substitute

This was not a good day to shop at my usual shopping mall back in KC nor is it going to be a good day getting around the Bay Area for a very long, very very long time.

The photo gallery for the trucksplosion story is amazing.

...which makes you the Prince of Absolutely Fucking Nobody.

Let's Get rid of those whiny precious aristocratic post-literate disengaged "hipster" assholes and bring back Dada.

THE TIME IS NOW. PICK UP A BRICK AND FOLLOW ME.

A letter to the editor in this week's Orange County Weekly, with a response not from the reporter but from the editorial staff, makes me all warm and happy inside.

IN WHICH WE’RE WISHED A NICE DAY, BUT IRONICALLY
Your rag and alleged journalists are certainly entitled to what I consider immoral, ultra-leftist opinions. Freedom of the press is, in fact, essential to a democracy. However, when a writer (Jim Washburn) has a column entitled, “Immigration? We’ve Got Bigger Problems” with a subtitle, “Why Our Noncitizens Are Our Best Citizens”, I would hope that the article would contain concrete examples of these declarations. Unfortunately, the writer chose to ramble on various issues, never addressing his topic points, before offering an example of a missed opportunity to the solution of illegal immigration by stating, “Back in the 1980s, Jesse Jackson proposed helping Mexico and other neighbors to (sic) overcome corruption and cronyism to (sic) raise (sic) job prospects and standards of living so people wouldn’t feel compelled to come here”. Mr. Washburns reasoning, like his writing, is muddled. Hey Jim, why don’t you and Jesse co-author a letter to President Fox? What a joke!!

Washburn’s final paragraph starts, “Immigrant-rights organizers are next planning a May 1 “Day Without an Immigrant,” (sic - comma should have been after the parenthetical close) in which they’re asking that people not work or shop on that day”. Great writing, Jim. I particularly enjoyed you’re convoluted word structuring in this sentence. Finally, Washburn, assumingly toungue in cheek, illogically states that blackened calamari tostada is as American as apple pie. Not that clever, Jimbo.

I applaud celebrating a “Day Without an Immigrant”. If illegal immigrants don’t work, don’t shop, don’t drive without a license or insurance, don’t commit any crimes, don’t send their children to school, don’t use any free governmental or health service benefits, etc. on that day, I would propose “A Year Without an Immigrant” so we can actually ascertain the true cost of illegal immigration.

Have a nice day,
David S. Gray
Via e-mail

The copy editor responds: Your letter, while dull, illustrates two important points: that you are frighteningly stupid, and that you really shouldn’t mess with a copy editor. In American English, we keep our punctuation inside our quotation marks unless the punctuation in question would change the meaning of that which is being quoted—for instance, if I were to say, “It sure is amazing how far David S. Gray’s ‘toungue’ is up his own ass,” and then someone else asked another person if he had heard me say that thing about you and your “toungue,” he would say it thusly: “Did you hear the copy editor say of David S. Gray, ‘It sure is amazing how far David S. Gray’s “toungue” is up his own ass’?” Am I confusing you now with all the switching back and forth between the apostrophes and the quotation marks—incidentally, what you do when there’s a quote within a quote? I’m sorry. Sorry you’re so pathetically dumb! By the way, you seem to have a bit of a problem with your possessives and you don’t know your yours from your you’res. By the way also? You’re a dick.

Don’t mess with Texas, you pussy little bitch.

WITH his vintage blue-and-red rep tie, carefully tousled hair and old metal lapel pin reading "I {heart} Grandpa," Loren Kreiss looks like a typical style-conscious 24-year-old. He collects cool things, like 2,194 "friends" on myspace.com, an antique Coke machine and 15,000 songs on his hard drive. His vintage wristwatch is a fashion accessory, not a tool.

"My watch and all my clocks are set to the wrong time," Mr. Kreiss said recently. "It's symbolic of me. I don't like to look at time."

But as the scion of Kreiss, his family's California-based furniture business, Mr. Kreiss (pronounced to rhyme with nice) sometimes has to work at being an iconoclast. He can barely contain his contradictions. For instance, his three-times-a-week maid often resets the clocks correctly, forcing Mr. Kreiss to reset them quirky again. (To avoid missing appointments, he consults his ever-present BlackBerry.)

The rest of the article is here at the NY Times.

But wait, no, I need to paste another quote: Mr. Kreiss writes his graphic novels on his BlackBerry while working out on an elliptical trainer at the gym.

Wait wait, no, here's another: He hung out with bands like Blink-182 during the height of San Diego's neo-punk scene, sang in a band and produced three records on his indie Lurid label.

Okay I have to go punch a yuppie now. Brb.

For some folks it's not enough just to buy the F350 Super Duty truck. Or to buy the crew cab version. Or to get the "FX4 Offroad" package, lift it, and load it up with accessories. No, the important part here is causing a confrontation of some kind, using the truck, so that there can be some manhood and throwdowns and getting up in someone's grill, as they say. A good way to do this is to take two parking spots in a suburban parking lot where you don't belong, when all the other trucks are at the far end of the lot because their drivers were grownups.

Bill O'Reilly doesn't want to smear the nice Reverend.

WHEN SOMEONE SENDS A REQUEST TO MY WEBSERVER FOR AN MP3 FILE, THEY GET HEADERS LIKE THIS:

200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2005 20:10:47 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: "2b0a8-60ac4b-765d9280"
Server: Apache/2.0.55 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.55 OpenSSL/0.9.8 DAV/2 PHP/4.4.0
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
Content-Length: 6335563
Content-Type: audio/mpeg
Last-Modified: Sat, 15 Oct 2005 20:03:06 GMT
Client-Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2005 20:10:47 GMT
Client-Peer: 64.81.85.145:80
Client-Response-Num: 1

PLEASE EXPLAIN TO ME, IN YOUR OWN WORDS, HOW THIS IS A "MOVIE" AND WHY YOU ARE RESTRICTING HER FROM SAVING IT TO HER LOCAL DISK UNLESS SHE PURCHASES QUICKTIME PRO. WE HAVE ALREADY UNCHECKED ALL THE BOXES. THERE IS A STORE WITHIN WALKING DISTANCE OF MY HOUSE THAT SELLS SHOTGUNS, AND I HAVE A FULL TANK OF GAS IN THE CAR. I HOPE YOU UNDERSTAND THE IMPLICATION HERE.

LOVE,

SOMEONE WHO READS THE RFC'S AND TAKES THEM SERIOUSLY

Faux folksy fuck flails at flip, frivolous fun.

via waxy.org links

Watch out for hysterical urban legends, unconfirmed reports, and exaggerated nightmare scenarios about looting in New Orleans. There's looting and violence all right, and when all is told there are going to be some sad and frightening stories about it.

But who benefits from a lot of scare talk about masses of armed looters, snipers, and great crowds of the unwashed attacking rescue personnel? The people who want to blame the victims, that's who.

All those officials who failed us are going to talk long and loud about the breakdown in civil order and the need for zero tolerance and lots of soldiers with guns. Don't forget the real villains here: the people who didn't give the evacuation order in time, the local agencies that left people on their own without transportion to leave, the federal agencies that pulled the funding for the levees, the President who couldn't be bothered leaving his vacation until the corpses were floating already. They'd just love for you to concentrate on all those grimy underclass losers stealing beer and taking potshots at helicopters.

Keep your focus. The "grownups" in suits who were supposed to spend our tax money to save lives stood around while Americans died. If they try to look good later by shooting some pathetic losers for boosting a beer, it's doubling their own crime.