substitute

The Afghan mujahedin CIA operative-owned IHOP on 17th Street in Costa Mesa has big news. They are leaving the IHOP family to be free! With luck, they will not need any Stinger missiles to do so.

However, they do need to rename the place, and they're having a contest to do so.

Ready... set... GO!

Current Mood: hungry

Well you can, but don't put in your PIN; insist on doing it as a credit transaction. Why? Because people love to steal the PIN. It's way easier to empty your bank account that way than it is with regular credit card fraud.

Retailers will do just about anything to force you into using the PIN instead of a credit card type transaction, because credit cards cost them money and PIN/Debit transactions don't. So you have to say it's credit, punch the credit button, decline to use your pin, and then tell the checker again that's credit. Or they just automatically present you with the PIN entry screen with no other options.

So, what happens when you use your PIN? Usually nothing, because supermarkets and other big retailers are secure environments. But if you use one of those rollaway ATM droids, or the ATM at some nightclub, not so good. And if you go to a gas station that only takes PIN transactions, like the ARCO here, you might just get royally and electronically screwed.

Current Mood: awake

The publisher of our local rag, Tom Johnson, is a sensible guy, and he wrote a thoughtful editorial on Friday. He
rightly points out that one of the city's parks has been designated a "passive park," which is an entirely new concept, exactly to keep Mexican-Americans and other soccer fans from playing in the park.

This is of course the work of Costa Mesa's racist-majority city council, which includes now internationally known Mexican-baiter Mayor Allan Mansour. But Johnson moves past Mansour to the real force behind the local spiral into race war.

The editorial called out our local white supremacist bile factory, Mr. Martin H. Millard. Millard straddles the border between mainstream politics and skinhead neo-Nazism adroitly. He delivered support and votes for Mansour while keeping his scarier buddies out of the picture. He's slime. And Johnson points him out very accurately as one of Costa Mesa's biggest problems.

The response from Millard at CMPress would be funny if he wasn't so powerful.

Tip of the hat to Geoff West at A Bubbling Cauldron for this story.

Current Mood: awake

Miscellaneous Hip-Hop Guy from 1992 showed up last night. Black guy in his twenties somewhere in red sports jersey, baggy pants, really big athletic shoes, red bandanna with sideways red athletic cap, swagger, radio Walkman permanently attached to head. He looked like he'd just answered a casting call for a movie about the life of Tupac Shakur.

He made a beeline for the ice cream store, which had just closed, and banged on the glass door, hard. He alternated doing that with doing the tough guy gangsta swagger walk in circles for a few minutes. I tried to differentiate between "kinda eccentric guy in the wrong neighborhood" and "total loon".

Finally the ice cream store guy came to the door. This was D.P., who is a classic Newport Beach preppy wimp: polo with popped collar, curled short hair, weak chin, very clean athletic shoes. People who went to high school with him describe him as a Drama Dork.

D.P. popped open the door and greeted LL Fool J, and they proceeded to carry out a complex Hip-Hop Guy handshake with lots of knuckle bumping and finger gestures. They then departed into the back of the ice cream store.

[Poll #542747]

He plays mostly sixties covers, as you'd expect from a guitarist of his age. He did cover Richard Thompson's "From Galway to Graceland" which was a nice surprise. Turns out he idolizes Thompson. He told me his 16-year-old son shares his love for the RT and is trying to play in a similar style, and is "scary good" after just a few years. Won't let the kid at his Chapman Stick because he's afraid his son will outdo him and he'll have to jump off the Pier.

He's a good guitar player, but uses so much reverb and delay/loop stuff that you're hearing what he picked last week. At times he stops playing for a bit and the music just goes on. My own theory is that he dropped, like, a POUND of acid in 1974 and the rest of the world sounds this way to him. And he thinks he's playing like Richard Thompson on Small Town Romance while we all talk like we're underwater.

Anyway he's a very nice guy.

Newlyweds, storytellers, and the Warcraft Widow ( behind the cut )

Yup, him.

alpaca
Originally uploaded by conradh.

This is a picture of an alpaca from the 2004 Orange County Fair.

I like alpacas.

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Costa Mesa Cultural Happenings: It's Not an IHOP Now

Don't use your debit card at the gas station.

local politics: white supremacists, soccer, and newspapers

Goin' back to Carvel

Tonight's Troubadour at D's

Summer nights in Costa Mesa

He's baaaaack!

alpaca

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May 2009

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