while sitting in my car outside the house talking to hmc on my cell phone, i saw this guy hobbling down the street. honest to god, it looked exactly like that guy who walks around downtown, carrying that sign that says impeach clinton 12 galaxies guiltied to a zegnatronic rocket society. it was frank chu, who i just saw the other day walking in the dyke march during gay pride weekend.
only he didn’t have a sign, but he was still hobbling along, holding his arm out, as if he couldn’t help it. i guess that’s what he does on his day off: hobbles around with his arm out, but just without the sign.
and then i remembered where i was, and that it wasn’t frank chu at all, but just some guy limping home from the hospital emergency room.
i apparently broke my right ring toe today.
i stubbed it on the couch, not doing anything particularly challenging, nor was i in any sort of hurry. just clumsy and not paying good enough attention.
but that was this afternoon, and it’s still hurty and getting purpley and a little swollen.
the advice nurse says there’s really nothing to be done, but it should heal mostly by itself. i can tape it to its friends next door for support, and i should wear shoes around the house, so i don’t kill it again or any of its other compatriots.
“i rock harder as i get older.”
i just saw fahrenheit 9/11, and it’s incredible.
i don’t think i’ve ever come out of a film feeling more passionate and sad and above all, just angry. sure, you watch all the lies and lies and lies this bush league administration are pulling, you laugh and get rankled over them as they are exposed on every episode of the daily show, but putting them all here together and linking them to the fact that these lies have caused thousands of unnecessary deaths of innocent people both here and in iraq just fucking makes you outraged.
you’ve got to go see this movie.
better yet, you’ve got to convince everyone you know to see this movie, especially people who don’t want to or don’t believe it. tell them to see it so they can see the liberal lies if you have to. but get them to see it.
and then register. and then vote.
fucking fascist motherfuckers.
dammit.
governator figures we can save taxpayer money by killing pets sooner!
As a favor to the state’s cash-poor counties and cities, Schwarzenegger has asked the state Legislature to reverse the 1998 law, which makes adoption of wayward pets the first priority of shelters instead of quickly putting them to death
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The Schwarzenegger administration said repealing the Hayden Act could save local governments up to $14 million. As proposed, shelters would be allowed to kill dogs and cats after holding them just 72 hours, regardless of whether the shelters are open to the public during those three days.
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Schwarzenegger has proposed a change in the law to allow birds, hamsters, potbellied pigs, rabbits, snakes, turtles and other animals that are not cats and dogs to be put to death immediately after capture if the shelter favors that approach, animal rights groups said. Currently, a minimum six-day window covers all animals, but the protections for everything but cats and dogs would be eliminated under the changes.
Schwarzenegger also would eliminate a requirement that people convicted of animal cruelty be prohibited from owning a pet for three years and be forced to pay for medical care for the animals they have mistreated.
Shelters no longer would be required to search for owners who have embedded microchips in their pets that store addresses and phone numbers.
can we get an amendment to be able to euthanize hummers after they’re towed and not claimed within a couple of hours? or alternatively, can i get a tax break if i adopt a really big food-guzzling pet?
UPDATE: after the uh, howling outcry, the governator pulls a britney: “I realized last night that there was a mistake that I made on the budget,” he explained, noting he only had a few weeks to put his proposed budget together between his inauguration in November and when the document went to the printers in December to meet the Jan. 10 deadline for delivery a spending plan to the Legislature.
Saying he made a mistake months ago that would have made it easier for shelters to kill stray dogs and cats, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Friday he has reinstated the state’s six-day waiting period before lost animals could be killed.
i’m so confused i don’t even know if i can sum it up.
well, ok, here it goes.
basically, it looks like i’m up for a promotion again. they’re offering me the strategic technical account manager position, so it’s basically what i’m doing now, but on a global account scale.
what does that mean?
i’m not sure.
no, that’s not true. it’s about having a technical vision for the account, it’s about setting the direction of what we will and won’t introduce there, it’s about coming up with new solutions and “out of box” thinking, and mostly it’s about fostering high-level technical relationships, between our people and their people.
but this still begs the question: do i want to do any of this?
i straight up asked my boss whether he thought i could do the job, and he said that i had earned the right to do it, and that he thought i definitely could do it, although it would be a big stretch. he did caution me that the problem he’s seen is when people get pushed into positions like this and don’t really want them, they can’t/won’t grow into it, and then everyone’s unhappy. (mental note: talk to current stam who’s leaving, as well as that se who became stam last year, but suddenly is no longer stam. what happened there?)
i went to yoga yesterday and somehow, everything was better. you do what you can, you try your best, and if it feels right, you can’t feel bad for doing what you did.
but then after coming home and having people start to dump their problems on me again, i’m all confused again. i can’t see straight.
i’m even watching episodes of queer eye, where someone’s taking this big move to improve their life, and wondering, “is this inspirational? or disinspirational?”
i finally got around to watching interstella 5555, which is the animated collaboration between daft punk and leiji matsumoto, the legendary creator of starship yamato, galaxy express 999, and captain harlock.
essentially it’s a album-length music video, entirely animated to tell this crazy story about abducted alien rock stars who are kidnapped and brought to earth, made to look like humans, and brainwashed to be pop stars as part as an evil plot for galaxy domination (what isn’t these days?). it’s really cool as there’s no dialogue at all, but the audio is just the entire daft punk album discovery, with some sound effects here and there.
it’s a lot of fun, sort of like dj q-bert’s wave twisters, but with a retro anime bent! fantastic!
peeked out from hiding today after sleeping almost all of yesterday, lured out by wanda to the clothing swap by the prospect of making cookies! not quite as exciting as mmmmmm…pie! but certainly an easier level of difficulty, which is key for those post-andc weekends.
i brought over a few shirts, including a pretty fantastic shiny black shirt which i just don’t wear anymore. i ended up with a couple of things, mostly a couple of pants including one domini fleece pair and one exciting red polyester pair of (girl’s?) levi’s.
but mostly i just made lots of chocolate chunk cookies for people and sat around, watching people try on fabulous clothes. it’s been a whole weekend of food service. perhaps i should chuck this whole technology career and go work at in-and-out?
animal style, anyone?
went to the andc last night, and honestly, i don’t even know how i got through it.
started off meeting rachel and ro to help them get ready and eat a quick dinner beforehand, and then helping them go to the andc. suddenly when we actually got there, i was somehow pulled into trying to help laz and ron set up the projectors, since everyone was freaking out. it turns out that some very expensive borrowed projector got dropped and smashed to pieces, so that’s why. but i didn’t find this out until later.
when r+r left for home after a couple of hours, i helped them out to the car, and then went back in for the ceremony, and then was off to help the food team for a couple of hours. i’ve somehow never done food before in all my years, and while gratifying to help out, it’s pretty stressful, not in dealing with people, but trying to get all the food out, and dealing with the limitations of the space in heating water, making chai, finding this or that, and trying not to blow out the fuses.
so honestly after all of that, once my shift was over at 1am, i couldn’t really relax. i danced a little to ben chun’s set, but couldn’t get into it. and by 3:30 i was pretty dog tired, but i knew if i layed down i would pass out for the night.
instead, at 4:30, as people were starting strike, i headed off to the barton house to make pancakes for the afterparty. which rocked. somehow i found this extra spurt of energy, and kelly and i manned the griddles for a couple of hours and made a shitload of pancakes.
oddly enough, i eschewed the puppy piles and the hot tubs, and headed home, barely making it before i fell asleep.
i’ve picked up this horrible habit from hmc, which is not opening your mail for a while. well, at least i do get around to opening it, but sometimes it gets tossed in a huge pile that sits around and gets more and more menacing until it’s a big onerous chore to go through it and deal with it.
usually there are no ill effects from this, as they’re mostly bank and credit card statements from hmc, which get automatically paid. there is one credit card bill that keeps getting missed, since i think she’s in charge of it, and she never opens any mail ever, so that’s a little annoying (and needlessly expensive).
however, after plowing through the pile last night, i realized that i forgot to pay my dmv registration. somehow i managed to renew my residential street parking permit, but not my actual auto registration. and not only that, i realized that yesterday was the last day to make the second deadline, meaning that i’ve got to pay the full sucker’s late fees, a hefty 70% extra for not paying attention.
when will people learn to open their mail? didn’t we all see house of sand and fog? when people don’t open their mail, bad things happen. houses are lost. people die.
don’t let this happen to you.
pistons in five.
it wasn’t even close. you could make a case that they beat the lakers for five straight games, except for kobe’s miracle shot and the game 2 overtime. and taking it too the lakers in game five, leading by as much as 27 is just embarrassing.
it proves again the theorem that i tried to ignore during the season, but which i guess is proven again: you can’t win a title by buying a superstar team. the rockets tried it with barkley and pippen, and the blazers tried it with pippen and all those other bastards. of course, mostly i hated those teams because of scottie pippen. but the lakers tried it this year, and while they got to the finals upon the strength of their superstar team being actual hall of famers, they just couldn’t stand up to a true team that worked and played like a team.
and even the biggest indignity: darko seeing minutes in the final! how big a slap is that? (carmelo who?)
however, if karl had been healthy, it might have been another story, but i guess we’ll never know. my pistons earned it, and are world champions! the basketball world is as it should be.
and hell, we didn’t even burn down detroit this time.
i think the only downside is that all the excitement is what caused me to get outbid for that retro ben wallace jersey on ebay. not that i wanted us to lose game five, but if we had, i know i would have won this before game six… such is the price of success, i guess.
fascinating little thesis by Japanese roboticist Doctor Masahiro Mori which describes the fact that robots, cg animated people, and their ilk are endearing to people when they sort of resemble humans, but as they get more and more realistic, they start approaching a point where they suddenly become very creepy because they’re a little too real but clearly not real:
This chasm — the uncanny valley of Doctor Mori’s thesis — represents the point at which a person observing the creature or object in question sees something that is nearly human, but just enough off-kilter to seem eerie or disquieting.
of course, this doesn’t explain the fact that despite this, people still fuck real dolls, which are as creepy as it gets.
woo boy! pistons up 3 to 1 on the vaunted (and my beloved second squad) lakers. and to be honest, they’ve been outplaying them for four games straight. if it weren’t for kobe’s miracle 3 in game two, this series would have been over in a sweep. we’ll see if we can wrap it up on tuesday, but no home team has won all three games in the 2-3-2 finals format…
meanwhile, there’s a nice article on espn about why you gotta love the pistons. it’s because they got soul, man!
the only reportable thing we did this weekend was to go see the exhibit on fela anikulapo-kuti at the yerba buena center for the arts. it was pretty fascinating, as i was familiar with him as a musical legend and the father of afrobeat, but didn’t really know much about his political and resistance history, or the extent to which he was a rebellious figure, had his own compound which he declared independent, or even did things like marry 27 wives at one time.
it’s odd that on one hand he can be viewed as a great political figure, fighting against the corruption and injustices in nigeria, and on the other hand could also be viewed as some crazy david koresh-type meglomaniac, making the kakakuta republic=waco.
it was cool to see the work by sanford biggers there, which i actually saw last year when i went up to marin with stephanie smith to see the sock guy.
i got the new pj harvey album uh huh her last week, which i like a lot. it’s strangely catchy and very sparse and dark.
but the funny thing that i noticed as that on the back of the case, there’s a large notice that says: fbi anti-piracy warning: unauthorized copying is punishable under federal law. and there’s this big official-looking fbi anti-piracy seal on the back.
which makes me laugh.
who is this intended for? is someone who’s going to pirate this cd actually going to look at this and think, “oh , i didn’t realize that piracy is illegal. i better stop right now!” hell, anyone who downloads these off of kazaa or whatever won’t even see it anyway, so what’s the point?
if it’s for the people who burn and sell mass fakes, then it’s a safe bet that they already know that it’s against the law, so again, what’s the point?
maybe it’s like the now ubiquitous parental advisory explicit content warning labels, which let you know that you are buying the good version with all the proper profanity, and not the sissyfied version by accident. so it’s telling you that it’s worth pirating, in effect, a brand of value.
this so smacks of the oh-so-successful war on drugs “just say no” campaign. which speaks for itself.
my favorite is the “say no to drugs” warnings on the little plastic screens in public restroom urinals. who are those for? what’s the thought process there?
hmmm. gotta take a leak. aahhhh, that’s better. what’s this i’m peeing on? just say no to drugs? you know, that’s right. i am going to change my life. thank you urinal guard!
Bill Parcells, the coach of the Dallas Cowboys, lets his sensitive side show:
“You’ve got to keep an eye on those two, because they’re going to try to get the upper hand,” Parcells said about quarterbacks coach Sean Payton and defensive coordinator Mike Zimmer. “Mike wants the defense to do well, and Sean, he’s going to have a few … no disrespect for the Orientals, but what we call Jap plays. OK. Surprise things.”
After a murmur in the room of reporters, which included a Japanese journalist, Parcells repeated, “No disrespect to anyone.”
Parcells later apologized…
don’t forget, the dallas cowboys are “america’s team.”
thus, what i learn from this, is that it’s ok to make questionable racial references, as long as i preface it with the remark, ‘no disrespect to anyone intended.’
ok, here goes: i will hereby reference any play where someone does something incredibly uncoordinated or acts like a big dumbass lout as a “whitey play.” no disrespect to anyone intended.
(btw, mr. parcells, it’s asian. i’m not a piece of furniture or a type of food.)
i realize that i’m irritated today.
i’m so irritated today.
i don’t tell you the reason, because i know it’s hard to feel any sympathy for someone just because they didn’t get to go on a trip to bermuda for free. so i won’t.
but just know that it’s unjust. drudgery and forked-tonguedness in the service for others should be rewarded.
and sometimes it is.
but today it’s not.
and thus i’m quite irritated.
1. Exaltation to divine rank or stature; deification.
2. Elevation to a preeminent or transcendent position; glorification.
3. An exalted or glorified example.
i don’t think you realize what’s happening.
for me, it’s all come full circle. this is where it began. back in the late 80’s, i followed that scrappy pistons team as they repeatedly got beat down by the celtics, and then got by them, and then got beat down by the lakers and had that ‘88 finals stolen from them.
and then in 1989, they came back and played the lakers in the finals, the rematch, and swept their ass. this, months after michigan won the ncaa tournament. michigan was the king of basketball.
and this is where basketball won my heart.
sure, i’ll follow football during the season, and i’ll even watch things like tennis and soccer. heck, i even went to that grand prix fangly-dangly, didn’t i? but when you get down to it, this is the sport that i love, this is the sport that i dream about, this is the one that means everything.
and we’re now full circle. the new bad boys against the lakers reloaded. i didn’t know who i’d root for, but watching the game, it’s all clear. i love the lakers, because they’re my adopted team after moving out to california. i flirted with the clips and even the warriors, but come one, there’s only one real team in the state. (kings? come on, even with c-webb, they’re too soft to be called a team. they’re more like a rec league.)
but i looooooove the pistons.
i cheered and marvelled over shaq’s phenomenal performance in game one, but i howled and screamed when the pistons won.
six more games. bring it on.
went to “play” punk rock kickball for zero’s birthday today. the results are a little sketchy. i’m not sure who won, and i either scored a bunch of times or was out every time. and we tackled some people and i think i got kicked in the head, but i don’t seem to remember that or much else. i do remember, uh, accidentally spilling lots of beer on people.
and now i’m hurty and oddly sore. and have a lot of shit in my hair from making it stand up straight, even after washing it twice.
do these hippies really think they know what punk rock is? sheesh.
i guess it’s inevitable.
you find a new favorite dj, who just keeps playing kick ass sets that rock your world every time. every time they play you can’t help but jumping out of your skin and dancing until you collapse into a spent heap.
and then you might not go see them every time they go and spin, but you do make special efforts to see them, and it’s fucking great.
until that one time. where you go see them, and at first it’s a little off. but maybe it’s just you? you haven’t been out for a while, you’re just tired, or you just need to get warmed up? then you realize, they’re not playing breaks anymore, but just techno? or whatever.
or they’re too busy getting sandwiched up on the stage by two or three girls to really worry about how their set is suddenly boring, leaving you to suffer.
so eventually, you go off to the other room to sway to the electro-hop, and another dj has fallen to mortality.
on the other hand, can someone explain uberzone to me? i mean i see it, and i appreciate the energy, and i can see that everyone there was just going out of their mind jumping up and down to them, but they just left me cold. i mean bored stiff. it was like watching trance being performed live. or more than that, it was just so… white. there was no soul to it, no funk. it’s like watching fatboy slim v.2.0. where were the filipino kids on the decks?
in colorado springs to visit the xxxxx data center and associated folks out here.
i guess it’s not bad out here, at least the people seem to think that it’s a hidden jewel of great weather and nearby access to lots of outdoor activities.
i guess they don’t get the really bad stuff, but i did see huge stormclouds and lightning, and did get pelted with huge drops of rain in the afternoon.
and lord knows how much i love rain. the bigger the better.
the best/worst thing has happened. with the pistons’ win over the pacers, it’s a pistons-lakers final! my two favorite teams in the big show: but whom do i root for?
it’s like the old pistons-lakers finals, but back then, there was no doubt— my beloved bad boys over those damn showtime lakers. i had no love for magic or kareem, and especially not byron or james. but after moving out to l.a., the lakers were back to the dumps, and i loved them as underdogs, with eddie jones and nick van excel. and then they got shaq, and drafted kobe!
these new lakers are my lakers, as i’ve followed them from inception through their awkward phase and their glory years. and then the big all-star season, i rooted for them in our season ticket seats!
but now they’re up against my hometown team… what to do?
arrrgh. i guess the first love is the strongest. but i won’t be upset no matter who wins.
i hope it goes seven…