funny and sad, all because it’s true: terror-beepers to help americans panic faster and more easily

check the vw convertible commercial feat ELO. (quicktime required)

tivos are being offered with a rebate for $199. now’s your chance. flip television you don’t like the bird.

…flip-flop free-fall, a dirty waterfall on fire.

for a moment, everything was mixed and shaded, made only of orange, pink and blue. it all converged in a mix with the thick hazy air risen above the tallest buildings out the window. today the clouds look as if they’ve been combed across the sky, and i can’t tell you how nice it was to drive on the highway with the few others that were heading to work at this ungodly yet so- satisfying-to-be-awake hour.

the 110 yesterday was compressed like an accordian. the street was filled with leaves and dirt and twigs and old crunchy palm trees, and the wind blew hard in the warm air, making the leaves scurry along the ground like ants and fly in the air like moths.

hands down, the colder months are the best part of the year. have a good thanksgiving, won’t you?

i’m not sure if this was in a movie or not, but this is the dream i just had, (i’ve used the names of some of the super friends for the other characters and fleshed out details otherwise not obvious in the dream to make it more understandable):

INT. CLASSROOM

The classroom is full and BLACK VULCAN, who is friends with BATMAN, sits down after failing miserably to answer the math question on the board. He is distraught and embarrassed. It was an easy math question.

CUT TO

BRAINIAC stands up, and walks to the board with a stride to long for his short legs. He adjusts his brain harness and takes chalk to wall with a sharp snap.

CUT TO

The blackboard filled with numbers, letters, equations, and a correct answer. Batman stares up at him in disbelief, and Black Vulcan slouches down in his seat. Brainiac looks at the class, smirks at Black Vulcan, then at Batman. As he walks to his seat, Batman starts to shake his desk violently, pretending to be trembling in fear of Brainiac. He passes Batman’s seat and hears:

Braniac stops in his tracks and steps in front of Batman’s desk, his bottom lip quivering. He accentuates his words by slamming his right hand into the books on Batman’s desk every third word or so. He looks at Batman, with tears in his eyes.

Batman looks at him and cracks his knuckles. The entire classroom explodes in laughter and Brainiac stands there, glued in his place, to fired up to move. Tears roll down his face. After a second, Batman sees a moist stream of urine flowing down the side of Brainiac’s pant leg. Batman looks like he feels a little guilty. The class’ laughs get louder.

CUT TO

GIGANTA, sitting at her teacher’s desk shaking her head in disapproval.

More uncontrollable laughter. Brainiac returns to his seat, sits down, and buries his head in his arms.

END SCENE

presented by:
the super friends players

seattle’s kind of on the front page of slashdot twice right now, with the release of the new version of pine and the monorail passing. i wondered why the server was so slow earlier today, just goes to show that even an .edu can get /.’d. i posted about it almost exactly two years ago, here; everything else there makes me cringe (it relocates you to the blogspot page).

i can no longer download or even stream any music here at work. it’s a real bitch, especially after seeing all that shit over at slatch today. and and and and and, it’s hot as fuck here. it’s hot when i wake up, it’s hot when i get to work, it’s hot when i go to sleep. stupid weather. i hate it. whoever heard of 84 degrees in november? it’s like i’ve been walking around in wool all day, sweating it up like richard simmons.

broadband’s been slow as hell here at work, too. can’t connect to shit. did i mention it was hot?

getting old sucks. sifting through old posts, i found i had so much more time to write something up about completely nothing at all, and i actually enjoyed reading it. it’s nostalgic, sure, and a little bit sad. growing old is only something to be afraid of if you think your best days are behind you. i don’t want to think that. so i won’t.

new episodes! more musicals! did you see the one where brak entered the rap contest? so good. with this and mystery men, cee-lo’s only going up in the rank’s of my List. anyone heard his record? sounds like good shit to me.

weird al guest starred last week, and if there’s only one christmas special to watch this year, make it the brak show! word is, adult swim will be on every night from 11pm to 1am starting january 12th, including futurama and home movies for the first hour then various from the next (via uasw )

one thing: what’s up with brak’s mom’s voice this season? why does she have an english accent? is it just randomness for its own sake? that’s fine, just wondering.

Genre-defying beautiful noise, cut straight from the brain of Geoff Farina; Karate is a melting pot of distinction. I took a listen to Airport, the album’s sixth track, and it all fit together like a puzzle: intricate pitter-patter of drumming and frenetic guitar laced with talk/yell vocals of lazy small town conversation and revolutionary-style speech.
(more…)

passed, that’s good, right? i’m pretty excited about the green line running from ballard to downtown in ‘07. i’m not sure what it’s going to look like, but i’ll be disappointed if it looks anything like the old line that runs from seattle center to westlake.

robert schneider sounds like a huge pothead; it’s pretty funny. it also sounds like fun to be in that band (from the beloved tapeop book):

It seems like you guys, as a band, enjoy recording and operating in this way.



It’s fun to learn. It’s a thrill on its own. Plus we’re never, “Oh shit, time’s ticking away! It’s $20 an hour!” We’re just sitting there, smoking pot and having a really good time. Taking all night to do a guitar track if you have to. Like the guitars on “High Tide.” All the lead guitars on that – I just stayed up all night with a pillow, on my back, with the remote for the 8-track next to me and just recorded all the night. I was just baked, smoking pot, lying down on the floor. It was really fun.

Cool. So you’re pretty adamant about doing the next few records yourselves?

We’re gonna do them all. We’re always gonna do our records on our own. We’ll just get higher bedgets and more great equipment. Someday we’ll have a 16-track, maybe. Right now we’re happy with the 8-track; there’s a long way to go with it, with the new mics and new board.

bad things, haiku:

having to work nights
getting headaches from the screen
watching dawson’s creek


getting home so late
falling asleep while driving
my feet really smell

10,000 words down
40,000 words to go
no fucking way, dude

haiku as a way
to fill space when you don’t have
any other way

good things, tanka:
something to make you
move like you used to: the clash
traininvain.mp3

i’ve had a fever the past couple days, running around 100 degrees. i left work early yesterday and drove home in the traffic, feeling drunk with my head swimming in an ugly, murky mud and my eye sight filtered through the moldy glass of the windshield. i sat around watching tv all day and emailed in sick to work again hoping to regain some sort of hold on my health.

when i was younger, i used to get insanely high fevers and hallucinate, i’d see grotesque creatures hiding in the corners and folds of the ceiling, waiting to kill me in my sleep. my mom would tell me to pray, and i’d recite these prayers as fast as possible, scaring the shit out of my mom. i recall seeing tracers on people, and my brother told me once that i ran around the room with my middle finger and pointer finger turned down as if they were walking around. what i remember of that, was seeing a small guy running around on the dressers and on the walls.

i hate being sick.

turns out jason from neo/eureka farm is going to be death cab’s new drummer. i remember hearing stories about how they recorded his drums in some canyon, down at the bottom with a bridge arcing over the top and mics hanging from it. another one is that he had pieces of metal on strings attached to his snare drum and he’d pick them up with his stick and drop it in time to the song, making some weird noises. good stuff.

robbie recorded the last revolutionary hydra album, and it sounds good, i love the sound he got out of the vocals. check out indiepages for a sample: indiepages.com

we went over to book soup finally, in west hollywood. it’s a nice place, books stacked to the ceilings in these really burly black bookshelves. it’s overcrowded with books, really, and it’s hard to get around in there because it was so crowded. i loved it, really. i only wish they had some used books.

i picked up a copy of the tape op book that compiles a lot of really good articles from the mag – interviews with fisk, vanderslice, albini, elliott smith, apples in stereo, and a lot of other people. there’s a ton of informative and interesting articles on recording philosophy and equipment, i haven’t been able to put it down all weekend. if anyone knows where i can get a couple (or three) sm57’s for around 50 bucks a piece, lemme know. you can get a free subscription to the magazine, too, if you visit the website. i’m waiting to move to start all my magazine subscriptions, and this one definitely goes on the list.

speaking of moving (segue’s flawless, huh?), we finally applied for a place in hermosa beach. it’s about a block and a half from the beach, is a little small, has a view of the ocean, and is expensive. hopefully we’ll find out if we get it soon, looking forward to it.

went to part of the afi films festival tonight and caught shaolin soccer, which will be re-released in the us next year by miramax. they dubbed it, and originally i saw the subtitled version and was pretty satisfied with that, although i noticed a few scenes were cut from that version, so the us version will be a little longer, albeit still a short hour and a half. i liked it just as much as the first time, although could’ve done without the remake of kung fu fighting song at the end. oh, yeah, they’re renaming it “kung fu soccer,” because not everyone watches pbs (shaolin wheel of life) or slow motion martial arts (kung fu) and knows shaolin monks are the shit.

not impressed, so far. this season seems to be full of boring-ass guest stars (see horation sanz, kelly ripa, et. al.), and the cast being retarded. eli seems to have disappeared for the last two episodes since debuting on the show, and phil stubbs has delivered some of the only laugh-out-loud lines i’ve heard.

this whole carol/ed/dennis love triangle is stupid and drawn out. carol’s an idiot, martino is an ass, and ed is a little of both.

i’m still going to watch next week, just to see if that cheesy scene where ed rides on the horse in a white tuxedo is a dream, and if so, will seriously re-think watching it anymore. i’m losing interest, fast.

my apologies for that bum link to that karate song last post. i’ll get it back someday, i’ll have something else for you by the end of the post. if you just came for the music, skip to the end, junkie.

what a bitch to sound so pretentious about all these “art” projects i’m working on.

it’s been raining here for the past few days, almost three, now. the first day it rained, i was pretty ecstatic about it, i drove to work in the dark and it was bumper to bumper traffic from here to la brea. the next day, the same thing, and i was still pretty happy about it, it’s what i enjoyed most about being in seattle – being in someplace warm when it was cold outside.

this place, however, is not made for rain. i was driving home from work at around 3 am and hit highway speed entering the onramp, and right when i got to the main highway there was a huge puddle infecting the road. i let go of the gas and crusied over it like a good drive, but i could feel the car already losing control. accidents are no fun, sadly, amy got into car accident the other day, that makes three in the past three weeks. i wish i didn’t need a car, nor want to drive one so often.

the news was filled with reports of the “winter storm” rushing through southern california, it was odd, and to me over-reacting, but i suppose it isn’t for locals. i felt stupid wearing a scarf here.

i love the way this song starts out so noisy, it’s hard to hold on to anything until the beat kicks in, and then the singing starts and it’s a whole new thing – the heart of the song turns into this pop ballad backed with bass blown out of speakers and then by the end it collapses back into this orderly mess of static and noise. fucking brilliant: this is the dream of evan and chan.mp3

i’ve only got about 3500 words going on my novel, pretty far behind considering i should be aiming for 2000 words a day if i want to finish by the end of november.

since i’m in l.a., i also have a screenplay in the works with jonas, and have thought a little harder about pushing out some recordings quickly, otherwise none at all would come out. it’s easier to think of doing things because i can – i used school as an excuse not to do things for so long, that now that i’m done with it, i fell like i have no excuse not to do what i want. this is my free-time, no constraints. to hell with everything else.

except for bills and debt of course. at least i don’t have to start dodging my student loan officer just yet. all in due time, though, i guess.

i’ve had at an average of around 13 hours a day in front of a computer screen, and i can’t say my wrists are enjoying it much. i do exercises at work, and i try to sit up straight as possible, but sometimes my ass gets sore from sitting up straight, so i trade off with my back getting sore from slouching. fascinating, isn’t it?

if i lived closer to work, or i worked closer to home, i would gain back at least an hour of my day, everyday. karate played here a while back and i missed it, found out the day after they played. buy the album, it’s nice: airport.mp3