Home Alone

Well, I am home alone. Mer went to go work on classroom materials with her friend Annie. They went to a bar, too. I bought a quesadilla at Yummy Taco and rented Chicago. Tom and Emma came over on Saturday; Tom had an interview for a job at Kaplan. We watched

• The Kid Stays In The Picture: I don't know if it was good or not I didn't really pay attention
• Bringing Down Da House: Embarrassing / Unfortunate
• NARC: Embarrassing / Moustaches

Now I'm trying to get PHP + Apache + MySQL working for my implementation of Fiendster.

I had drinks with Billy and Ruby Lien on Friday. Billy's doing okay, I guess. It made me want to start working on my stories again, whatever that means. It's always nice to open up a word processor and just type things up. I was thinking about publishing a book of short stories in the shower this morning. Not publishing the books in the shower, mind you. On the way home, I picked up a copy of PSM Magazine at a newsstand. That thing is a piece of shit. Here are some quotes:

While the story is somewhat cliche, the gameplay is tried and true

What?

Jak's ability to transform into an unstoppable dark version of himself, his gun-wielding capability, and the fact that he can whip out a nimble hoverboard at any point automatically makes the gameplay much deeper and more unique.

Yeah, I bet it's real great. Thanks, shills.

I went for a bike ride today. It was beautiful. Maybe I'll ride my bike to work tomorrow. Maybe.

The Dickies Roadshow

Yesterday a guy who was sure some gigantic wizard in outer space was granting him wishes blew up a bus full of people who were sure that some gigantic wizard in outer space was granting them wishes. Also a bunch of still-anonymous individuals who, presumably, were sure that some gigantic wizard in outer space is granting them wishes blew up the office of a guy who put helping other human beings ahead of whatever stupid beliefs he may or may not have had about the special rewards he'd receive when he went to the fairy cupcake kingdom after he died.

The Fiend Fest was okay. I met Mer there around 7:45 -- it took me a long, long time to get up there, because I had to buy earplugs and then run back to the office to take a horrible shit -- and the show hadn't started yet, though they had said to be there at 6:00. At 8:00 they let people in and the bands started going on at 8:15. So the bands, in chronological order, were D.I., Balzac, Agnostic Front, The Dickies, The Damned, and The Misfits. D.I. and Agnostic Front were terrible -- an embarrassment to themselves and hopefully their fans, though I don't know if their fans are capable of being embarrassed. Balzac was okay. The Misfits web site describes them as "horror punks from japan," which apparently means dressing up in spooky costumes and singing like The Misfits.

The Dickies were just great. It's just Leonard and Stan now, of course, but they seem to have tamed the three frosted-tip jerk-offs (who're playing drums, bass, and rhythm) pretty well, because every song sounded like the album version. Leonard made some characteristic stage small-talk, which sounded, as usual, gratingly rehearsed. Among the gems:

• He referred to Stan as "the best bisexual Muslim guitar player in all of punk rock." Stan leaned awkwardly toward his mic and said, "Well, first of all, I'm not religious." "Second of all," he said haltingly, as if he resented having to participate, "you're the one wearing the snakeskin stretch pants."
• Leonard presented literally 5 or 6 variations on a proposal for a new reality-TV show he'd like to shoot called "Who Wants To Suck My Dick?"
• Leonard mentioned that the new album came out on Fat Wreck, which meant that Fat Mike from NOFX was his boss. "How'd that happen?" he asked. After a moment's reflection, he said, "Oh yeah! Heroin!"

So anyway, I danced around a little, but I don't have the energy for it I had when I was 16.

The Damned played a boring set that took too long to set up and too long to play. Then The Misfits took even longer to set up. I'd never seen them live before, and they're probably better than their Tour Edition ("Dez" from Black Flag on guitar and Marky on drums). They played the songs really fast and there was some kind of buzz problem with one of the PAs and the vocals were too low. The band was also kind of ticked off because not enough people were dancing around. I am sorry guys, but I woke up at 7:00 AM, and your roadies spent 45 minutes dicking around trying to hang black sheets in front of Marky Ramone's drum kit. Jerry Only kept trying to get people excited with good old working-class crowd-pleasers like, "Hey New York, are you ready to have a good time?" Some article somewhere once described him as "the hardest working guy in punk rock." I'm no expert, but I think it is definitely not punk to be the hardest working guy in punk rock.

I'm starting to feel pretty healthy again, which means it's probably time for life to fuck my ass. Thanks for everything, God, you great merciful faggot!

Cracked-out Blackout

So there was this blackout on Thursday, right? Big frickin' deal. When the power went out at my office, my boss made sure everyone had a way to get home, and then we all walked across the Manhattan Bridge together. It took about 2 hours door to door and I was pretty beat. Mer and I hung out on the steps of our building with our neighbors Jamie and Tony, and then we went in and ate stuff out of the fridge and drank some beers. When it got dark, I lit some candles that these kids outside Flatbush Hardware had been selling, and then read to Mer out of the Diamond Age (she liked it so much that she stole it from me over the weekend and read the whole thing). The exciting part was that our friend Ted had been planning on staying with us that evening -- he had an early flight to catch -- and we figured, since he'd've been taking Metro North, that there was no way he'd make it. Well, at around 11:30, Jamie knocked on our door to tell us that this guy was wandering around outside our building calling our names. Ted had driven all the way down from Hartford on a dark highway and somehow found his way across the bridge and into our neighborhood. He had to get up at 4:45 to catch his flight, and when I got up to wake him up, the power was back.

Unfortunately, so was my sinus/throat infection. That was awesome. Not.

Here are some movies we watched over the weekend:

• About A Boy: Quite charming
• Bowling For Columbine: Characteristically excellent and hate-filled, though it looks like Michael Moore needs to take better care of his teeth
• Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: I mean, it's quite good, but the battle of Helm's Deep is a little boring.

By the way, shut the fuck up, Sean Astin, you fat corporate mouthpiece piece of exploitative shit. Doesn't it cost enough to see a movie these days? Some people need to get paid a bit less, I think, if some schmuck set painter is gonna lose his job. I probably do, at least.

Appreciated, IBFT-style from some Ain't It Cool News message board:

You stoner fuckwads destroyed the world with that crap. Of all the cloying stupid bullshit catchphrases going, those are the worst. How about FORGETING everything you learned in kindergarden and seeing how things turn out? Stop sharing, stop waiting your turn, and STOP THINKING IT'S OK FOR ANYONE TO HAVE A FUCKING LAME ASS OPINION. News flash: if you sit at home and watch "My Little Pony" tapes and enjoy them, it isn't an example of the beauty of pluralism in action. It's an example of a reason why you should be in the fucking gulag. I for one think movies, like everything else I can think of, would be a lot better if everyone STOPPED deferring to every mongoloid's right to have an opinion, and instead decided to scream and hate and fight each other over their differences of taste and viewpoint like fucking Palestinians after a funeral.

Dickies tonight!

Well Today Is Just Turning Out Great

I just took my second burning, capsaicin-flavored dump of the morning. Chicken Dansak Curry and Burrito, you are delicious: Why do you want to hurt me? I gave the "Enchilada" menu to one of the marketing people, and she says she might order some for lunch on Friday. What else happened that was bad? Oh yeah, a little spider crawled down my shirt today on the subway. I don't know where it came from. And then when I got to work and was looking over my boss's shoulder at this bug report, I spilled coffee all over myself.

Yesterday wasn't fantastic either, mind you -- I had to stay at work until practically 9:00 PM, and then on the way home, a hot piece of melty tar from the Canal St. Station ceiling fell near me, almost splattering the book I was reading (Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, which I thought I'd read before but don't remember any of it).

The day before that was pretty good, though. Mer'd told me that the guys at the Golden Deli had a very affectionate cat, so I went over there to see. I couldn't find the cat, so I asked the morning guy and he said, "Abdul! Take him to see the cat." So Abdul grudgingly takes me down to the basement to see the cat, a skinny calico that seems perfectly friendly but clearly isn't interested in me, despite Abdul's repeated attempts to pick it up and put it on me. That evening I visited another cat at the Haifa Deli across the street. It thought I had food when I called it over and walked away when it found out I didn't. The guy at Mike's pizza let me pick up my take-out food even though I didn't have the cash on me. I paid him later.

I just got some spam that said I could buy an acre of moon land. Don't want it, thanks.

The AniMatrix on DVD was strictly okay. I mean, the animation was, in most cases, pretty interesting, but the stories were pretty lame. They were just too short to be good. It was 9 stories, each one about 5 minutes long.

The Enchilada

Man, I was feeling kind of down last night, but Mer made me one of the best dinners I think I've ever had. I kind of helped -- no, I shouldn't even say that because my contribution was miniscule. The food was pasta with red pesto, green beans, mushrooms, and onions, with chicken on the side. Totally delicious. Then we had smoothies and wine. We also watched The Business of Strangers, with Julia Stiles and Stockard Channing: Julia Stiles, as usual, all wrong for her part, but Stockard Channing was good. It could have been a little punchier.

So I just walked over to (what used to be) The Big Enchilada. Now it is just "The Enchilada." What?! I asked at the counter and they said it was because they were under new management -- the girl pointed at this frat-boy type in an Oxford shirt with an asshole haircut sitting at one of the tables. He definitely looked like an asshole. The food was as good as ever, though. Let me tell you.

When I get paid in a few days, I was thinking about buying Call of Cthulhu to play with Tom and Ted et al. come September. I think we should all get dressed up in period clothes and drink gin and tonics while we play. They are in for the gin and tonics, they say. I, as the Dungeon Master, will wear robes and a silver pendant.

Sclar Tabotage!

That is what some junk mail just told me. My sty went away.

I bought a couple of tickets to the Fiend Fest show at Club Exit NYC. They were very expensive, but I was worried that Leonard might die or The Dickies might break up before I saw them again.

Okay, so people were talking about this guy who wrote a paper that says there's no such thing as a fundamental unit of time -- as evidenced because of Zeno's so-called "paradox," that says it's impossible to move anywhere because in order to have moved x units of distance, we need to first have moved half of x units of distance and so on, until we use up infinite time going nowhere. It's a paradox because motion is clearly possible. Anyway, some other people are saying that the paper doesn't make sense, and that the guy who wrote the paper doesn't understand infinite series. Now, I haven't read the paper in question, nor do I really understand math that well, but I don't see what the problem is. The opposing side's argument is that you can have a sum with an infinite number of addends, and it'll come out to a non-infinite value (like when you sum 1 + (1/2) + (1/4) + ... and get 2). The thing is, numbers can be infinitely subdivided, but the understanding of time that the author is arguing against says that time can't be. So if you've got a minimum unit of time that it takes to move any distance, no matter how small, and you've got an infinite sum of these fixed units of time (corresponding to the infinite sum of the distances), then Zeno's right and it takes forever to go somewhere. The guy who wrote the paper is saying that time is continuous, and thus can be infinitely subdivided -- to the extent that time even exists, anyway. So he does understand infinite series, right?

Here are some movies I want to rent:

• Spider
• Crash
• The Devil's Backbone
• I don't know

Seymour Fattenstein

Hello. I have a big sty, like one of those eye-pimples, you know? It is right on the cusp of my lower eyelid. I look like I got punched.

Man, is it ever going to stop raining? I wanted to ride my bike today. This reminds me of this Ray Bradbury story called... well, I don't remember what it was called, but it was about this people exploring Venus, and apparently it rains all the time on Venus and they are looking for this place called the Sun Dome, I think. Man, are they excited about that Dome. But when they get there, it turns out the place is all broken down and deserted. That's where the story ends. Serves 'em right for wanting something real bad. The rain woke me up this morning, so I got up and shaved and showered and made myself a breakfast sandwich to take to work. Now it's raining again.

Emma, Tom et. al. found a place really really near our apartment. It's just awesome -- that they're moving in nearby, that is. I haven't seen the place. We had dinner last night with Emma at the Chat 'n' Chew on 15th. Mer has a new cell phone.

How bad do I wanna go to the fucking Misifts show? Very badly. As soon as tickets are available, I am going to buy them. It's on a tuesday, I think. Wait. Yes.

Feverish, Fake Christ On A Shitting Cross

Okay, this nonsense about gay marriage has got to stop. Reading all these speeches from the president and the pope (the president of the unicorn-worshippers) is really starting to shit me off. "Marriage is holy, while homosexual acts go against the natural moral law?" Way to go, all you degenerates. Give me a fucking break. You know what, let them keep their stupid heterosexual-only, God-says-you-can-throw-acid-in-your-wife's-face marriage, but make it legally meaningless, and replace it with a domestic partnership structure that doesn't discriminate against human beings. Maybe already-married people could be grandfathered in, but I'd just as soon say, "fuck 'em." Living on this planet can be pretty frustrating. Suck a fatty, God.