key (also heart-shaped) that goes on a delicate chain around your neck. Keep the diary itself under your pillow. Once a week, try spritzing it with your favorite perfume to keep it smelling fresh!
- Create a special other web page under a pseudonym. If you can't think of a good pseudonym for your alter ego, consult the chart in the footnote below.²
Don't post anything about someone that you wouldn't feel comfortable saying to his or her face. Even if it seems totally improbable that your subject would ever read your pathetic website, it happens all the time. Go ahead: say something in passing about an acquaintance, just a little joke, just an end-of the paragraph segue. If it's possible that it can get blown wayfuck out of proportion or totally misinterpreted, I guarantee that someone will read it, forward it to the subject of your quip, in an email with a subject line that says, like, "Um... I think you should read this...." Oh, and it's even possible that the emailing samaritan might not actually know the acquaintance at all. She's just going out of her way to serve the cause of bloggy justice. OR WHATEVER. Then guess who's paying for drinks the next ten times at the bar? That's right.

That said, I'm going to complain in a public forum about my landlord.
     My landlord is not a big management company, a faceless corporation, or a government entity. He's just a regular guy from the neighborhood, who, after he retired, bought some property and started living the American Dream (at least, the version described in Monopoly). As far as I can tell, he owns two properties: the two-apartment building in which I live and the building in which he lives. Right across the street from me.
     Oh did I mention that before he retired, he was a cop? A detective, apparently, though none of my roommates seem to know what division he worked, you know -- Homicide? Vice? Internal Affairs? Anyway, this datum would not in itself have bothered me overmuch. In theory, I think detectives are cool.
     It turns out that in practice they can be creepy. When he wants to talk to any of us, he doesn't call us on the phone. Instead, he usually materializes from behind a van or something in front of the house just as we're leaving or approaching the building. It's unnerving as hell. My theory is that he prefers to talk to people in person -- so he can tell if they're lying.
     It's obviously hard for Detective Landlord to turn off his powers of observation and deduction. As a result, I keep the blinds in my room closed at almost all times. This may seem a little paranoid -- surely he's got better things to do than gaze out his window at his tenants, right? You might think so, but listen to this little tale:
     It was wicked hot for the last couple of days, so I finally dragged my sorry, ragged little air conditioning unit out from under the table in the corner of my room and stuck it in the window. Sweet motherfucking relief. But my roommate Jewelly took one look at the unit and said "Detective Landlord isn't gonna like that. He has those air-conditioner sleeves installed in the walls and I bet he won't like you using a window unit instead."
     I said "but I can't put mine in the sleeve because it vents to the side instead of the back, and I can't afford a special $700 AC unit just bec--"
     "It doesn't matter. I'm just saying that he's gonna bother me about it. You'll see. I can almost guarantee that as I leave the house to go to work tomorrow, he'll appear and talk to me about it."
     "Nah," I said, "that would be crazy. If he has a problem he'll call me. If he even notices the AC."
     "Oh he noticed all right. Just wait. You'll see," she said.
     At 9am this morning she called my cell. "UD. I told you. I told you. He saw the AC and he wants you to move it. He wants you to call him. I told you he'd stop me. God." I could hear her shudder. "Think about what this means, the fact that he was able to catch me leaving the house. I left at like 7:30, which is earlier than usual. He was RIGHT THERE."
     "Damn," I said."That means he must have been... like... waiting? Awake? Staring out the window?"
     "Standing in the vestibule, maybe?"
     "Or watching your window for the first sign of light from within? Oh my god."
     "Maybe he waited up all night just to be sure he wouldn't miss me. He was on a civilian stakeout. This is scary. My window is in the back; he couldn't have been waiting for lights."
     "I fucking hope he doesn't have cameras... oh god."
     "Waaaaah!"
     "Waaaaaah!"

....aaaaand Scene! Thanks very much. Help.

--------

¹ I actually prefer the term "livejournlings" for LJ users -- it feels like a combination of yearnings (such as the desires for attention and for a community of people who understand you) and yearlings (which here serves as a synonym for juveniles). Journlings. Heh. Never give the naïve a pen. Always give the naïve a pen!

² BIGOTED PSEUDONYM GENERATOR -- Take a first name from column A and a last name from column B:

A Tools	B Presidents
Hammer Spanner Crowbar Maul	McKinley Hayes Nixon Quincy Adams

2006-06-16T21:22:00.000-05:00

Okay, before I post anything else, here's the long promised NHL Team Name Tournament.
     Everything takes so stupidly long to complete. I want to complete team name tournaments for every major (and some minor) sports leagues in the country, so that I can then have a super super team name tournament of all the winners of the earlier ones. That would be a serious clash of titans, yeah. But I think it would get ridiculous or impossible at a certain point.
     As I mentioned in the notes for the NHL tourney, I've identified six unbeatable team names, instant winners of any team name tournaments: Gravity, Chaos, Time, Energy, Infinity, the Void. Before you argue with me about them, I want to head off some obvious criticisms at the pass:
• I'm not saying these are the only six.
• A lot of other big candidate concepts are synonyms, subsets, or siblings of the ones I've got (e.g. Heat doesn't need to be there because Energy kind of encompasses it).
• I can see how you could argue that Infinity and the Void are opposite sides of the same coin and maybe should only count as one concept, in which case I'd rather go with Infinity.
• I know I didn't include Mass in the list. Partly I left it off because Energy is there, and E=mc². I realize that by this logic I shouldn't include Time on the list, as I also left off any expression of the concept of Distance (Dimension, Space, etc.); and some would say that Time is just another dimension, another measure of distance. Hey, and Chaos, when considered as a synonym for Change, is a time-based phenomenon, so what gives, right? Fuck, I don't know.
• I'm willing to listen to arguments in favor of things like Life, Sentience, Intelligence, or even Art. But for the moment they seem less universal than terrestrial, and hence not as powerful. But I'm listening.

A reader asked for my views on "the recent tourist-stabbings here in our fair city," and I'm all too happy to oblige, in a babbly, barely-coherent, late-night fashion. I don't actually pay attention to hysterical disaster tabloid news, because it's bad for your brain, bad for your heart, and bad for mankind -- I'll get back to that in a second. But I saw a local news program while I was eating at the diner the other night, so I caught some details of this case. Also I looked up a few other facts on the web, and here's a summary: A homeless man with two first names stabbed four people over the course of two days before being apprehended. Victims included two Canadians, a Texan, and a Brooklyn man. The stabbings happened in the subway and in Times square.
     Okay. My commentary has more to do with the coverage than the event. I don't like to get my news from local TV news programs or tabloid newspapers, nor do most of the people I know. But a lot of people only get their news from such sources. I don't know the demographics for the NY Post's readership, but I'm betting that the poor, the undereducated, and the stupid are heavily represented. Seriously, that paper is for shit, and it shares several characteristics with the local news show I caught that night.
     Not to mention that every other story on the TV news show was about death, crime, or something burning, the angles on the stabbing story were perverse. The points they kept on hitting: A homeless man. Random, senseless attacks. Tourists attacked. Young women tourists, from Canada. Also a Texan, whose uncle made a point of saying to the press that he had forgiven the attacker. Um. The stabber had been arrested many times in the past for various things and GASP let back on the street. Brave people chased the attacker down after witnessing the Times Square attack. Blah blah fucking blah. (In an obvious attempt to keep the story from damaging tourism, several news organizations included NYC Police Commissioner Ray Kelly's comments that a) the attacks did not seem to be intentionally targeted at tourists, and b) violent crime in the city has gone down blah percent and crime in the subway has gone down blah percent.) Basically, the entire broadcast was saying: you're not safe. Fear strangers. The system is broken. Cars move fast and kill your babies. People lose their homes in fires. Drug arrest! Random violence is out to get you. Stay at home. Trust only your family, and maybe not even them. And oh yeah: buy lottery tickets!
     Fuck, I don't know. This is such well-tread ground. Local news sucks, smart people have always known that. But real journalism isn't sexy, and it isn't scary, and it doesn't make good TV. It doesn't make judgments, and one of the main thrills of exploitative sensationalist journalism seems to be the way that it allows its consumers to feel morally superior to other people.
     All right, I'm getting sleepy now. But how do we solve this shitty "news" problem? That documentary about the Fox News Channel mentioned a study that showed that Fox viewers knew demonstrably less about the news, and believed things that were wrong. I'm not stating that as impressively as I could; the results were truly shocking. But I think this happens all the time. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that certain news sources -- or even certain types of news source -- cause actual damage to their consumers. Should there be laws about what can be called news? Fuck, maybe not. But if an organization purporting to present "news" can be shown to be an instrument of control or repression, a source of misinformation, or just the propaganda arm of a corporation or political organization, shouldn't they be called some thing else? I'm so sleepy.
     Bad journalism is anti-American. Bad journalists, tabloid papers, and local news programs are this close to committing treason. Then again, trying to curb free speech is un-American too. Somebody help me out here? Can somebody explain to me how to save the country from rabid, unchecked, unregulated free-market capitalism? I don't understand anything anymore. I can't think anymore. Too much Murdoch.

2006-06-08T10:40:00.000-05:00

I'm glad that people dug the NBA Team Name Tourney (that's TNT for you kids at home) because maybe by the time I'm done with this post I'll have the next one done -- you'll know if the following acronym is hotlinked: NHL. Whoops, doesn't look like it. But I'll give you a preview for quicksies: the NHL features some of the least intimidating team names I've seen in pro sports, including but not limited to these doozies: The Capitals. The MightyDucks. The Maple Leafs. That's right I said "leafs," bitches.
     Don't you hate it hate when you have a whole bag of pickles but every time you reach in at random you only get the sour when you're craving the half-sour action? It's like, okay, yeah, I can roll with this full flava for another pickle or two, but if I don't get some halfsies up in this piece I'm'a pickle somebody's muhfuckin' face, knaamean? (And don't come up in here suggesting that I segregate my pickles, aight? Not gonna happen.)
     Ahem. Last Friday was my birthday and I marked it peacefully with four family members. (Last year's three-parties-in-one extravaganzago was great, but cellularly exhausting; a once-a-decade kinda deal, mos def.) Here's an anecdotal example of why my family is so awesome: First of all, I've got them trained so that unbidden, unreminded, uncoached, and uninstructed, they go straight for my Amazon Wishlist, read my notes and priorities, and order accordingly, from Amazon. When I get to my mom's house for dinner, I can see several unopened Amazon UPS boxes, and that they had arrived hours before. She unpacks them and wraps their contents despite my protestations that my pals and I routinely exchange gifts in unopened Amazon boxes, and it's totally cool. After eating cake I open a gift from my mom, and it's this wicked awesome illustrated step-by-step book called The Directory of Knots. It's got a spiral spine, so its stays flat while you manipulate ropes. My Mom enjoys watching me drink in its awesomeness, and she's like "Ohh, when I saw that book I knew I had to get it for you, but it's so cool that I'm gonna have to buy myself a copy."
     My Aunt, her sister, replies "No you won't. I saw the book in the store too and bought him a copy for Christmas, so I'll just give it to you instead."
     Wah-ha! Perfect! 1) They both know how much I love knots and knot books, and despite a glut of awful knot books in print, they independently spotted the truly interesting one and bought it instantly; 2) deep down, they both want the book too.
     That anecdote also serves as a pretty strong argument for the preservation of the traditional "Brick & Mortar" bookstore. Or, at least, a VR emulation of the pedestrian browsing experience, with current book covers piped right in to the environment. Hmm. And maybe you could design your own store, maybe by picking "curators," bookstore display veterans who could design island or endcap-style displays with various topical or genre themes (or whatever!) and everybody would hear about the coolest displays and download them into their personal VR Bookstores, and the best designers would get really well-paid and the art of display design would go international, upping everyone's game until the Personal VR Bookstore™* becomes the kernel of the world's first real, workable, and goddamnit profitable Gibsonian cyberspace FOR REAL, chumps! YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST. Give me my money.

---------

*PVRB™, then obviously "P-VeRB™," as in: "Where's Jacob5000?" "Over there in the corner, sculpting his P-VeRB for his date tonight, gonna go book shopping with his gurl."

2006-05-25T21:40:00.000-05:00

I'm stupid, but I finished the graphic I promised at the end of the last post. It's not exactly a graphic, I guess; it's a three-page PDF. So, for you:
An NBA tournament decided entirely by team name.

2006-05-25T16:36:00.000-05:00

I bought some jeans. I bought some bright green underpants. I think that $20 pants and $10 shoes should make you wonder about how many hours the 12-yr-old Thai girl who made them had to work before she could afford a don't-whip-me-today voucher. Midtown at lunchtime, a clogged toilet of festering humanity, about to overflow.
Okay, now, for a prize (TBA) tell me what author I'm currently reading who spawned that mercifully aborted pastiche of a paragraph. Stu is disqualified from this because he knows.

10 END FOOLISHNESS 20 BEGIN POST FOR REAL

Somebody else was watching at my house, so I watched, some of the last Clippers vs Suns NBA playoff game the other night. Several comments:

I don't know much about the Clippers, except that they are named after a boat or grooming tool, they are from LA but are not the Lakers, and they have been a punchline since forever.
I was therefore impressed by the fact that they were in the playoffs, until I remembered that in NBA, getting to the playoffs is the equivalent of the 200 points you allegedly get on the SAT for signing your name.
From a purely literal team-name standpoint, it seemed a foregone conclusion that the "Suns" would beat the "Clippers." I like this idea, except that the Suns would therefore have to dominate everybody always. They don't, right? This reminds me of a story that doesn't belong in this bullet point. Look for it in the next paragraph.

Okay, quickly: while I was at Oberlin, one of the cartoonists for the weekly student paper was David Rees, who later achieved fame with clip art and bad words (and I say that with the highest regard). He was a genius back then, too, and my favorite cartoon was about Oberlin's sports teams, which were awful (which was fine with anybody who wasn't one of the teams, because: joxx can eat hott coxx) and who also had a bad default name: the Yeomen. It was obsolete, weird, and gender-specific in a way that did not fly at Oberlin, resulting in girls teams called the Yeowomyn or the Yeoherstory or whatever. David's comic was a non-linear job where he just suggested a bunch of possible new names for the team, and without a bunch of explanatory folderol, neither. The one I remember -- and I remember it all the time -- was "the Oberlin Universe Controllers." Heh! Universe Controllers! I dunno. Tickled me. Funny because so demonstrably false, so not intimidating. Shit, I don't need to explain why it's funny. Just promise me you'll think about it for a sec. SO MY POINT IS: who can beat the Suns in a stand-up literal team-name fight? The Universe Controllers, that's who. Can you think of anybody in the NBA whose name could possibly even challenge the Suns? I can think of only two possibilities, but now I like this idea enough to waste a few hours on a graphic. So....
So stay tuned for a "humorous" graphic. I'm hoping it will be so funny that it will get forwarded and linked and then start an internet trend of unfunny imitations. But remember, bitches: you saw it here first. Or back when fake tournaments were a weird internet fad in like 1999. Or in a New Yorker cartoon a couple months back. Shut up. THAT'S HOTT. Seacrest out! (...and honey, if what I saw last night is true, apparently so is Clay Aiken OH SNAP OH NO YOU DI'I OH MAH GAH OH YES I DI'.)

2006-05-16T00:56:00.000-05:00

I had two goals for this evening:

1) cut my hair, and
2) write a post -- for this blog.

Two goals is not a lot to ask of my A.D.D. A.S.S., but the procrastination-distraction part of my brain is run by an evil genius (think Lex Luthor) who welcomes any challenge with bass-chuckling, finger-steepling glee. To be honest, Lex was hard at work before I even framed my goals for the evening, because the goddamn haircut was itself a distraction -- a totally justifiable and very time-consuming distraction -- from the only goal that really mattered to me: this post. Here is a list of the things I did that were neither hair-cutting nor post-writing. The weirdest part of tonight's menu of diversion is many of the items were multitasked; I'm so efficient at not doing what I set out to do that I can now get twice as many non-essential tasks accomplished! If only I could teach myself to construe my main to-do list items as non-essential, maybe I could trick myself into getting them done first. Lex is way too evilly genius to be fooled by such a clumsy ruse.

Played God of War on the PS2 until I got to a part where I had to flip a switch that I knew would open an important door, but would also release like ten hammer-weilding giants on my ass, and I sat there in mute, frowny, but mild displeasure. Getting stymied by a procrastination is irritating.
- Meanwhile, I fought the instinct to write a review of God of War for the Review blog, which would have used up today's allotment of Blog Mojo (Heh heh: BM for short. Or even better: BloMo. Heh! "I blew my BloMo on the God of War!")
Watched a Scrubs ep with my roommate that I'd already seen -- yesterday, in fact. Laughed even harder this time.
Watched the opening sketch from this week's SNL, which featured an oval office broadcast from President Al Gore, played by the man himself. Almost cried (with sadness and anger, not humor. It was funny, but oh man, it made me want to start the revolution.)
Played Pass the Pigs and Cosmic Wimpout with the same roommate. She won the former, lost the latter.
Called TimeWarner Cable customer Service to straighten out this serious molassesy service problem. For weeks the service has been totally jacked, and nothing we did fixed the problem. The lady who answered the call was really mean and cold and was clearly taking out a bad day on me -- unprofessional, but I can imagine how hard customer service can be on one's patience, so I forgive you, mean lady. BUT! The tech support guy she transferred me to was without a doubt the coolest TWC employee on the continent (he was in Ontario). After he fixed my service problem with the tech support equivalent of a flick of his wrist, Ned and I talked about regional differences in North American accent and vocabulary, which prompted him to give me a link to this page [Results from a dialect survey], which prompted me to give him the link to the soda/pop/coke chart, which at the same time allowed me to introduce him to tinyurl.com, which is a revelation the first time you see it. Recognizing a kindred spirit, he then gave me the following list of links: toothpaste for dinner, a minicomic site; Preshrunk, which is about t-shirts, I think; bash.org, an archive of humorous interactions from the chat function of MMOGs; Penny Arcade, which I haven't looked at yet; bodytag.org, specifically the java applet plagues12, which is apparently some kind of locust emulator. Thanks again, Ned!
- Meanwhile, I made cookie dough with the intention of eating it raw. It is in the freezer now, chillin'.
Talked to Confusing Wizard about education.
- Meanwhile, I made an ate a bowl of Ramen.
At this point I actually cut my hair, the distraction on the to-do list. It took almost two hours.
Did the dishes from two previous distractions.
Perhaps most retardedly, went out at 1:45am to satisfy a left-field pickle jones before finishing the first paragraph of this post. See, Saturday night, walking home at 3am from ghastly mess's house (after a late night of games: Cities and Knights of Catan, Liar's Dice, and Casino) I passed a neighborhood 24-hr health-food-specializing deli/grocery and they had pickles that were fucking great. I ate like eight pickles that night, and I've been craving them ever since. I don't know where they get them, but the half sour are as good as the full sour. Mmm. Oh yeah, so tonight I went out to get some more.
- Meanwhile, I called one sleeping New Yorker and two Californians. None of them picked up the phone.
Ate pickles.

Finally, I finished this post. It's fucking late. I wish I could sleep. I think I can refill my Ambien scrip tomorrow. Good night, my children.

2006-04-27T01:24:00.000-05:00

School is full of lies that even kids can tell are lies. They tell kids lies because they think the truth is too complicated, harsh, or just plain anti-American for young brains to handle, or more to the point, because school is not really about truth, or even education in its purest sense. Kids may not be able to figure out the whole truth, and they may not even care, but the effect of lying to kids is that you lose their trust, and they start to disengage. Maybe that's the point?
      One thing that always bothered me as a child was the story of how Louis Braille went blind. Do you remember the bullshit story? It goes: young Louis Braille is hanging around the early 19th century equivalent of the garage (come to think of it, I suppose it might have been the garage) and long story short he pokes out both of his eyes with an awl. Maybe he doesn't poke them out, but the implication is that of serial ruination, of sequential awl-putting-in-eyes.
     I don't care how young you are. That shit doesn't sound right. Who can continue to hold an awl after putting it in one of their eyes, let alone use it to fuck up their other eye? Well. I waited a long time to check the wikipedia about this, but I just did. Turns out he fucked up one eye and the other one went blind out of sympathy. See for yourself. Heh. Well, that makes a lot more sense now, doesn't it? He only poked out one of his eyes. Still, it seems kinda weird to be putting an awl in your eye, even if you're very bored. The kid was three years old, which makes it a little more believable.
     God, I remember the power the word "awl" had for me after I heard that story for the first time. And the actual object was like forget it. Whenever I got within five feet of an awl, I got very wary, because here was a tool that could make you do dangerous things. Was it like fleeting urges I used to have to fling myself from high places? They weren't suicidal, these urges, just curious, but they definitely gave the momentary sensation that I was not fully in control of my actions. I imagined awls doing something like that, hypnotizing children into hurting themselves against their will, like a haunted kitchen knife in a bad horror movie, infused with the angry ghost of its first victim. Maybe you weren't responsible for violent acts committed with an awl. Like your parents could burst into your room, see you standing over the corpse of your obviously awled-to-death little brother, and give you a horrified face like "what did you do?!?!" until their vision falls on the bloody awl in your hand and they go "Ohhhh," with resigned comprehension, Mom pointing it out to Dad: "Awl."
      Well whatever. I wrote this because even though the Braille story always bothered me, I have found myself -- as an adult, and while sober -- putting very sharp things near my eyes for various reasons that couldn't possibly good enough. Do you ever do this? I'll find myself looking very closely into the mirror with the sharpest tweezers ever made, and think "If a car backfired right now, or if somebody just said 'Boo' real loud, I could perforate this fucking eye. Maybe I should get this thing away from my peepers." But I persist with whatever cockamamie task I believe is being accomplished. Would you trim your eyelashes with a double-edged razor pinched between your fingers? I'm not quite that ridiculous, but the difference is scant. Stupid is.

2006-04-11T02:02:00.000-05:00

After all the press about Ambien causing people to sleepwalk, sleepeat, sleepdrive, and do on, I was proud to report that all I'd ever really done under the influence was sleepbabble, sleepcomposesongsaboutgoats, and sleeptalkaboutHarryPotter. Oh, and I have a tendency to turn on the light so I can write down ideas that seem like utter genius at 3am but in the light of day turn out to be really boring (you should be glad (or rather, I'm really glad) that I don't try to sleepblog.) But! I wasn't gaining weight and I wasn't endangering nocturnal animals.
But last Saturday morning at 6:30am, about three hours after taking my sleeping pill, I got up, went to the kitchen, and made myself a rather involved snack. I had no memory of doing so until I found the recipe I had transcribed during the creation of this unique dish, which I will reprint here verbatim, straight from the index card that bears the unmistakable handwriting of Sleepy-Time Jer. All errors are sic, faithfully and embarrassingly reproduced. The tautologically superfluous first line is not a part of the recipe, but rather an optimistic exhortation to the housemates -- STJ is nothing if not generous:

Eat while there is still some left— --------------------------- MORNING NOODLE VEGGIE SCRAM --------------------------- PREPARE in bowl, brin to boil: 1 pkg ramen 2 cup water COMBINE I BOWL 2 beaten eggs 1/4 tomato, chopped handfull fresh dill arugula whatever 1 piece whole wheat bread, toasted + dice - toasted & diced [other side of card] MEANWHILE FRY EGG NUMBER 3 --------------------------- AS NOODLE MIXTURE BOILS ADD WHILE STIRRING THE EGG/TOMATO/BREAD, ONE EGG HAS COOKED AS SOUP SETTLE, PLOP 3RD EGG OND. ADD SALT PEPPER, CUMIN, DRAGON SAUCE

Sigh. First of all, I urge those of you now reaching for your boiling bowls and dragon sauce to reconsider. Even if you could decipher the shouty part of the instructions -- which you can't -- the result, while technically made of food products, falls well short of the minimal culinary goal of edibility. In terms of presentation, it suffers from a problem master chefs refer to as "looking like vomit."
Second of all, [insert joke about having to reconsider my claim that I have not endangered nocturnal animals while on Ambien].
Finally, I'd like to offer an improved version of the recipe:

--------------------------- MORNING NOODLE VEGGIE SCRAM --------------------------- PREPARE: 1 pkg ramen EAT

2006-04-08T02:09:00.000-05:00

I've been AWOL for a long time, and I'm sorry. Aside from the several exciting and time-consuming real-life problems that have occupied my attention lately, the main culprit has been recoding the reviews page so that you can leave comments there. This is not a particularly interesting problem, but working on it took forever (as all work had to be done in 20-minute spurts, and it's really the kind of problem that requires hour-long focus) and I didn't feel like posting here until I made the stupid reviews page work (oh, and I haven't got comments coming any time soon on the book review page, so don't bug me about it). I think it's working okay now, even though I plan to tweak the layout of the comments section of each individual post page.
<boring details>One irritating thing about using Blogger's native comment function instead of an outsider program (like Yaccs, which I use for comments here): when you click the "comments" link, you are taken to Blogger's Leave Your Comment page, which is ugly and more complicated than it needs to be. My advice is: unless you're already a registered Blogger user and logged in at the time you want to leave a comment, use the "Other" option, which lets you type whatever name you want and allows you to enter your website address (though it ignored a bogus one I entered, which is no fun at all). But the "Post Page" format, with which you're all familiar from reading LiveJournals, is a nice way to see comments in the context of the post. Anyway, I hope you feel it was worth the wait. I just realized that without your comments, I have less taste for writing reviews. I hate shouting into a vacuum.</boring details>
I'm going to a wedding on the Brooklyn Bridge tomorrow, and the forecast calls for rain.

2006-03-27T18:19:00.000-05:00

I woke up at 6:30am and couldn't get back to sleep, so twenty or so minutes of denial I just got out of bed and started watching The Fog of War, which is a bad choice if you're looking for something to lull you back into a carefree slumber. The part where he talks to Castro about the Cuban Missile Crisis many years later is just chilling, fuck! It goes something like this:

Some years later I had a chance to meet Castro and I asked him, I said "I have three questions for you: 1) did you know the warheads were there; 2) if so, would you have recommended to Kuschev that he use them to strike at the US; and 3) what do you think would have been the consequence of such an action?" And he said to me: "1) I knew they were there; 2) not only would I have recommended that he use them, I did recommend that he use them; and 3) Cuba would have been totally destroyed."
[Pause]
That's how close we came.
[Pause]
Oh! And what's more, he said: "And if you had been in our position, you would have done the same thing!" I said "Mr. President, I hope to God you're wrong! Bring the temple down on our heads, are you mad?"

I'm not too interested in talking about whether people think that the film was too easy on RMcN, or allowed him to make excuses for various unconscionable actions, because first of all I didn't have a passel of personal emotions tied up with the dude like people who lived through the Vietnam years, but also because like most of Errol Morris's movies, it's just somebody talking, and as in real life, you have to decide for yourself how seriously to take what the talker says. So you know. I thought McNamara says a whole fuckload of interesting and important things, and I don't particularly care, in this instance, why he said them -- his personal absolution is his own business. Fuck. Now I'm talking about it, and I'm not sure I agree with myself. Also, maybe this belongs on the review page.
In other news, and I swear this is not included solely to piss off stinkeefresh, but: I saw this dude on the train and I was so dismayed by his outfit that I wanted to kill him with my brain. And it wasn't that bad, I guess, but it was like this: Ponytail. Goatee. Athletic style "letterman" jacket, you know, with fuzzy torso and white leather arms. Jeans, really new, really blue, with tapered legs. Hightop sneakers. So all in all, he was a lot like the dude from American Movie, except that I wanted to explode him with my brain.

2006-03-22T15:49:00.000-05:00

As they renovate the office building, they've been making all the bathrooms wheelchair accessible, which is a good thing. But I've seen the results, and it looks like the new men's rooms have a stall and a urinal instead of the previous two-stall configuration. That's a drag. But the thing that's getting my goat lately is the retarded tango of bathroom keys. While our floor is renovated, we're forced to travel all over the building to floors with completed bathrooms, and in order to access those bathrooms, we need keys, which are provided by the building management. (I'll skip the detailed complaint about how slow the two working elevators are, which means that you can't wait till the last minute to dash to the bathroom.) What bothers me about this situation is the very concept of locking bathrooms.
     I've always hated the way retail establishments blatantly lie to their customers about bathrooms ("we don't have a bathroom" -- FUCK YOU!), but I understand why they do it. They don't want a parade of anally incontinent homeless people spraying liquid feces all over the walls or whatever, so they create a blanket policy that denies the existence of the facilities even to clean, paying customers. Partly it's because the only people who clean it are the regular staff, and they don't want to clean up homeless poop, and even without homeless poop the place never gets cleaned and so is unsuitable for customers.
     But the office building doesn't get that much homeless traffic, and it has a janitorial staff that cleans the place nightly. We get some non-resident traffic, like messengers, salesmen, visitors, whatever. But this whole thing with needing a key is so irritating, such a pointless and pathetic flexing of administrative power. It's stupid power, too, second-class power: the power of petty bureaucrats and bouncers, of rent-a-cops and assistant principals. They can't do anything real or productive, so they assert themselves by making other people's lives more difficult, by creating time-consuming but ultimately ineffective barriers to progress. Grown-ups shouldn't have to ask permission to use a bathroom. (The musical Urinetown uses just this subject to explore systems of control: citizens must pay to urinate, every time they have to pee. Those who are too poor to afford the fee sometimes give in to their bodily pressures and let flow behind a building or into a bush, whereupon they are seized by the authorities and hauled off to "urinetown," never to be seen again.) 90% of the time, the bathrooms in the building are used by tenants, who pay fucking rent. The cost of installing and maintaining the locks and copying and distributing the keys could be better used to fix the goddamn elevators.
     And don't tell me it's for people's safety. Don't tell me about undesirables. It's all nonsense and justification after the fact. Bathrooms should be open. Bathrooms should be free. I said to PMD last night that one of the worst feelings in the world is needing to sleep but having no place to do it. One of the most irritating has to be needing to shit, but not being able to get into a bathroom because the door is locked.

IN OTHER NEWS! I just added a link on the left to a page I've created for reviews of things other than books. Check it out. Also, I'll put a note in the upper right of this page (above the eagle) when I post new reviews, because I've been neglectful of the blog recently in favor of the review pages. Sorry.

2006-03-14T18:28:00.000-05:00

I got two pieces of spam in my work email inbox today that I liked. The first one I liked for its subject line, which is straightforward, helpful, and somehow playful: "Buyer beware - Penis patches!" The exclamation mark is [sic], written, I suppose, by "Thelma Blackburn," the putative author of the email. Thanks, Thelma, both for your advice and your enthusiasm! Oh yeah.... WHAT THE FUCK IS A PENIS PATCH??!?!!? Heh. Well I'm not such a sucker that I'm gonna click actually read the email and find out. Maybe one of you can tell me.
     The other email I liked for an embedded image, which I've slapped up on Flickr for your enjoyment. What I love about this image is that somebody used a fairly sophisticated little graphics package to create these faceless little homunculi, just so they could show me, sort of, how to use a bizarre-looking sex... toy? aid? (It actually looks more like sex furniture, doesn't it? Like a dirty director's chair, scaled for a midget? Or a dirty ottoman. A hottoman. Heh.) Back in the old days, magician types would create golems or homunculi out of clay, twigs, berries, or belly-button lint, and animate them somehow to perform some thankless, repetitive, or unrewarding task. I like to imagine that this is not a CGI of two people, but rather a wallet-sized photograph of two animated magical monsters that the Hottoman corporation animated and forced to do it with a footrest.
     So I was cheered up by some spam today after getting hopping mad at the television in the office building's lobby. The new owners of the building have made several weird choices for the building's decor, but putting a large flatscreen TV in the lobby makes the least sense of any of their choices. Perhaps it was put there to distract tenants from the fact that they're waiting an average of a minute for an elevator to arrive. (That doesn't sound bad? It is. It's almost like eternity. It's like waiting infinity (Remember when you first learned that word in like second grade everybody started using it all the time? That was awesome.).) But if you're gonna have a TV on all day in the lobby, you should at least tune it to MTV2, or something better than 24-hour Business News Channel, aka Abbreviations on Parade, or the All Acronym Channel.
     Anyway I got nervous/mad because when a prescription drug that you take is on the television, it's never good news for the people who take it. And poor little Ambien, my personal favorite script and absolutely essential sleeping pill, is getting a lot of airtime these days. Apparently some dipwads took Ambien, went to sleep, and then got up to go for a little drive in the car-car, for real, and got in some accidents, and woke up with no memory of any of it. The reporters seem to express particular horror over the blacking-out aspect of the story, which is totally sensationalist, playing on our primal fears of loss of control, like I wonder what else these crazy sleep-drivers did before they got into their wreck? Did they lose the baby's college fund at an online poker site? Did they order the entire run of Girls Gone Wild videos? Did they put the meat plates on the dairy shelf?!?!? DID THEY WEAR WHITE AFTER LABOR FUCKING DAY?
     It makes me mad, and I really hope they don't take my Ambien away, because insomnia sucks, and the classic alternative sleep aids (antihistamines or benzodiazepines) make me groggy as hell. And to be honest, I've spoken of Sleepy-Time Jer before, which is me if 1) I've taken Ambien, 2) I haven't fallen asleep yet, and 3) I start talking to other people. It's true. I don't remember most of these occasions, but STJ's interlocutors always claim that they were tremendously amused by the conversations, and that STJ never did anything to embarrass his host body. So they're trying to kill off a person (a personality? A manifestation?) to whom I've become attached over the years. He's provided entertainment to many generations of roommates, and it would be a crime to deprive the world of his antics. Right? Or do I have a totally overblown sense of Sleepy-Time Jer's worth? Roommates, friends, or bedmates who have good STJ stories are invited to share them on the comments board.
     And who knows. Maybe Lunesta does the same thing. (I'll try to expand this later.)

2006-03-03T05:42:00.000-05:00

God, you think you're safe when you single out something like the fedora for derision. You picked something so inarguably obsolete, so universally reviled, that it's stopped being a real thing and ascended to the status of punchline. (In fact, from a comedy standpoint, it was lazy, lazy, lazy -- if you had coupled it with "trenchcoat" instead of the "duster," you could have written straight to the Hack Writer's Guild (founded by the staff of MadTV back in '97) and demanded honorary membership, dues be damned.) There may be a few articles of clothing less acceptable to the zeitgeist than a fedora (see examples: 1, 2, 3), but even the fedora's acceptability relative to those monstrosities doesn't leave it in the realm of the wearable. Not even close!
     Now if a reader didn't know that these articles of clothing are not wearable except by actors portraying the mentally ill, I'd say that reader had deliberately spent time and energy avoiding this knowledge. Why would they do such a thing, you ask? Since they're (please god oh please) not wearing a fedora now, it seems they are acting in defense of a past -- in which they evidently wore a fedora.
     But hey! Wearing one in the past is no problem! Forgiveness is free in Jesus' America! "Mom" always said that It Takes All Kinds To Make a World, or maybe "one Man's Proof is another man's Pudding!" Oh wait, it goes: "To each his own" said the lady in the lime green terrycloth tracksuit from Juicy Couture as she blew a rooster.
     It's time for the reader to let go of all embarrassing things in his or her past, and to STOP pretending they're not embarrassing! He can embrace the pastime Poindexter, but not identify with him! She can shout: "She's dead to us now! We are no longer she, hooray!" (but under no circumstances "Huzzah" or "Milady" or "Good Sir Knight").
     Together we can get through this. But I must stop writing because it's 5am and I can't keep my tenses straight anymore.

[Hey, you know what's fucked up? I totally made up that green tracksuit as a joke, but OMG look!]

2006-02-19T21:46:00.000-05:00

I haven't played a "tabletop" role-playing game (RPG) since I was in like 3rd grade and a couple of my classmates and I tried playing Dungeons & Dragons. Therefore, I'm sure my recollections or descriptions of same are totally wrong. Later in this post, I plan to use those recollections to construct a lame analogy. Some of you may be familiar with RPGs and may feel a need to leave a comment to correct any inaccuracies. Resist any such urges, you fucking nerd, because after puberty, every hour you spend thinking about RPGs lowers your Charisma by 1 point for an entire year. It's the attractiveness equivalent of breaking a mirror. Don't do it.
     Speaking of hopelessly uncool: when you see a teenager who has made some socially suicidal sartorial choice, don't you just want to just shake him like a baby that won't stop crying? You can't help them, because even the most clueless teen would never -- and should never -- listen to an adult's advice about being cool. But I'm not so fucking out of touch that I can't recognize the difference between a) things kids do/wear to annoy their parents that can help them socially with at least some of their peers (facial piercings, hair dye, baggy pants, or anything that goth kids wear, say, or do), and b) accidental social death by clothing. No. I saw this kid at an art-house movie theater in East Stroudsberg, PA, and I just wanted to cry. Here's this kid who probably feels like the most sensitive, intelligent, and artistic kid in his entire high school. He may even be right! He craves a way to stand out from the crowd, to declare his individuality from the Abercrombie & Fitch crowd (and hey -- going to see Brokeback Mountain alone on a Saturday night in rural Pennsylvania is a pretty good start, Chaci!). He wants to be special. Perhaps even The Most Unique Person Ever. [Aht-ta-ta! Don't do it, language cops! See paragraph one! --UD] I can totally sympathize! But dude. Dude. You simply cannot wear a fedora and a duster out in public. No one can ever do that. Not even on Halloween. Stop it now. THAT is the attractiveness equivalent of eating lead paint chips: it seems like a good idea at the time, but the damage is irreparable.
     Speaking of heavy metals that cause brain damage: Last night my sister was complaining about how she couldn't find a "regular" thermometer anymore, how the stores in California have only electric, digital, in-ear, or forehead-strip thermometers. She was bummed, and for a moment I was totally with her on Themometer Memory Lane. I fondly recalled the act of shaking down an old-fashioned mercury thermometer before using it, or twisting it between my fingers to get the right angle to read it. I specifically remember that I wasn't allowed to shake it down until I was deemed old enough to do so without dropping it, and that reaching that age was a minor maturity milestone of my wonder years. Ahh, memories.
     Then I realized that within like ten years, mercury thermometers will probably be discussed with the same hindsighty horror with which we discuss shoe-store fluoroscopes or the factory ladies who licked their radium-coated watch-hand paintbrushes. And -- holy fuck -- with good reason. Assume for a sec that you've never heard of them. Okay. So in order to take your temp, I propose to make a tube out of glass, fill it with cartoonishly poisonous poison, poke it into a soft nexus of mucus membrane that provides equally handy access to your circulatory, respiratory, and digestive systems, and then have you clamp it jauntily between your jaws so you can grind it back and forth in childish ignorance and impatience. Sound good? No, it sounds like a comedy sketch that even Saturday Night Live would reject as too unrealistically over-the-top. Fuck fuck!

     Okay, now the D&D reference I warned you about. One thing I remember is that your "character" was a piece of paper listing your characteristics and your possessions. The possessions were on the order of swords and daggers and gold pieces and cetera; characteristics were a list of desirable traits like Strength, Agility, and Charisma, each of which had a corresponding number from 1 to 20, with 1 being an almost unsurvivable lack of a trait and 20 being a godlike embodiment thereof. (I'd bet that this seemingly arbitrary scale corresponded to the most poly of the game's essential ployhedra, the iconic icosehedron -- the 20-sided die.)
     (Yikes -- I would totally understand if you wanted to assassinate me for writing that last sentence. I await your ninjas with shame.)
     But so anyway this is about A.D.D. again ((sister golden hair) surprise!) and how additive modifiers to my A.D.D. characteristic made it superhard to post last week. If you think of A.D.D. as a possible D&D character trait (albeit a negative one), most of you walk around with comfy little subpental single digits. That means that without ever once blinking your eyelids, examining your cuticles, or checking your periphery for amusing distractions, you can probably attend a 4-hour symposium (on the difficulties inherent in adapting 21st century agricultural theories, tools, and methods to regions of the Ukraine that have been perfectly happy for centuries with subsistence beet farming -- even though you're a Goddamn law student, but whatever?) and joyously take complete notes organized into coherent subsections with many nested layers of bullet-points and numerically ordered lists (in arabic, roman, kanji, or even Hebrew numbers you showoffy fuck).
     Well I start out any day with my A.D.D. at 13, but if I don't get coffee in me quick I earn a (+2) modifier. So last week my A.D.D. characteristic was almost pegged at "heroic inability to observe two adjacent muons without getting distracted by the smell of salt, which makes you think of briny, which rhymes with shiny."

This week's other A.D.D. modifiers, in no particular order:
• Renovations (+1): The office is undergoing renovations, which makes everybody edgy and superbusy and demanding of my bloggy time. Plus when you come in every morning, your entire work area looks and feels like it has been coated with white cornmeal, which if you imagine it in your lungs, you have trouble paying attention to anything but the five-o'clock whistle and how far away it is.
• Winter Olympics (+2): I could write a billion words about the fucking Olympics, but I can resist writing about it much more easily than I can resist watching it. Suffice it to say that the coverage seems so specifically tailored to people with A.D.D. that I feel, perhaps for the first time since Athens, truly at home. That Lampley dude, that ass Jimmie Whatever, and Bob fucking Costas are there to make sure that I never have to sweat through five consecutive minutes of the same event, and they swaddle every non-sequitur edit with cottony blather.
• Books (+2): I've been reviewing them. It's distracting, but it's all for you, Damien! All for you! (Jump! twangggggggCraaaak! Swingle, swingle, swingle.)
• Miscellaneous (±?): Cold fingers. Back spasms. Diner food. 40 pounds of impacted fecal matter discovered in John Wayne's colon postmortem.

Next Post: Direct quotes and stock tips from The Sleepy Time Jer Saga. Also more about Olympics: Skeleton. A Ski Jumping quote. Oh my god and my nemesis Al Trautwig who you never see on screen except during the Summer Games Gymnastics Comps, but you hear his comment(at)ing on everything from curling to the Cinderella story of two farmboys who had a dream to win Olympic Gold in honor of their grandma (who's currently dying in a Kentucky barn after an accident sustained while spattin' tabaccy at a hummin'bird), by coming in under that ol' radar and beating Rupert and that other bitch (bitch!) at tonight's special live final Tribal Council. To tide you over, here's a:
Usage note for language nerds! Although the media peeps always seem to say "The Olympics," I've noticed a bunch of athletes eschew the definite article, as in "Dude, I'm totally stoked because getting to Olympics has always been my dream" [I made up that quote, but I swear I've heard this kind of thing a bunch]. Other examples of this in English: 1) "Batman" vs "The Batman," which some people get really rankled by the latter, but I kinda like it, and 2) "C.I.A." vs "the C.I.A.," where the former seems to be the insider slang, as in "My boss at CIA was a relic of the cold war" [also a made-up quote].
Also, I was totally stoked to hear a snowboarding commentator say the following sentence, which may be syntactically kosher but sounded really Germanic and weird at the time: "This is the kind of trick we've been seeing him in practice all week long do." Heh. Say it out loud to yourself using a slacker/surfer SoCal accent.

2006-02-07T01:41:00.000-05:00

FUN NEW FEATURE!
At tuckova's request, I've added short reviews to the list of books that I've recently finished or abandoned. Check it all out on my new BOOKS PAGE! Look for the permanent link on the right nav bar where the book list used to be.

HUMOROUS TIDBIT!
While doing "research" on Amazon for my retarded translation essay, I found this awesome user review of The Odyssey (Look for the one by R. Bundy). Chances are it'll be removed in due time, so I've preserved it in a jpeg, which click here to see.
In case you didn't follow the link that says "read all my reviews," click here. You'll see why Mr. Bundy has no love for Homer: he gave it all to his headphones.

SOCIAL COMMENTARY ON CONSUMERISM!
Any of you watch the Superbowl commercials? If so, read this Onion editorial from exactly two years ago.
     Between expensive Superbowl commercials (all of which seemed to rely on extreme violence for laffs: flying tackles, falling through a roof, getting hit on the head with metal toolbox, punching through walls, bear attacks, getting stomped flat by a dinosaur, etc. I know it's the Superbowl, and it's all macho and tough, and violence is the order of the day, but I don't remember it being this extreme in the past --it was like somebody turned the Schadenfreude knob up to 11. And don't get me started on the Busby Berkeley Burger King ad that culminated in a giant Whopper being assembled from the flattened bodies of showgirls, oy fucking vey), um. Where was I?
     Okay: between the expensive and "funny" commercials was a straight-faced ad from Gillette advertising their new razor, called Fusion, with not five but six motherfucking blades. If you're interested, check out any of these recent stories from real news sources (Globe and Mail - MSNBC - CNN/Money) or the Amazon product page, which has good pix and info.
     This excerpt from the story at MSNBC (which was picked up off the Reuters wire) depresses the hell out of me:

Fusion is the first entirely new men's razor system launched by Gillette since Mach3. But early last year, Gillette launched M3Power, a men's battery-operated pulsating model, which is now the world's top-selling razor.

[Oh, and by the way: emphasis mine. Heh.] Sorry -- what depresses me is: a) Reuters using the bullshit marketing jargon "razor system" without comment or quotation marks, and b) the fact that Gillette can shove a battery in the handle of a razor and, within a year, make it the "the world's top-selling razor" (I think they mean "razor system"). The first point just reminds me that Reuters is compromised, co-opted, and/or lazy enough to use a press release to create a "news" story that is indistinguishable from a paid advertisement, its pathetic existence justified by placement in the "business" section. The second point just confirms the predictable credulousness and idiocy of consumers. A vibrating razor. I mean come the fuck on.

RANDOM OBSERVATION!
The headline for Reuters' top story (at 12:53hrs) sounds very weird without foreknowledge of the context:

Cartoon Fury Spreads

Who's afraid of cartoon fury? Similarly, follow the jump and the full article is titled:

Afghan Police Kill Four in Cartoon Bloodshed

Doesn't really sound that bad. But it is.

2006-01-25T13:13:00.000-05:00

The following was too long for a comment, but it's a response to Stu's comment on the last post, in which he said

One of the main things about kissing is that it's pretty boring to watch and quite a lot of fun to do -- I'm not sure I could stand to watch even two horribly attractive actors kiss for more than 5 seconds without wanting to know when something is going to blow up and zombies will begin rappelling into the scene.

My reply:
Simply ridiculous, Stu. Rappelling zombies? I don't think so. First of all because rappelling requires too many things that zombies don't have: long-term planning ability, equipment, motor skills, just to name a few. Also, are your attractive smoochers standing at the base of a cliff, or leaning against a building? Because otherwise they're indoors, where rappelling is just more trouble than it's worth, or they are out in the open, which would require a helicopter, and, well, jeez, what kind of asshole would give a bunch of zombies a lift in his huey? Well, wait a sec. Maybe I can make this work.

     Okay, maybe it's a SWAT helicopter or something, and all the SWAT dudes put on their rappelling gear and took off for a four-hour flight to pick up these kissy gorgeous people, who are stranded in a field outside a town that's been completely overrun by the undead. Unfortunately for everyone involved, one of the SWAT dudes had been bitten by a zombie and neglected to mention it to anyone, so in midair he dies, turns, and swiftly dispatches his snoozing SWAT buddies, who die and turn in turn (...there is a season....).
     The pilot doesn't notice all this stuff for whatever reason (no rearview? restrictive harness? bulky helmet with broken comm system?), so he keeps flying towards the tongue-wrestling twosome. When he sees the heroes in the middle of the field, he tells his passengers to jump down and grab them, quick before any of those goddamn flesheaters are attracted by the noise of the rotors. The fully suited-up and harnessed SWAT zombies don't really respond except by scratching at the partition that separates them from the pilot, which they've been doing for a while now, but he hadn't noticed. Anyway, he follows standard SWAT procedure for encouraging reticent jumpers: he opens the side hatch and tilts the huey 45 degrees, spilling out the zombies, who slide down the ropes, utterly confused.
     Our liplocked heroes take a breath long enough for the girl to sigh "we're saved!" As they watch the SWAT zombies slide faster and faster down the ropes, the guy goes "Um..." and a second later the SWAT team hits the ground with a THUD THUD THUD THUD and the guy goes "...maybe not."
     The two SWAT zombies who didn't pulverize their legbones on impact struggle to their feet and start moving towards the couple. The guy goes "Okay, we can do this. We just gotta take out these bastards and get to those ropes so the pilot, who can't be a zombie," (cut to the pilot waving and giving them an oblivious thumbs up) "...so the pilot can haul us out of here to goddamn Bermuda already." The girl says "Okay. And don't think I've forgotten that you owe me a Strawberry Daiquiri." The guy chuckles, cocks his shotgun, says "Make it a double, baby" and BOOM BOOM shoots the two walking SWAT zombies. The girl walks over to the two remaining SWAT zombies, writhing at the bottom of the ropes, and uses her pirate cutlass (don't ask) to dispatch them, screaming "Yo-ho-ho, motherfuckers!"
     The couple grab the ropes and start kissing again. "I can already taste that daiquiri..." shouts the girl over the noise of the chopper. Cut to the pilot, who takes off his helmet for a second to wipe the sweat from his brow. This allows him to see a freaking army of zombies over a little hill, heading towards our heroes. He screams like a girl, panics, and slaps the button that releases the ropes. Our heroes watch, stunned, as their lifelines squiggle uselessly to the ground, pooling around their feet. "There goes our last best chance at survival," grits the hero. But we cut back to the pilot, who pitches the chopper forward to make his hasty exit. This causes a FIFTH SWAT ZOMBIE, who hadn't fallen out during the earlier roll, to fly forward through the partition into the cockpit! The pilot screams as the zombie grabs his head and takes a huge bite. Cut to outside shot of cockpit as gouts of blood paint its windows from the inside.
     Cut down to our heroes' point of view as the helicopter halts, spins around a bit, then plunges to the ground like an olympic diver some 200 feet from them, causing a giant fireball. Both of them shrug, saying "Huh."
     BUT! Cut to the zombie army, cresting the hill, moaning! "Honey," says the girl, looking behind her at the horde, "flesheaters at six o'oclock! Um. And 4 and 5 and 7 and 8 o'clock! Fuck! What are we gonna do?" The guy starts gathering the rope off the ground, saying "help me pick this up." She says "Why? You gonna hang the bastards? One by one? Come on! We gotta go!"
     "Nuh-uh," he says with a glint in his eye and a smile on his face, "I've got a plan."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Heh. That's all for now. Just proof of concept. Plus I've always wanted to use the word "huey."

2006-01-24T14:36:00.000-05:00

So I had a positive experience with my cellular provider, which is as rare as a ribeye done right (thanks, Texan Analogy Generator!). I will give you a brief recap, with a lot of the folderol excised (and replacing the provider's name with "CORP" because I don't want to a) piss them off or b) give them free publicity):
UNIVERSAL DONOR: Hiya. I have two cell phones: one has always been a mobile phone with CORP, but the other was a Verizon land line for years until I had the number ported to a second CORP cell phone.
CUSTOMER SERVICE REP #1: Uh-huh.
UD: But so now I want to cancel the newer one, the 718 number.
CSR1: Okay sir, that's no problem at all.
UD: Great.
CSR1: You are aware that there is a $150 early cancellation charge for that?
UD: Fuck shit fuck goddamnit titty cock ballsuck!
CSR1: Um.
UD: Sorry, not yelling at you, just yelling. I must have agreed to that in October. I feel like an idiot.
CSR1: It's okay sir, I hear it all day long, every day.
UD: Thanks. Wait... really? You hear people screaming curses all day every day?
CSR1: Um.
UD: Wow. I guess people only call when there's a problem, but... damn. That does not speak well of CORP.
CSR1: ...
UD: Okay, whatever. How much is it monthly?
CSR1: Well, it's ten dollars a month until the contract expires.
UD: And when is that?
CSR1: Uh, let me check. Um. Um...January, 2007.
UD: FUCK BALLS! Sorry.
CSR1: S'all right.
UD: $150 now or $120 over a year, huh?
CSR1: Yup. I guess --
The line is disconnected. UD redials the number and waits on hold again.
UD: Hi I just got disconnected before can you take my number so you can call me back if we get disconnected?
CSR2: Sure. (he takes down the number, maybe.) How can I help you?
UD: (explains situation as above) So. I can cancel now and pay the $150 fee, or pay $120 over a year.
CSR2: There is another option. You could transfer the liability to someone else.
UD: Sounds promising so far. Tell me more.
CSR2: Well, you just find someone who wants to take your phone and phone number, and you transfer it to them. Any store can help you do this.
UD: Hmm. I don't see the upside for the other person. Lemme get this straight. Say I did this in June of this year, when there would only be six months left on my contract. So does that mean they'd only have to keep the service for six months?
CSR2: No, they would have to sign a new one or two year contract.
UD: So they get a used phone but a new, binding, contract and a phone number that could continue to get calls for me forever?
CSR2: Yes.
UD: That is an unattractive option.
CSR2: Okay, sir.
UD: I have a better idea. Instead of charging me $150 for canceling the service, how about you cancel the service, but DON'T charge me the fee?
CSR2: What?
UD: You know, as a goodwill gesture to a loyal customer, just... don't charge me the fee.
CSR2: (tapping sounds heard)
UD: Hello?
CSR2: Okay sir. We can do that for you. Because you are such a good customer.
UD: What, really? Really? Wow! Thanks!
CSR2: No problem sir. Just hold for another representative.
UD: Wow?

So that's nice. I didn't have to throw a hissyfit, or ask for a manager, or call down biblical plagues on the CSR's head, or threaten to commit suicide while on the phone (which oh my god can you imagine hearing someone kill themselves on the phone? That would totally suck.). They don't always play ball, and sometimes they are just petty and powertrippy, taking their bad days out on you, but CSRs may have a little list of "magic phrases" that if a customer speaks aloud, you must hand them the keys to the kingdom. In this case it may have been "loyal customer," but that might not work for everyone, because I actually have been a loyal customer of CORP for going on six years, muhfuckah. It's really because I am a "lazy customer," but they don't have to know that.

2006-01-18T18:43:00.000-05:00

Movie Kisses are weird. It seems like movie characters always have to look at the lips of their kissing partners before they can kiss them. Do people do this in real life? Not always, right? Is this a convention, something taught in every acting class, like "there is no kiss without the look" repeated like catechism? Or does the practice propagate itself, consciously or unconsciously? (e.g. Do actors watch the look-then-kiss it and go "yeah, look at that! That works!" or are they just so moved by the scene that without realizing it, the next time they have a kiss scene of their own, they ape it without meaning to?) Are directors constantly screaming at their actors in vain (as in this even longer e.g. I've created to fill more lines with carriage returns)?:
      "Stop! Cut! Brad, I said DON'T look at the lips. Stop looking at the lips. Don't do it. Stop it stop it stop it. Just kiss 'em."
     "Right, Chief, my bad. Won't happen again."
     "Really now, Bradster? Because I've heard that bef--"
     "I got it. Got it now. No prob."
     "I'm trusting you here. No look. You know where they are: on her face, where yours are. Kiss them."
     "Yep. Got it."
     "Trusting you...."
     "Yep. Trust. Well-placed trust. I'm your man."
     "Not looking--"
     "Right."
     "--Just kissing."
     "Ten-four. Loud and clear."
     "Please now. I think you'll agree this falls under the umbrella of artistic choices made by the director."
     "Chief! Of course! I'm clay. You mold."
     "I'm trying, Bradski. Lord knows."
     "You're the artist here."
     "Well, thanks, but really. Um. Shall we try it? Again? This time with NO LOOKING AT THE LIPS?"
     Brad snaps his fingers and points at the director with a winning smile, cocking his head at a jaunty angle. Every female crew member sighs in unison.
     "Okay so if we're ready with the NO LOOK AT LIPS kiss shot, let's fucking do this thing."
     "Rolling."
     "Speed."
     "Scene 191, take 42."
     "Jesus god.... Action!"
     . . .
     "CUT FUCKING FUCK CUT MOTHERFUCK IT!"
     "Shee-it. Did I do it again, Chief?"

2006-01-12T15:03:00.000-05:00

I told you that I used to lick subway poles, and I'm sure that was a preamble to some post about being chronically germophobic. I hate to repeat myself, but I'm too lazy to search the archives to see what I've said on this subject in the past. And NO that is not a veiled request for somebody else to dig up any such posts -- I don't veil that kind of request. Okay, SHUT UP: 1, 2. Heh. That second one is kinda funny. Bucket of roaches, indeed.
Let's begin again. I am not germophobic until I have a cold or a flu or something with icky phlegm-related symptoms that I want to GO AWAY. That is when I have the ability to... well if not turn into, at least empathize with my almost paralytically germophobic roommate lo, who sees the entire world as if Marg Helgenberger were holding a blacklight over it. But of course I can't be thinking about it all the time. So I touch things, remember to be afraid, and recoil in Tex Avery-style cartoon horror.
THINGS I TOUCHED TODAY AND IMMEDIATELY REGRETTED TOUCHING:
• Elevator button*
• Metrocard vending machine touchscreen
• Buzzer of doctor's office
• Own nose
• Pen-on-a-string at pharmacy
• Some railing somewhere
• Your mother
You like how that list tells a story? I tell how I picked up a prescription, filled it, and sold it to your mother. She thinks my antihistamines are amphetamines. She's still sneezing, but her apartment is spotless. Waaaahhh! Glaargle.

* Let me mention that there is a huge amount of construction/renovation going on in my office building right now, so the elevators are filthy, littered with particulate debris and discarded hardware, but also lately I've noticed that they -- the elevators -- stink. They stink of Hard Work. It's not a smell I like, consisting as it does of 80% underarm odor and 20% soupy asscrack funk. Huuurk. What's up with the assbroth, laborers of the world?

2006-01-06T13:42:00.000-05:00

[from Tuesday] A nasty cold seems to be sweeping the city, and I was so scared by the symptoms that I didn't mention the worst one until today, because I thought it was just me. But both of my bosses have a form of this beast, and its worst feature is that it makes the victim short of breath in a real scary asthma attack/ anaphylactic shock kind of way (except it's not like asthma or allergies: I got wicked spooked because my Albuterol inhaler didn't do shit, like nothing nothing, and even though I don't have an EpiPen, I am pretty sure it wouldn't have helped.)
     You stay short of breath for like a couple of days, and on the worst days you can't walk more than twenty feet because you just can't seem to get enough oxygen to power your body through such a heroic journey -- you just want to sit as still as a statue until you can make do with shallow little gasps of air that only half-fill your wasted, useless lungs. Then you cough and cough and cough -- violently, deeply, diaphragm-shreddingly, hernia-causingly -- until you retch, or if you're lucky, maaaaaayyyyyybe you manage to hork up one of the syrupy lungpies that enshroud your every alveolus like malevolent mucoid raincoats. At that point you can spit out what you horked up and examine it for microscopic encoding of US Government labratory serial numbers.
     This thing feels like a designer disease, because it has such a weird combination of symptoms; I've never had anything like it: Clogged sinuses, headache, sore throat, but no fever, no body aches, and no sneezing. I'm picturing a computer program at some very advanced research facility. The interface is, like for all government software, ugly and utilitarian, all default colors and shapes from Visual Basic or whatever. But it does the job: the scientist (or whatever) just clicks check boxes next to a giant alphabetical list of symptoms (chills; congestion; cough, dry; cough, productive) each of which has its own "intensity" or "severity" slider, and when he's satisfied he clicks the "Generate Disaese" [sic] button at the bottom of the screen. Somewhere across a sprawling underground complex, a little slot opens along the baseboard of a white-walled cell, and a petri dish slides like the devil's own hockey puck towards a terrified arab carpet installer from Qatar whose name is the same as a suspected terrorist's.
     He doesn't want to get too close at first, but after two years in various godawful cages without cellmates, visitors, charges, or legal representation, the appearance of this odd cylindrical dish ranks up there as the most interesting thing to happen since eight months ago when he saw a cockroach riding on the back of a rat. And this thing doesn't look as gross. Kinda looks like a weird dessert....

2005-12-28T17:25:00.000-05:00

All right, I'm way behind on any kind of end-of-the-year feature, here. No index, summary, or anything. But here's a core dump to tide you over until I cobble together something that exhibits appropriate levels of annual closure.
     Oh my sweet Jesus fuck, there are a lot of people on the streets of Manhattan right now! I went out for lunch and had to punch my way through a rather larger than usual number of ovine obstacles. Tourists especially love to gather on midtown street corners in confused, upward-staring knots, and for some reason, every vacationing schoolchild in THE WORLD is out there too, either dangling frustratedly from some parental limb or bounding around like a pinball in the jet bumpers, screaming "kidnap me!" to any psychos in the area. Seriously, it's a pedophile's paradise out there. I wonder if I could clear the streets by going out there and saying something like "some one just stole a baby! Protect your children! Run!" or like "I heard someone's jabbing tourists with AIDS needles! Run back to your hotels! Baaaaa!" Whoops. Maybe not with the sheep sound at the end. Might discredit me a bit as a doomsayer.
     But so even though the streets are littered with human detritus, guess where I went that was completely empty? A bookstore! Best Buy's registers looked like they were hosting a "imitate a breadline" contest, but over at Coliseum Books, If you closed your eyes, spun around, and hurled a knife at random, it probably would have hit... a book. No joke. Then I guess you would have to buy the book, because of their policy: "You throw a knife into it, you bought it, you sociopathic knife-throwing goon."
     Seriously, why are all these people here? Christmas shopping should be over by now. Maybe they're staking out Times Square territory for the New Year's Rockin' Eve? Oooh, that police barricade looks better than the rest for getting crushed against! Let's get trampled in front of the Marriott Marquis! Or is it Marquee? Fuck it! Trample me NOW!!!!

2005-12-23T18:40:00.000-05:00

Somebody sent me this link the other day and I almost lost my shit right then -- here, my friends, is fame: not self-promotion, not self-publishing, just straight up WIKIFUCKINGPEDIA. Boo-yaa! And I'm telling ya: not only didn't I write it, but I have no idea who did! If anybody feels like taking credit, I'd love to know who you are: comment if you're proud, email if you're shy.

* * *

It's time for resolutions, time for housecleaning. It's time to reaffirm my commitments to projects I care about (i.e., UDvCLM, recording music, socializing) and time to reduce the amount of time I spend doing things to which I am not really committed in the long term (my job, bathing, laundry, literal housecleaning). Ha ha. I'm kidding about that last group there. I've seen mice in the kitchen, so I'd better pursue at least that aspect of housecleaning. Gotta put into effect a plan to eradicate those cute-ass motherfucking rodents. Oh, and I am reaffirming my commitment to swearing, cocksuckers.
     (I was gonna tell a short version of a cute mouse story, but as usual it swelled out of control. Since it's not essential to this post, if you're interested, see the footnote below.**)
     If I didn't recognize it for the procrastinatory diversion it is, I might even consider a site redesign (but I do, so I won't). But maybe it's time for a Harper's-style index or summary -- it beats having to write new content! (My webhost provides a bunch of statistics which are mostly boring, but also misleading; the list of top "referrers" is supposed to show how most people get to my site, but most of the sites that make the list are totally bogus, not things people came from. Robot or crawler programs are somehow to blame (e.g., I'm pretty sure that 3,044 of December's hits were not the result of my readers clicking a link over at good old www.virgin-daughter-rape.incest-family.net), so I've been tediously looking up and disallowing entry to the IP addresses of the worst offenders. More distraction, it's true, but it will save bandwidth and make my stats a little more accurate)
     So the kind of statistics I'm actually I'm curious about are things like:
UD Statistical Index

number of posts about the weather
number of posts that mention back pain
number of posts that mention fatigue
number of posts that mention or refer obliquely to Attention Deficit Disorder
number of posts that apologize for low post quality
number of posts that apologize for low posts frequency

...And so on. I'm interested in stats for individual years, and for the entire history of the blog. First of all, it should be funny (sort of), but it should show what I'm most repetitive about, which could make me a better blogger, right? And that's as good a resolution as any.
Now here's a chance for some reader participation. I need help with some things, and you guys were so helpful when I asked for trivia questions last week (a big thanks to all who helped -- each of you is individually the bomb, and put together you make a modest cluster of bombs. I got email from people I'd never even seen a comment from, which is always a treat. Your typical Lurker is fun to interact with, if you can coax him from his fetid hermitage.) AHEM! The things I need/want help with:

Suggestions for other amusing/useful categories for the UD Stat Index. Post these to the comments.
Actual research for the index, the searchy grunt work. Email me if you want to help with this.
I'm gonna add some info to the wikipedia page (whee! I'm so geeking out about this, still!). One of the first things I was gonna add was a photo from this subset at Flickr. I think they're all kind of ridiculous, and anything I didn't add to the set was ignored for a reason... but so which do you think I should use?

Thanks again for all your help, and if I don't talk to you before Christmas, Have a wonderful weekend.

**OPTIONAL CUTE MOUSE STORY about an encounter I had with a widdle baby mouse a week or two ago. This mouse, he was so small and young that he wasn't mouse-shaped yet -- he was the approximate shape of a cartoon teardrop, tapering to a mousy little point. I interrupted him in the kitchen sink, and since he was tiny and the sink was large and all of the sudden the light was on and a huge human was standing over him, he couldn't jump out of the sink to escape, so he just vibrated with abject fear. It was cute and heartbreaking. I promised myself that I would help him out of the sink if he couldn't do it within five minutes, because although there was enough food and water to sustain him for a couple of days, it was a cold night, and the sink stainless steel. I'll put out mousetraps, but I'm not about to kill any mammals with my bare hands (look out, koala bears) or let them freeze to death in my sink. I stood very still and eventually he stopped vibrating and resumed his search for a way out of the sink. He climbed very cutely atop a coffee mug, ran around its rim a few times, and nonchalantly perched atop the handle of the spoon sticking out of the mug -- the little showoff had some balance skills. But as that mug sat in the middle of the sink, I was like: "there's no way out from there, little fella. You should climb up the inverted glass I moved closer to the edge of the sink, you can reach the counter from there." As if I had been issuing him a challenge instead of advice, he leaped from the rim of the mug to the counter, like a bird, cat, or one of those jumping spiders. He dashed along the counter back to wherever it is they live, leaving me stunned. I had to update my mental encyclopedia entry about mouse abilities. Little fuckers can fly, even baby ones that look like furry tadpoles.

2005-12-14T14:48:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure I'll get to making you a shiny new post this week because I'm hosting the Quizz-Off Finals tomorrow night, and I'm basically having ten kinds of panic attack about it. My co-host, the estimable Ghastlymess, is, despite his handle, calm as a cuke, but even his soothing, suicide-hotline voice on the other end of the telephone isn't keeping me from freaking the fuck out a little bit. So I'm feeling like we'll never be ready, while at the same time knowing that these things always work themselves out.
Hmm.... You all feel like helping? Feel like giving a little back to the community? Doing your part for the war effort? Since I know you're all nerds out there, I bet you have your favorite bits of trivia at your mental fingertips (eww, mental fingers). Here's your chance at the most fleeting kind of fame: email us your absolute best question or bit of trivia (use jeremybroomfield@yahoo.com ). If we use it in the quiz, we'll give you credit.

2005-12-08T15:50:00.000-05:00

From today's Times, file under "things that make you want to barf":

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she can give no guarantee that terrorism detainees won't be abused again despite what she called the United States' clear rules against torture.
"Will there be abuses of policy? That's entirely possible," Rice said at a NATO press conference. "Just because you're a democracy it doesn't mean that you're perfect."
She offered assurances, however, that any abuses would be investigated and violators punished.

Huk! -- Gak! -- Huk-HUAAAALLLLLP!! Barfffffflefrowlf!

Which brings me to today's theme: counterfactuals. Which before nuncstans gets frisky, let me quickly point out that I am not actually discussing logic, semantics, or if-then statements, but just a more folksy, literal interpretation of the word "counterfactuals," which I take to mean "shit that ain't true." FUCK IT we'll just call it the "What Ifs"! Also, miz jaxxon if you're nasty, you all can watch my commas dance in and out of my quotation marks like girls doing double dutch, because the UD style guide doesn't get specific on this issue. This is clearly a major failing of the style guide, which I wrote. Um, or which I wrote a third of and then saw something shiny.
(In practice, I'd always put my commas inside my quotes until a) I did some programming in a language where what's in quotes matters a lot and more importantly b) some anglophile reader whose opinion I trust on many issues grammatical scolded the bewhoompus outta me when I let a homeless question mark find comfort and shelter inside a quotation -- in the comments section, even. So now I sometimes move punctuation to the right of a quotation mark just as a twitchy defense mechanism even when it's clearly wrong to do so. What can I say, I'm only human.)
Oh, speaking of shiny distractions, did you know that in addition to the hilarious term "full stop" which the Brits use to refer to the punctuation mark we Murrakins call a "period," they also UPROARIOUSLY refer to their quotation marks as "inverted commas"? Wa ha ha! Don't get me started on "fanny."

Damn, dawg! It's the WHAT IFs! Which I can already tell are going to be an unsuccessful humor experiment which I will abort after, oh, let's say four items:

• What if "speed skating" meant something dirty? Like "I heard Paris Hilton (for example) went speed skating all over his Runson."

• Oh yeah, I forgot to mention: what if "Runson," "Bunsen," and "Junson" all became popular slang terms for male sex parts? Replacing "pecker," "cornhole," and "sackdoodle," respectively?

• Heh. What if I actually thought "sackdoodle" were a widely used term for the nutsack?

• What if the deli across the street -- where I get my breakfast and lunch every weekday -- didn't outrageously inflate their prices, underpay and verbally abuse their staff (which consists completely of undocumented immigrant workers who have little recourse), or routinely fail health inspections for (I'm guessing here) unacceptable amounts of rat feces in their prepared food (which in New York the standard for "acceptable" is necessarily pretty lax, and over the years we've come to expect a certain amount of ratshit in our food; it may not be a good thing, but it's our thing. Know what I mean? Heey, fuhgeddaboudit.)?

All right, that's it for the stupid What Ifs. In closing, here's a scene from my ongoing campaign to mess with the office building's doorman ahem concierge:
KEVIN: Damn, it's 2:30 already? Where does the day go?
UD: Who you callin' a dago, you fucking Irish piece of shit?

----

Oh and here's the picture of the mustache.

2005-12-05T15:32:00.000-05:00

All right, I'm jonesing for a song, and Limewire is no help, no help at all. It's not even that great a song, but I have a deep cellular craving to hear the bridge from "Little Lord Fontleroy" [sic] by Quasi. It's buggin' me so much that I'm twitching. Of course, that could be the Adderall, hup! Anyway. If you've got the song, please email it to me quick like a bunny and stop the madness (see address at left; I'm too lazy to write a goddamn mailto link, even though this parenthetical note is much longer than a mailto link, I know, shut up). I actually feel like I cannot do any work, not a lick, until I hear this bridge. I'm like a robot stuck in a recursive loop of instructions, or paralyzed by a paradox. Except I'M NOT A FUCKING ROBOT.

In related news, I noticed while not working that Tai Chi is a spoonerism of chai tea. Big whoop.

2005-12-01T18:26:00.000-05:00

This may come as a shock to some of my newer readers, but I am a deeply vain person. Most of my friends let me slide on this account because I have a charming tendency to combine my vanity with a towering immodesty, so, you know. It's all good. But so here's the thing about my the zits that have colonized my head/neck/face area: I don't like them. They make me feel blemished and unclean... which, of course, I am. As you know, I never used to wash my hair, and I've never been a daily face-wash, scrub, or toner kind of dude -- metrosexuality is just too much damn work. But here I am, with hair all clean and poofy after god knows how many days of consecutive shampooing, and my face has seen soap at least once a day for the same amount of time. Worst part: a well-meaning friend bought me some witch hazel-impregnated cleansing and toning wipes to help with the face oil at work, where we have no hot water. Which means that I have something called "wipes" on my desk. Wipes. Fucking... WIPES! What's that on your desk, buddy? What these? Oh they're just my WIPES. Glaargle! I do not think of myself as the kind of person who needs "wipes." But there's no getting around the fact that at present, I am.
     (Digression:I maybe be especially oversensitive to this word because of a product called Kandoo, which if you don't know is a flushable moistened paper towel thing for kids who are toilet training. It's basically a baby wipe repackaged to appeal to the actual baby, like: Baby's First Toilet Paper, or Toilet paper with training wheels. For no single reason I can pinpoint, the very existence of this product skeeves me the fuck out. Maybe it's the fact that it's moist. Maybe it's the way that some overly literal marketing fucktard suggested putting "doo" in its name, presumably so that consumers wouldn't forget its purpose. Maybe it's the fact that, for the sake of a stupid pun, it takes a perfectly serviceable (if old-fashioned) figure of speech that seemed to signify a particularly American type of eagerness -- (dictionary.com:"a willingness to tackle a job and get it done") -- and threatens to associate it forever with ASS-WIPING (like if this product gets really popular, who would want to be described as having a "can-do attitude" anymore? I know that at best it's a minor linguistic tragedy, but still -- who do they think they are?) Maybe it's the vomity purple/green color scheme of the brand, or JUST MAYBE it's the goofy frog spokesanimal who is depicted on the packaging WIPING HIS FROG ASS, oh mah gah.)
     Yeah.
     But so! About my zits: I have a theory. When your body perceives an attack, as from an infection or a foreign object, it usually sends white blood cells* in great quantity to deal with the situation. I think something similar has happened to me. I think my body believes that my face is being attacked by my beard (here's the picture of the beard, sorry for the delay), that my face has in fact been besieged for almost a month by objects that my body has misconstrued to be foreign -- my own goddamn whiskers. I think that in response to this perceived threat, my body has instructed every inch of skin north of my collarbone to pump out as much oil as possible.
     Now, I'm glad that my body is aware of and responsive to threats -- that's a reassuring sign that my immune system is still online (which will be handy when the bird flu metastasizes into a lethal pandemic, hits New York, and wipes away half its population like god's own sheet of Kandoo). But I guess I'm a little confused about the strategy. Is the oil supposed to make my skin so slippery that my beard is supposed to, like, lose its grip and fall off? I guess that might work if my face were being attacked by a squid.
     Well, whatever. The point is that despite the fact that I really kind of like the beard, it's going to come off very very soon. I know that some of you will be disappointed.** Hell, I'm disappointed. I was so proud of myself for making it through the itchy week two without caving in. (Yes, I know it is fucking lame that this is what passes for a proud achievement in my life. Fuck off.) But since the oil production shows no sign of abating, and since I can't keep my stupid dirty fingers away from my face, it's got to go. At the suggestion/request of Sars, I will shave my jowls, neck and chin first, leaving a Fu Manchu/thigh-tickler style mustache for a week or so. But then it's back to smoothness, and hopefully I won't have to shampoo until 2006. If you want to run your fingers through my greasy beard before it's gone, I will host an open house this Saturday at the Socrates Diner in Greenpoint between 11am and 1pm. Your hands might get greasy, though, so don't forget your wipes.

-----

* Awesome fact from Wikipedia: "The name "white blood cells" [is derived] from the fact that after centrifugation of a blood sample, the white cells are found in the Buffy coat, a small fraction between the hematocrit and the blood plasma, which is white in color." Heh! This is totally random, but the term "Buffy Coat" makes a nerd like me think of this yellow thing.

** When I told a friend of mine in California that I had a beard, she actually yelped with irrepressible (and kind of freakish) delight, as if I'd told her I was having a baby.

2005-11-28T17:44:00.000-05:00

I am going fucking insane. I can feel my brain coming apart like a Droste chocolate orange. If you're curious just how BORING a process this really is, continue reading. All day I've been attempting to pay the bills I've been ignoring for more than a month, but I seem to be unable to do it. Not just apathetic or uninterested, but like Superman and Kryptonite repelled, weakened, sickened by the prospect of performing this essential, if unexciting grown-up task. Granted, there are a host of unusual complexities to this billing cycle, mostly because I moved and have yet to get some of the old bills out of my name. But fuck. Fuck. OH MY GOD THIS IS BORING. I can hear you clicking links to different sites -- you sound like a forest full of clicky little bugs. Or is it frogs who make that noise? I'm not talking about cicadas. Cicadas whirr. I like cicadas because some of them have a 17-year life cycle, and I just finished listening to my favorite song by Ratatat, which is called "17 Years."
     My brain is coming apart but my back is coming together, its muscles contracting like a man whose fed-up wife put arsenic in his stew. My woolly beard has stopped itching, but my face is still playing host to the acne equivalent of the Tri-Wizard Tournament. The Kilo-Blemish Competition or something, where zits of many nations converge to see which group can completely conquer my face first; like its model, it is taking way too long and is a big letdown. I can't stop touching my face in horror, which in turn horrifies my dermatologist and anybody else who knows how dirty a New Yorker's hands get on a typical day just from brushing up against NY air. Oy fucking vey.
     Despite the ingestion of prodigious dosages of approved chemicals for the treatment of ADD, I can't concentrate for more than five minutes on anything that isn't shiny and moving around a lot. (Which brings me back to the bill-paying predicament, but only for a lousy one-liner. Look for it later in these parentheses. I need to sort out the bill situation so I can get money from my roommates to help pay the bills, because I can't cover them myself. See, I'm quite low on cash. Indeed, I'm... wait for it... I'm so broke I can't even pay attention!)
     Ugh. This is everyone's least favorite type of post, the self-pity post, the whining post, the nothing funny what the fuck post. (The whining post. Can you picture it? A battered four-by-four hammered into the dusty Texas ground, with iron rings hammered into it. The Whining Post. Feels like I'm tiiiieeeeddddd... to the whining post.) Great, now the word "whining" is starting to look all weird and misspelled. Well, at least I gave in to fate and mentally released myself from having to do that stuff with the bills, freeing me to write this garbage. Hooray. But don't fret. I'll be back soon with observations about the world, or, for a change of tone, maybe just a list of things that I like (here's a preview of the latter: cheap glow-in-the-dark makeup; gummi worms; X-acto knives; rubbing alcohol). This is the stupidest post EVER but fuck it, because it's done now and you can suck on it.

2005-11-23T13:31:00.000-05:00

A brief note for those of you who haven't gone on vacation yet or those of you who hate your families so much that you have snuck off to read blogs during your Thanksgiving special time when you should be tossing your niece up in the air or listening to your aunt's career advice.
     I'm back, and beardier than ever! Which is to say that if you are chilling in the Poconos for two weeks, alternately reading, staring at the walls, and snacking, nobody gives a shit if you don't shave. So my two and a half weeks of growth looks a lot less skeevy than my unshaven days 3 through 9, during which I look like a chain-snatcher or a guy who might break into your car just to take a shit in the backseat. Now, however, I look like a mangy woodsman, i.e. where the beard actually grows I look okay, but there are some mysterious patches of sparsity. But the consensus among those who have seen it has been like "huh. It looks okay," as if they were expecting a UD beard to progress from the aforementioned petty criminal stage straight to, like, the beard equivalent of John Wayne Gacy. Or sumpthin.
     I will provide more details of my trip away and how it has changed my perspective on my life (hint: expect a lot more Jesus on this page... praise be!) next week. I'm going out of town AGAIN for T'givuh (which is my name for a Thanksgiving full of Jews (or as I call them now, the heathen damned)) and Monday I'll be back with even more facefur and maybe a luxurious coat made of squirrel tails, because as I discovered while reading the Pennsylvania Hunter's Handbook (or whatever), there is NO LIMIT to the number of squirrels you can kill in good ol' PA, and you can kill 'em whenever. Yee-hah! Bear Season lasts, like, three hours -- fuck that shit. Come here, you chittering, nut-gobbling, upside-down-on-a-tree-trunk motherfuckers. Grizzly Donor's got two barrels of Thankgiving wishes just for you!
     Oh, and I was kidding about the Jesus for fuck's sake.

2005-11-05T17:04:00.000-05:00

Dear friends, readers, nemeses, creditors: I'm going to the Poconos for two whole weeks, during which time I might not post at all, and I might not even be able to check my email. My cell phone won't have service unless I go into town, which I might not do very often.
I know this fills you with jealousy, because you are probably picturing me hanging out at Beautiful Mount Airy Lodge [Regional 80s television reference.* Apologies to those who don't live in the tri-state area, whatever that means. -- Ed.]. But simmer down, I'm just going to my aunt's house. In my opinion, my aunt's house is the cooler place to be, even though it lacks the obvious advantages of a tennis "professional" and heart-shaped Jacuzzis. So for two weeks I'm going to be almost incommunicado in the mountains of Eastern Pennsylvania, during which time I will read a lot, cook a bit, rest a lot, perhaps write a bit, and breathe a lot of bracingly clean air. Maybe I'll write a song.
But so I'm sorry about the lacuna, and forgive me if I don't reply to even the wittiest emails. I'll get back to my responsibilities when I return on the Monday before Thanksgiving.

* Another fun regional 80s television ad was the one for the Westchester County Fair, which had a great hoedown jingle that at one point had a memorable breakdown that went: "{clap clap clap) Rides and attractions! {clap clap clap) Non-stop action!" That was a fun ad, partly I think because it was never really made clear what form the "action" would take, so we had to use our kiddie imaginations (as most of us city kids had never been to a county or state fair before). Pie-baking contests? Sheep-, or other shearable mammal-shearing contests? "Indian" wresting? Bare-knuckle carny boxing? Skeet shooting? Varmint wrangling? A 3-Legged Race with teams consisting solely of morbidly obese trailer-dwellers? Giant Voltron robot wars? It could have been anything.

2005-11-01T14:24:00.000-05:00

DREAMS
I usually don't post about my dreams, because nobody cares about other people's dreams (with the clear exception bluntly stated by Built to Spill in the song Made Up Dreams: "No one wants to hear what you dreamt about/ Unless you dreamt about/ Them.") I seriously believe this. People who habitually blog about their dreams have serious problems with empathy -- they can't put themselves in their readers' shoes to figure out that such posts are generally insufferable, uninteresting, solipsistic. If you only blog dreams once a year, people will read them, because they'll figure it's gonna be worthwhile.
So, prefaced by those apologies, here's an interchange from my dream last night:
LINDSEY LOHAN: Here comes that Hilary Duff bitch.
UNIVERSAL DONOR: Hi Hilary!
HILARY DUFF: Hi Jer!
LL: (rolls eyes) Tsk! Hhhhuuuhhhhh!
UD: What?
LL: Why would you say hi to her? Just to get my goat?
UD: What? No. I wouldn't do something "just to piss you off." And if you interpret my saying "hi" to someone as an aggressive act against you, you're getting a little twisted, a little too world-revolves-around-you-y. Though, come to think of it, not all that atypical for a chick. Not the solipsism, but the polar misinterpretation of an innocuous male statement.
LL: (sighs) Listen. How long have have you thought that we were going out?
UD: (taken aback) Huh? What do you mean?
LL: How long have you thought of me as your girlfriend?
UD: (defensively)WHAT?!? I haven't ever! That's crazy! What are you talking about? I'm not delusional--
LL: Because you should know this: every time we've had sex...
UD: (jaw drops in utter shock)
LL: ...which was seven times, EVERY time, you've taken a little "catnap" in the middle...
UD: (still stunned, having had no idea they'd slept together)
LL: ...you might have thought I didn't notice, but I did.
UD: Oh. Um. You shouldn't take that personally! That's just medical. It doesn't mean I wasn't enjoying it! I'm sure you're great in bed!
LL: I know I am.
UD: I'm just tired, is all!

----------------------------------

PRAGUE
...Is a game that's been described in the comments section (thanks to Annie-poo!) as a party game, but here's my Internet version. I'll make four statements. One of the statements is a lie, all the other others are true. You guess which is the lie, and if you get it right, you win. (That's the most basic version; the original gave points to various players all guessing at the same time and all providing statement tetrads.) My house rules have a guideline that the lies are actual lies in spirit, not in technicality, for example, if my statement "I just drank a Snapple Iced Tea" were the false one, it would be because I didn't drink a Snapple, not because I really had a Diet Snapple Iced tea, or because I was still drinking it. That would be lame. So here are four very basic, unexciting statements. Guess which is the lie, and I'll make up much spicier statements the next time.

1. I just ate a Halloween size minipack of grape-flavored Now and Laters.
2. Last night I washed my hair with a product called Cinnamon Buns.
3. I religiously read the bridge column in the New York Times.
4. I have memorized a mnemonic song that lists all the elements on the periodic table.

You know, now that I think about it, maybe the game is supposed to include three lies and one truth. Whoops. Somebody confirm or deny that?