Unfortunately it is not the kind from Mexico where they're on fire.

But I'm sure all of you—especially maddox_84—will find this a delight.

Warning: Freak Show

.wmv stream

trip

I had to drive six and a half hours just to be in a crowd of people yelling WORKING CLASSES WORKING CLASSES, but it was worth it.

Had a painless drive up, collapsed in hotel. The next day I was a consumer whore and went to both Aquarius Records and City Lights Books. I got the Joseph Spence record, some Tuvan throat singing, a Masada I didn't have, and Blue Cheer. Their "classic rock" section was about 15 CDs total, three of which were Blue Cheer. God I love that place. I asked the woman behind the counter if the Tuvan record had any hippies on it, because Jared and I both wanted throat singing with no fucking hippies. She cracked up and said she wasn't sure about the hippie content on that one.

At City Lights I pillaged their "Evidence" section for You Can't Win (the original true crime book, beloved of Wm. Burroughs), a history of cocaine, a book about Charles Ponzi, and How It All Began: A Personal Account of a West German Urban Guerrilla. I also got some Borges.

Down the street at Caffé Puccini I hung out with some cool old guys who talked about life and smoked and drank coffee and made sense, and were really nice. They made me want to move to North Beach and grow old bullshitting at a café.

Then I went and saw Gang of Four at the Fillmore. They were very, very good. As jwz said, I'd waited 20 years for this. My last chance to see them was at the US Festival in 1980 or something when I was a minor and my parents wouldn't let me go. Fortunately, they're still really good. I haven't felt the floor flexing beneath me from the people around me dancing in a long time. The crowd was singing along with just about every song. John King can still beat the shit out of a microwave oven with incomparable style and verve. I took out my earplugs for "I Found That Essence Rare" because it may well be my favorite song, ever.

The openers were okay. Menomeno was kind of Pinback Junior. Good, but nothing boomtacular, kind of precious. Radio Four sucked. Their music was the kind of thing I like, but the singer was a talentless egotist and a shitty bass player. Plus, if you're going to do Joy Division/Stranglers/Shriekback postpunk music, don't have a percussionist with bongos and timbales. Just don't. They were all very carefully made up to be stars on VH1. I hope a gator eats them.

Then I went back to my hotel and KOLLAPSED, and poor genericus began his Dark Night of the Soul. I proceeded to have too much bourbon in my hotel room and pass out.

Due to the excessive Maker's Mark, the next day started kind of slow. By 2 pm or so I managed to have a cheese sandwich and some coffee and became human. That night I had indonesio-fusio-asian food with tuliphead who was charming and kind and drove me all over town in her small, red rentacar. After a pleasant meal we went to meet gordonzola and anarqueso in the darkest bar I've ever been in. They bought me mineral water and we gabbled about life, love, and cheese for a couple of happy hours. Various odd people kept entering the tiny room we inhabited at the bar and opening up what appeared to be a broom closet and staring into it. One of them said he was "just looking around".

The next day was checkout time, and off to have lunch with hep, which didn't happen because oops. I spent some time in a Starbucks in SoMa watching a serious of dot-com stereotypes: shaved-head white guy in college t-shirt; fedora + suit coat + slacks + Pumas white guy; older white guy with very expensive retro sunglasses and fauxhawk; token black guy with wacky hair and expensive club-guy sunglasses; white guy with long narrow beard and Google t-shirt.

Then I got rained on so I left town and drove down to SLO. I checked into the Trave Lodge, stuffed my face with meat at a BBQ joint, and went back to the room where I drank a beer and read. The next day I slept in and then went downtown and enjoyed the ambience and more meat. It was market day which meant asparagus, fresh honey, and the insane. There's a guy who looks just like Charlie Manson who will play any Zep song for you; a sprayshellacked hair guy with a Jesus sign; an assortment of anti-environmental Libertarians with a booth; and some well-scrubbed but crazy-looking churchy types.

There was also a lot of meat so I ate some more, and also some of the free almonds that the almond guy was handing out: "FOUR SECONDS OF FLEETING PLEASURE PER ALMOND GUARANTEED!" I shopped at the book and record stores but wasn't going to be spending more money on this trip, so I just enjoyed poring through ephemera and madness in the used book store, and failures from the 80s in the used stacks at Boo Boo Records. Damn, there is a lot of Robert Hunter vinyl left over from those days, and lots of .38 Special.

I then went back to my room and drank more beer and watched TV, and read, and slept. The next day I met bruisedhips, godforesaken, and lil Owen for breakfast and street wandering. Owen is an astonishingly beautiful child and a lot easier to hang out with than I was at that age. There wasn't even one fire! After a pleasant couple of hours I got in my car and drove the 5 hours home. Instead of going down the coast past Santa Barbara and Ventura and the Sepulveda Pass on a Friday night I went inland through Maricopa towards Bakersfield on Hwy 166, and then south on I-5. Going over the Grapevine it was raining so God-damned hard that my traction control was kicking in going uphill at 70 mph, and I could just barely see the car in front of me at a distance of about five car lengths. It was very frightening.

At home I'm a tourist.

So, why is this guy still being called "Al Qaeda #3" in every other news report?

From the Sunday Times Online. I can't find this story anywhere else. Which suggests to me that the U.S. news media is just going to keep reporting that this guy is "Al Qaeda's #3". Which suggests to me that they're somehow getting WORSE at reporting the news.

May 08, 2005

Captured Al-Qaeda kingpin is case of ‘mistaken identity’
Christina Lamb and Mohammad Shehzad Islamabad

THE capture of a supposed Al-Qaeda kingpin by Pakistani agents last week was hailed by President George W Bush as “a critical victory in the war on terror”. According to European intelligence experts, however, Abu Faraj al-Libbi was not the terrorists’ third in command, as claimed, but a middle-ranker derided by one source as “among the flotsam and jetsam” of the organisation.( Read more... )

look at the world through polarized glasses

Privilege, wealth, entitlement, perception. Those are the four words that keep recurring over the last six months.

Privilege can only be seen from outside and below. As a straight white male U.S. Citizen from a prosperous suburban Southern California home, I'm only about an inch from the top of that hill, but it takes effort and education to see it. It looks as though there's a huge peak of wealth and power towering above me that I can't achieve, but the real mountain is beneath me and it's vast.

Because of all these advantages, which were mostly invisible to me, I had a very easy time of my first 18 years. I recommend a suburban middle-class environment for any child. When you're demanding, immature, and helpless anyway it's a tremendous help to be in a community designed for such people.

After that, my privileged status was notable in the negative. I didn't suffer the full consequences of my nervous breakdown after college. Instead of being dead, I was kind of broke for a few years and got a lot of help from family and friends, and got decent medical care, and was able to be partially employed, and finally able to use my educational and other advantages to recover financially and build a new career. Everything about my background served as a cushion, and I survived a nasty depression and a series of personality and mood disorders and came out okay. During this time I got to see a few rungs down from my own place in this society, and who was clinging to them, and I got some idea why. That was my education. I didn't get my face smashed in when I had my car crash; I got a nasty shock and a couple of burns from life's air bags.

Now I'm back in suburbia and making a decent living. I'm effectively insulated from my own capacity to fuck up. I could lose my job. I could get a new disease or injury. I could get into legal trouble, acquire a new addiction, crash my car, whatever. If I didn't kill myself I'd be okay. Not just my own personal situation (my family is okay for cash and owns some property, etc.) but the entire framework of society will save me. It's very, very unlikely that I'll experience poverty in my lifetime.

So, why am I droning on about this?

The privilege of this suburban, entitled life creates an illusion of flatness. Looking around me I see what looks like a universe of people like me. There's a perception of that "level playing field" where everyone can get a job, everyone has a working car, everyone has a little free time and a reasonable education and a few bucks in the wallet. If someone succeeds, it's because he worked a little harder and a little smarter. If someone fails at life, maybe he's not too bright or he drinks too much. People who want to go back to school, or buy a condo instead of renting, or travel, they just make it happen with a little elbow grease.

Far too many of the people around me resent this existence.

They want more! Television shows them wealth porn and then explains that anyone can achieve this, with just a bit more of the elbow grease. They fall for it, reliably. Since the only things holding them back from the MTV's Cribs lifestyle are welfare queens, whiny liberals, and tax-and-spend politicians, they can be induced to vote against all of these things. Once these obstacles are removed, every man a king! The message is that we are all entitled to more wealth, and that wicked or mistaken people are trying to rob us of it.

That mountain stretching above us looks so huge and inviting and beautifully unreachable; we can't see how tiny it is without looking down. And that's a painful view, because suddenly we see how rich we've been all along, and how many people we're sitting on. The people on the summit would rather we kept adoring them.

arroz con bozo

tuliphead: do we get to pick the one we want from the tank
substitute: mmm, clown tank
tuliphead: i hope they rubberband their horns shut
substitute: i hate it when the butcher hits the clown with the cleaver the first time and it squeaks
tuliphead: it's neat to hear them rattle the pot lid when the water boils, though

hay everyone Dashboards graet!!!

http://stephan.com/widgets/zaptastic/

Widgets can autoinstall. Widgets are hard to remove if you don't know what you're doing. Widgets can screw you really hard in the wrong hole. There's even a goatse widget! Oops. Perhaps they should have thought this part of Tiger through just a little bit more.

Ah, the magic of the internet!

Folks it's great to mix these three things: South Orange County asshats, homeowners associations, and internet bulletin boards! I especially like how he wants material he's politically opposed to removed from the board, but when they ban him he says "we're all adults here". Also, website designer. Also, the phrase "graphic argument". Also.. oh never mind.( let's read! )

For an additional $5 I will trash one (1) competitor per post

WHERE'S MY MONEY?

As I was showering today, I kept thinking about how much I like the great selection, free shipping, and fantastic customer service at Zappos.com. It's really better than any other online shoe store!

inventory sale

I return from my vacation to find my friends & family in heaven and hell simultaneously. The count among people up to 2 degrees from me is:

1 animal bite requiring ER visit and antibiotics
1 big promotion and raise
4 bone fractures (in four separate people!)
1 new and incurable liver disease of unknown origin
2 breakups
2 acceptances to good academic programs
1 new cancer diagnosis
1 government grant
1 childhood asthma diagnosis
2 new apartments that were greatly desired

If I touch you, either you'll get $50,000 in small bills or your left patella will explode.

I always wanted to see this thing.

In 1978, a German guy named Syberberg made a seven hour movie about Hitler starring puppets.



Yow.