tiresome

Dear LJ: I already changed my password once to make it much more obscure. Now I'm getting the warning that it's too easy to guess, again. Obviously you're monkeying around with the definition of "too easy". You're a big, grown-up company now, and it's time to stop testing everything out in production. This is FUCKING ANNOYING.

None of us want fruit rollups now, ever

The day was a usual work day, which lately means trying to find out what's going on mostly, or what I should be doing. This is less fun than actual work, but unfortunately it's just as important.

I had an unexpected nap at 5 or so and didn't wake up until 7:30. Groggle groggle. Staggered into the shower and out the door. Saw people at D's. They had some dead guy playing classic rock as usual. Further performances by any artist of James Taylor or Cat Stevens songs may result in over-the-top violence of the kind seen only in imported Japanese DVDs. You have been warned.

It was good to introduce djfntstque to some more people, so he can see the freak show that is the patio.

Just in time I remembered not to go to Ruba and feel left out and old and ugly and pathetic, and instead went for a drive to clear my head and then home. Tamales + margaritas = pleasure.

I want to get lost in something and come out a year from now.

If the fact of death were to be admitted the American Dream would be revealed as a lie

Holidays bring out a weird split personality in the U.S. We are instructed to enjoy each holiday, and the quarter of the year we call the "holiday season". It's our liturgical calendar. Everything from Christmas to Superbowl Sunday is celebrated with deadly serious intensity. It isn't just that advertisers push us to buy stuff. We get into this shit really deep and want to do each holiday perfectly. We will be joyful, or patriotic, or "spooky", or whatever the occasion calls for, and we will demonstrate this with decorations and special foods and events and and and.

At the same time the holidays scare the hell out of us. Partly because of public service campaigns over the years by anti-drunk-driving organizations, we have a national obsession with the hazards of holidays that's just as strong as our desire to celebrate the hell out of them. "Enjoy your Memorial Day barbecue" or "Have a Merry Christmas" has acquired the suffix "safely" in the last 30 years. It's understandable that we'd want to reduce the body count from New Year's drunk driving or poorly cooked turkeys, but we put way more effort into it than the actual numbers warrant.

Sentimentality makes us frightened. Each holiday must be perfect — the Christmas Carol Christmas, the Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving — or it will be a terrible tragedy. Not only must the snacks be perfect and every child rosy-cheeked and laughing, but no one may die during the special happy time.

I'm on the record as disliking the new Halloween for other reasons, but the safety bit is hilarious here. Folks! Let's make sure that while celebrating the Day of the Dead, All Hallows' Eve, the terrifying Pandemonium in which the gates between Hell and Earth swing open and the dead walk the earth and Satan Himself tests the faithful with the terrors of the grave, that we're all super safe and stuff!

And now a piece of found poetry received from my HR Department today on this very subject: ( SAFE HORROR )

Weave a circle round him thrice

1. I'm as big a fan of biotech against disease as the next guy, but I get this nervous twitch in my eye when they talk about using genetically modified chickens to fight the bird flu.
   
   
2. ANTI MONKEY BUTT POWDER!
   
   
3. We're going to be using Roombas to find snipers now? Well, not exactly.
   
   
4. Due to bird flu, the Croatian government has quarantined the late Marshal Tito's parrot. Sometimes life just presents us with this great condensed symbols we don't need to improve.
   
   
5. We have beautiful desert wildflowers in California; they're surprising to see in what people think is a wasteland. Feral Flowers is a wonderful site about the weird habits of these plants and their periodic appearance and disappearance.

O joy

We love weekend hardware failure, we do

Suck City Slurpers

While installing mom's new Mac today I tripped the power the computers are plugged into. When it all came back up I had no Internet connection. Two sets of cables, a new switch, two new network cards, three calls to the ISP, and four hours later I was out $70 and still no connection. Tomorrow I'm buying a new DSL modem in hopes that will fix it. After that I dunno. I do this for a living and this one has me stumped.

After that experience I am exhausted, deflated, and depressed. I am supposed to go to a Halloween thing tonight but I have no interest in dressing up and people will probably give me shit if I don't, so maybe I'll just go home and read.

D's is full of ethereally beautiful women and their grunting, brutish boyfriends. It's like a Popeye cartoon tonight.

ROKKEN WITH DOKKEN AND SUKKEN KOKKEN

So there's this horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible band that plays D's. They're called the "Over-Reactors" and it's a duo. They manage to hit the wrong notes and emphasis in each song, almost all of which are covers except an original they always do which is titled "One Sick Pony".

They do things like cover the Cowboy Junkies' cover of "Sweet Jane" and then somehow fuck up. Ooh boy, he's fucking up the Foo Fighters now. Anyway, he's here tonight solo.

The weird part is their band website reveals that he's now in Dokken. What? Dokken exists? They played Guitar Center? Acoustic? WITH THIS GUY IN THE BAND? It must have been something straight out of This Is Spinal Tap.