Do you bite your thumb at me, sir? (Costa Mesa mix)

There's this Del Taco in Costa Mesa, California at Newport Boulevard and 17th Street. It's open 24 hours a day. It's near a couple of record stores, some bars, and Café Ruba, which is the coffee joint for unhappy teenagers.

So a lot of kids and young adults hang around this Del Taco and raise heck. It used to be a big straightedge hangout. For some reason it's where fights happen in this town.

The drunk bro dudes at shorescrew.com have documented one pretty good Del Taco brawl for us: Del Taco Fight (page with embedded Quicktime video).

It's almost identical to a fight I saw in fourth grade except everyone's in their 20s and a vintage car is vandalized. Special attention to the really cool ape noises the guy in grey makes near the end of the barely visible second half of the battle.

where is that dynamo coming from? ?

This is mesmerizing:

Grafik Dynamo is a net art work by Kate Armstrong & Michael Tippett that loads live images from blogs and news sources on the web into a live action comic strip. The work is currently using a feed from LiveJournal. The images are accompanied by narrative fragments that are dynamically loaded into speech and thought bubbles and randomly displayed. Animating the comic strip using dynamic web content opens up the genre in a new way: Together, the images and narrative serve to create a strange, dislocated notion of sense and expectation in the reader, as they are sometimes at odds with each other, sometimes perfectly in sync, and always moving and changing. The work takes an experimental approach to open ended narrative, positing a new hybrid between the flow of data animating the work and the formal perameter that comprises its structure.

FOR YOUR HEAD: USB SHAKING OCTOPUS

YES I SAID USB SHAKING OCTOPUS FOR YOUR HEAD

This is just plain sad: Bryan Harvey

From Phast Phreddie, via my friend Julie DuBrow:

Dear Friends,

This morning my brother, who works in the Richmond, Virginia area, called and asked me if I knew Bryan Harvey.

I was familiar with The House of Freaks when the group was based in LA, and Gutterball with Steve Wynn; and I ran into Bryan and his wife from time to time when I was down in the Richmond area visiting my brother and/or Stephen McCarthy (of The Long Ryders, who has played in several bands with Bryan since they both moved back to Richmond in the late eighties). Twice I saw Harvey dressed as Presley when he sang in the band Fat Elvis--with McCarthy (it may have been Fat Elvis' only two shows).

My brother told me that he had just read in the paper that Bryan and his family were found dead in their home.

( the rest of the story, as far as we have it )

Wanna hump? I mean, hi.

1. Watch exile.ru's War Nerd wind up and slam Victor Davis Hanson into the toilet where he belongs! Yay!
   
   
2. Since my chosen future profession is Postapocalyptic Barbarian Warlord, I read this helpful set of instructions on living through a gasoline shortage with great interest.

Go Go Gadget 401(k)!

Personal Rate of Return from 01/01/2005 to 12/30/2005 is 0.5%