The Bootup Kids

The local rich kids all showed up at once and began staring at this laptop, giving me the opportunity to create my own D.I.Y. Apple ad. I'm not sure whether "Think Different" or "The Power To Crush The Other Kids" would be the best slogan to use. Maybe a new slogan for emo kids with lots of cash?

A phrase that was unfamiliar to me

But I understood it as soon as I heard it.

"Mayor Nagin got his nigger wake-up call."

Dorkness at Noon

It was really great to see changeng tonight, as he headed back home from playing down in Laguna. Between him and me and Jared and Deanna and Dan we managed to invent a urine-powered car, perfectly plan Stuart's takeover of all world media, and have just a little bit too much caffeine. Or at least I did. Blink, blink.

I had a nice talk with Movie Guy Dan about old punk rock days and was surprised to hear about some people who should be dead, but somehow aren't: Texacala Jones, Paul Cutler from Vox Pop/45 Grave/Dream Syndicate, Rick Wilder from the Mau Maus.

I met Dorothy, who is Deanna's friend and is nice and smart and stunning and apparently a champeen pool player.

I bought tomatoes and olive oil. There were various millionaires in the market buying cookies and whisky. As I drove home I thought about the idle rich, as I have been a lot lately. I see them when I go to the local ritzy mall to get my computer fixed, and they're just kind of hanging out buying stuff on weekend afternoons, looking a little dazed in their gigantic $500 athletic shoes and gigantic $80,000 wondertrucks. I wonder what it's like to have nothing at all that moves you, and no reason otherwise to move? It seems like a kind of Hell.

DEVELOPING...

From: BreakingNews@MAIL.CNN.COM
Subject: CNN Breaking News
Date: September 3, 2005 7:13:28 AM PDT
To: TEXTBREAKINGNEWS@CNNIMAIL12.CNN.COM
Reply-To: newseditor@MAIL.CNN.COM

-- President Bush:

Watch CNN or log on to http://CNN.com and watch FREE video.
More Americans watch CNN. More Americans trust CNN.

NOPD.

I used to know a guy who was a New Orleans cop. He'd also been in the Navy and been a zoo keeper. I got the impression he joined the force for the right reason: decent pay with overtime for someone without a fancy saleable degree.

At the time he left the force (1996 I believe), some 40 officers were up on felony charges. Some of them had called out hits on other officers. I remember him saying that anyone who could get out of that department did. I never asked him how much of the corruption he experienced himself. Since his personality was "straight arrow", my guess is that he made his bargain with the job as much as he could without getting murdered or being unable to sleep nights. It can't have been easy. His final choice was to leave the city and move to Oregon and start over. I had dinner with him during his trip West when he came through L.A. Some things I remember from our conversations:

—

"See that security guard outside the warehouse there? You know, if you've been a cop you can always get a guard job, but I'd never do that if I could avoid it. I remember once I got a call for a robbery and assault. I show up at a warehouse just like that, and there's a guard down on the ground all bloody and broken, and a guy beating the hell out of him with the guard's own flashlight. I got out of the car with my gun, and the guy dropped the flashlight, held up his hands with the wrists together, and said "Go 'head and arrest me now! I respeck the po-lice!"

—

[While watching some scene in a cop bar on tv in his hotel room] "Now, now. That is not a cop bar. Where are the wasted, whisky-soaked detectives shooting into the ceiling? Where are the drug dealers? Where are the women having sex with Coke bottles on the bar?"

—

"The absolutely only thing I miss about that job was the food. Cops eat free in New Orleans."

—

He was doing tech support, and then he was a campus cop for a while and then I think he moved to PA and I lost track of him. Gregg, if you find this say howdy, and please correct anything I got wrong.

Mostly for turnip

I'm sure the people of New Orleans would have liked to show their appreciation for the official Presidential photo-strafing, but their surface-to-air missiles were wet.

And now a short musical innertube.

I thought I'd break up the steady diet of horror and gloom with some unseemly levity.

HEY, LIBERACE!

(no subject)

I think we just saw the whites of their eyes.