bag of rocks

with GPS you know it's all just a matter of degrees

2007-06-04T16:43:00.000-04:00

This morning the bor newsroom woke up bright and early to do some work. The wake-up call included a weather report. it allowed me to spend some quiet time by the lake and without other people. Breakfast in the sun was followed by a bunch of presentations and an insanely huge lunch. I think I overdid it. Then we drove to Red Rocks open space for the GPS Scavenger Hunt. I don’t really feel like getting into this part, other than it was beautiful and kinda fun because it was basically hiking with a purpose…upon returning, I hopped in the tub and grappled with the problem of how to hear the telly over the sound of the water. Finally I figured out that all I need do is turn on the telly in the bathroom to the same channel (it can only be seen from the shower, not the tub) and use the volume for that tv and the picture on the other. Curb your enthusiasm is good in the bath. So is ali G. which I am still watching. In a luscious bathrobe. We have dinner in like an hour, so I think as soon as the feet stop aching, I will head to the outdoor bar with the fireplace which is obviously my spiritual home.

They tell you to begin at the beginning, but I’m going for begin at what is please god please almost the end. We’re sittingn in DFW after an of course delayed flight out of COS and our flight is now delayed for the 90th time to about 2 ½ hrs late. I hope I get to see my apartment again.

Picking up from last time. Some sort of drinking game was underway when I made it to the bar and I reluctantly joined in. it was different rules for me as I was drinking scotch. We made our way to dinner which was sick. Under a pavilion, outdoor FP, and tonnnnnnnnneeess of food, all of which was yumsters. Then there was the afterparty.

There’s the guy. You know who he is the second you meet him. He’s the one who found a way to get off the property and get 4 cases of beer and fill up his bathtub with it and a monstrous amount of ice. He’s the one who’s gonna make sure you get bombed. We’ll call him Saviour. I’ve NEVER played a drinking game until that day. I haven’t even heard of most of them. So the flip-cup tourney was complete news to me. I was still in the midst of getting peoples names, faces, locations and job titles right. So the beer-covered desk was a strange distraction. Anyway, seeing the vast majority of your coworkers really fucking tanked. Eg, of of the more established members, who was moving house the next day and had a flight at 7am, took it upon herself to order beer from room service. Do you want to know how much a case of domestic beer costs at a 5-diamond hotel (domestic)? $150. So it was no small wonder (in retrospect), that when it hadn’t arrived 20 minutes after ordering, she was on the phone in the toilet (not ON the toilet though) literally screaming at room service demanding the bring the beer “right now”. The poor girl who showed up looked pretty fucking scared. And I probably would too. We looked like barbarians. Actually it just looked like a frat party. Or spring break. the highlight for me was when we started kicking the french doors into the bathroom like we were cops breaking into an apartment. that is REALLY Fun. I left at 130, knowing we had to be on a bus at 8am to go rafting, and when I went to bed four doors away, I could hear them rockin till the break of day. Obviously, people looked hysterical the next morning. There were a few bright-eyed, bushy tails, but for the most part, eyes were puffy, heads were slung, hands rested on bellies and voices were coated in beer and cigarettes. We spent two hours on the Arkansas river, and my particular guide was so clichéd I wondered if he was just putting us on. He described each rapid hit as “epic” and advised us all to buy the kind of sandals he had on (he also complimented my solomons). He was nice and let us be pretty lazy, which was why we came floating in about 10 minutes after the boat in front of us, in last place.

Cold and wet, but certainly no longer hungover (nothing clears up a headache like the fear of being swept out of a boat), we boarded the bus and tore through our box lunches. Box lunch with three sandwiches, chips, apple, a snickers bar, some weird coconut thingy with chocolate chips and, inexplicably, a packet of ranch dressing. I ate every crumb. We returned finally and I jumped in the gorgeous tub and watched Curb Your Enthusiasm.

One of the girls I work with, Jersey, had suggested going to Garden of the Gods which I’d been all for earlier, but was now totally not feeling like I wanted to go anywhere or do anything.

You know what sucks ass? The fact that we were supposed to land at 915, and it’s 1022 and I was just told I was allowed to turn on my approved electronic device. Yeah. So fucking late.

So we ended up renting a car and driving to a tourist trap old style western town where I bought a dress to wear to dinner that evening since I apparently took “casual dress” waaaay too literally. Dinner was extravagant, and began with our CEO giving a speech via an anamatronic moosehead in the banquet hall we were eating in. there was dancing and booze and a mess all around.

I finally crashed after stopping by Saviour’s for round two. This time there were god knows how many cases of beer and a pony keg. I have no idea what kind of debauchery ensued as I could literally barely stay awake. This morning Jersey and I got in the car (which we’d sweet-talked our way into parking for free) and went to Garden of the Gods and Manitou (?) springs. Then we drove to the airport and proceeded to get delayed for a fucking iron age.

I’m tired and pissed off and since I accidentally brought my netflix with me, and it’s “metropolitan”, I’m gonna annoy the people around me with my bright computer screen and watch it.

Ps, it was a fun time… ☺ just in case you want to hear more about the flight, after we boarded there was (in dallas) apparenlty some issue in the cargo hold. a hole in a firewall. so they had to move our bags from one area to another. that obviously took forever. then the captain said we might not get to land at LGA bc they close at 12am. but they did let us land. but there was a plane at our gate. so why can't we just park somewhere else? it's like 2am, there've got to be empty gates at laguardia. fuck me. so we finally get to the gate and get off the plane and theyv'e put all the flights that have just come in's baggage on the same fucking baggage claim. finally got to sleep around 3am. ugh.

my trip to colorado springs

2007-06-04T16:38:00.000-04:00

Even though I’ve been traveling for 10 hours or so, was unfortunate enough to call two fairly disgusting airport chili’s appetizers (shared between five people) and a hideously overpriced Stella dinner and have to get up at 7am to work tomorrow morning, I am still excited enough to get out my stupid computer and start typing this in a word doc since there’s no wireless in my room (tomorrow, it’s lake terrace in the am, this might be one of the rare times I’m excited to be up at the ass crack of dawn). There is a television in the bathroom, people. I am now watching some special on the travel channel, on a giant flat screen tv (not the one in the bathroom), on a hugely comfy chair with a leather ottoman in one of these ridiculous hotel robes. I want to live here. Maybe I do want to be rich. Cause this shit is sweet.

It’s been a harrowing day anyway, as we started off in moronic traffic from the office to LGA. Not entirely sure why the cabbie decided to take the fdr to the triboro instead of the queensboro, but then again, the man wouldn’t go over the speed limit on the rare occasions when we had the chance to do so.

It didn’t really matter that we got to the airport 40 minutes before our flight, because it ended up being delayed. And then we sat on the tarmac for god knows how long. This might be one of the worst feelings ever. Stuck on the ground in a giant metal tube –did I mention that there are French doors out to the Colorado air (which is fragrant with wcs’s smell of choice: fire)? – waiting to go somewhere that isn’t even your final destination. Bleh. We finally got in the air and luckily the connecting flight to Colorado Springs was delayed too so we didn’t miss it.

This place, the Broadmoor, is pretty huge. There are apparently 700 rooms and 15 places to eat. I am looking forward to poking around tomorrow before breakfast and the meetings start. Maybe I’ll try to throw this up too. I’ve already taken about 20 pictures, just of the room.

I can’t even explain the weird computer thingy that controls everything from the television to the drapes (automatic drapes! See THOR). I am hungry. That is about the only problem now. That and the fact that I don’t have nearly enough free time here. We’ve discussed the cog railway to my erstwhile namesake, (Zebulon) Pike’s peak, or cycling to the Garden of the Gods, or hiking anywhere. We hope to get some good stuff in between the teambuilding and trust falls. Tomorrow is meetings all morning and a GPS scavenger hunt, whatever that means, in the afternoon. Better get some rest. I actually ASKED for a 630 am wake up call.

Oh yeah, for those of you who have no idea what I’m on about, the whole lot of we north Americans from no-suck inc. are here in Colorado Springs for a corporate retreat. Yeah. I don’t really know. Shit, I hear a train. So far, we have the best smell and the best sound present and accounted for. I have got to find a way to sneak out of these meetings.

This is the first time I’ve been West since I moved back from England, and that’s a long time. I’m taking the opportunity to reconnect with my hippy roots. I busted out the Eugene, Oregon Grateful Dead t-shirt, listened to a lot of MMJ and Son Volt on the flight over, and kinda wish I’d brought some weed with me. I’ve got my fleece jacket and my zippy shorts/pants. Sometimes I forget how nice it is to commune with actual nature, not the crap version we have around NYC (skeelz notwithstanding).

That’s enough for my first liveblog of corporate America in the Rockies. Where’s my coors light?

love train

2007-04-11T18:37:00.000-04:00

sometime last week (friday?), i was on the platform waiting for the subway. there was a guy a few people down from me and i was like, 'huh, he's pretty cute'. then he turned towards me and i realized it was someone i hooked up with about four years ago. i spent the rest of the ride trying to avoid eye contact.

today i saw emmett. i forget whether or not i ever posted the story of emmett so here's a short version
new to new york city, i was smashed around 4am on a diverted F train. i didn't understand the intricacies of late-night weekend subway madness, so i was halfway to far rockaway or whatever before i realized what was going on. i asked the conductor (emmett) for advice and we had a chat, etc. he was like a 50 year old black guy, not unlike morgan freeman. i thought he was harmless enough. but he asked me for my phone number and i felt trapped. i was actually trapped on the train. and i gave it to him. never, ever, in my wildest dreams (nightmares) did i imagine he would call me twice a day for the next month and once a day for a month after that, in spite of the fact that i only answered once, by accident. he left messages, it was horrible.

so this morning one of my worst fears was realized. after years of fearing the F train every time it pulled in (difficult when you commute on it), i finally saw old emmett's head poking out the conductor's car window this morning. ugh.

seein' things

2007-04-10T19:42:00.000-04:00

saturday i had a belated birthday brunch with (beta) and woozy at cafe orlin in the east village. it was fantastic. check that shit out.

we then went to see black book. This movie is great. i highly recommend you watch it sometime.

later that night maj, xx and i were at local 138. there was some weird show on the tvs called "when good pets go bad", which seemed to focus primarily on elephants and giant cats misbehaving (loose definition of "pet"), but ultimately led xx and maj to mock me once again for my love of america's funniest home videos. i know it's a crap show, but nothing makes me laugh like watching people fall down. i explained this to them again and recounted a story about how i once fell and couldn't get up for 10 minutes because i was laughing so hard and then immediately burst into hysterics the next day when i recounted the story to a friend. (i was giggling even when i told xx and maj about it, three-odd years later.)

anyway, it seemed rather fitting that, on the way to the subway, i took a giant header on essex. i don't really know what happened except there was a cellar door involved and maj came over and found me lying, rather confused, on the sidewalk. as soon as i figured out what had happened, i started laughing. amazingly, i was relatively unscathed after the incident. if i'd been sober, i'm entirely sure it would have been a much worse scenario, but i only have scrapes on my palms (stigmata, just in time for easter), and one bruised knee.

so monday night west river and i managed to finagle our way into the Andrew Bird show at Union Hall. there are barely words to describe the mind-blowingness of this gig. first off, he was like three feet away from us. well, here are some pictures:

He's a funny cat, and his drummer is pretty sincerely multi-talented. he would be drumming w/one hand, looping himself with one foot, drumming with the other foot and playing keyboard with the other hand. it kinda reminded me of a musical tasmanian devil.

But old AB himself is pretty fun to watch, too. he played the first song with one shoe (red & black stripey socks, for anyone keeping track), and removed the second one shortly after finishing. the stocking feet helped with all the freaking buttons he had on the floor to loop himself and do other weird tricks. he would do the violin part first and then run back and put the violin/bow down and play the guitar for the rest of the song. he did a lot of running to and fro. and also there was a glockenspiel. fuck yeah, glockenspiel. you can see the sort of double-barreled phonograph behind him and in the picture without any people. he fed his violin through that and stepped on a peddle to make it whirl around, throwing the sound all over the place. i guess that's like a musical tasmanian devil, too. or a game of ping-pong with sound. anyway, you can see the setlist all for yourself. but i was most blown away by his whistling. it sounds ethereal on the recordings, but he can actually pull that shit off live. and it looks like he puts no effort at all into it. i don't know how he gets that vibrato kicking. and his voice is lovely, as well. excellent show, i say. he was on letterman last night, which if you missed, you should check the repeat date and dvr the shit out of it.

slut search

2007-04-04T16:47:00.000-04:00

unlike most things i hate in the world, reality tv is something i can actually avoid, so i rarely have moments when my blood boils and in a rage i scream "i cannot FUCKING believe the FUCKING human race sometimes". but rest assured, unless it's "manor house" or something akin, i think reality tv is quite possibly the saddest thing humanity has ever come up with.

and now, it seems, we've got the ultimate in complete steaming shitpile there-goes-the-neighborhood tv: the search for the next doll (unsurprisingly on CW11). what the motherfucking fuck have we come to in this place? we are seriously auditioning strippers on NETWORK TELEVISION?!

The CW's new music/reality series, "Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search for The Next Doll," is a behind-the-scenes look at the process of selecting a beautiful and talented singer/dancer who has what it takes to join one of the world's most successful performing and recording acts. Out of the thousands of gifted hopefuls who audition, only one young woman will make it through the challenges and undergo a total transformation to win her place in the spotlight as the newest member of the Pussycat Dolls. (emphasis mine)

i surrender.

the look

2007-04-04T16:29:00.000-04:00

i don't know how long it takes, but somewhere along the way regular riders of public transport pick up a 6th sense that recognizes the guy who just walked through the doors of the train is not quite right. i was sitting reading my book and this guy comes in. first hint: rain hat--but not in this cheerful
yellow, more like the color the "i know what you did last summer" guy wears. clue two: long plastic-y trench coat. yes, i do realize it happened to be raining that day, but you take what you're given. hint three: velcro shoes. for some reason, these really are relegated to nutters and total nerds. fourth sign: fanny pack (see previous clue). all this was topped off by the guy's glasses, which were some bizarre combination of swimming goggles and sunglasses. he came and sat down in the seat perpendicular to me, made an odd face and we went back to minding our own.

but then the train slowed down and he got out some packaged eye drops. like the kind that come a dose at a time. i hope i'd be hard-pressed to find someone who thinks administering eyedrops on a train is a good idea, but this dude was all over it. obviously, he ended up with juice all over his face (wow, that sounded really dirty, huh?). anyway, he wasn't particularly offensive or creepy, there was just something off about him.

eventually a kid (college?) gets on at union square. and here's the rub: he looks at the guy, then he looks at me with a "is this dude a nutter?" face, ("mostly harmless" my brows responded) then he looks back at the guy with a "are you a nutter?" face and sits down a seat away (on the set of three) and sort of bunches himself up by the part that sticks out next to the door.

the point, uninteresting though it may be, is this, we are aware of who the crazies are, but sometimes we sit next to them anyway.

it's familiar, but not too familiar

2007-04-03T19:32:00.001-04:00

so since i last reported anything of consequence (never?), i've been taken to Spring Awakening and a rad indonesian dinner by the maj, the traditional birthday meal at chestnut by xx, baked either the raddest or second-raddest cupcakes alive and reunited with west river to see The Long Winters.

We checked them out last night at the Hall and they really are a delightful group of guys. their music is a little on the 'i need prozac' side of things, but it turned out they are very cheery live. aside from the bassist, who really looked horribly sad to be any variation of awake, but soldiered through and played a good set. the lead singer reminded me physically of Kurt Wagner, and he was really funny and engaging. their drummer might be the smiliest person ever to sit behind a kit. the keyboardist/guitarist was cool, too. it was mostly a treat because we were literally right in front of them. they did not play "(it's a) departure" or "delicate hands", like i wanted them to, but they did play "seven", "teaspoon", "pushover", "fire island, AK" and some stuff from the albums i don't have. they have a great energy, even when they're all sick (with, according to the lead singer, the bubonic plague) and played a tight, if too short, set, including some acoustic songs with just the singer/guitarist and the near-dead bassist, a fine treat. sans encore, though, as everyone looked pretty roughed up.

NB: i have zero clue why that one section is still black and some loser font. i tried like three times and it just won't stick. we apologise for any inconvenience. ps I heart the macallun 18.

it's been a while since i've tried to do one of these

2007-03-29T17:47:00.000-04:00

i hope it works

hello sunshine

2007-03-27T19:35:00.000-04:00

ah, early spring. these teasing days where you tear through your clothes finding the reserve warm-weather outfit you haven't packed away to make room for itchy sweaters and lined trousers.

unfortunately, the beauty of this day does little for little miss wcs, because we are too busy having internal arguments about wanting and not having a cigarette. i'm on about hour 44 or so and we are not liking this one bit. it does seem like there's a lot of gunk exiting my lungs here and there, though, and i don't want to go through that more than once, so annoyed i will continue to be for the next 12-18 months or so.

woo-hoo!

2007-03-26T19:39:00.000-04:00

according to last night's episode of the Simpsons, i can add one very heroic man to the list of people with whom i share a birthday. Aretha Franklin & Elton John, say hello to

Homer J Simpson!!!!

not sure there is a person (real or otherwise) i'd rather share a birthday with.

from the floorboards to the flys, here i was fated to reside

2007-03-21T20:02:00.000-04:00

the maj took me to see "the pirate queen" last night. i was already disappointed that the play was not, in fact, based on some long-lost decemberists song, it also turned out to be the shittiest thing i've seen in a long fucking time. and yes, i remember the times they are a-changin' debacle.

the lyrics were completely naff. they were not clever, they barely even rhymed. the queen elizabeth character made and off-the-cuff beheading joke. there was a pot shot at wales, and a song called "boys'll be boys", that came with a reprise.

i swear to god i was holding in roaring laughter the entire first act. i didn't have to worry about the second act because i left at intermission. all i have to say is this: if someone tries to get you to see this musical, break your own leg to avoid it.

sit on a train, reading a book

2007-03-21T18:10:00.000-04:00

perhaps it's because i'm riding the train at off hours, but something was definitely up yesterday, or, as my mother would say "the crazies are out". i was almost entirely sure it was a full moon, but it tuns out it was just after a new moon. go figure...

on the way in i was Queen Elizabeth II. Only she was Greek. but she had it all, the hair, the glasses, the skirt and shoes.

but it was on the way home that things went haywire. i noticed a guy standing in front of the doors, holding up a sheet of paper and what looked like a trapper keeper folder. he was sort of oscillating, peeking through the three-inch gap between the two rectangles he held aloft.

of course, this is weird behavior, but nothing could've prepared me for the idiocy that was about to come out of this liberace-coifed lunatic. he starts telling everyone that the papers are a shield to protect him because he's a motherfucking angel. this prompted one of those rare moments on the subway when people actually make eye contact with each other. the people sitting in the group of seats next to me were all giggling at each other.

eventually, he gets around to the part where he invites women 29 & younger (whew, i barely make the cut!) to join him as an angel. women 30 and over, he said, were stuck as part of mankind. mankind is obsolete. i don't even know what the fuck that means. how are we obsolete when we're all sitting here on a subway train? anyway, i missed a great deal of this speech because i was wearing headphones, but it certainly added to the surreality of the whole experience that, peppering this total mental case's speech, was lou reed telling me "she's too busy sucking on my ding-dong".

a couple stops after gabriel got off the train, a guy comes through the car handing out xeroxed sheets of paper. on the paper, in very nice penmanship, is a note to the effect of: my name is so-and-so, i fell off a porch when i was a kid and now i suffer from epilepsy and seizures. from the years of 1952 to 1962 i was aspiring to be a successful dj. i am also a James Brown imitator. please help in any way you can... at the bottom, he's copied his driver's license and a business card for his james browning. i had a look at the license because after reading the note and looking at the guy, i thought he looked rather young to have been a dj in 1952. apparently, he was aspiring to be a dj at the tender age of three, as he was born in 1949. even the later end of his range, 1962, would have brought him in at 13-year-old aspiring dj. he was a little pushy. when he came to collect his pages, he gave everyone that "so you're really not going to give me money" look.

1968/8024

2007-03-16T18:40:00.000-04:00

while other people i know are using their time to do things like read a book a month (or is it two?), learn a new skill or just be better people in general, i've undertaken listening to every song on my ipod. unfortunately this is a sisyphusian task since in the time since i began this stupid feat, i've put almost 500 new songs on my itunes. anyway, as i said earlier, the best thing about this "project" is getting weird songs put together.

the other day i was lucky enough to have this combination
Jeff Buckley's "Hallelujah"
Amii Stewart's "Knock on Wood"

not that i care, at all

2007-03-15T17:05:00.000-04:00

but what the fuck is going on out there in pop music land? with my lazy half-day schedule, i've started dvr-ing mtv's "after hours" which is "music videos". what it actually is is music video, set of commercials, music video, set of commercials. not only that, but they actually play the SAME FUCKING VIDEO twice in the same 1.5 hour show.

but the point here is this: what happened to avril lavigne and nelly frutado? before i go any further, let's get one thing straight: i never liked either of these people, but they've both pulled complete 180s on me in the past x years. avril used to be bitchy and brunette, now she's blond and wants to be your "girlfriend". nelly used to be a twit who wanted to be like a bird and now she's a slut. it seems the only constant here is that they both still lack talent.

the only thing i can hope to see is that bloc party video where he's walking through the train, and as i'm not overwhelmed with joy at their new album, even that is barely enough to keep me interested. i'm thinking it might have something to do with the fact that the lead singer is gay. not that i mind gayness, but it seems like no one is writing nice love songs for the ladies anymore. of course, no one probably was in the first place. that's not bitter, i just mean i'd put money on the fact that a great number of songwriters were/are gay, that's all.

jensenator and i went to see tunng the other night at UH. i was impressed with them. it turned out the tall dude in front of me was the singer or something for lonely, dear. they were not so great; nothing new under the sun. tunng did their shit and a bloc party cover and made me want to buy their record. which i would do if i were not making half a salary. things are very weird on this side of the economic spectrum.

i'm not complaining actually. it seems i can still pay my rent and bills and eat, and i put my pajamas on at 3 in the afternoon sometimes and i have plenty of time to go to the gym and i make myself delicious lunches. the only real difference is i am sitting on my couch listening to the new Oh No! Oh My! (exclamation points? please. so last year) record c/o lester writing this instead of doing it at suck inc. yeah. i'm not about to complain about this shit any time soon. except beer. soon i will start to miss it. a lot.

italian vacation

2007-03-10T10:48:00.000-05:00

it seems like the gods were smiling on me and xx for our journey. we encountered damn near perfect weather everywhere we went. except siena, but the insanely delicious meal (me: artichoke risotto, she: pizza with eggs and whatnot) totally made up for it.

without a doubt the highlight of the trip was the cinque terre. it'a a little cluster of towns that look like they fell down a cliff and piled up next to the sea. well, here:

yeah. charming as fuck basically. birthplace of pesto, make their own lovely white wine. awash in clams and mussels and such. and home to a seaside piazza where the local custom appears to be getting some wine and sitting around talking and watching everyone else do the same thing.

we did all the major tourist things at the rest of our destinations: leaning tower in; pisa, ufizzi, duomo, the david in florence; and too much stuff in rome to list.

my main goal throughout the trip was to eat and drink as much as possible. i would drag poor xx in to every paticceria (sp?) i saw for treats. i think i averaged about five meals a day. food is good.

one thing i don't get though: at what age do slim, gorgeous, trendy italians pull the ultimate Mr. Rogers and dump it all to turn into (adorable) shortish, cardigan-clad old people? it's REALLY bizarre. it's as though on some birthday they come at you with a little cap and cardigan (bowtie?) if you're a fella and a calf-length skirt, stockings, ortho-shoes, an apron and a headscarf (and perhaps a shopping bag or cart of some kind) if you're a lady. personally, i'd be looking forward to getting old if i got to wear that getup--and get to see my husband in a sweet little hat and suit everyday.

this trip afforded way fewer adventures than india, a welcome change, to be honest. however, there were two somewhat harrowing incidents which i will recount for you now.

the first occurred on our first night in pisa. we'd been in london much of the day (curry, pint, run for the bus), having arrived there after a much-delayed overnight flight. in short, we were shattered and just wanted to get to the hotel and crash. when we deplaned, the plan, as is always my plan but seems suddenly to be more often than not thwarted, was to find a cash machine and get local currency. i do not mess about with those rip-off huts called bureaus (does anyone else out there really hate spelling the word 'bureau'? not a single time have i got it right on the first try) de change. i refuse to pay money to get money, especially when i'm already losing money because our own dastardly currency refuses to be worth a shit; anyway i am not the kind of traveler American Express would approve of, i do not purchase currency in advance or upon arrival and i certainly do not use traveler's cheques. this is my own damn problem, because there were two cash machines in pisa airport. one of them told me my card was not valid for international withdrawals (a declaration xx and i would become well familiar with, and would cause us to rejoice and pull out money any time we found a deutsche bank or a banco tuscana, regardless of whether or not we needed it), the other one might as well have had Xs over its eyes for all the good it could do us. at this point (around 11pm? jetlagged to hell), xx and i just kept looking at each other and saying "what the fuck can we do?" i could smoke a number of cigarettes and pace, xx went in to check the thomas cooke, who, despite being occupied by a live man, was closed and unwilling to help two stranded (bureau-hating) american ladies. some people from the bus service to florence told us there was an atm about 10 minutes away "under that bridge". we clomped off with all our shit and no energy. but we were lazy and once we saw that there was no easy way to get under that bridge, we thought, "fuck this". we decided we'd beg a taxi driver to take us to the bank and then just pay him (for those of you paying attention, this is where the irony that we could've just popped off the plane to the then-open thomas cooke and had our sweet, sweet cash rather than literally paying someone to take us to get money (surely at a rate higher than even the shysteriest BdC's commission) comes shining through). so we go up to a taxi driver and explain our situation, using that incredibly rude, loud and slow version of english reserved for people who don't speak it, and after about 10 minutes of our panicked entreating the driver looks at us and says "you have a credit card? i take(a) the credit card".

the second involves us arriving extremely late from rome into london, taking the last bus from stanstead to liverpool street (in central london) and trying to get a taxi to go to the flat we were borrowing from rope-a-dope. r-a-d was in venice with her hubby and had given us the keys on our way through (see curry above) london the first time. so arriving at 230 am on a sunday and getting in a taxi rank as it's raining all over the place is not the most efficient way to get somewhere. things went from bad to worse when a group of girls came running up, one sans shoes, poked their heads in a off-duty cab, got in and sped off, prompting a girl in the queue behind us to scream "it's not like they're gonna shag yeh!" we waited about 40 more minutes and got into a cab. the driver wasn't quite sure where we were going, so i was craning out the window to make sure we didn't speed past the flat (i was slightly nervous i wouldn't pick it out, as i'd only been there once). anyway. we got to the flat and there was a note "they've had to change the locks, go to xyz Cassland road and ask for cara, she has a spare for you". it's nearing 3am. i'm supposed to go knock on some total stranger's door and ask for a key? yes. and that's just what i did, because i was not planning on sleeping in the rain, love london as i do. after buzzing thrice, a bleary eyed chap, who was uninterested in my apologies, came down and said gruffly (not that i blame him at all) "you sara? it's in the bbq". so back to the flat i went. in the bbq.

friends with benefits

2007-03-08T10:53:00.000-05:00

i know, i know, you want to hear about italy and london. it's coming. we're messing around with photos and such and the newsdesk got slammed with news as soon as i returned. soon, my sweets, soon.

anyway, upon my return, i received great news from no-suck, inc. while i am still a half-time employee, they've officially hired me, which means i don't have to invoice them AND i get health insurance, 401(k), dental, vision, oh, and i accrue vacation time! woooot!

you might laugh you might frown

2007-02-14T16:23:00.000-05:00

wow. it's weird to be back. we've had some ups and downs around here lately; and a lot of blogger just sucking on the relatively few occasions when i actually did want to say something. here's a slight re-cap of the past 2 months.

panama was awesome. the canal is really an amazing feat. i got a tan. and a panama hat.

i quit the suck job. i started the no-suck-but-part-time-so-what-do-i-do-for-cash-now?-job. today is second to last day at suck, inc. i suppose i better find something to do with the second halves of my days. considering whole foods, the apple store or a movie theatre. i don't have any real aspirations, people.

have, once again, undertaken listening to every song i own. this has already gone to shit as i've got quite a bit of new music lately that i refuse to put on the 'pod for fear of wrecking my songs listened-to so far. first i tried doing it in order of album, but then i went for shuffle songs. today i got "pale blue eyes" and "africa" in a row. still, it's such sheer joy when a long-forgotten song (like this blog) pops up out of no where and reminds you of that crush or the time you whistled along down the street and the bloke following you actually slowed down because you were freaking him out or how at one point some song was super important and that you still remember every chord change, backbeat and modulation even though you haven't heard it in ages, or that jesus christ, spiritualized are an amazing fucking band. also fun: drinking a six pack at home when your roommates aren't around and playing with your itunes and macbook remote control--very good indeed. i'm too lazy to find shit for you these days, so go find boy least likely to's "be gentle with me" and wait for spring.

went to the ATL to see carson's wee bairn who is very cute and was my first spit-up experience. i handled it rather well, if i do say so myself.

went out for drinks with Mary Land on the UES a month or so ago and was so hammered i ended up getting in the front seat of the cab (not initially, mind you, at a stop light around 38th street) and telling the driver about all the bangladeshis i met in india. he asked me out for a drink after this mad ramble, i declined. he has yet to stalk my house.

got name checked on stephen merchant's absolutely fantastic radio programme on bbc radio's 6 music. highly recommend you check this out.

made a mosaic, haven't grouted it, it's been 2 months.

have actively decided to get into PG Wodehouse.

so, on to the future. tomorrow, i finish out my time here (there is a slight chance i'll continue part time when i return from my sojourn) and get on a plane with xx to italy. first we'll be scooting from heathrow to stanstead with a short stop for lunch with roper and a visit to the neighborhood in which i used to work. then we'll fly to pisa. the plan is pisa, cinque terre, florence and rome. mostly i'm concerned with food and boat rides in cinque terre, but people keep telling me some bullshit about art everywhere and oh, it's so amazing. we'll see about that. then we return to london, xx heads back stateside and i hang out for three days of old friends and large and more alcoholic pints, and hopefully, Hot Fuzz. and a lot of staring at the thames and sighing wistfully.

and now, per usual, a link that is entirely unrelated to anything i've just said, courtesy of VP
it's just like a mini-mall.

we are but a breath in the life of the cosmos

2006-12-22T12:29:00.000-05:00

nasa found some super old timey light...

like from the beginning of time.

right after JC was born.

(via /.)

i just can't look, it's killing me

2006-12-16T16:39:00.000-05:00

the problem with free, very good scotch is there's nothing at all preventing you from drinking your body weight in it. thus, i woke up with a headache and, once again, that random feeling where you're not quite sure what's going on. and you're certainly not sure how it's 9:00 and you're usually out of the house somewhere around 830. then, maybe you think, "is it saturday, because i don't remember friday, and i know the maj and i were going to the jingle ball, and i think i'd remember that." and finally, your brain kicks into high gear and you realize, it is friday, and your alarm clock has finally died on you (because you knocked it over one too many times last weekend).

this whole jingle ball thing came about because the maj has connections at z100, and they gave her two tickets and vip access, whatever that means. i'd been listening to z100 in the mornings, and become familiar with the line up. nelly frudato or whatever, nick lachey, the pussycat dolls (who, at the time, i didn't even know of), the fray (who i described to all who asked as "those guys who did that gray's anatomy song"), jojo (who's always on at the gym), evanescence (what is that shit all about, anyway?) and finally, the only real reason to go anyway, the killers. there were other bands, but a few i didn't recognize and the rest sucked.

we got to MSG when jojo was onstage and made right for the "all star bar". this was a bar close to where we were sitting that was, again, free. since scotch was still seeping from my pores, maj and i decided to go with johnnie walker black. but there's something a little disconcerting about being poured a JW black from one of those bar hose thingys. it's, well, it's just not right. and i won't even get into what the barmaid interpreted the phrase, "just a little ice, please," to mean.

now, have any of you out there in netland been in a room with like 50,000 screaming 12-year-olds? i had, twice before, as a veteran of two, uh, well, how do i say this...new kids on the block concerts. one time in the second row. but let me tell you, my perspective (on a great many things, actually), has certainly changed. they are loud. and bouncy. and they don't even have breasts but they know all the words to that "don't you wish your girlfriend was a freak like me" song (don't get me started on the grammatical faults of that shit). i know now, without a doubt, i will be a hugely annoying parent. anyway, shit rolled through. we spent most of our time hiding in the bar, along with most of the other attendees over the age of 17 who were not there with offspring. we popped out for the gray's anatomy song, because, well, i wanted to. guess who knows the lyrics to that song? every single fucking person in that room except me and the maj. i looked around, stunned, as groups of girls took endless pictures of themselves, waved their cellphones in the air (god, bring back the lighters, at least, please) and acted generally like mentally deficient fish. at one point i actually gasped with fright.

of course, nothing was more disturbing to me than the pussycat dolls debacle. maj explained to me that these girls are strippers or something, or like, burlesque dancers, and they have a club in las vegas and stuff. again, i'd had no idea who these freaks were until i got there, aside from knowing their "music" was strongly sexual and weakly artistic, at least that was my guess from the name. maj really wanted to see them for some reason and so we went back into the fray (no pun intended) and suddenly i felt just like the time i ate a bunch of mushrooms with some friends and went to guillaume's brother's 15th birthday party. in other words, entirely unwell.

the killers, however, made it all worthwhile. they shot a bunch of confetti and streamers up in the air, and sang "when you were young", "can you read my mind", that new xmas song they did, "somebody told me" (at which point everyone in the audience aside from the two of us decided to stand up and start yelling -- we were already at it) and, of course "mr. brightside". needless to say, as soon as that was over, we bolted.

win ken stein's resignation

2006-12-13T10:25:00.000-05:00

i'm a little late coming to this one, especially considering Professor Stein was one of the many who helped mold my young mind in cowwege. and considering this book is directly related to my paycheck.

first off, i haven't read this book, nor do i have any plan to. due partly to professor Stein's hard-line belief that water will destroy the middle east before oil, i see no point in opining over what israel or the palestinians or any other motherfuckers want to do about peace. secondly, i do think "apartheid" is out of line, i'm also confused as to why people want to keep writing books about this bullshit. this will end at one point and one point only: when humanity vanishes.

but the real problem i have with this whole issue (or two i guess--maybe three)

least importantly, the bitchy response from the carter center:
“Although Professor Kenneth Stein has not been actively involved with the Carter Center for more than 12 years, I regret his resignation from the titular position as a fellow.”
if that doesn't throw it out there that Prof. Stein wasn't exactly going to be missed, i don't know what will: Professor Stein used to wash the floors here, he doesn't now, but he did once.

nextly, the god-awful sentence from the NYT:
Mr. Stein also said he had been struck by parts of Mr. Carter’s book that seemed strikingly similar to a work by a different author, but he would not disclose the details.
when are people gonna fucking learn that you can't use the same fucking verb twice in a sentence? unless it's fuck.

and finally, perhaps most disturbing:
David Rosenthal, the publisher of Simon & Schuster, dismissed Mr. Stein’s claims. “We’re confident in his work,” Mr. Rosenthal said of Mr. Carter. “Do we check every line in every book? No, but that’s not the issue here. I have no reason to doubt President Carter’s research.”
Do we check our work before we release it to the masses as fact? nah. what's the point in doing all that? i do happen to know that authors warrant and represent that, if their work is one of non-fiction, they take responsibility for any statement they claim is a "fact", so it's not actually the publisher's responsibility (so far as their asses are covered), but, hey, i don't know, if a former president were being accused of fabrications and rejiggling of history, i might want to come out a little stronger than "well, we figured he used to be president, so he must be telling the truth, right? i mean, why wouldn't he? he probably remembers everything that happened accurately and has no personal agenda, so, you know, whatevs."

the end of the article accuses Prof S as being sore at Former president goober because he didn't get enough cred for his work on the book. i know what it's like to be snubbed from the acknowledgments, and i'm a pretty petty and jealous person sometimes, but A: PS isn't the only one lobbing these complaints and B: i've seen the dude teach, his ego is gigantic, but his respect for truth, knowledge and credibility is bigger.

whew.
my foot is fine, super troopers was awesome (as per us.).

UPDATE: it seems i'm having a mighty hard time with follow-through lately, craigslist just reminded me that i neglected to actually link to either article i was yelling over. whoops. i guess it was that urgent need to turn to my actual work every now and again. anyhoo, here you go. and also here.

Ode to Real Genius

2006-12-12T17:11:00.000-05:00

if you are worth anything, you are familiar (intimately) with the 1980s geek fest movie, Real Genius. There are many great things about this movie (in no particular order).
1. it is hilarious. almost every single line in the movie is quotable, which really says something
2. it features possibly the most geeked-out soundtrack ever made. this shit isn't just indie-synth schlock, don henley, robert palmer and byran adams are all represented. for those of you who have yet to see this movie, i won't mention anything about the song in the final scene, because you should see it with purity of mind
3. laslo hollyfeld's #1 car
4. the overarching theme of "war is bad"
5. the fact that this is a 100% geek movie. it's not a geek vs. cool people movie or a "hey, look, geeks are really OK" movie. it's geeks and no one else even makes an appearance (save the beauticians). geeks in their own environment -- as geeky as they want to be. this fact can go unnoticed no longer. applaud the 100% geek film. find me another one!
6. this is more of a theory than a reason the movie is great, but i do believe that Chris Knight is the world's very first hipster. (well, this version of hipster.) he's 90% sarcasm, hates authority, wears ironic t-shirts (and they looked old way back in the '80s!), smart and creative but still a huge slacker until it's absolutely necessary to do some work, loves to party, seemingly living off his parents' dime (except for the liquid nitrogen coins he uses for coffee). oh, and he has "bad on purpose" hair. i think he might be wearing eyeliner as well. just a theory.
7. the last scene of this movie is a fantasy for kids and adults alike
8. there's barely any obscenity or nudity, so when it's cut and played on, say Comedy Central, you don't actually miss much (or anything?), even better with the dvr.
9. what kind of movie randomly throws Stacy Peralta in it as a Pilot? a totally awesome movie.
10. "kent, this is jesus, kent."

i blame you for the moonlit sky and the dream that died with the eagle's flight

2006-12-12T16:49:00.000-05:00

remember that song "sleeping satellite"? i'd absolutely entirely forgotten about it -- but thanks to this handy dandy music matrix (?), i was able to have the following thought process: "oh man, that song! i remember that song! god, it sucks."

however, let's not hold it against this unknowing little matrix. for most of the day i've been having a grand old time in the world music section. this might also be the only place where you'll go from deep cut rolling stones to nick drake in no moves. rock on.

in more serious news, i had a little minor surgery this morning. two weekends of mosaic-ing a table for the new compy (yes, i am now wild cherry sara, fanboy) left a substantial number of tiny shards of glass all over the floor of the apartment (not to mention xy's feeble, disastrous and pathetic attempt with the nippers, resulting in a single tile shattering into umptillion pieces followed by his feeble, disastrous and pathetic attempt at sweeping it up), one of which (actually two of which) made its way into my dainty little foot. the first was located and removed as swiftly as saddam hussein. #2 proved a little more osama bin laden. so i limped around sunday (to the bocce playoffs, at which we won and then lost and are now out of) and monday (to work, where i complained nearly the entire day to everyone who would listen), unable to work out and catching infinite flack from xy about sitting on the couch with my foot in a basin like an 80-year-old. this morning my concerned co-workers asked about it and i informed them that the damn thing was still in there. they all wanted me to go to the doctor but i'll be damned if i'm gonna mess with four hours of bureaucratic inefficiency and pain for a little sliver of glass. plus, i can't afford the copay. long story still long: we ended up with my foot on the desk and about five people around me, one of which was shoving a (sterilized) needle into my foot. i doubt that i'm really conveying the full weirdness of this situation, but i promise you, having someone poke your foot with a (sterilized) needle while it's sitting on your desk with people you work with is more like something that would happen in one of my lynch-esque dreams than reality, but go figure.

coach dball just pointed out that i forgot to "end" the story. a "denouement" was expected, he said. i swiftly reminded him of the "lady or the tiger" (which it turns out he'd never read), a story in which the author leaves it up to the either sadistic or super sadistic reader to choose the fate of the main character. so, i ask you, dear reader: do i still have glass in my foot or did we extract it on my desk at work? here's a hint: i'm leaving work right now and going to the gym. then i'm going to watch super troopers. study up kids, there's a quiz on "real genius" tomorrow.

shiny happy N trains holding hands

2006-11-22T12:57:00.000-05:00

last night, i was in my usual commuter's daze when something magical happened. a swift, sleek, quieter train came gliding into the station. it was a fascinating new N train. very much like the 4,5,6 and L trains, it's got those blue seats and a map telling you what stops are up next. it's pretty phat. i wonder how long it will take before there are coffee stains on the floor an scratchitti (sp?) all over the place.

happy thanksgiving bor-ers!

kill the headlights and put it in neutral

2006-11-22T11:09:00.000-05:00

this past weekend xx and i ventured up to camp guillaume for a weekend of chilly weather, dvds and books. and green bean casserole.

as we were booming along the highway in guillaume's 1986 Honda, the battery light was coming on and going off occasionally. of course, i paid no mind to this because it's an old car and old cars have circuit problems and fuses that blow and lights just go on for no reason. also, guillaume had just had the oil changed, and when i used to have my oil changed, they'd check shit like your battery, and further, every time i went up to 4th gear, the light would go off. so i'd just punch it when the light had been on too long.

we stopped off for some absolute shite chinese food, rented "kiss kiss bang bang", bought four bottles of beaujolais nouveau, and went up to the house.

the next day i hooked up the bomb wifi (with a router on sale for $35, which is now on sale for fucking $10), and did some work whilst xx graded papers and the like. every time the car started, we'd joke about how haha that was lucky. as we came back from grocery shopping saturday evening, though, it seemed our luck had run out. the headlights looked like shitty flashlight beams, the radio died and there was no clock or interior lighting... just as i put the car in park, it gave up.

we spent the rest of the evening panicking (me), drinking (both of us) and watching movies (both of us). here's a line up that makes no sense: American History X and Mean Girls. yes. both of our cell phones were dead so i spent a bit of time imming moms and dads and coach dball about what maybe to do. everyone agreed it was probably the alternator. although dads went on and on about checking the battery cells for sulphuric acid and if they were low, filling them up with water. i still have no plans to ever do something like that.

the next morning we went out to look at the car and see what we could see. (actually, i was gonna do the sulphuric acid thing then, if necessary.) so i got in and tried to start it, just in case. it worked! joy! we drove around a little while and hemmed and hawed about what to do. should we take it to a mechanic? where? is anyone gonna be open on sunday? does anyone even have parts to this car? should we just drive to a train station and leave it there? should we turn the car off whilst we're closing up the house or just leave it running?

in the end, even though we'd planned not to, i shut off the car. it was force of habit!! anyway, we got all our shit together and were on our way.

my hands were adhered to 10 and 2 on the steering wheel, and i rarely dropped below 80mph, afraid that if i went any slower, the engine would just give up. this was especially funny when, at one point, i found myself going 95 and slowed down, only to have an suv shove itself up our butt, so i moved into the right lane. turns out the tailgater was a state trooper apparently not interested in making any money on a sunday. we were sure that if we got pulled over, we'd never get the car going again.

we re-routed ourselves in order to stay mostly on highways, as i feared stop-and-go traffic would be the end of us. then, just outside the toll plaza for the tappan zee (damn you, lack of EZ pass!) bridge, something happened. or, something stopped happening. namely, the car stopped working properly. luckily we were just at an exit. once we stopped at the light, though, that was it. our little honda was over and out.

i threw her in neutral and we pushed the fucker across the street. i was not very helpful in this endeavor because i was laughing so hard...pushing a car is a funny event. of course, the steering wheel locked up, so we couldn't go any direction but straight, which was not the most helpful. anyway, eventually this older, four-toothed black man came by and told me to pop the hood. then he suggested pouring coke on the battery terminals. most people would tell this guy to fuck off, but when you grow up in atlanta, using coke to fix everything ain't that much of a stretch. obviously, though, it didn't work. he also had a smoke in his mouth whilst leaning over the car, which just makes me nervous, but is apparently the sign of someone who knows what they're doing.

the tow truck pulled in a few minutes later and he took us to his shop. Joe Corbett is a nice man. we sat around and waited for him to look for an alternator...they found one! at another shop! we'd be on our way in an hour! 40 minutes later, the guy still hadn't shown up with the part. then someone called... "the neighbor kid saw him wandering around at the other shop. i'm going over there to get it from him". it was at this moment that xx and i decided we needed to get the hell out of there. we left Joe and Mark, his Hungarian counterpart, chainsmoking over the engine of the car and had a stroll around Nyack. it's a cute town. we got some overpriced chocolate.

when we got back, i said to xx, "why is the car in the exact same position as we left it?"...hood still up, still on the jack but not really raised. it did not look fixed. nor did it appear to be in the process of being fixed.

of course the alternator that showed up was the wrong one, it was for a 96, not an 86. very fortunately, there was a bus back to PABT just around the corner. we said "fuck it" and hopped on.

so, when guilaume returns from three weeks of eastern european gallivanting, he will have to go to nyack to pick up his car. ... sorry!

for those of you who like total closure to a story, i just got off the phone with old joe, who said they got the new one on monday and it's all fixed, but not before the first new alternator they got was defective and they had to order another one.

so there you have it. why i prefer to rely on public transportation, which sucks all the time too, rather than sit in mechanic shops on cold sundays and then have to take the bus home anyway.

DCFC @ TAMSG OMG

2006-11-10T15:01:00.000-05:00

jeez.

ok, very super quickly, i did MI5 assassin for halloween, using the moms's weird old mini-dress and a black wig, and a knife in my boot. it was hot. the maj and i rocked the flavorpill party for a while, long enough to see a band called VIP (who apparently do not exist on the internet). you, whoever you are, need to see these people. they will blow your motherfucking mind. and you will say "why the hell didn't this happen before?". much like you did when You Tube first showed up on the scene. anyway, we left a bit after CSS went on. oh, and this guy hosted the whole thing in a cow outfit. he was off the hook. anyway, we went downtown to some penthouse party where i found a james bond to hang out with. he and his friend wanted to karaoke, so we went to sing sing, but they neglected to tell us that they were sans ID (in their defense, people rarely get carded in the UK), and THEN they tell us that one of them is 19. jesus. obviously we went back to the party and went off our faces.

last friday i took rudolph and west river down to sin-e for the KEXP listener appreciation party (read: free budweiser select (again) until 8). needless to say, we ended up destroyed by free beer and extremely loud music. and oh, god, burger king ROCKS, chris de burgh and all. the poor cats i was catsitting were in for quite a shock when drunk sara came storming through the apartment, spilling food everywhere and falling over whilst emptying the litter box.

saturday i saw Marie Antoinette. look out for the anachronistic chuck taylors in the shoe scene.

sunday, many of us watched many many many other people as they ran down 4th avenue for no apparent reason and then, in celebration of the physical fitness of others, i skipped the gym and made some cinnamon rolls.

sunday night bonnaroo and i went to home-away-from-home union hall and saw the comedy show. i've always harbored a crush on michael showalter, but seeing him live, the smit is for real. what a cutie. he was very funny. eugene was also pretty amusing, the lady who was there was not for me. and david cross gave us his C+ jokes, although i still thought they were funny.

and this brings us to wednesday when snoop majjy maj and i saw ben gibbard & co at the theatre at madison square garden. first off, this shit is fucked up. i have no desire to go back to that place. (except for the jingle ball, but that will be free.) it's like somewhere between "tron" and a shitty casino. however, i do enjoy the sitting aspect. anyway, BG has a very strange stage presence, emphasized by an extremely weird little rock-dance he does through every song, regardless of whether it's appropriate. neither of us were terribly jazzed by their performance, and we missed ted leo + the pharmacists, although we did have the best indian meal available outside india at dimple before hand. anyway, maj made the brilliant observation that seeing them live makes you realize just how produced their albums are. yeah. and also the theatre sucks and EVERYONE (except me and the maj) sang along to that song about his girlfriend dying and him going with her (follow you into the dark or whatever). fucking crazies.

and all of this is my long winded way of showing you what those brilliant yet crazy japanese have come up with now. bag of orange balls!! (boingboing)

happy news, gig review, sad news

2006-10-27T12:35:00.000-04:00

the compy is fixed!! let my life begin again!

maj and i hit union hall for to see oppenheimer open up quick like for some other band. breakfast in NYC really grabbed my attention a while back (thx, lester) and since they were in the hood and on early (and i got my ass on the list) we figured we'd check it out. A+ use of air horn, as well as good stories involving Allen Ginsberg and H. S. Thompson, who by the way, wrote the pilot for Nash Bridges. Betcha didn't know that! anyway, we were all planning to eat at UH after the show, but the place was so damn packed we ditched and went to Rachel's instead. then i watched like 4 episodes of The West Wing, which sucks bc they were the last four. anyone else see Studio 60 this week? when they hired Charlie? jeez, guys, a little creativity wouldn't kill you.
http://www.oppenheimermusic.co.uk/

and in more annoying and dangerous news, we're killing the coral reefs really fucking quickly.

fix more mistakes

2006-10-26T11:26:00.001-04:00

lifehacker just enlightened me to the fact that you can Undo a "closed tab" on firefox. i am forever closing the wrong tab or just being stupid, so this is wicked useful: ctrl+shift+T.

pixies tired of being pixies cover band

2006-10-24T16:43:00.000-04:00

pfork has the scoop on the nme announcement that the pixies are gonna record a new album.

will it suck ass? mm, probably

will i buy it the nanosecond it's released anyway? yep.

oh snap

2006-10-24T14:10:00.000-04:00

you know how i'm always starting out saying something and then ending up somewhere else, only to have it all make sense later? or not? bear with me here.

i am super excited because my megacheap supersize ext. hard drive arrived today. this little bitch is tiny. heavy, though. it's been hell these last few weeks without a compy at home, and i'm hoping the IT dude at work is finished making it all better.

so this weekend was another lovely adventure up to camp guillaume. i might rename camp guillaume camp sit-on-the-couch-listening-to-REM-and-getting-stoned-and-drinking-scotch, because that's about all that went down this weekend. literally, i was on the couch from 11 am until 330pm saturday. i haven't done that shit since college, at least not if i'm not hungover. anyhoo, we drove around a little and saw ye olde woodstock site. it's just a big lawn, no evidence (well a wooden sign) of its hippie-laden past. a delicious new york strip steak was had at "friends" pub. as well as a dessert called 'sex in a bowl', which did not come in a bowl, and while indulgent and delicious, it still has a ways before catching up with its namesake.

on the way up, we were discussing SUVs and how much we hate them. or rather, the other people in the car were. i tend to agree that they're a waste of practically everything, but i was certainly not quite as venom-filled about it as some of my cohorts. anyway, a giant suburban passed us and the guy driving it looked over and shook his head all "tsk tsk" like. and i'm thinking "what the fuck is up his ass?" i'd just tossed a butt out the window, which i know i shouldn't do, but, well, i recycle manuscripts, so it's OK; so i thought maybe it was that. then i realized we had one of those "i do support the right to marry" bumper stickers. so i bet that motherfucker was all against the gayness of the car. or the supportive of gayness in the car. so there he was in his giant SUV that we were all bitching about, and he's shaking his head disdainfully at us. nobody won that round.

the most exciting part of the weekend was upon arrival, we would finally get a chance to check out the bear damage. you might remember guillaume emailed me last week and was all "a bear mauled the porch". of course, in the interim, a tree had fallen as well, so camp guillaume was starting to look pretty ghetto. trees falling, trash strewn everywhere (c/o the bear), screens to' up. and that was the best part... there was a nice piece of screen that had some rad claw marks from where le ours tried to get through the screen. i took lots of pictures of it. i'll post them sometime soon.

why not now, you ask? because my computer is still broken and i haven't loaded anything onto my new ext hard dizzy.

Ahmet Zappa likes Fraggle Rock

2006-10-20T15:38:00.000-04:00

me too! but ahmet's gonna make a movie out of it, according to bklynvgn.

would you like to play a game?

2006-10-20T13:39:00.000-04:00

oh jeez. they made a computer out of DNA and it can play tic tac toe.

and don't criticize what you can't understand

2006-10-19T14:56:00.000-04:00

watch me.

the maj got a fancy new job that gives her free tickets to some b'way shows. the other night at bocce (we won!), she's all "wanna go see 'the times they are a-changin'?'" (look at all that punctuation!) at first i was thinking, "hell no," but then i figured i might as well see just how bad something like this can be.

first and best about the evening, we had some rad vietnamese for dinner. i don't remember the name of the place but it was on the south side of 47th, i think, between 7th and 8th ave. (Maj, do you remember?) if any of you have been lucky enough to have north-east-indian-chinese food, the sauteed singapore noodles are the way to go. they got the good-style hot sauce too. skip the spring rolls. the ice cream looked awesome, but we had to jet.

so on to the theatre. i ~~forget where it played~~, it was at the Brooks Atkinson, but it was a really nice theatre, except for how they covered up all the detail of the room with those giant lighting racks. blech.

so the whole concept, can you BELIEVE how trite and stupid this is? the setting is 'somewhere between awake and asleep', the whole shit is based around a circus where 'the clowns want to live their lives', god almighty, how did this get greenlit?

it was as bad as i'd anticipated if not worse. they turned "just like a woman" into a duet, and "mr. tambourine man" involved the main character descending from above sitting on the fucking crescent moon and a stupid-ass clown dancing around below. "knockin' on heaven's door" was all flashlights and guys in black (it sort of reminded me of that part in the movie ghost where all the evil spirits came) dancing around the old dude who is ostensibly dying.

oh, it was god awful. do not go see it. don't let anyone you know go see it. ever. stay home, smoke some weed, have a beer and listen to your dylan records. you will have a much better time.

so on a completely unrelated note, rudolph just told me his sister drank her contact lenses (she was on a b-trip and stuck them in a glass b/c she didn't have the holder thingy); and moments later guillaume told me a bear attacked camp guillaume. just so you know.

i'm pretty sure i'm the last person with internet access to see this

2006-10-18T17:48:00.000-04:00

but if you haven't either, it really is worth a look

i especially enjoy the part where it looks like they're skating.

OK Go treadmills

ready for a funeral

2006-10-11T11:22:00.000-04:00

when someone dies, some of us decide to go to work the next day, because what else are you going to do. but then people come up and ask you to do shit and you want to scream at them "don't you know someone just died!?" but they don't know, neccessarily. and you realize you shouldn't have come to work, you should've stayed home and continued to stare blankly at the wall trying to remember the last thing you said to your uncle.

you think about the relationship you had. the things that made him him vs. everyone else. his gruff demeanor that scared the shit out of you as a little girl but that you later came to realize was all a big act to hide the fact that he was one of the biggest pushovers on the planet. how he took you out on his harley and told you story upon story of riding all over the country on it. how every time you went on a trip, you got him a t-shirt from the harley store. how he made you a mix cd every time you went to visit. how he made the absolute best turkey stuffing, putting an absurd and glorious amount of butter in. how he listened to a short-wave police radio when he napped. how he was always trying to get you to watch movies you thought sucked. how he loved his dogs and hated his wife's cats (but really he loved them, too). how he helped you buy your first laptop. how he forced you to re-write your resume and buy nice paper to print it on. how, upon seeing you emerge from the pool as a little girl, he said "you're all wet!" and thus a nickname was born. how he brought you a weed magazine back from his recent trip to amsterdam and went through it with you, commenting. how you would go to the gym together and he would explain his entire, intricate workout. his navy tattoos. how he quit smoking after his first heart attack. his siatica. how he bought you your toolkit and tried to talk you into getting a 145-piece socket wrench set that you clearly had no use for. how he would always grill you a steak because you and he were the only ones in the house who could really appreciate it. how he would explain how to grill a steak. how he took you up to his hunting camp and told you the whole story of what is your favorite fireplace. how he died exactly like the violinist on Gray's Anatomy and how weirdly you keep focusing on that because it's the only thing as absurd as the idea that you'll never see him again.

try not to cry for too long

2006-10-05T16:42:00.000-04:00

rudolph just emailed me this at work. cheeky bastard

There's a sad sort of clanging from the clock in the hall
And the bells in the steeple too
And up in the nursery an absurd little bird
Is popping out to say "cuckoo"
[Marta, Gretl, Brigitta:]
Cuckoo, cuckoo

[Children: Marta, Gretl, Brigitta: ]
Regretfully they tell us Cuckoo, cuckoo
But firmly they compel us Cuckoo, cuckoo
To say goodbye . . .
[Marta, Gretl, Brigitta:]
Cuckoo!
[Children:]
. . . to you

[Children:]
So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, good night
[Marta:]
I hate to go and leave this pretty sight

[Children:]
So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, adieu
[Friedrich:]
Adieu, adieu, to yieu and yieu and yieu

[Children:]
So long, farewell, au revoir, auf wiedersehen
[Liesl:]
I'd like to stay and taste my first champagne

[Children:]
So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, goodbye
[Kurt:]
I leave and heave a sigh and say goodbye -- Goodbye!
[Brigitta:]
I'm glad to go, I cannot tell a lie
[Louisa:]
I flit, I float, I fleetly flee, I fly
[Gretl:]
The sun has gone to bed and so must I

[Children:]
So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, goodbye
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye

[Guests:]
Goodbye!

indie rock nostalgia night

2006-10-05T13:12:00.000-04:00

As part of our WCS HS Reunion week here at BOR, i took the maj deegan (actually it was a b-day pressie for her) to see Built to Spill last night at sucky Irving Plaza. (look at all my capital letters today!)

Camper van Beethoven opened, and they were really on it. They managed to play a whole lot of songs I didn't know, but I only have one album, so that is to be expected. It was a real treat for me though, and they had some hysterical graphics, including, "thank you seattle. you're too kind"(sic). All in all, a band I'd suggest you get out there and see. Well-paired with BtS, as well.

We've seen indie-rock gods BtS a couple of times, or maybe once, but it was a long show. But once again, they came out and rocked the shit out of a more aged than usual audience. Someone at the show had some Really. Good. Weed. I also saw my HS actor-crush for the second time in a few months, we had a cigarette at the same time. It's weird to have a big ass crush on an actor through HS and then run into him when you're in your late twenties...we're like buddies now. Not at all. Anyway, I'd go through the setlist, but for some odd reason, I don't know any BtS songs by name. It was damn good, though. They are a very good live band. We are old and tired and left before the encore.

Also, Magno Martini at Spice = super awesome. Maj thinks the upstairs lounge at revival looks like Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, and I'm ready to agree with that statement. And since I forgot to mention it, Christine Fellows (i think), who opened for The Mountain Goats Saturday, is like a bad version of Jenny Lewis and has lyrics like "boys lined up like beer cans". How fucked up is that Foley shit? He gives gays a bad fucking name. Jerk.

So tonight I fly the ghetto (read: air tran) skies down to the ATL. Lester is making me and canton and mountaineermaid some sort of tasting menu at his fancy restaurant friday and then carson had to go get knocked up and we'll all be celebrating that saturday afternoon, followed by the main event saturday night, followed by a massive hangover/midlife crisis sunday and return to new york just in time for the WYB!! season opener bocce game on monday. Tuesday=fucking naptime.

booyakasha

2006-10-04T12:47:00.000-04:00

did i spell that right? i don't give a fuck, b/c the moms just imed me and said this:

wild cherry moms: OK We Are booked at Gomboa Resort for 12/28-1/1.

happy panamanian new year!!

ariel tram!!

tonight, on a very special "bag of rocks"

2006-10-03T16:44:00.000-04:00

I just found out that my company plans on saving us in the event of disaster, after seeing two huge boxes of such in the kitchen, by feeding us chocolate peanut butter "balance" bars. luckily, since we've averted said disaster, we can reap the benefits of the impending expiry of said balance bars and eat them. i've had four today. i am fucking balanced.

this weekend was a whilrwind of activity.

the maj got all 26 on our asses. i brought her 26 balloons. she loved that. it's fun to be the one attached to 26 balloons in a bar. schwags, as though reading my mind, brought a table cloth and some banners that said, rightfully, "happy birthday". it was old skizzy. among normal gifts, n'orleans gave the maj some sort of voice activated barking dog thingy that is, in a word, hideous, and craigslist, in a surprise visit, gave our lovely vegetarian birthday girl some leftover chicken pad thai. good work, that was.
i to lady in 99c store: can you blow up 26 balloons?
lady in 99c store: now?

saturday was coach dballs' birthday extravaganza. an extremely slow vietnamese sandwich made majjy maj and me late for the pre-movie drinks, but thanks to certain other attendees, we were fixed up with tall boys in the movie. i have NEVER come that close to pissing myself. the movie was plenty funny and then we headed over to professor thom's for a few breers. they played a lot of songs that reminded me of high school, which reminds me, this is Wild Cherry Sara's remeniscient high school week in honor of my 10th hs reunion coming up this very saturday. woo! i did not get fat!!! or married!! or pregnant! we're celebrating by doing things like finding '80s music, which, while not from my own high school era does remind me of that fake hs experience i should have had where the hot guy totally wanted me even though i was kind of a freakish weirdo who wore giant grateful dead t-shirts. we're also watching a lot of "freaks & geeks" on dvd. mostly we're wishing we weren't going. although i can't wait to talk to a classmate who recently myspaced me and under "heros" in his profile it says, amongst others, "whoever invented cheese". we're gonna have a good time.

so i left PT's to hit bowery ballroom with west river and se los mountain goats. john darnielle (did i spell that right?) is wicked funny and very down to earth. they played a pretty well-rounded set, although i did not hear my all time favorite MG's song, "cubs in 5", which made me sad. but he did play "dance music" which made me as happy as one can get whilst still listening to the song "dance music".

after the show, i walked back uptown and re-met up with the coach dball birthday crew at sing sing. it's never a good sign when you're at sing sing before 1am. acutally, it's rarely a good sign when you're at sing sing after 1am, either. after that, for no good reason whatsoever, most of us cabbed it over to the magician, where even those of us who were trying our damndest to pace ourselves realized we were shitfaced and it was time to go home. only an hour or so after last call though.

what's even better is that when i came home at ?:?? am, i checked on my ailing computer. something had gone awry last time i used it and i was curious to see if re-installing itunes had fixed the problem, as i was sure it would. the answer, sadly, was no. i sat up looking at what was left of my computer, a sad screen consisting only of, "missing operating system" for about 15 minutes before finally giving up on help.

things only got better from there, i had to come into the bloody office to do my freelancing because clearly i can't do it on a computer with a missing operating system. so i spent two hours of a sunday at my office. yes!

why is it when we have all three netflix in the house and a bunch of shit on the dvr none of us are around and it all sits there until we decide to erase/send them all back and when i'm sitting home on a sunday now that gray's anatomy is gone and i can't go out because it's erev yom kippur there's nothing at all to watch? why!?

obviously, i spent yesterday not eating, but also not working, which was a pretty fair trade.

i better get started on racking up some sins for this year.

i totally forgot to mention that i had an interview that i completely forgot about until about 1 hour prior. needless to say, i pretty much nailed it.

the best thing to ever happen ever

2006-09-28T12:06:00.000-04:00

so, i just got a new 'pod. i call it elefant because it's gigantic. 80GB of storage. that's twice the size of my piddly laptop's hard drive...it's a video, which i never saw the point of. but now, thanks to magic or fate or just pure dumb luck, my vast wasteland of disk space will soon be filling up with the greatest comedy show of all time ever in the world...

the state.

the first season is now available on itunes.

rejoice!! now!

i'm going as a JW for halloween

2006-09-25T14:35:00.000-04:00

Son: Daddy, what's that?
Father: That's the Watchtower.
Son: What do they do there?
Father: That's where they teach people how to ring doorbells.

--B train, Manhattan Bridge

ONY

had a lovely weekend at camp guillaume. we celebrated the yid new year with the hasids in the 'skillz. bonjour, brooklyn brewery Ocktoberfest! bienvenue! thanks for getting us all drunk, along with whatever that other beer was, saturday night. pics of leaves changing? maybe.

also, Lambchop at bowery busts its way into my top three gigs ever. maybe four. wow. but they managed to take the win as the lowest ever attendance at bowery ballroom. including west river and me walking in just before the opener and seeing no more than 15 people in the whole place (except, of course, the tables upstairs. those fuckers got there super early). it's very sad that so few people were at the show, but having space and quiet during a gig was certainly welcome.

i'd say there are generally two mindsets for gigging: you're either going to see a band you know well & love hoping it will be the louder, clearer, louder, better, funnier, louder, somehow more transcendent (yes, wr I used that word) version of the albums you've been listening to, OR you go to check out a band you've heard here and there who happen to be in town so what the fuck, you haven't got anything better to do--is there anything better to do than go to a gig? doubtful.
anyhoo, Lambchop was the textbook example of all the hopes and dreams of scenario 1 coming true. 12 or so peeps on stage, including a string quartet and everyone on top of thier game, not to mention (finally) a very respectful crowd, who cheered, danced, and shut the fuck up when it was called for. go, lambchop, go!

you get me through my current occupation

2006-09-15T10:26:00.000-04:00

i think it's pretty well established that i LOVE devotchka. I saw Little Miss Sunshine because they did the music (liked it a lot as well!), i saw them back in june or something and i went back into manhattan at 1130pm last friday to see them at midnight at spiegeltent.

so surely you wonder if this was worth it? yes. yes it was.

because not only were the awesome and play loads of loviliness, they had an aerialist:

11

2006-09-11T17:18:00.000-04:00

:(

here's a very interesting recap from teendrama, with photos (be sure to click on the link at the bottom).

i lived in atlanta and saw most of it go down on telly. it was mind boggling to wrap my head around how someone crashed planes into buildings, not to mention how strong the buldings were, and their size, since the planes didn't go right through them and they stood standing for a while. then i freaked out even harder because i'd had a dream i was in the world trade center looking out and there was smoke coming from below me and then the whole floor i was on started falling a few days beforehand.

digression, digression, point

2006-09-11T16:45:00.000-04:00

so i just had HALF of a SMALL (or grande or whatever) mocha (not from *bucks) and i'm pretty amped. i absolutely cannot hold my caffeine. i just walked into the boss's office and spouted off a stream of words even i didn't understand, closing with "i just had a cup of coffee and i'm really hyper, sorry", so part of why i find this so hysterical might be because i can't even type without hitting two keys at a time right now.

while i define myself as a smoker, i rarely smoke during the day. but when i do, i take rudolph with me because he does. i cheated this morning and just a few minutes ago he came by my desk to see if i wanted to go again, i looked at him with my caffeinated eyes and said "no thanks, gottafinishredliningthiscausewehavetosenditouttodaybecausetheauthor
isallmadit'stakingthislong" so moments ago i got this email from him:

I just saw Dan Rather come in our building. I wonder if he’s meeting someone here. See what happens when you don’t smoke, you miss DAN RATHER.

ps i think all the jonathan swift i'm reading is rubbing off.

sometimes it looks like we might just be OK

2006-09-08T15:03:00.000-04:00

war, poverty, hatred, stress, stupid jobs and kevin costner movies are some of the bad things we've come up with as a species.

but we can do things like this, too.

via ze frank, who was hysterical at ted. (via Waxy)

two weekends in one

2006-09-05T16:40:00.002-04:00

not only did we have some seriously divergent weather patterns this weekend, but i managed to get two weekends for the price of one by spending thursday, friday and most of saturday at camp guillaume and kicking it bk style sunday and monday.

thursday evening got off to a rousing start as rudolph and i left the office to walk to PABT and Penn Station, respectively. of course, this sort of required going through the Radio City Music Hall area, where googols of sad-sack teenagers were waiting to go inside and cheer about bands that suck and the imagination-lacking videos they use to burn into viewers' subconscious. more to the point, i said to randolph how my 16-year-old self would have probably shit bricks to get into something like that and now here i am walking past it at a jaded 28 thinking everyone involved with the VMAs is beyond pathetic. i don't even know who was nominated so that could be a total lie. either way, they were blocking up the sidewalk and that was annoying. and MTV blows.

what was awesome was when we finally emerged from the vma holding pen, we were in Times Fucking Square. i was pretty sure i was moving through the circles of hell; i was waiting for phlegyas to show up and offer me a ride. rudolph took off for jersey and i went into penn to find guillaume for the 6:57 train to port jervis, via secaucus junction. meeting people at train stations is fun and simple. especially when njtransit has two "ticketing areas" with "waiting areas" right the fuck next to them and you are on the phone with guillaume, patience waning, screaming, "i'm in the ticketing area and i don't see you, you must be in a different ticketing area". finally i decided it would be easier to just meet on the platform, which eventually worked out.

guillaume bought this cute little cabin in bethel, new york. bethel is in the catskills, which is a mountain range and which, like many other mountain ranges, tends to be quite a bit cooler than the surrounding lands. i was not informed of the fact that the heating oil man was not meant to show up until friday morning before we left. meaning that we were heatless for thursday night. obviously this isn't normally a problem in august, but since mother nature decided to smack us upside the head this weekend, it was a pretty serious issue. not only that, but the cracked out people who sold guillaume the house had kindly left the matresses there, but they'd never taken the plastic off. so i slept on a mattress in a plastic bag with one sheet over me. maybe it was the poor quality of the previous night's sleep or my unending generosity, but friday morning i was up and at 'em on the way to home depot for a grill and then on to wal mart for some flannel sheets and comforters and other homey items on which i spent entirely too much money.

some of you may be aware that the catskills were once known as the "borscht belt", a lot of hasids still hang out at decrepit camps in the area and there was no shortage of them when i went on my excursion. still, it's weird to see loads of them roaming around home depot, and odder still, wal mart. it was hard enough for me to simply be in a wal mart, but a wal mart full of hasid families was almost too much. because i like any sport involving a lawn and not much skill, i wandered into the "sporting goods" (read: guns and camo-everything) aisle. i saw a dude buy a gun. i heard another dude (none of these people were curly-cues, by the way) arguing with the gun man about the mandatory waiting period. i walked up to the gun counter and asked if they sold horseshoe games. they were out for the season.

i got back to the house and the heat, propane and cable had been hooked up so i hopped online and did a little work and then got to work grilling the steaks i'd imported from fairway. i bought some lovely hickory chunks which did not abide my impatience and eventually got covered in charcoal. it was a delightful dinner, after which we got insanely baked and watched harold & kumar go to white castle. the next morning i whipped up some chocolate chip scones and strawberries and cream. not healthy in any way, but fantastically delicious.

spent most of saturday travelling through the drizzle of upstate new york and new jersey to the drizzle of brooklyn. luckily, the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy had arrived via netflix. sunday xx and i went to atlantic center. why the hell does it always look like there's about to be a national emergency at target? entire aisles are devoid of product every time i go there.

we hopped up to the maj's who threw a bbq in honor of summer ending and her brother's visit to ny. this event ended in us all being so fucked up that we started throwing any flammable item within reach into the grill. monday was all about productive. i finally finished editing a friend's manuscript in the park and then xx and i met the maj and brother deegan (and briefly lucy) at lovely union hall, where we played some fantastic bocce.

and now here i am, at work. boo.

tip for a long weekend

2006-08-31T17:10:00.000-04:00

even though my job sucks, they do things like give us the entire friday before labor day weekend off, so what can you do? guillaume and i are headed up to his fancy new house somewheres upstate for some steak grilling and i guess a lot of copy editing for me. yee haw.

knox: but that's not the point, that's not the point at all
charlie: what is the point?
knox: the point, charlie, is uh...

beer

is it just me?

2006-08-24T10:38:00.000-04:00

or is the nytimes.com front page every conservative republican's worst nightmare?

yesterday on the subway i finally saw something that inspired me enough to fill in my username and password on blogger and get this party started again. at least for today.

these two guys were sitting next to me and being generally annoying and loud. each listening to headphones and so talking over their own soundtracks. they took pictures of women as they got off the train with their cameraphones, which is just bizarre behaviour in my book. but then i looked over and noticed in one guy's armpit -- brace yourselves here -- was something that really really can only be described as a cocoon-like ball hanging in his pit tresses. talk about naseous. repulsive. of course then i couldn't stop staring at it. gross.

ps - the day my skillz go beyond screenshots and ms paint is the day i sell out.

didya miss me?

2006-08-03T14:59:00.000-04:00

i got me a free starbuck's coffee. i don't even like coffee. or iced coffee, but i'm a jew. and it was free.

the woman who sits behind me has just informed me that tomorrow is "miller time" and seems to believe that she is going to bring beer to work and we're gonna drink it. i don't have anything against this, but that does not make it any less fucking weird.

finally made it to union hall last night. hoorah! they've got some nice bands lined up for the next week or so. i'm sadly going to miss oppenheimer tomorrow cause i'm going to see the 'rents. but maybe i'll catch the mugs next week finally. and rumor has it that sam champion will be there at some point.

so the point of this post is to welcome me back by telling you this quick tale....

i downloaded the newest version of itunes on my computer here at the office...in norwegian:

2006-07-23T07:42:00.000-04:00

first off, through no fault of the US govt, the aforementioned friend's family are safely back on us soil, or at least on their way (i'm not sure when she sent the email).

perhaps you've seen movies, or even that windows wallpaper that alludes to a place...a tropical paradise where it's just you and the sand and the lapping sea. a corona ad, perhaps. the end of 'trading places'. that stupid 'kokomo' song. there is always the promise of a place where mangrove trees grow over the ocean with enough low hanging branches to sling a hammock over, where the palm trees gracefully arch out over the sand, straining to get a look at the sea, where the water is blue, or green, or some new color that defies description. and there's no one else around. no one. unless you count the few people staying at the same bamboo hut village you're staying. where the food is unbelievably good and the beer is cold and they don't sell it during the day, but they are willing to give it to you for free. and the weather is perfect. and the rain is a performance not to be missed. and on the other side of this perfect island is another beach. different from the miles of uninhabited, almost flat, shallow waters of the first side. this side has thunderous surf, chrystalline blue waves, and is backed immediately beyond the sand by a jungle. perhaps a nice richshaw driver will take you and those with whom you came on a short walk, where you will see a lagoon that brings tears to your eyes because the color of the water can be captured only by an immensly expensive and rare gemstone, if that. and you will see a bird that glows.

you might, if you're very very lucky, spend three days floating on your back in this paradise of paradises, and continually say or agree with the maj as she says, 'holy fucking shit, this place IS perfect.'

so there was that whole thing. we're in chennai (madras) now. you may not know that indians didn't stop at renaming their cities. a great number of streets were renamed too. this makes it damn near impossible to get anywhere in the cities. it's not like anyone knows where the hell he's going anyway. every taxi, rickshaw or auto rickshaw we've been in has stopped to ask directions, or taken the lonely planet map away from me and made it perfectly clear that he is not at all familiar with his city of residence. i used to think new york cabbies weren't so great compared to london taxi trivers (which is true), but this shit is ridiculous.

good god i've gotten about ten mosquito bites since starting to write this. my feet are on fire.

ok, this ghetto version of IE won't even let me change the font or colour, so we're goin' analog. enjoy.

baited breath

2006-07-16T07:53:00.000-04:00

today's update is only this:

i just found out that one of my closest friends in the world's family are stranded in beruit. it would seem that they should be fine but it will probably be hard for them to get home what with the aiport bombed and all. some day i will tell you the stories of the post office, and the train to calcutta and maybe even some other stuff, but for now, let's just wish them well.

wcs

a quick tally

2006-07-12T02:45:00.000-04:00

Number of times my imminent death has become a very real possibility:

5 july: 2
9 july: 2
10 july: 4
11 july: 8

jeeps with a minimum of 10 people + fog + himalayas + monsoon season + washed out roads + 7+ hour journeys = lots of really fucking close calls.

ps--we had our very own bomb scare here in gangtok...a box was left in the middle of MG Marg and the police shut everythihg around it down and cleared the area. turned out to be some dude's pyjamas.

it sure does rain a lot here

2006-07-09T08:14:00.000-04:00

greetings from gangtok! the commercial and something or other capital of sikkim. the views from here are pretty great, even if the clouds are still blocking the major himalayan peaks.

we arrived yesterday, promptly found some other travellers, and got drunk. today was a bit of shut up monastery and walking up steep hills and krrish, a movie you should see if you're anywhere near a theatre that's playing it. (ny kids, i'm looking at you here.)

the rain will not hold us back, we will trudge on through the mud. and the leeches. tomorrow we go up to some valley with some dudes and trek around. it sounds like a lot more driving and staying in hotels than trekkking, but if you could see the kind of rain that's coming down right now, you'd be OK with that, too. pray for clear skies.

i've finally realized that there is a minimum of three cups of chai a day, and this is if you refuse upwards of five offers of it. what's more, it's usually poffered by some adorable child who looks at you with gigantic brown eyes and a dazzling smile and has this cute metal basket that holds glasses that he or she is delightedly swinging back and forth in anticipation of bringing you a hot glass, and sweetly says "chai?" you've said "two please," before you even know what happened.

hey, HBO has commercials on it here. isn't that weird? i suppose that might be the least weird thing i've seen here, but i still get a kick out of it. i'm surprised at how many hotels have had tellys. even the bare bones place we stayed in siliguri had one. we do not have one here and it's a nice change of pace.

this town apparently has a city-wide wake up policy that requires some dude to roam the streets at some ungodly hour banging on a gong and yelling something in one of about four options of languages, a la "bring out your dead". who knows, maybe that's what he's saying.

gangtok is the source for "alpine gouda cheese". what else do you want from me?

chow mein is very popular here. i've enjoyed it myself. it is more like what is called lo mein in the states, but with thinner noodles. also popular here is chewing on red stuff and spewing a geyser of red saliva all over the place. these dudes are way into that.

a spring roll has nothing to do with anything you've ever seen before. it's basically a chow mein omlette. yep, that's what i said, and that's what i meant.

per usual, it is loud, chaotic, confusing and beautiful. and the water is rather unreliable.

who knows what my rrs reader looks like

2006-07-07T09:45:00.000-04:00

so we're in darjeeling at the mo. it's a bit wet here. but that's what happens when you travel to india during the monsoons. despite all the rain/mist/clouds, etc., it's still been sweet. all wide eyed and what not. i've been taking pictures like a japanese tourist, and will upload them at some point and you will all gasp with disbelief when i show you just how fucking insanely enchanting this coutnry is.

a few highlights:

our shared jeep (read: 15 people in the equivalent of a shitty land rover) broke its axle on the way from siliguri to darjeeling and we were serendipitously picked up by the bus. this is clearly not scratching the surface of this story, but it's enough to give you an idea of how things work around here.

delhi is kind of a hell hole. the maj and i were thrilled to leave. we flew to bagdogra or something like that. it's beautiful in this part of the coutnry (west bengal).

people LOVE taking pictures of us. we were at the zoo earlier and we felt like one of the attractions. the maj and i patiently smiled whilst about 20 bangledeshis (who we'd met thenight before at a park) all posed one by one to have their pictures snapped (with oldschool film cameras) with two white chicks.

the food is unbelievably good and almost as unbelievably cheap. we ate lunch for less than a dollar each.

that's it for now as i'm typing this on a shitty keyboard with a pretty heavy buzz on and we'rea headed off for more beers.

xo

wcs

the longest day of my life

2006-07-01T07:27:00.000-04:00

currently i am relaxing at my friend wanda's house in woking, surrey. she very kindly came and fetched me at heathrow, drove me to hers and had her lovely fiancee (congratulations!!) make bacon sandwiches, which we enjoyed in the garden. i've had a shower and a tea and it's fantastic. in a couple hours, i'll go back to LHR and await my final leg to delhi. i do not like planes. i will also be enjoying the second of two flights in middle seats, hurrah. i am tired. it's 1230 here, about 730 eastern time.

weather in london is spectacular. even a bit hot.

watched 'junebug' on the plane. it's rather enjoyable.

cheers
wcs

so this is it

2006-06-30T11:35:00.000-04:00

my final entry on us soil for a while. last night, we had a very good celebration of all things american, mac 'n'cheese for dinner, a west wing, oh, and roll bounce.

xy shaved my head, and i won't mention the weird bald patch right above my right ear and the chunk he tried to take of my left ear (of my ear, not my hair). i look like i like the ladies...ooops.

namaste, motherfuckers.

come pick me up

2006-06-29T13:02:00.000-04:00

the maj just emailed me this confirmation from sweet ass hotel in delhi re: our pick up at the airport. it's like a piece of candy, this one:

Please note the driver would be standing near the arrival lounge with a placard in his hand which shall be having Hotel’s name and your name printed on it. The same shall be at the time of pick-up for Ms. Wild Cherry Sara. The placard shall be having her name printed. The car would definitely be in the parking but the driver would wait for you near the arrival lounge. If in case you find any trouble locating the driver please contact the hotel reception at [redacto].

the placard shall be having my name printed!! and the car would be in the parking lot! yes! and what do i do if trouble finds me first?

with a little help from my friends

2006-06-29T11:00:00.000-04:00

this is a special shout-out edition to those of you who have been so sweet about me going away...

some folks from work went out for a special lunch yesterday, and i was presented with my very favorite insanely delicious dessert: buttercup's banana pudding, so for that, thanks to rudoph and west river.

west river came through with the hilarious "sara, please come home safe EP" mixtape. i've never gotten an EP mixtape before, but i love it. we discussed how it makes good sense, as he didn't want to overload me with stuff, and this was the best and why waste time with filler. nice work, wr. thanks.

lester sent me the 21st century version of a mixtape, a buncha links. including lilly allen's LDN, which he suggested i listen to whilst im back home is where the heart is, and i just might!

stella has kindly volunteered to take me for a last fling with charred cow flesh tomorrow before i go to the airport.

and xy will be not only watering my plants, but doing the honors of removing the vast majority of my hair tonight. too bad he has no idea i sabotaged the shit out of the netflix queue for the time when xx and i will be gone.

xx took the time to read through more of my lonely planet than i did and spent tuesday night following me around the house as i pre-packed spewing all sorts of useful facts.

apple brandy gave me a handy list of good street foods to try in delhi and the name of a restaurant or two.

and lots of others who've given me advice or hooked me up with people who've travelled in india. thank you all!

i hope to do at least a few posts from hindustan, but who the hell knows what will happen. check in every now and again and i'll try and give you a reason to stay.

ps, what's up with this? someone stole a government laptop that had all sorts of infor about veterans? kinda strange thing to steal if you ask me. this is just like the time someone stole bono's laptop with all the lyrics to the then-upcoming U2 record.

a last holdout

2006-06-28T15:34:00.000-04:00

brooklyn record's all up in timboo's with a great, albeit quick, piece about the age-old bar. it's not a place i frequent. i've been maybe twice in the last 4 years, but whenever i did go in (super wasted and ready for karaoke) the people were friendly and fun.

br talks about how it is an ironworkers bar, which makes me wonder how many ironworkers are really left in the slope. but the best thing about the article is the picture...see that guy in the cowboy hat? he's always standing out front of timboo's. full suit, hat, great stache (the kind you're just not allowed to have unless you're over 70), beautiful cane and a bunch of union pins on his lapel. i see him out there almost every saturday and sunday morning. yeah, morning. anyway, whoever you are, cheers to you, that guy!

just so you know

2006-06-27T13:37:00.000-04:00

i'm officially a douchebag. i just bought a moleskine journal (r) to record my idiot musings whilst in india.

things left to buy:

purse/bag, knife, soap, some stuff for the maj, toothbrush holder.

good news: i will be in fucking london for saturday's england v. portugal world cup game
bad news: i will be boarding a plane just around halftime of saturday's england v. portugal world cup game.

kisses,

cliche cherry sara

devotchka!!

2006-06-26T15:12:00.000-04:00

Saturday guillaume and i checked out devotchka at bowery ballroom (oh, what a thrill with two visits to bb in one week!). they were totally awesome.

nick urata's voice is just as spine tingling as i hoped it would be, and they treated us to the two stars from their latest ep of covers, "curse your little heart": "i cried like a silly boy" and "somethin' stupid". i remember 'the oblivion' and 'queen of the surface streets' and 'how it ends', the rest of their set was nicely sprinkled with ballads, but much of it was rambunctious and fun. the crowd really got into it. the girl in front of me bounced through most of the show, only landing on my foot twice.

also cool, two bands (i think norfolk & western used one) with theremins in one night. YES! btw, norfolk & western are worth checking out, if only to watch the one guy who seemingly plays every fucking instrument there is...banjo, mandolin, musical saw, accordion, violin/viola(?). he came out for a devotchka song and played violin with them, too.

for the encore, they brought out a bunch of young ladies with accordions, here is a blurry picture of them:

ps--this band have an AWESOME sense of style. they were so professional looking. uh. that nick is HOT.

fun with realaudio

2006-06-23T12:12:00.000-04:00

how many times can i talk about how much i love mmj? lots. and more excitingly, i can give you a link to their 3+ hour bonaroo performance. woo! it takes a fucking year to download tho.

via gothamist, i think.

ps, that is bor fave andrew bird whistling and violining along in there. dude sounds like a theramin

you gotta put your faith in a loud guitar

2006-06-23T11:18:00.000-04:00

there was a little bit of controversy at last night's Air Guitar Championships at Bowery Ballroom.

It seems the judges (the owner of Vice, a dude from the daily show, former champion sonyk rock and an a&r dude from Atlantic Records) didn't know exactly how the scoring worked and so asked for a reneg on the champion they chose. what happened was, william ocean scored ok in the first round and got a near-perfect in the second round, while the guy with the sombrero scored very well in the first round and also got a near perfect second round score, giving him the title. seems fair enough. whether or not you win should be based on your chosen performance song as well as compulsory (enter sandman, excellent choice!-- when the contestants all got to listen to the bit they would play, it took about three seconds before all their heads, save that of the rainbow zombie guy, who totally stayed in character, were bobbing along. mine was too) performance.

anyway, the judges were all "we'd like to have an air-off", because they wanted william ocean to win. give it up for the man, he shaved the word "air" into his chest hair, and crushed a beer can by sort of piledriving it. he also had his cohorts carry him through the crowd during his entersandman. he was pretty insane. (his first performance was prince, i think, and he came out with a graduation gown type thing that said Warning: prepare to be rocked on the back.) anyway, the sombrero guy, who's initial song i cannot remember but who was very good, went totally insane during the second round and ran up the stairs to the balcony where the judges were and hooked his legs through the bars and leaned over. we all thought in some way he was going to die. but he didn't, he just spilled all the judges' drinks and knocked a bunch of shit over and scared the shit out of them. intense, thy name is sombrero dude.

anyway, it was a bit shitty because they'd given sombrero guy his trophy already--the head of the air guitar committee or whatever looked like he walked off a dockers ad, not exactly the kind of person you'd expect to be in charge of a bunch of air guitarists--but now they wanted to take it away. william ocean was very gracious and clearly did not want to be a part of such an unearned and underhanded win, the audience were torn, wanting to see an air off (who doesn't?) but also thinking it was a shit thing to do. in the end, the air guitarists spoke, all of them stuck up for mr sombrero head because he'd won it fair and square. one of them even told the judges to "follow the rules". it was an interesting political process.

other highlights of the evening included me getting pissed off at the morons who had to take upwards of 40 pictures (i took two ~~and haven't uploaded them yet~~), a guy breathing fire, a 50-something guy who put on a pretty sad performance, but was cool nonetheless, psycho dave losing his wig about six seconds into his performance and ruining his chances (much like that fucking penatly kick ghana undeservedly got fucked the US in yesterday's game...ahem), bjorn toroque endlessly talking about himself, the owner of vice remarking that rainbow zombie's partial-moon looked like a "baby's cunt", and the overwhelming joy that only comes when someone plays "crazy train", good god i love that song, i mean are there better lyrics in the world than "i'm running off the rails on a crazy train"? (no, there aren't)

extra special attention should be paid to the guy who...caught the air guitar that one of the performers pretended to throw off the stage. to you, dude, i say this: you are SO. FUCKING. LAME.
the final hurrah, anyone was invited to the stage for "keep on rocking in the free world"

william ocean, in all his violent glory

if living right is easy, what goes wrong?

2006-06-21T10:53:00.000-04:00

i met (beta) for the son volt show at the world financial center yesterday. it was really fun! if you like alt-country, free things, bagels and breezy afternoons, you would have liked it, too.

the show was at the marina next to the financial center so it was just lovely out. except for the short, heavy rainshower we got. which was exceptionally weird as it was sunny to the west. i bet there was a rainbow somewhere.

i don't know son volt that well, i've heard and always liked them, but the only song i recognized was "drown", which is great and i used to think was they might be giants...they played lots of pretty stuff that goes well with sunny afternoons, and some crunchier stuff and they covered "i'm not like everybody else", which was pretty cool.

well, that was vague.

i made the horrid mistake of meeting xy for a drink downtown. he and i are both big fans of that area of the city, so we walked around and got shitfaced. gin is disgusting. i liked it up until about 4 hours ago, and it is now my sworn enemy. i was cuddling a bottle of gatorade on the train ths morning, trying to regulate my breathing and not spew all over my fellow commuters. one of my coworkers just sent me an email addressed to "drunky the clown", which made me laugh, which made me want to puke.

best. videos. ever.

2006-06-20T13:08:00.000-04:00

accorting to pfork. ok, it's some of their favorites, which means i can exuse them for the lack of

sabotage
i can't wait
just
if i could turn back time (kidding)

T minus 10 days

2006-06-20T10:33:00.000-04:00

ok, so 10 days from now i will be getting on a plane to fly for two days over to india. weird. how is it that i planned this thing myself and i still can't get my head round the fact that it's actually going to happen? and what do i have to do still? laundry, for sure. probably buy some shitty clothes i can discard along the way. start malaria meds....make a big fuck off list of all the shit i need to do.

the moms was in town this weekend and we went shopping. EMS was certainly glad to see us, as i think we bought nearly everything in the store. water purifier, rehydration salts, deet, rain jacket, etc. i hope it all fits in my pack.

we spent the rest of the weekend in the theatre...

first off was the history boys: pretty good, apparently it is a movie, too. members of the cast were familiar from harry potter. anyway, it was all about how learning just to learn isn't meaningful, it's learning to live that is important. duh. still, a bunch of boys in ties lolling around a classroom pontificating is always relatively amusing, and it's very clever. there was a lack of english audience members illutsrated when no one even chuckled when they made a comment about living in hull...

we came out of the matinee and were lucky enough to catch the last few minutes + stoppage of the usa v. italy game on the jumbotron.

then we had some din din at the jewel of india restaurant, which was not far from the theatre. food was pretty good. i had some tasty lamb tandoori and mom kicked it korma style. the puri was gigantic, like the size of a basketball. unfortuntately, about halfway through my meal i looked over and noticed this sitting next to me:

next was the lieutenant of inishmore...i've been to the aran islands, they are fucking beautiful. windswept, wild, wooly. we stayed on the tiniest of them all, inis oirr, where no one locked their doors and you could traverse every inch of the place in about 45 minutes. after a long day of walking around and around and around, shwags and i went down the pub/restaurant/city centre and ate the most irish meal ever: lamb and roast potatoes with carrots or something. it was the hartiest meal in memory, and it was accompanied by live music and footie and, obviously, beer. we never wanted to leave. but the point is, these are very wee islands off the coast of galway and not a whole lot tends to happen on them. basically a member of an IRA splinter group is called home because his cat has fallen ill (actually it's been bludgeoned but he doesn't know that) the dude is what some of us would call a psychotic and his temper is feared throughout the land. the father reminded me of an old english professor i had, round pale yet blotched face, white hair, jolly stature. and the other guy was a whiny, long-haired wussy-type who provided the majority of the comic relief. the only thing i don't get is what this play is doing on broadway, it's pretty silly, and seems like it would only really appeal to a pretty small niche, those who enjoy irish nationalist humor...but moms and i both thought it was a fun time. NB: it was at the lyceum, which is probably my favorite b'way theatre.

the moms and i crashed at the algonquin hotel, which is fecking gaaargeous. they've done a really nice job keeping it looking nice. apparently it looked pretty shit up until about five years ago, but they've mended all that now. lots of very dark wood and large leather chairs that want you to sit in them all day and drink expensive scotch. we didn't, but next time!

my only complaint is this:

stupid, stupid, stupid wallpaper of new yorker cartoons. who likes that shit? they really do give themselves a lot of credit for being a literary heritage site, there's a little booklet in every room that tells you all about all the famous stuff and people that were there. it's interesting.

anyway, if you have the means, i highly recommend putting up a family member there.

sunday was the big shop, bookended by the Immigrant Day Festival (or some such)

and "7th heaven" the 7th ave fair in PS. -->

which i followed up with dinner at sakura. verdict: fucking rad.
xx and i split a tofu and avocado salad (best idea ever?) and then i had an alaska roll and a spicy tuna roll, both of which were super fresh and not that pricey (5 or 6 bucks). plus they have a nice backyard. here are the trees from it:

we were dancing all night long

2006-06-16T10:34:00.000-04:00

so, you'd think that after getting up at 545 and drinking and hanging out in the windy sunshine all day, i'd probably want to go home.

not so much, it seems. xx and i split off from xy when he went back home to drop off some shit and change and we hung around le cite. then we re-met up at guero, which was apparently formerly a lesbian bar and they haven't really done much redecorating. we had a pint there and then walked over to loreley for hollaback's birthday.

obviously, loreley's just the kind of place where you know you're not getting out before at least 3. coach dball and k-fed spun all the hits the kids love and we danced our asses off yet again. at some point, bonnaroo was doing everything she could to get rid of the little glowy bracelet someone had bestowed upon her. the thankful recipient then proceeded to wave it up and down for practically the rest of the night. xx vanished into the night around 3am, leaving me to fend for myself, which is never a smart plan. in this case, we closed the place and headed over to sing sing for karaoke. somehow we got in after they'd closed and continued our revelry for an hour or so. the highlight here was k-fed's spectacular header off one of the tables. some sort of surf move gone pear-shaped, he managed to not only take quite few beers down with him, but didn't miss a beat of whatever song he was singing. it was hilarious.

i think i remember someone singing "islands in the stream", and at one point i engaged in what can only be explained as embarrasingly drunken behaviour in which i and a cohort did a freestyle song about blogging to U2's "one"...don't even ask.

we emerged into daylight and ignored the (smarter) ones who suggested getting food, and instead headed over to drink more beer at someone's apt in the les. there were a number of bloggers amongst the crowd (real ones, who like get paid and stuff) and hysterically the conversation turned to php and css and other geeky subjects right around 6. just after i'd hit 24 stupid hours of being awake. staying up that long seems like a fantastic idea at the time, but it's really not.

arrival home: 745 am. sunday was hell, i never even bothered getting dressed. thank god i had weed and super troopers.

drink beer out in the country

2006-06-16T10:20:00.000-04:00

saturday was family day at the races as xy and some friends were heading to belmont and xx and i went along for the "ride" (ha!).

unfortunately, this required getting up at 545 am, something i rarely, if ever, do. if i'm gonna be up at quarter to six in the morning, it's because i still haven't gone to bed yet. anyway, through all our crankiness, we grabbed some rad bagels from bagel hole and met up with the rest of the crew. there was some discussion as to the absence of one guy, post, who apparetnly had gone to bed only minutes before we were meant to meet and leave, he would meet up with us later, and i'm pretty sure he never bothered sobering up.

we arrived well before the gates opened, which xx and i used as grumble fodder for why the hell we had to get there that fucking early, but whatevs.

there's of course the strange juxtaposition at tracks of people who wear fancy clothes and sit with opera glasses way up high and people with coolers and baseball caps, which i never really got past. xx and i spent a lot of time wandering around the various floors saying, "ooh! more rich people!" and wondering how it was any fun to hang out in those outfits all day.

i won my first race and lost all the rest of them, i ended up down about $10 on the day, which i guess is fine. i've never been much for gambling anyway. no one really won big, but the boys seemed to enjoy throwing large amounts of cash away.

awesome: they had smithwick's for $6.75, which was cheaper than a lot of other beer
stupid: they had a fucking get well card for a horse. A. HORSE.

gates to microsoft: i generally spent most of my day just reading blogs, anyway

2006-06-15T17:13:00.000-04:00

billy g isn't even gonna drag his ass to the office any more.

"I believe with great wealth comes great responsibility - the responsibility to give back to society and make sure those resources are given back in the best possible way, to those in need," he said

is it just me or did once he catch a rather largish load of flack for not giving money to charity for many years?

alternate headline: gates admits to "mostly just staring out the window" all day long

whatever happened to good old fashioned vinegar and bakin soda (or was it powder)?

2006-06-13T16:45:00.000-04:00

mentos + diet coke + geeks = bellagio

(slashdot)

you're now allowed to do something you should've always been allowed to do in the UK

2006-06-13T14:30:00.000-04:00

convert your own cds into mp3s, etc.

but don't even THINK about doing it for your friends.

via slashdot

it seems the avoidance of coffee wasn't such a smart choice

2006-06-13T12:44:00.001-04:00

i'm not much into coffee, but thanks to this article i just recieved from craigslist, i should perhaps start drinking it by the gallon.

i vaguely remember 1010wins mentioning something similar to that last line of "the primary approach to reduction of alcoholic cirrhosis is avoidance or cessation of heavy alcohol drinking," but i'd already missed the beginning where they tell you that coffee cuts down on your chances of it.

pass the mochalatte!

dog bites zip burger

2006-06-09T15:25:00.000-04:00

we've had a busy day here at the bagofrocks newsroom, but now, in the shade of the afternoon, i'm here with some good news.

1. dog bites man might have real potential
2. zip burger is delicious

dbm is shot in a very similar way to the original "office" series, and is equally awkward. the only real threat this show has (aside from not having longevity) is that people may be a little sick of feeling sick when they watch tv. it was only the first episode and i cringed mulitple times, which, for me is a good sign. but what with the us office and curb your enthusiasm and the office office, other people might be over it. i'm certainly keeping it on the dvr, though. i urge you to give it a shot. you will be impressed, even if you don't enjoy it.

some friendly coworkers and i went to zip burger for lunch. me = burger w/goat cheese, grilled vidalia onions, let, tom, bacon on whole wheat bun. west river = burger w/cheddar & vidalia onions, rudolph = veggie burger (wow! all lentily and delicious) w/gouda on soudough, redvines = burger w/american and let/tom. + 2 orders fries. verdict: we all talked about how good it was the whole way back to the office and plan a return trip next week. the patties are a little on the greasy/thin side, but delicious and cooked miraculously to medium rare. fries are a little salty for my taste, but rudy loved that. west ~~wing~~ river thought i overloaded mine and overpowered the burger, but he can suck it. word to the wise, the milkshakes are made with soft-serve ice cream.

hours logged on the phone with cingular = 4.5

2006-06-09T12:50:00.000-04:00

ok, so first there was the phone that hooked itself to the internet all day long, resulting in various monthly charges of 60 and 70 bucks, which required at least one phone call each to remove from my bill.

then there was the replacement phone, sent with a sim card that wasn't compatible and therefore disabled the voicemail icon.

then came the replacement sim card for that sim card that was STILL THE WRONG sim card.

then came the next sim card, which, following a message that said "message center number" when i tried to send a text to xx, i finally called to activate.

when you call for this shit, they make you punch in your phone number, then when they answer the phone, they make you give them your phone number again. then they ask you your name, then the last four digits of your ssn.

what with all this information they're using to verify things, i'm pretty fucking amazed at how the woman managed to activate my sim card to SOMEONE ELSE'S phone number. of course, i didn't know this until i tried to call myself and leave myself a vm to see if it worked and the icon is back. beep boop boop beep beep beep beep...dead air. DEAD. FUCKING. AIR.

luckily, i now have cingular's customer service number memorized and am currently on the phone with travis, who is, as they have all been, very helpful, but in whom i have very little confidence.

he just said "this is probably not going to be good".

turns out the lady i spoke to was making changes to another customer's account, which explained why she thought i had a nokia. (travis told me they work off three separate screens and she punched in the wrong number on one of her screens after verifying the account. which is obviously very comforting.) i mentioned that not only do i not have a nokia, but haven't for quite some time and have even recently been the recipient of a REPLACEMENT LG phone from THEM, so doesn't she think it's weird that it says i have a nokia; and also i DO have text messaging and i'm a little concerned that she says it says i don't on my account. this did not prompt her to double-check that she was looking at the right account, she just gave me a little attitude and activated my sim card to some other poor sod's phone -- who, incidentally, just unexplainedly lost all use of his or her phone. ha ha, guess they'll be dialing 18003310500 soon!!

anyway, they're now going to, for the third time, ship me a motherfucking sim card (dare i mention that i asked them to ship it to my work address, but they went ahead and sent it to my apartment anyway? nah, i'll leave that out). only travis didn't know what i was talking about when i said i need a special one that starts with 4101 instead of 4103, so chances are this one won't work either.

stay tuned!

all the news that's blatantly obvious

2006-06-09T12:27:00.000-04:00

i was just glancing over the times website trying to avoid reading about that guy they dropped 2 500lb bombs on, and noticed these hard-hitting headlines in the AP and reuters section:

Lawyer Says Pete Doherty in Detox

Bush: Not Clear When Troops Can Leave Iraq

Extremists Mourn Al - Zarqawi's Death

sunday times xxxword

2006-06-09T11:09:00.000-04:00

i am a week behind on my crosswording, so i'm still doing a week ago sunday's.

58 down: ejaculate

c _ _

what the?

bollywood 101

2006-06-09T10:17:00.000-04:00

woozy and i hit the imaginasian on monday to see fanaa, a movie set in kashmir and delhi. i heart bollywood for many reasons, but one of the more important ones is their blatant disregard for realism of any kind in their plots...observe:

blind girl from kashmir goes to delhi with her dance troupe and meets the suave (?), sexy (?), rougueish-yet-charming womanizing tour guide who pulls out his heavy artillery of horrid, on-the-spot poetry to cajole her into hanging out with him. he gives her a tour of the city and she touches his face a lot. all her friends, of course, are split between "stay away from that slime ball" and "oh, he's so dreamy!"

eventually, she caves and they have a big dance scene (nb: i missed this b/c i got a call from the maj in prague which i figured i should go ahead and take, woozy says it was pretty good). the last day she is in town, tourguide fails to show up for whatever they're supossed to do. so she, in all her blindness, tracks him down and yells at him and they do it (nb again: i have NEVER seen such a racy bollywood movie, normally they don't even kiss, but this time they were clearly doin' it). she leaves the next day to get on a train and of course he shows up on the train and, get ready, carries her down the tracks back to delhi after they pull the fucking emergency brake.

they decide to get married and she finally goes for the eye check up her mom's been nagging her about. lo and behold! there is a new surgery "silly girl, you should have come to the doctor long ago, there have been such advancements!" that can, you guessed it, restore her sight.

she comes out of surgery, mom & dad are there, but rehan (tourguide) is nowhere to be seen. then we find out that someone has blown up something in delhi and she is called in to identify the remains. she clings to the horrid sweatervest she knitted him and remembers when he said "to be a piece of wool wrapped around that finger" (hello shakespeare!) and it's all very emotional.

then we see the like, center for anti-terrorism or something and they're talking about this uncatchable mastermind behind all these recent bombings, etc. of course, we now know it's rehan, who has cut his ridiculous hair, finally stopped wearing scarves all the time and is acting all james bond at the airport. turns out he's fighting for the IKF to create an independent kashmir.

he goes back to his snowy training camp where the boys are all playing footie and his grandfather is all "i'm so proud of you". eventually the indian gov't find out he's stolen a trigger for a nuclear bomb and they chase him around for a while. he ends up in the middle of the night at the door of like the only house for 1000 miles.

guess who lives there?? what's-her-face and her son, rehan (ahhh, that's why they had the sex scene!) and her dad (mom's died). of course, she was blind when they were together, but now she's not, and can't recognize him (i guess his voice didn't tip her off, plus she thinks he's dead). anyway, they bring him inside and nurse him back and eventually everyone figures everything out and rehan the elder says he just needs this one mission and then he'll come back to them forever and they get married at her house.

however, she ends up shooting him because he refuses to give up the trigger to the indian gov't.

the end.

i can't believe what i do late at night

2006-06-06T11:40:00.001-04:00

nickels gratuated from graduate school not too long ago, so we went out to celebrate saturday. we started at the crocodile lounge, which, while playing pretty good music and having some of the nicest barstaff around, isn't all that. $5 bud light is not made up for by free, salt-ridden pizza. give me capone's any day over that shit.

anyway, we moved on to grassroots, which turned out to be a bust because nickels only had his birth certificate and college id and that is apparently not enough to convince that guy who's always sitting on the stool that he's 21. we rolled across the street to bull mccabe's. i haven't been here since tampson took me there about 4 or 5 years ago, either before or just after i moved to le cite.

kirin ichiban and i wanted to crack some balls, so we got on the old pool list. here's the funny thing about playing pool in bars: sometimes you play with some really fun folks and you all have a good time. see: last week's trip to brooklyn social club. sometimes, you play with some totally anal retentive arseholes who seem to think that, despite being at a crowded bar at 12 am, it's totally acceptable to make you call all of your shots and play by every fucking rule in the book. "oh, no, you hit our ball, that's a scratch". dude, go to a fucking pool hall if you're gonna act that way. rules are all fun and stuff, but we're fucking around here. plus, we shouldn't have to play by your rules, we can all make up some new ones together! like i get to whack you in the nads with the short stick after you grumble at my teammate's ass kicking pool abilities. anyway, justice was served when we beat the ever loving shit out of them and the team that followed, including a beautiful three-in-a-row streak that ended with the eight ball for me. woo!

we'd had just enough of that, and nickels had taken it upon himself to finish my fucking widmer bros, which angered me, so we popped over to sing sing. normally by the time i get to karaoke i'm, uh, hammered. but we were all severely buzzed at this point. which worked out well, since there was an 80 minute wait for songs.

this gave us plenty of time to cajole sake shots out of the guys sitting next to us, get kirin ichiban drunk enough to sing, for nickels to bite the fucking shit out of my finger (i can't for the life of me remember why), for people to sing "champagne supernova" three times (what's up with this song? why do so many people want to fucking sing it?), for me to sing "don't stop believin'" with xx and "manic monday" with wafflehouse, and for about 6 dudes all wearing the same button-down striped shirts to convince us to come with them and hang out in their room (there is no way to make this not sound like a freshman girl's first time at a frat party).

so we went. we were three girls and two guys, so we were safe enough. they paid for everything though, can't knock that. plus we got in some beasties, allman brothers, lots of madonna and tom petty. it seems that given the chance, i will become a karaoke whore...oops. but when no one's singing, i'll do it!

per usual, we got ejected when the place shut down and proceeded to spend the next 1.5 hours on the street talking to another group of guys all wearing button-down shirts. sadly, none of them, nor my own friends, agreed with my theory that since it was already getting light, we might as well go down to the staten island ferry for a sunrise cruise. losers. next time!

and once again, the sun was above the horizon when i finally closed my eyes. these early sunrises are gonna be the death of me.

why do you suddenly care about July 13?

2006-06-05T15:11:00.000-04:00

because that's when the office will be starting its webisodes! 10 minute web-only tide-you-overs.

my deepest fears come to light

2006-06-02T16:09:00.000-04:00

who doesn't have the slightest hint of panic that those colonial w'burg ads are actually gonna be about our very own broken-glass-and-hipster-laden tourist destination?

via gawkster

and the gap between crack and thunder, crack and thunder, is closing in

2006-06-02T10:34:00.000-04:00

i am constantly taunting new york with my claims that its thunderstorms are lacking in both frequency and intensity. atlanta gets fierce storms almost daily due to its immense radiation of heat (mostly from traffic) and they are loud and scary and i love them. so you can imagine my delight last night when finally the gods started banging around on the drums up there.

xx and i were on our way to the rogue wave show at southpaw when the 12oz drops began falling all around us. sparsely, at first, cold plops on our arms and heads, leaving us plenty of time to establish the gate as our first port of call. we dipped into bagel world, though, when someone turned the water pressure way up.

this turned out to be a fortunate side trip, as not only am i pretty sure they stayed open well past their normal closing time to accomodate the few of us caught on that particular block in the storm, but when i saw the guy run out to a car and unload a giant batch of cupcakes , i ran out after him with my umbrella to protect the little sweeties, and xx and i were granted with free (and absolutely delicious) ones!!

it might have been the angry latnia coming in, yelling at the guys behind the counter and racing out of bagel world with a metal ladder into a thunderstorm or the ever so slight lightening of rain that convinced us to make our way to the gate. we ran down the block and managed to grab two pints (brooklyn blonde!!) and settle out on the patio.

yes, the patio. yes, it was still storming. but they had their canopy out and there were quite a few of us camped out enjoying the smell of fresh rain and the lightning and thunder and watching sad fools walk down the streets in various states of drenchedness whilst enjoying cold (US) pints. we had a nice chat with two guys who have a boat and drink very fancy beer, which they let us try (leftbrau? it's delish!) and the guy and girl on the other side of us who were equally giddy at being able to watch the storm outside with beer.

we were also fortunate enough to be within earshot (not that it was very difficult) of "that girl". note it was roughly 9pm, not the time for such antics. she was yelling at what i can only assume was her boyfriend, who looked somewhere between bored, horrified and resigned, almost the entire time we were there. at one point i mouthed to xx "is she wasted?" and that girl promply confirmed my suspicions by announcing, "but i am an artist, it doesn't matter how talented people are, it's all luck!!!" whatevs, hon. go home time!

things had finally eased by the time we slid down to 'paw. we got there just as the vaguely interesting second opener finished up and rogue wave came out about 20 minutes later.

when i saw rw with nada surf earlier this year, i was pretty well disappointed, but retained a desire to check them out when they were standing on their own, and i am very glad i did. they sounded clear and powerful and well-rested, and it looked like zach had actually bathed in the past couple days. he was sporting a seemingly clean black tee shirt versus his dingy white one of last show. he also seemed to have got some new jeans.

the thing about rogue wave that always made me think they should be great live is the tidal nature of their songs. each one has slow parts and rockin' parts and swaying parts and melodic parts. they're like a perfectly-toasted, buttered english muffin: some bites are very crunchy and a bit drier, and some are that awesome burst of butter that's been hiding in one of the deeper nooks and crannies and it's glorious. (eg, endgame, 10:1)

anyway, enough with the breakfast food analogies, this time, as i'd hoped, the drum rolls in "bird on a wire" came through with avengance and zach channeled freedy johnston eerily well for "california". the whole set, while lacking in a few of my personal favorites, was well rounded and included, to my very very very very very very very beer spillingly joyous surprise, a downright delicious cover of the beatles' "i'm only sleeping" of which just a few nights prior i'd been extolling the virtues to xx at brooklyn social, as well as "something in the air" as a closer.

the overall pleasantness of the evening despite near-misses of lightning strikes was almost enough to make me not care about the group of morons standing next to us at the show. i always stand behind the tall guy, because there is one for every 5 or so peope at every show. and they are evenly distributed throughout the crowd. but this tall guy was not only oafish and gennerally irritating to look at, but came with a set of two petite girls, neither of whom could manage to shut their traps the entire way through the fucking show. this of course caused oaf man to continually bend down to hear what they were saying and respond, forcing me to rearrange myself about 50 times over the course of the show. not only that, but these fucktoids were standing at the front of the raised part of southpaw, which means they were fucking up a lot of people's good times. the guy next to me and i exchanged "should we just kill them?" looks a number of times and by the end of the show xx and i were just agog at how moronic these people were acting. why the hell do you go to a gig if you don't have the slightest intention of listening to the music? get the fuck out before i dump my beer on your oafish (or "that's so stupid"-repeated over and over and over and over again) head!

but it was really fantastic time.

this is what you get when you mess with us

2006-06-01T14:21:00.000-04:00

continuing our very special 1984-themed bag of rocks, my very own mayor mikey thinks it's not such a bad idea to keep a DNA database for all legal US workers.

or perhaps this is closer to gattaca?

adventures in customer service

2006-05-31T16:01:00.000-04:00

the last 15 minutes have presented me with what are hopefully the final chapters in two misadventures in which i've been lately involved.

the first is to do with my email at work. for those of you who use outlook, you might be familiar with the handy little tool known as "auto-complete". this means when you put someone in your contacts whose name is Crackhead Buttjammer, all you have to type in your "to" field is "crack" and bill gates fills in the rest. only we got a new server recently. i'm sure in the long run this will bring us nothing but great joy, for now it's a motherfucking pain in my ass. all my files require half a dozen more mouse clicks than they used to, i had to reset all my shortcuts and this new problem with email is hassling me.

since i've seen a number of verbatim emails reproduced in blogs cause nothing but trouble, here is my version of what happened (and i'm paraphrasing myself here)

Dear Tech Support:

My little thingy that makes names pop up in the "to" field of my email doesn't seem to be working. Instead, I have to scroll through my contacts list and select them. This is especially difficult for my distribution lists, as it becomes very time consuming. Next time you're in the office, can you fix this?

Lovingly,

WCS

--------

Dear Wild Cherry Sara,

Since we got a new server, you and your distribution lists are fucked. Sorry. You'll have to redo them all.

Tech Support

-------

Dear Tech Support,

I actually already did redo all the lists, but they still aren't recognized until i go through that drop down menu that allows you to choose from the "universal" contacts or my "personal" contacts. This sucks for me.

WCS

--------

No response at press time.

Update. turns out they could and did fix the problem. hooray!

Nextly, we deal with Cingular Wireless. I'm not linking to them because you can figure out what their website is and there's no real reason to anyway.

I had this LG phone that had a mysterious icon on it some of the time. it was a little arrow pointing up. I looked high and low through the user's manual and there was no mention of this icon. i called cingular and a very nice lady and i had some chuckles over it and she couldn't find it either.

then, two months ago there was a $75 charge on my bill for internet use. i don't use the internet on my phone--ever. ever, ever, ever, ever EVER. when i accidentally push that button i fly into a panic and smash cancel as hard and as frequently as possible until i get that reassuring blank screen with the time and "cingular" on it.

anyhow, insanely long story involving about seven (20+ minute) phone calls to cingular short, i got all the charges (and subsequent charges) removed and they sent me a replacement phone. i'll give them this, cingular customer service i swear used to be staffed by prisoners at minimum security prisons. surly idiots who could not have given less of a shit (not that i can blame them) about me and my phone problems. but they've been replaced by very nice (indians?) people, one of whom told me all about how he's going to buy a new car (new to him) and he was gonna sell his mom his old car but he totalled it and it was almost paid off and...

ok, so i got a new phone. yay! and it wasn't logging on to the internet every single minute of the day. yay! but i realized after a couple people said "didn't you get my message?" that the voice mail icon was no where to be found. boo!

so again i called and they explained that (oops!) the new sim card they'd sent with my new phone didn't work with that phone (why they shipped these two things together if they do not work in tandem is beyond me), but they would gladly and promptly send a new one. which they did, and i got it today. and i called to activate it and it turns out they sent ANOTHER WRONG SIM CARD. what the bloody fuck? isn't there a bin marked "LG phones" and a bin next to it marked "sim cards that work with LG phones" or something like that in the big warehouse in texas where they keep all this shit? good god.

three arms

2006-05-31T13:04:00.000-04:00

and a baby.

sheep in sheep's clothing

2006-05-31T11:18:00.000-04:00

one of the things i vaguely remember from this weekend is telling xy over and over again that i was a sheep in sheep's clothing. at the time i thought it was immensely clever, but i have no idea what i was getting at, and the only reason i remembered it in the first place was the nofx review in pitchfork (linked above).

the best thing about summertime weekends is that all the prats tend to get out of town, leaving the increasingly smelly, steamy, sticky streets to people like me. this is also an important weekend for me because i moved here on memorial day in 2002, so i like to do as many new york-centric things as possible. and drink lots of beer outside.

saturday xx, guillaume and tbone and i took a lovely walk through red hook which began with an investigation of the future whole foods/current toxic waste dump (below and below), wove through the bqe (left) and culminated in a binge at the new red hook fairway (below left). $75 got us a bottle of the most delicious olive oil i've ever tasted, some sausage, steaks and FIVE kinds of cheese. xx and i have both decided we want to marry the cheese guy. we went back about three times and had what can only be described as completely retarded conversations about goat's milk brie and romano cheeses. as we rang up, the cashier asked 'do you always buy cheese like this?' it was more than slightly embarassing.

after dropping off the food, xx and i felt that magnetic pull towards the only place one should spend a sunny saturday afternoon -- gowanus yacht club. we followed this up (after xy joined us) with a trip to brooklyn social, where the aforementioned "sheep in sheep's clothing" comment occured. and where we later schooled two dudes who'd been at a wedding earlier that day at pool. again and again. turns out i don't actually suck at pool. at least not that much.

we knew things were out of hand when the barmaid from gowanus showed up at bsc, and then they were really out of hand when ivan, conjuring a serious case of deja vu, told everyone it was time to go home, please. i went to bed just as the sky was turning that very pretty but somewhat disturbing shade of blue and the birds in the tree outside my window were happily chirpping their heads off, making falling asleep at 530am a lot more difficult than it should have been.

11am! another stupid thing i said when xy and i were at brooklyn social was that i'd make breakfast the next morning. he forgets to take out the trash, or wash his dishes, etc. but does he forget i said i'd make breakfast? no. xx and xy and i united our hangovers to create some poached eggs, sausage, bacon, cheese grits and mango juice.

we headed into manhattan for the avenue c street fair, where jensenator met up with us and we all enjoyed various street foods and confusion over the number of "healthfirst" vans throughoutthe fair. we also noted a distinct lack of hipsters, which we compared with the overwhelming number we saw at our own 5th ave fair not long ago. where did they all go? xy and i had a swift half at patio lounge, where i had some rasberry beer thing that tasted like black cherry soda. nice, but very sweet.

monday i had a delish brunch at five points with (beta), woozy and guillaume. passionfruit belinis = awesome! we popped over to lunasa for a couple hefeweizen before heading once again to the yacht club (which had been ransacked and was out of pbr, 160z bud, regular buds and various wursts) and eventually to commonwealth where we finally realized this beautiful gift of three days of perfect weather, walks and wheat beers was winding down. boo.

but fear not! tonight, we head back to our home away from home for trivia!

oh big brother, where art thou?

2006-05-26T12:18:00.000-04:00

America Online Inc. employs more than a dozen people, including several former prosecutors, handling almost 12,000 requests a year from federal state and local police agencies. The unit works 24 hours a day, seven days a week and maintains a special hotline that police or federal agents can call to help them with their queries and tailor their requests. For the last five years the company has published a "Law Enforcement Training Manual" complete with information about how long the company retains basic subscriber information and unread email, to sample subpoena and court-order wordings to speed processing of the police demands.

this should freak you out. a lot.

Oh goddammit!

skype. china. wiretap. ugh.

(via consumerist)

no skills of any kind required

2006-05-26T10:36:00.000-04:00

every now and again, i look at the parks department to see if they have anything i want to do there, and here is the requirement for a "community assistant":

There are no formal education or experience requirements for this position. However, the ability to understand and carry out simple instructions is required

hell yeah, the ability to understand and carry out simple instructions!!! totally have that!!

apples are hot & juicy!

2006-05-25T17:09:00.000-04:00

there was an article or four in endgaget that mentioned macbookpros' tendency to get a little hot under the collar, and how therefore apple put a warning in their manuals and dumped the term "laptop" altogether.

this article, while interesting, i suppose, in and of itself, linked to another article about a "don't chew on me" warning for shuffles in the UK (vs the "don't eat me" warning in the US).

this, of course, reminded me of the guy i saw the other day on the F who was, i kid you not, nor do i exhaggerate: treating his nano like a lolly. first he was just sort of pushing it against his closed lips, but then, i guess he just couldn't resist. at first i was concerned that he'd fuck it all up by getting saliva in little slot where you plug in the, uh, plug thing, which is gross anyway. then i realized the nano has the headphone jack and the pluggy inny thing on the same side and he was sucking, and now, it seemed, chewing, on the other side. so good for that, i guess. then i wondered about the "lock" mechanism. then i realized the guy is chewing on fucking ipod nano and he's probably got way more problems besides getting his drool in the lock mechanism.

still, what the hell?

if only i'd been that duck

2006-05-24T17:31:00.000-04:00

Little boy to duck: Uh, what the fuck, dude?
--Harlem Meer, Central Park

ohiny

onion rings and pixies covers

2006-05-24T10:55:00.000-04:00

i am hungover, so it's no surprise that an article in the times about a guy driving all over the country and eating a bunch of fast food caught my aching eye this morning. what was a surprise was his ability to appreciate The Varsity, an atlanta establishment for lots of years that holds a very special place in my heart (and not just because it's clogging my arteries). everyone has a thing at the varsity, and mine by far and away is the onion rings. they have what are basically broomsticks with loops of thinly sliced onions (vidalia?) stacked on that they dip in to batter and then fry. what you end up with is more like one mutant onion ring, but good lord are they delicious. what i wouldn't do for some right now.

what i do have right now comes to you courtesy of manlio, who correctly told me i'd love this> what happens when some dude with what is clearly limitless free time remakes pixies songs in the style of, oh, say, the beach boys? or the beegees? go find out. you will be rewarded.

23-fer tuesday

2006-05-23T13:04:00.000-04:00

huh. iraq is starting to sound a lot like east compton.

NO!! I'm a volcano!!!

2006-05-23T12:04:00.000-04:00

when i lived in london, my friend had a halloween party. the english aren't super into halloween. not like we are. so my friend's party was actually a theme party. we will not discuss how moronic it is to have a themed party on halloween, for we should be happy they had a fancy dress party for halloween at all. (they do seem to have fancy dress parties more frequently throughout the rest of the year, however. and they are very fun despite the disproportionate number of people dressed up as the clockwork orange kids.)

the theme was Hawai'i. why? i don't know. it's not like it's bad enough to have a themed party for halloween, but -- right, i wasn't going to do that...

so i decided to go as a volcano. i was extremely impressed with my cleverness. i wore a long black skirt and a black shirt and painted my face and neck bright orange, donned an orange clown's wig and had orange crepe paper streaming down from my neckline. it was entirely impossible for anyone to NOT know i was a volcano. right?

as halloween is not much of an event in london, it's not like walking around new york with a huge orange wig and an orange face. you kinda stand out. especially when your lame ass friends and flatmates could muster little more than shorts and hawaiian shirts as costumes. and also would not walk within 20 meters of you.

and suddenly you'll notice that the things people on the street have been hollering at you all sound the same. and eventually you figure out that what they've been saying is "you've been tango'd".

ahh. you don't know what this means, but your friend explains tango is an orange flavoured fizzy beverage whose commercials regularly featured people popping cans open, taking a swig and ending up looking like what i would call a volcano. their hair pops out and they turn orange. i've never actually seen one of those ads, but i saw others whilst i lived there, and they were always pretty good.

the point is, today craigslist sent me a link to this tango ad. not only did it remind me of that moronic night when i rode the tube angrily declaring myself a volcano, but it's a nice rip off of that sweet sony ad from a while back. the frog does not fare so well this time.

also: dr. dog and myspace i recommend gettin' down with the kexp podcast.
finally: do you know what's been missing from your life? my old kentucky blog does. it's a whole bunch of different people covering such songs as "love will tear us apart", "god only knows", "in the aeroplane over the sea" and "there is a light that never goes out". but it's missing no more.

blogger spellcheck says clowns cannot have posessions and nothing can be fizzy

THIS IS THE BEST PROM EVER!!!

2006-05-23T10:54:00.000-04:00

i was just ~~reading~~ turning all the pages of NY Magazine and i came across this article about al gore. i didn't read word one of the article, because i'm over al gore, but i did see the raddest picture of people who used to run the country ever:

i am fairly sure al is telling the photographer: "no, seriously, i LOVE you". and note the trajectory of bill's gaze. as well as the generaly sleazy look on his face. hills looks kinda cute. and wasted.

Save 5ave

2006-05-22T16:11:00.000-04:00

GL is sporting this rendering of what the view up 5th ave will be when frank gets his retarded paws all over it.

ps don't vote for freddie hamilton...

how to gracefully disappear in a room

2006-05-22T15:29:00.000-04:00

i spent most of the weekend holding back tears of laughter as my aunt's rotweiler ate every paper product in the house: paper bags, paper towels, paper napkins, tissues and, the piece de resistance -- grabbing the end of the toilet roll and running through the house, tping the inside, for ten minutes. she also tried to eat my socks. she loves my socks.

but then i got on a train and came back to new york city. i celebrated by immediately getting poured on as i walked out of the subway. this has been happening a lot. and i have been not bringing any kind of rain gear with me a lot. thus, i have been walking around soaking wet frequently. but, no matter.

the fifth ave fair was on in full effect and like good street fairers, xx and i ate our way up it and drank our way down it. yes. street fairs are like heaven on earth. snacks included a rib from blue ribbon, sushi from blue ribbon (oh god!), mozareppa, pickles, a samosa, pad thai and beer (six point ipa and sweet action, yum).

i then hopped the f to meet jensenator at webster hall for the national show. we got there early to check out doveman, which turned out to be a waste of time, as neither of us were terribly interested.

but the second opener, this baby dayliner person, was very entertaining, if a little unnerving. he sort of mosey-dances his way around the stage with his pompadour and sings (badly) very strange and funny lyrics over what might be very obscure 80s tunes and if not are very good copies of 80s tunes. jensenator smartly said it was like karaoke, mostly cause the guy just isn't a very talented singer. but i was definitely getting a little dancy itch in my legs and he's pretty freaking funny. worth checking out if only for sheer entertainment value. however, i was over it about three songs before he was.

then the national came on. played a very nice set with most, if not all, of alligator and a few from dirty songs.... they're good. real good. very tight. i have a huge crush on one of thier guitarists now based on not only his cuteness, but the fact that he's the one who plays all the pretty little riffs, and watching his fingers run across those strings? wow.

lit up and mr. november were sure crowd pleasers, and i was surprised that all the wine got as big a reaction as it did. i did not get 90 mile water wall, but that's OK. i did get karen and secret meeting.

so matt beringer, though. uh. issues. the lyrics certainly make you think something's up, but his onstage antics rival thom yorke's in the "super crazy lead singer" category. he sort of knocked the mic against his head and looked generally disturbed most of the show. i sort of hope it was an act, cause this dude looks like he's got serious problems. also, not one for the "performer/audience" banter. more of the "this show was supposed to be at bowery ballroom, but they moved it, and we don't care. this show was supposed to be for charity, but now it's not, so we're all getting personal slaves" (only it took about 10 minutes to get that out) type.

good show, though.

and finally, the answer to today's inane question: yes, pink good & plentys taste better than white ones.

i couldn't make this shit up if i tried

2006-05-22T14:44:00.000-04:00

first, they finished the human genome. so, there's that.

second, and more importantly: someone is creating an anti-diarrheal drug that grows in rice and is made from a human gene.

so, like, "human rice" will stop the runs. or something. does this make me a cannibal?

(via slashdot)

didya hear about iran? they are such copycats!

you knew they'd fuck it up sooner or later

2006-05-22T14:33:00.000-04:00

some companies are writing in support of anti-net neutrality laws. awesome! (via slashdot)

(ps, that was sarcasm)

brook-lyn! brook-lyn! brook-lyn!

2006-05-19T15:03:00.000-04:00

blah blah civil war in brooklyn. wburg sucks! no park slope sucks! they both suck! doesn't anyone else remember those stupid L train vs. F train fights people used to have on craigslist? this has been going on for eons and for eons more it will go. who gives a shit? what really sucks is the MTA, 'k?

HOWEVER, and far more importantly, the borough unites in this, my new favorite blog ever (don't worry, i'm fickle, there'll be a new one next week):

BROOKLYN!!!!!

good god there are a lot of bloggers in this borough.

also sprach fifth avenue

2006-05-19T13:21:00.000-04:00

we don't want no baby gap up in here
on the un-billposted section of the wall around the big hole at 5th and 13th, where the BG is rumored to be gestating as we speak.

it's so, so, disappointing

2006-05-19T10:27:00.000-04:00

one of my friends in london emailed me yesterday to tell me of his miraculously successful attempt to get a ticket for radiohead there last night. he phoned them up about 5 hours before the show and got the ONE remaining ticket.

and this morning, i got his review:

it was pretty good. nice to see them in a smallish venue for the first time in about 13 years.
they played for over 2 hours and let down was in there

i have seen radiohead five times now, and i didn't even bother trying for tickets to this tour because they were pretty expensive and i knew, KNEW they weren't ever going to play "let down" live again. and that's pretty much the only thing i'd need to see to complete my list of songs i want to see live (except for los pixies' "dig for fire"). so i was like, whatevs. but now, i see on a few setlists and have confirmation from a living friend of mine, that they are playing motherfucking let down on this tour. god fucking dammit!

gone, daddy gone, the [maj] is gone away

2006-05-18T10:54:00.000-04:00

the maj and i had a little lame fest last night. we dropped by american apparel and spent more money than we should've and then walked, via rachel's taqueria, back to my house where we ate and booked our hotel for delhi. then we said goodbye to each other about six bazillion times.

but, there's something pretty fucking rad about saying, "i'll see you in india", especially when it will be as i walk up to find her laying by this pool:

yes, my brothers and sisters, this is the pool of the maidens hotel. it's old colonial style with lots of "grounds" and a "bar" and also a "pool". and they will pick us up from indira ghandi international airport. the maj gets in july 1 at 10pm and i arrive 2 july at 8am.