I Think I Just Shitted On Myself

Maggie's not kidding when she says that Trapped In The Closet is crazy. It's totally bonkers. Imagine the Buffy musical episode, but subtract out any self-awareness and sort of the contextual propriety of the music, and then replace that gay tap-dancing demon with R. Kelly with a real serious look on his big dumb face, and you're getting close. Oh yeah, and make the writing real stupid. A quick run-down for those of you unfamiliar with the material: Trapped In The Closet is a 24+ part R&B opera that's being released in little 4 minute chapters; it's a story of infidelity and betrayal, beginning with R. Kelly's character Sylvester waking up in a woman's bedroom after cheating on his girlfriend with her in a club. The woman, hearing her husband enter the house, hustles Sylvester into a closet to hide. In the story that unfolds, all the characters are cheating on each other in clandestine and surprising ways. The following is an edited (because people on the Internet are fucking illiterate) transcript of my favorite chapter that, I hope, will highlight some of the important themes. To set the stage: Sylvester's girl Gwen has been cheating on him with police officer whom he's discovered earlier in the story and who accidentally shot Sylvester's "cousin," Twan. The police officer has a wife himself, whom he's just found out to be cheating on him -- with a midget, no less.

Now the midget jumps out of the cabinet and stomps the policeman on his toe
The policeman's hoppin' around on one leg, screamin' out "son of a bitch!" while he runs under the table
He yells "freeze," dives over the table, and lands on the midget, while the midget kickin'
Real fast screamin' out "Bridget, Bridget!"
She yells, "Darlin, don't hurt him!"
He says, "Bridget, get yo' ass back,"
Then he continues to rough up the midget as if the midget was under attack
Then Bridget runs up to her room, goes into her purse and pulls a number out
The policeman puts him on the table and yells, "Man, what the hell you doin' in my house?"
He wipes cherry pie crust off his mouth and says, "Man, I was payed not to tell you."
Then the policeman pulls his gun out and yells, "Trespassin', man -- I got the right to shoot you!"
The midget says, "Mister, the man that payed me to do this would kill me if I tell."
He points the gun in his face, the midget says, "God, I think I just shitted on myself!"

There's more, but I want you to wait for it. Props to Maggie and Katie for totally getting me to not be a lonely creep yesterday and the day before -- we went to a Mediterranean restaurant on Tuesday and I totally ate the fuck out of some rosemary-flavored chicken thing and a canoli from Rocco's. Then, yesterday, Maggie and I met Katie at her office in the New York Times building (I'd never been there before -- it's strange and dark and depressing) and went to the Museum of Natural History to see the Darwin show, but, wouldn't you know it, it was a sort of limited admission dealie that was sold out for the hours we were gonna be there. So instead we just kind of wandered around the museum, which I always love. Best of all, the fucking whale was open again -- the last time I'd been there they were "cleaning" it. That's gotta be my favorite thing in the whole collection. I took some pictures, but I'd have to turn on the big computer to upload them, and I don't know... not in the mood. You all know what that looks like, anyway. As Maggie mentioned, I did indeed work up the courage to touch the elephant, but it wasn't no fucking toe I touched. I copped a feel off that motherfucker's flank. We also saw a real live pigeon in the gift shop; racial, so...

After that, we parted ways and I went up to my friend Asta's house for her holiday party. That was fun, kind of, but I've noticed that all my Harvard friends from high school have chosen to be these sort of blissed-out intellectual dilettantes, none of whom has (ever had) a real job, and it makes me kind of uncomfortable about what I've chosen to do, which is to be a cranky working stiff. Asta has this neat little hollowed-out wooden bear that you put incense in, and then you can watch the smoke waft out of its nostrils. I had weird dreams and stomach problems all night, and now it's raining.

Now at Sylvester's house, Twan's got a patch on his shoulder, playin' cards, getting along
They're laughin' and talking when Sylvester says, "Gwen, baby, get the phone,"
Then she walks away from the table picks it up and says hello
Theres a lady on the other line panickin' and cryin' and talkin' all off the wall,
Gwen says, "Wait, slow, slow down -- who am I talkin' to?"
"My name's Bridget and I found your number in my husband's pocket -- I had to call you."
Two minutes later Gwen's shakin' her head sayin', "girl, I understand."
Sylvester says, "Who is it, baby?"
She hangs up and gives him the address

I spent Christmas at my parents' house, and it was really nice and relaxing. Got along great with my sister, which is sort of a rarity. They got me several nice sweaters, but the best present was, well, you guys already know. My dad is really into downloading movies off the Internet these days; like I've been telling people, it's almost as if he'll watch any awful movie out there as long as he can steal it. It kind of runs contrary to the way he normally operates. We watched Minority Report together awkwardly, sitting in chairs in front of his new wide-screen G5 because he "couldn't remember what the movie was about."

I finally met up with Billy to give him his birthday present, Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow for the Nintendo DS. That little machine is pretty neat -- the game that comes with it, WarioWare, is a total blast. It's an endless supply of these tiny little mini-games that practically never repeat and that you have about 5 seconds to figure out and win each round. I bet the multiplayer version on the Gamecube is utterly delightful. We sat around and ate oranges and chocolates and then I went back to Brooklyn.

Now, meanwhile, back at the policeman's house, the midget's cryin' his ass off
While he's lyin' through his teeth about to get his li'l ass told off,
Then Bridget busts into the kitchen with a double barrel, sayin', "James, I can't let you do this"
Then he looks at her and says, "What? You'd shoot me for this fuckin' midget?"
She says, "I love him!"
The midget says, "No, Bridget!"
And then James points his gun and says, "We all gon' die up in this kitchen"
Now Bridget and James starin' each other down, slowly backin' apart
Then the midget takes his inhaler out and says, "This is not good for my heart"
Then James says, "Bridget, don't make me do this, baby put the gun down"
That's when Sylvester and Twan busted up in the house and say, "You put the gun down!"
Twan and Sylvester are sniffin' around trying to figure out what's that smell
As they turn and look at each other like, "What the hell?"

The smell is the shit in the midget's pants.

A Strange Encounter

Today seems to be going absurdly nice, weather-wise, so I went out for a run around the park. I haven't been running consistently since it's gotten colder, so I did have to stop twice and walk a tiny little bit -- though on the whole I think I rocked the loop pretty hard. But one of the walking parts was the initial slope of that hill that Tom and Emma can identify as The Widowmaker, and as I was psyching myself up to start running again, this strange rumpled little old guy in a button-up shirt and a leather hat who looked like he could've been one of the engineers on the Manhattan Project came up to me and started talking:

"You... American?"

"Yes."

"You American citizen? You born this country?"

"Yes..."

"You human... humanity? Or technical?"

"Uh... technical."

"What type technical?"

"Computers."

"Computer is technical? Hmmm... Like what computer -- programming or hardware?"

"Programming."

"Maybe you could tell me question, okay? Let's say you are engineer... science... scientist, and you have proposal for new [unintelligible], and you send to company, institution, you know, and they [unintelligible], you know, give you the brush-off."

"What's the problem?"

"They give you the brush-off."

"Well, you could submit your proposal to a different organization."

"I submit already to multiple company."

"Or you could publish it yourself."

"Publish it... no... I need verification from expert."

At this point he let me go, and warned me to be careful running in the cold -- advise I could have used, perhaps, earlier in the week. "Good luck," I said. Now I'm going over to my parents' house to help them do holiday things and hopefully give Razor his birthday present. Send me e-mails!

Tuffy Tuffins Sings The Blues

Last night I went out for dinner and drinks with my old friend Eve, who I'd stood up the night before when I got stuck in Manhattan. I had a bunch of errands to do on the way, so I gave myself an extra long time to get there, like an hour and a half, and then, wouldn't you know it, I got to our appointed meeting place with an hour to kill in the freezing cold. If I'd had a cell phone, I guess I could've called her house and come over or had her meet me, but I don't have one for another few days at least, so. So I tried to think of what one of my cool friends would do were he/she in a situation like this, and the answer is "go to a bar and have a drink and maybe meet a pretty girl while you are sitting by yourself at the bar." So I walked up and down Smith St. for a while peeking in the windows of all the bars and trying muster up the courage to be the only person in an empty bar or the only single person in a bar crowded with corporate happy-hour revelers. And I couldn't do it, which was humiliating and depressing, so I ducked into the Cafe St. Clair, as recommended by T. Rounsaville, and had the loneliest cup of hot chocolate ever, feeling like the most pathetic and small creature ever to spend Christmas by himself. And after that I was still 30 minutes early, so I wandered in and out of some of the trendy little boutiques on Smith. I found this one place selling little house and home trinkets, and in one corner of the store they had this bucket of old comic books from the 70s, some of which must have been at least a little valuable, and which included such titles as Kull The Destroyer and Devil Dinosaur. Then I read the Voice for a while on the street. Here's some more of my dealings with tuffytuffins:

(23:25:03) tuffytuffins: Did you miss me?
(23:55:26) Nintendo Julian: Who... who are you?
(23:55:32) tuffytuffins: You did. Didn't you?
(23:56:21) tuffytuffins: It's OK. I missed you too.
(23:57:44) tuffytuffins: Are you there? Please don't ignore me!
(23:57:50) Nintendo Julian: Look.
(23:57:54) Nintendo Julian: What... what's the deal?
(23:57:55) tuffytuffins: I think I am in love with you.
(23:58:03) Nintendo Julian: Alright, that's enough.
(23:58:09) tuffytuffins: Why are you toying with my emotions?

Then Eve showed up and we went to this great Peruvian restaurant with a menu distinctly similar to the venerable Coco Roco's. We ordered a plate of ceviche to start with, which I'd never had before and which was absolutely delicious. My spirits picked up after I got some food in me and warmed up (the cold can really put a damper on brain function), and we chatted about life and love and how awful things can seem sometimes. Then we hoofed it over to Angry Wades and had some drinks and managed, by increments, to secure the seat next to the fireplace again, though we had to share it with one of the off-shift bartenders who was reading a Robert Jordan novel, of all things. He revealed that the fireplace is, in fact, not real -- it burns natural gas and the logs are all ceramic. Which doesn't make it any less cozy. After that we took a walk over to the Gowanus Canal and watched the moon for a while, which is when we noticed a train going by over the elevated tracks around Smith and 9th, which clued us in that the strike was, in fact, completely over. And then I went home.

(00:11:46) tuffytuffins: Well I guess we can only be friends.
(00:12:01) Nintendo Julian: If that. Who are you?
(00:12:11) tuffytuffins: I'm your new friend.
(00:12:29) Nintendo Julian: Alright, I think I've had enough of you.
(00:12:34) tuffytuffins: Why?
(00:12:41) Nintendo Julian: I want to know who you are.
(00:12:47) tuffytuffins: You want my name? Why do we need labels?
(00:12:55) Nintendo Julian: Because this is creepy is why.
(00:13:06) tuffytuffins: What is creepy?
(00:13:11) tuffytuffins: Friendship?

So what are we all doing for Christmas? Some of you are away, I know, but I have presents for practically all of you, and wouldn't it be nice if we all sort of sat down and did the presents thing in one shot? Everyone's going to that New Year's Eve party, right? What if we all showed up a little early to that and traded gifts before the party really got underway. I'm just saying. And I totally want to do the whole Jew holiday thing the week of the 26th; we can do it at my place or yours.

(00:13:13) Nintendo Julian: Where did you get my name?
(00:13:40) tuffytuffins: I searched for people who like Nintendo.
(00:13:47) tuffytuffins: I like Duck Hunt.
(00:13:57) Nintendo Julian: Alright.
(00:14:10) tuffytuffins: Then you were very nice.
(00:14:17) tuffytuffins: And that's when I fell in love with you.
(00:14:19) Nintendo Julian: I'm going to block you.
(00:14:34) tuffytuffins: No friendship?

The kicker is that I wasn't actually able to block her using my weird Linux AIM client, so she's still out there somewhere, waiting. I'm still sort of hoping this is someone I know in disguise, in which case the joke's on me but which will also mean I won't have had a totally creepy exchange with a female version of the main character from Notes From Underground.

The Big Vacation, Day Four

Billy cancelled his party on account of the transit strike, which sucks. I was kind of counting on having something to do, but can see why he'd wanna put it off. Now, as per Katharine's advice, I'm doing the vacation thing -- I bought some Doritos and a pint of Ben & Jerry's Peanut Butter Cup ice cream (as far as I can tell, no flavor is better than this) and I'm chilling out watching David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, which, sad to say, is not quite as creepy as I'd hoped. There is, however, a pretty hot sex scene involving rubber tubing and various types of calipers in the gynecologist's office. Okay, I finished watching the movie -- depression-city, and not quite the body-horror diddle-fest I was hoping for. Turns out it's based on a real set of gynecologist twins named Steven and Cyril Marcus who totally went bananas and killed themselves with barbituates.

Here's an interesting thing: The saga of tuffytuffins. The other day I got an IM from somebody I'd never heard of before, but whose screen name I kind of thought I recognized on account of it reminding me of this joke that Tom and Maggie used to use to "wind me up" -- so I sort of played along, thinking that the person would eventually reveal themselves to one of my friends (or one of their friends). That's not quite what happened (edited for the salient points):

(23:13:16) tuffytuffins: Hello.
(23:14:24) Nintendo Julian: hello

(23:14:52) tuffytuffins: Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?
(23:15:25) Nintendo Julian: is that the same thing as...
(23:15:27) Nintendo Julian: ...no
(23:16:04) tuffytuffins: Well, I have.
(23:16:21) Nintendo Julian: how was that
(23:16:32) Nintendo Julian: you find out what you need to find out about yourself?
(23:16:33) tuffytuffins: He looked like the blond guy from Queer Eye
(23:17:06) tuffytuffins: Is that what I was supposed to be doing? Finding out about myself? Because I was just kind of dancing.

Ted and I saw King Kong last night after finishing up our Christmas shopping. The theater -- and Times Square -- was practically deserted, or at least as empty as I'd ever seen it except maybe for that dumb movie Vanilla Sky. It took me more than two hours to get into Manhattan, thanks to the strike -- I was worried that by staying at home I was missing out on the official "transit strike" experience, but no longer. The transit strike experience is basically all about sitting in traffic for two hours. So I was late meeting Ted, but he was gracious in his irritation. We went shopping at the Virgin Mega-store, which, did you know, has this weird little movie theater in the basement that plays strange foreign short films? We didn't see any of them. I bought a present for The Rase and Ted picked up some stuff for his family, and then we went to go see King Kong at the big AMC 25-screen theater around the corner, stuffing some contraband McDonalds hamburgers into Ted's messenger bag before going in.

The theater was practically empty, which seemed to give the impression to the two latin types sitting next to me that it was totally cool to talk the whole time, literally. Also, there was a real live homeless person sleeping across the three seats behind us, and during the opening credits he kept sort of wheezing and snuffling, which made me think, before I turned around and realized he was a homelo, that it was some funny person making monkey noises for a laugh. The movie was okay -- Andy Serkis did a great job with the monkey poses and facial expressions, but Jack Black... he's no Laurence Olivier. And the whole thing is 90 minutes too long. And what the fuck does it mean?

(23:20:09) tuffytuffins: Do you believe stuffed animals can be art?
(23:20:48) Nintendo Julian: Yes, of course. Case in point: The beanie-baby named Pinchers The Crab
(23:21:07) tuffytuffins: Exactly my point. Beanie Babies were my inspiration.
(23:21:15) tuffytuffins: That's what I do. I create stuffed animals
(23:21:24) Nintendo Julian: Out of what do you create them>
(23:22:21) tuffytuffins: Whatever materials are laying around. Maybe orange peels for stuffing. Maybe old underwear for lining. Once, I used cat hair.
(23:22:52) Nintendo Julian: Because, you know, whatever.
(23:23:05) Nintendo Julian: The orange peels keep the stuffed animal "moist" inside
(23:23:19) tuffytuffins: You have to give them souls. Otherwise they won't be art. Then they're just stuffed animals.
(23:23:31) Nintendo Julian: And the souls have to be gross is the other thing.

The cabbie for the ride home I shared with Ted was real talkative. After Ted got out of the cab, he asked me where I was from. I told him I grew up on the Bowery, and he said I had a strange accent, one that he couldn't place. "You go to school in California or something?" he asked. Then he asked what I do for a living, and when I told him I'm a programmer, he said, "I got a thing I want to sell on eBay -- I collect stamps, and I got $500,000 worth of stamps, you know from like 100 years ago, in an album at home. You could help me sell that?" That sounds like a lot of money, I said. I don't now if I can help you with that -- maybe you should go to eBay's web site and talk to one of the staff. "No, no, where do you live? I live in Williamsburg -- you could come to my house on Sunday and help me take a picture of the stamps and make a web site?"

(23:29:14) tuffytuffins: Would you like to subscribe to any magazines?
(23:29:21) tuffytuffins: I can get you a discount.
(23:29:42) Nintendo Julian: Which is your least popular magazine? I like to go my own way.
(23:30:17) tuffytuffins: People don't like the gardening ones. Do you have a "green thumb?"
(23:31:11) tuffytuffins: I also sell porn.
(23:31:19) Nintendo Julian: No thanks, Internet person.
(23:31:21) Nintendo Julian: None of that for me.
(23:31:31) tuffytuffins: There's lots to choose from.
(23:32:03) tuffytuffins: Do you want to know our least popular porn?
(23:32:21) tuffytuffins: Hold on. I'm checking
(23:32:56) tuffytuffins: Not child porn. That's pretty popular.
(23:33:11) tuffytuffins: Not midget porn. That gets a good college student following.
(23:34:00) Nintendo Julian: That's one of the roots of townie-student strife; a college moves into town and pretty soon the place is stinking with drifts of dead, naked midgets.
(23:34:14) tuffytuffins: Oh, the worst-selling category is "Tragedy Porn." Like sex in the aftermath of hurricanes and things.
(23:34:28) Nintendo Julian: I'd imagine most of that sex is pretty great, though.
(23:34:37) Nintendo Julian: Maybe it's the kind of thing that doesn't photograph well

So who is this person? She's got a sense of humor, I'll grant you, but boy does she not want to say who she is. I'll put the rest of our conversation into a separate entry. The transit strike is over!

The Big Vacation, Day One

Last night, Chrissy Rodney came back to the East Coast from UCLA and I hung out with him and Razor (and Razor's girl, SJ) at Razor's apartment. I didn't know this, but their Australian Shepherd dog Fry had gotten hit by a car around Thanksgiving and died! That's terrible. But they have a new dog now, Job (named for the Arrested Development character, but not spelled like that for some reason), which is some kind of Huskie-mix thing, that is absolutely adorable: It rolls around on its little mat with its legs in the air like a cat and gives kisses a'plenty. We drank lots of beers and I ate a double cheeseburger that they had in the fridge. My appetite has been absolutely zero for the past couple of days. Maybe I've got what Ted's recovering from. Tomorrow is Billy's birthday. I know what I'm getting him as a b-day present, but not as a Christmas present. Maybe he just won't get one -- it's the curse of the Saggitarius.

So I'm on vacation now for two weeks. Don't really know what I'm gonna do with myself -- I went running in the early afternoon, which was pretty unpleasant, given the temperature and the fact that I haven't run in a couple of months. I had to walk, I think, most of the way. The rest of the day I spent working on little projects, but that's not going to hold me over for two weeks. Literally e-mail me and tell me which of you are here and not at work. Want to see "Kong?"

I rented American Pie, which, believe it or not, I'd never seen. I actually thought it was pretty great -- the actors all have a sort of refreshingly gross look to them, and their delivery is often novel, if not always natural. Observations:

• Is it just me or is Chris Klein's character actually a pretty awful singer? It seems like 'Oz' rises to the top echelon of the jazz singing club pretty quickly given that he can't really hit the right notes all the time
• What's up with everyone cheering on Jason Biggs while he's doing that strip tease on the webcam? I feel like I'd be more inclined not to want to see this guy in my trig class take all his clothes off. Not that it's gay, it's just, you know, not good porno. Also, what's the deal with there being no narrative retribution for him putting that girl all over the Internet? I mean, I guess he has his own humiliation televised as well -- I will say that I've never really understood the little problem he has in that scene. That's probably the one awful sex thing that's never happened to me.
• Favorite character by far: Shit-Break. It's time the movies had a hero who looks a little bit less like Chris Klein and more like a fresh corpse that's just entered the "bloat" stage of decomposition
• How creepy is Natasha Lyonne? I could've called that Hepatitis thing if I'd seen this movie when it came out

I was going through some of my old journals this evening trying to collate some of my more continuous threads of writing to use towards a more cohesive long-form thing, and I was struck by how weird I've always been -- or at least, how weird I was even back then -- and how I still kind of worry about the same irrational things and characterize things to myself in the same ways. It sort of freaked me out, but it was not a wasted errand, since I got several pages of good material that I think I can expand upon.

The Rase was wondering what the actual meaning of the word crapulence was, since she often references that line from the Who-Shot-Mr.-Burns Simpsons episode ("wallowing in my own crapulence"). I do that do, but I didn't know what it meant, either, so we looked it up:

crap·u·lence (krpy-lns)
n.

1. 1. Sickness caused by excessive eating or drinking.
2. 2. Excessive indulgence; intemperance.

So, literally, it means "crapulence."

It never fails to surprise me how alcohol can make you feel pretty okay no matter how awful you're feeling.

UPDATE: COCKBLOCKERS

Single White Shemale

[11:36] Me: so I leered at her tits all night
[11:36] Tom: That doesn't sound like you.
[11:36] Tom: It must've been really liberating to finally do something "creepy."

I'm writing this at work. In other words, the strike did not go down -- they're going to "phase it in," starting with the private bus companies in the outer boroughs. My commute was a disaster, though, because of a "very sick passenger" at 4th Ave., one stop away from my house. They stopped the train for like 20 minutes in the tunnel, and then announced, loudly and repeatedly, that if we didn't want to wait any longer, we could walk to the front of the train and exit up there. So I stayed on board, because, you know, fuck it. Then a little while later they said that we all actually had to get off because the train was going out of service. So I queued up with everyone else and eventually made it to the middle of the train, at which point the conductor came on again and told us all to sit down because we were actually going to start moving again. The whole thing took about 45 minutes, no lie. The worst part was that I was sitting right near this revolting old I-Ti / Hispanic lady who would not shut up talking, apropos of nothing, to these two Muslim girls sitting right next to me whom she'd just met. I guess there's some reading of second-and-third-world culture in which complainy old women are sort of exercising some kind of powerful social force with the yakking and the clucking and the whining, but come on, people. The highlights:

• "He got so bad, with the gangrene, that he was rolling around in the car. Some people might say in that situation that death is better than living, but not me. Because when someone dies you lose something 'dat you love, right?"
• "They do the fistula surgery on her, and two weeks later, she's back driving the emergency truck, you know, to rescue people what needs help. It's not fair; there's no recovery time. And now the doctors're tellin' her there's another fistula."
• "At first, I thought it was funny, my niece, with the lipstick, but this morning I woke up and there's lipstick all over the walls! My niece, she so cute, you know that she loves her mama because anyone else tries to talk to her, she be screamin', screamin', and she don't never stop."

Okay, so these don't sound too funny in retrospect, but just imagine these two nervous Muslim girls covered up in their weird little insane-person headdresses nervously spinning the wheels on their iPods and praying that this woman with her wheedling, whiny voice will just STFU.

But I finally got in (at around 11:00) and stopped off at Han's to get a delicious breakfast sandwich: Egg, provolone, tomato, and bacon, on whole wheat toast. I recommend you give it a spin the next time you're eatin'.

Strikethrough

Haven't blogged in forever, and I'm only blogging now because I don't feel like working on my computer projects. Is there gonna be a transit strike tomorrow? It sure looks that way. And thus I stand to lose two dollars to Tom -- I made two bets, and I've already lost out on one in that Tower Video did let us come in and browse around with our Tall Chai Lattes. The times they are a-changin'. My job has a "contigency plan" in place so that we'll all be able to work from home, but you know what that amounts to? SNOW DAY! For those who aren't blessed to live in New York, the Metropolitan Transit Authority is one of the most grotesquely mismanaged bureaucracies in... well, in New York City; on the other hand, the strike we're looking at is basically going to cripple the city. I mean, literally, there will be no public transportation tomorrow, and everybody rides public transportation here. So. And then the next two weeks I have off. Anyone wanna take me on a trip with you? I'm rich and I love "fun."

I finished Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, and while it was beautiful in many ways, I still have the same complaint about it that I did at the outset -- that is, that the narrator is so goddamn affectless and, I don't know, fucking blase that it totally spoils the impact of you know, the cosmic horror. I think their design problems began when they named the guy "Jack Walters." Clearly he's gonna be a boring guy. And, I mean, you'd think he'd have a bit more of an internal monologue having been diagnosed as an "acute schizophrenic"

I bought Christmas presents for practically all of my friends this year, which is pretty rare for me, Fagin. Got a lot of the shit on eBay, and I actually ran into a bit of a sticky situation -- I bid on an auction before looking at the seller's feedback rating, and when a conscientious eBay user notified me, it turned out the seller's rating was 0 -- equal positive and negative feedback, which is extremely rare for eBay, which is basically a big cuddle-fest around the clock. Well, I read up on the rules on bid retraction, and it turned out I didn't have much recourse except to watch in terror as the seller's rating dropped to -2 and I got two more e-mails from other eBay members claiming to have been "scammed" by the seller. Well, the auction ended, and I won the item, but by the grace of the eBay fraud prevention team, the seller's account was suspended, releasing me from the contract I'd entered when I placed the bid. The seller responded a few days later to the panicky e-mails I'd sent her with an e-mail that includes the following excerpt (sic):

I know that this is a inconvience to you, but imagine my situation, I am having to close down all my checkings and savings accounts even the accounts I have for my boys college funds even though they have just been started due to they are only 2 and 4, but it pays to start early on things like this for the kids now a days with the economy and the world in the shape that it is in... I am sending the item out that day, that is if it is before 12:00, because at noon is when we take the packages up,. the boys lay down for their nap and we have my niece to babysit them while we run to the post office

Well, cry me a river, sister.

Congratulations to Tom on getting a line in on the episode of The Colbert Report introducing Bob Costas! Really... really proud of you, I guess.

So who wants to see King Kong with me? Who wants to see The Gay Cowboy Movie with me? Merry Christmas!

Wreckin' Booty Socks

OMGSNOW! I woke up to this scraping sound outside my window, and I was picturing this little kid dragging a two-by-four behind him up and down the sidewalk behind him. I was all ready to open the window and holler at him, but then I opened the window, and, you know. There it all was. Can't wait to go outside and walk around in it, maybe do some shopping, maybe just have a look around.

Sophie made some Indian dish last night that involved coating every surface in the kitchen golden with turmeric. When she was hosing it off with fantastik this morning, we made a fascinating discovery -- fantastik turns turmeric a deep chartreuse color -- something like grapefruit juice, or Emma's Furby: Our Lord The Flayed One.

So the message that girl left about her iPod the other night turned out to be a lot crazier than I'd thought when I was listening to it be recorded. She says something like (I deleted the actual message in a fit of annoyance): "Hi, this is Sam, I took your bag last night, and you took my bag... you took my iPod. Please give me a call, my number is..." Wha? The second message was (I think) from her boyfriend and sounded a lot more... conciliatory, I guess. He says something like, "Hey, uh, my name's Dan, and, uh, I think you might have left that bar last night with my iPod? If you don't mind, could you give me a call? My number is..." Clearly trying to strike a balance between appeasing his histrionic Jew girlfriend and trying to come off like a normal person. So I left her a voicemail wherein I delicately suggest that I know fucking nothing about her stupid iPod.

Two funny dreams: Friday night I dreamed Ted was taking us all to Ikea, and we bought a bookcase or shelves or something that required both screws and wood glue to put together. On the way back in the car, I was fiddling with the packaging for this furniture, and, without thinking, I opened the little tube of glue and squeezed a bunch of it into my mouth and swallowed it. In the dream it had this sort of sugary orange taste, a little like the filling of those little hard candies that come in the white wrapper with a picture of a piece of fruit on it. Anyway, though, once I realized what I'd done I started rifling through the instruction manual that came with the stuff and found an ingredients list for the glue that had a bunch of complicated-sounding chemicals on it and an ominous message like, "Toxic if swallowed." I asked Ted to drop me off at the emergency room, but he said, "No, you'll probably be fine." Last night, I dreamed that Tom (I think) was on a date with this girl who really wanted to go to this one particular restaurant -- in fact, he said she'd be crushed if they couldn't go there -- but it just so happened that said restaurant was closed the evening they were going out. So he enlists me along with the security guard who's patroling the restaurant to open the place up and act as waiters for him and this girl. And we do, but she wants to order a bunch of stuff that we have no idea how to cook. So we have to run out to a bunch of stores / other restaurants to round up the components of the meal. What a riot!

On Sunday The Rase and I and one of her co-workers went to that RUSSIA! show at the Guggenheim. I hadn't been up to that neighborhood in eons, and I'd forgotten how much I like just walking around up there around all those nice old buildings and mean old white folks. The show was pretty interesting -- I tried to pay attention to the historical aspects of the pieces, because that's, you know, how grown-ups look at art, I think. According to the accompanying information, Russian painting in the 15th and 16th centuries was mostly stylized religious iconography (which was actually pretty sweet, especially the wall-hangings made out of silver and gold thread) and then, by a combination of wars and varying travel restrictions / incentives, Russian painters were exposed to a more naturalistic composition in use by Western painters. Notably, all the important artistic reforms were top-down (i.e., coming directly or indirectly by edict of the tsar) -- the exhibit even described the "revolution" in portrait-painting that introduced the use of middle-class subjects as being a result of Alexander II's liberation of the serfs. I think my favorite painting was that famous one of the barge-haulers, because, man, those guys really look like they wanna rape something, but Sophie and I both discovered this other guy that we both liked, a landscape painter named Arkhip Kuindzhi. I also found a little machine in one of the corners of the floors that looked kind of like a cross between a seismograph and food processor, apparently measuring some important thing going on in the museum. That was almost as good as the paintings. Unfortunately, the museum closed before we got to the top of the spiral, so we only got to see until about the beginning of the 20th century. Lotta homeless people on the train.

After that, Sophie wanted to stop off at this fair-trade goods expo that some of her friends were participating in over at a private party in TriBeCa, so we went to that and homphed down like a million little hors'doeuvres sandwiches.

Fight The Future

Ahoy-hoy! Look what I found -- Comedy Central, weeks later, finally decided to put up the clip of Bring 'Em Back / Leave 'Em Dead: Asian Edition from the taping of the Colbert Report that I went to. So after many arduous attempts at screenshot-taking (Windows or DirectX has this video feature called "overlays" which, while enabled, makes it virtually impossible to grab a frame of video -- also makes it so that every pixel of a particular color on the screen becomes transparent down to the window containing the overlayed video; kind of bush-league if you ask me), I present you with the following:

As noted earlier, Tom and Ted are visible (in the first row on the right-hand side), but I am, unfortunately, just off-camera. Boy, Tom looks mad. The question put to us was about the 1980s band Asia: "Leave 'em dead!"

The Sarah Silverman movie was good, but it didn't, you know, give you any kind of insight into what she thinks about anything; it was basically just an hour and a half of pretty good stand-up. My favorite bit was probably the one she did at the beginning about de-boning Ethiopian babies to get at the precious "jewels" in their tailbones. "They have to... de-bone the babies," she said. She is cute as all get-out, I tell you. Hard to believe that she's going out with Jimmy Kimmel.

One of The Rase's friends got us SRO tickets to Sweeney Todd last weekend, which was, I hear, "so exciting that it is almost unbearable" for the theater critic from some New York paper. I don't know if I'd go that far, but it was pretty great as far as musicals go -- neat staging, good singing, etc., and the cast doubled as the orchestra, which was novel if not explicable. And this musical is probably the most operatic and least... catchy of all of Sondheim, in my limited experience. Here's the thing, though -- I find it harder, as time goes on, not to find musical theater anything but grotesque, in a way that regular theater isn't. Is that weird? It's just so hard to get over the idea that breaking into song is anything but ridiculous. Also, there was a little inset in the Playbill from the Broadway Cares AIDS charity that segued into asking for money by claiming that the chorus' demand that we "attend the tale of Sweeney Todd" is some kind of acknowledgment of the common tie that binds us all through triumph and tragedy, etc., etc. I'm pretty sure that's not what it means, but, you know, what do I know?

On Thursday I finished the nth-hundredth test case for this little software package I'm working on and put together a release, which made me feel pretty good. And then five minutes later I got back to thinking about how much more work there is to be done.

Last night I went out with Tom and Ted and The Rase to Great Lakes (after cramming in a gross burger at Bonnie's Grill), and when we got up to leave, I couldn't find my backpack. I'd probably have just written it off as lousy luck, but Tom insisted that we search the area, and we ended up finding a bag that nobody near our table would lay claim to and that was identical to mine except that it had a whole bunch of different stuff in it (laptop, wallet, etc.). So I wrote a note explaining that we thought someone had grabbed mine by mistake -- and it would have had to have been a pretty big mistake, considering that all mine had in it was my skinny little journal of "important thoughts" and a paperback copy of Phineas Finn -- and gave the other person's backpack to the bartender. Sure enough, about an hour after I got home I got a call from the owner of the backpack confirming the switcheroo and that she'd dropped mine off at the bar. Luckily Tom was still there and brought mine back to his house. But the story doesn't end there: I got a couple of phone calls this morning (that I let the machine handle) at like 5:00 AM from this unlucky girl who was wondering whether I'd accidentally taken the iPod out of her bag. Pretty sure I didn't, and pretty sure it was still in her bag when I gave it to the bartender, so... good luck with all that. We'll see what happens.

I'm shopping online for Christmas presents.

Jesus Is Tragic

So I'm feeding my boss's cats and one of the system administrators' cat this holiday weekend, and they both have HBO On Demand, so I've been catching up with Season 2 of Deadwood. Tom Nuttall's got hisself a bicycle, about which he says, memorably (approx.)

My bicycle can traverse boardwalk and ravine with equal aplomb; anyone who disagrees... sucks cock by choice!

Ain't that the truth. And then Bullock's step-son dies. So. The guy who plays Wolcott (also known as the guy who played the coward Jack McCall) sure is a motherfucker of a motherfucker-player.

Had a pleasant Thanksgiving with the family last night (though a postprandial cup of coffee at like 10:00PM gave me nightmares and panic attacks all night). My dad has this story that he tells about when he was in boarding school, in which this friend of his orders a teach-yourself-hypnotism kit off the back of a comic book or something, and the guy actually learns how to hypnotize people effectively enough that he's able to have some fun with some of their friends in the dorm (incidentally, this has gotta be the only time something purchased through the mail like this has not been a ravenous disappointment). So he hypnotizes a guy to believe that he's got a pair of sunglasses that'll let him see through girls' clothes, and the guy follows this one girl around for a few weeks wearing a goofy pair of sunglasses, and, you know, he hypnotizes some dudes to bark like dogs, etc. But the piece-de-resistance is when he hypnotizes this big dumb jocky guy to think that he's a log, and then... that's it -- he can't snap him out of it, presumably, as my dad explains, because a log can't see or hear or anything. The guy had to be brought down to the infirmary and eventually to the local hospital to get zapped or gassed or whatever to bring him out of it. And eventually he's totally fine and everything, but it was a tense three or four days, apparently. So I always bought that bit about a log not being able to communicate, but last night I was thinking about it a little more and it seems a bit implausible that this meathead is so deeply in tune with the concept of "logness" that he becomes completely comatose. I bet it was something deeper and creepier that happened, like some neural switch that my dad's friend accidentally toggled in this guy's brain. Anyway, moral of the story: Not. Getting. Hypnotized.

So it's looking like I might be getting a cell phone -- my mom gets some kind of special deal if I piggy-back onto her Verizon plan, so I think I'll probably be doing that pretty soon. If that's the case, I'd need to start paying for my own Internet, so I might want to sign up for one of those trifecta dealies that Time Warner does where you get cable modem, cable TV, and VoIP for like $100 a month. If you work it all out that's basically what I'm paying now, but without the cable TV. I'm oddly excited -- up until a few weeks ago, I was pretty goddamn sure the cell phone was bullshit, but I've been paying attention to how much fun my friends seem to be having snapping photos and hooking up and storing each others' numbers and all that, and I do understand that when in Rome, etc. So I'm giddy.

On the RMS-fanboy front, in case M-Biddy or someone missed this on Slashdot, Bruce Perens relates an incident of beardo hellraising at, I think, some UNESCO function:

I humorously remind Richard that he and I both have immunity as delegates, and he responds "You mean, I should have shot that guy Kramer?" Kramer is the CompTIA representative who comes along to these things to relate an pro-software-patenting and generally anti-Free-Software viewpoint which gets Richard very steamed up. There's a laugh, and I explain that our immunity probably doesn't go that far.

I saw the Harry Potter movie with Devin on Tuesday, and it was okay, you know. Not as much vision, let's say, as the one that Cuaron directed, but it's fun and exciting, and Ralph Feinnes sure does a fucking good job. That guy who plays Harry Potter, though: Not. A good. Actor. Tonight I'm going to try to see the Sarah Silverman movie with Tom and K-Rod. Also trying to throw together a dinner party tonight with The Rase and some friends. No luck as of yet; we'll see how that goes.

Good Morning, Heartache

You're like an old friend,
Come to see me again.

I went to The Game this weekend! It was me, Devin, Maggie, Tom, Ted, Katie, Dan, Emma, Katharine, Previn, Nate, and some cetera. I'd never been to this or any other football game at all, ever, and I hadn't been back to campus (as far as I remember) since graduation.

We arrived in New Haven at around 9:00ish, I think, and stopped off at Rudy's (across the street from 123 Howe where I lived the summer after junior year) for drinks. It was a real mad-house, and New Haven was absolutely goddamn freezing. I think there's something wrong with my boots -- my toes were like ice the whole weekend whenever we were outside, and my socks would be wet whenever I took the boots off, even when there it hadn't been raining outside. Maggie said, helpfully, that I should get myself checked for diabetes. But I digress. Devin and I broke away from the group for a while to take a walk around campus. We talked about what it would be like if we sort of jumped back into student life after having been in the working world for two and a half years; I still find it hard to believe that we (or I, at least) made it all the way through. It's sort of like a four-year pressure cooker. At the same time, though, I think people can pretty much adapt to anything; I never really felt like I couldn't handle it at any point of my college career, even when I actually couldn't handle it. Anyway, we all got totally blasted and eventually returned to Ted's house and conked out.

The next morning at around 10:00 AM we headed out to the tailgate, which is this big binge-drink that happens before the game actually starts. I tagged along with Previn while he said hello to a bunch of his friends at the Harvard half of the tailgate; I was hoping I might run into some of my Harvard "friends," but none of them seemed to be there. We ended up grabbing some gross little hamburgers from the Yale Dining Services tent -- the staff recognized us, which was nice and unexpected. I miss having an unlimited supply of gummy (yet fiber-rich) cafeteria food. The tailgate was a little dispiriting, since it was so chock-a-block with assholes; the Yale Heavyweight Crew team, for example, was having a "homeless party," replete with a trashcan fire and a bunch of douchebags from Greenwich, CT who'd slashed up their leather bomber jackets and sewed patches into their corduroy pants. I took a picture for evidence's sake but it didn't come out.

A cold morning in the Elm City

At around 1:30 we hit the stadium. Half-time was just finishing up and Yale was ahead 14-3. I tried to follow the action on the field, but I was so cold and it was so far away that I ended up just watching the clock wind down. No funny pranks or anything this year as far as we could tell, though some Harvard kids managed to lure Handsome Dan over to their side of the stadium, and the campus police had to go retrieve him. The fourth quarter finished in a tie, 24-24, and during overtime Yale fudged two or three plays and Harvard was able to score another point or something; we left before that happened. Pictures follow:

The new Handsome Dan inflatable: Wrinkly

The Yale Bowl, 180 BC

A happier group of fans have I never seen

At one point, this guy in front of us a few rows down just put his head down and started puking. He and his buddy were eventually herded away by security, but afterwards people would keep walking through the puke like they weren't seeing it was all over the goddamn ground. We kept yelling at them, "You're walking in puke! You just stepped in vomit!" But they never learned. Turns out that guy wasn't the only puker -- the tunnel we used to exit the Bowl during Yale's last-second choke session had like four pukes in it. Boola boola!

It was already getting dark as we walked back to campus from the Bowl; we headed over to Master Krauss's residence at Silliman for a little alumni reception. I crapped in the dining hall bathroom, which brought back some memories. Dean Flick stopped by for a chat while we were all reclining in the Master's common room. Apparently he thought I'd been dating The Rase all this time; I set him straight on that one. After Master Krauss kicked us out, some people wanted to "see the new couches in the dining hall common room," so we went over there, but there were no new couches. Some people went to this sushi place called Miya's to drink "sake bombs," which I think are shots of sake mixed with a half pint of Japanese beer. Katharine and Emma and I ditched out and went back to Rudy's, though I did take a picture of a swordfish at Miya's.

Don bites the bullet

Real or really really real?

Later on, in front of Yorkside Pizza, Katharine and I saw this girl sitting on the curb who looked borderline vomitous. We were going to offer her some help, but Ran, who'd showed up out of nowhere, alerted us to the fact that the Ford Explorer that the girl looked ready to puke on had D.C. plates and was actually packed with Secret Service. "If she throws up, they can handle it," he said. I'd hope so.

We played Mafia at Ted's house that night; the Mafia took the initiative by eliminating one of their own during the first night, which totally threw Ted for a loop. It was a very long day. I still feel kind of strung-out from being consecutively pickled. But, you know, when in Rome...

I got home late and drunk from a work-related party last Thursday and found the following message on my answering machine -- I couldn't even make it out completely at the time and I just decided it was a wrong number. Well, I just sat down and transcribed it:

Hello, how do you do? Do you notice that a lot of Spanish still have that itching powder, like, in the schools, they have 'em a lot and they don't like the teacher or something. They'll throw it on 'em, that white itching powder. Like in Dodge High School in uh... and John F. Kennedy in the Bronx. They don't like the teacher or the substitute or something, they'll just throw it on 'em all day long, they think it's funny. Anyway, this is a random phone call. Have a nice day. Bye.

Hmmm. Not clear what this means.

On the way home from CT we stopped off at a rest stop on the Hutch and we bought some gross things for lunch. While I was waiting on line to pay, though, I caught a glance of myself from behind in the security camera monitor, and it turns out I have this huge bald spot right in the back of my head. Not like a thin part that's exposed by combing my hair a certain way, but an honest-to-god bald spot. Jesus. I don't want to put any of that hair tonic shit on my scalp; if this is what Mendel had in mind for me, then so be it. But maybe Mer was right when she said I should find someone to marry me before I lose all my hair.

Cheese Lice

Devlin brought over two choice little ironic movies last night. The first was called Funky Monkey, and it was about a trained chimpanzee assassin that's rescued by his handler (Matthew Modine, who plays Alec McCall with remarkable skill, considering the character is apparently, not kidding, a black ops commando with the IQ of precocious 7-year-old) and teaches a fatherless little boy how to win at football. Not kidding. Highlights of the movie include

• The chimp actor's propensity to finger its nipples absent-mindedly whenever it's not doing something else
• A bumbling security guard's off-hand joke about having to take a job at ZIT (Zoology International Technology) because he didn't have a college degree -- if you have a college degree, chances are you're not gonna think that's funny; if you don't have a college degree, chances are you're not gonna think that's funny
• Matthew Modine's character literally crippling / murdering a whole bunch of dudes in fairly gruesome ways -- skateboard to the teeth, thrown into a bunch of buffet tables and chairs, whacked senseless with a fiberglass surfboard.

So that was good.

The second had been shipped to him along with the first, for pretty much no reason that we could discern. It was an animated version of the movie Ben-Hur, refocused, by Good Times Entertainment (of Quigley fame), so that it dwelt a whole fuck of a lot more on the Jesus shit in the original novel by General Lew Wallace. Best of all, though, Judah Ben-Hur is voiced by Charlton Heston, who sounds a whole goddamn lot older than the little Jew on the screen. Heston gives an interview that's included on the DVD that consists of a bunch of responses to what must be questions by some interviewer (though you never hear what they are), edited together in a series of disorienting 30-second takes. A choice segment (approx.):

This story is a classic. Whenever they produce a film or a stage show out of it, it plays around the world; millions of people see it... Why do I think this story has endured? One reason... apart from many others: Whenever they show the film, it plays around the world. And it keeps coming back.

Another great part was late in the interview he's talking about how great it is to work with the middling assortment of voice talent they'd assembled, and he cuts a noisy, heedless old-man fart. Like, "frrrrrp!" Tom and Devstar thought it might be somebody shifting around in a squeaky chair on the set, but I'm gonna stick to my guns. T'was a fart.

On Tuesday, T-Bone's friend Alex had gotten me and Ted tickets to a taping of The Colbert Report, so we checked that out and it was super fun. We had to wait on line for a real goddamn long time, but once we got inside, Colbert was real nice and the taping of the show itself was a marvel of efficiency. They literally do a single take for practically everything, and there was a bit with audience participation (the Bring 'Em Back / Leave 'Em Dead face-off) that they taped during the warm-up that was ready to go and on the monitors at the time they taped the actual segment like 10 minutes later. Since we were in the front row (the theater's tiny; only about 100 seats), I saw that Ted was visible in one of the shots. Tom claims that he could see himself, too, which, I think, would have meant that I'd be there, too, given the order we were sitting in (actually, come to think of it, maybe not...). I wanted to check when the put the clip on the web site, but it doesn't seem like that was one of the ones they picked. Stephen took some questions from the audience at the beginning of the show, and my only regret was that I didn't ask, "Can you give Marc Maron a job?" The production staff was real serious that we be really high-energy, lest we kill Stephen's "buzz," so I was worried about putting him off his game. Probing questions from the audience included, "What do I need to do to get a job writing for your show?" and "I heard you used to be in an improv comedy group. Is that true?" Jesus fuck, people.

So Stallman mentions his (former?) girlfriend on his 'blog sometimes, and I think I found some pictures of her. She's not half bad-looking, considering she's a Bride of Beardo, eh?

Yesterday, on a whim, I bought the Misfits album American Psycho at Best Buy, and it has this great song on it called "Hate The Living, Love The Dead." I'd forgotten how much the Misfits sound like HEAetc., esp. with regard to the sort of fast, straight-ahead drums and well-articulated guitar. There was a different Misfits album (think it was Famous Monsters) playing on some speakers at the store, and when I asked the clerk he said they didn't have it in stock, but he also mentioned that Michale Graves has a solo project he's working on that I should check out, so I did -- I'd forgotten until I got to his site that he's a real contemptible Republican nut-job. So, you know, there's that.

!Mi hermana y mi hija!

I'm watching a murky, rambling Spanish movie with The Rase called Sex and Lucia. The back of the DVD box says it's supposed to be "the most erotic movie ever made." Now, I'm not saying I didn't "pop wood" during the mother-daughter porno-actress jerk-off scene, but come on. Seriously. Another critic called it "intensely erotic," which, like I told The Rase, is the last way you'd describe something that actually was intensely erotic. Those film faggots.

Making a lot of progress in Call of Cthulhu, though I pay for every step forward with a hissed curse and a thrown controller. Someone on their bulletin boards was complaining that the game doesn't stack up well against Eternal Darkness; they called it Mythos-Doom, which I thought was pretty funny. I do agree, though, that Eternal Darkness is probably more faithful to the Lovecraftian ethos of futility, madness, and incomprehensibility, even though it comes in a brighter, shinier package. CoC gets all the historical details correct -- and visually, it's spectacular -- but its treatment of the... viscera of the subject matter is a bit shallow, basically a selection of relevant passages from some well-known texts. One gets the sense that the designers and voice actors didn't fully grok the material. There is, however, a fairly awesome scene in which Jack awakes to find a shoggoth slurming and slorming across the ceiling towards him: "Oh, fuck," says Jack.

Maggles flew out this week from L.A.; we homphed things and chugged things. She flew back this afternoon, but she'll be back next week.

Working on projects, feeling good. I ran with Tom today and didn't stop once; talking makes the run go better, for sure. Seriously thinking about getting some new-fangled phone-cable-internet dealies; a cell-phone, too, since everyone's on me about that. Everyone's riding me.

The Fire Next Time

So the Halloween Parade itself was kind of a drag -- against Tom's urging, we walked over there from my office, and it turned out that Ted was on the other side of the street, unreachable because the cops had closed off the entrance to the West 4th St. subway. The place was totally thronged with people -- pushy, awful, ugly people -- to the extent that you couldn't see the individual people marching in the parade, only the giant-size floats and costumes. Granted, those were pretty sweet: lots of Burton-esque papier-mache skeletons; this Mothra-like thing made an electrifying appearance; and Webster Hall had a float full of naked ladies, none of whom appeared to be chicks with dicks. After about an hour, we got tired and bored and forced our way across the street into the West Village. I had a terrible burrito at Burritoville. Just awful. Getting home was difficult, too.

"JAYNE COBB HAT" arrived as promised, but a few days too late. It looks ridiculous. According to a laminated card included in the shipment, I am Jayne's Hat Brigader #89. Or #39. Can't remember.

Tom's begun an epic game in which I am a contender. The rules are here.

On Sunday I went to go see the movie Paradise Now, starring Palestinian Clive Owen and Palestinian Holly Hunter. The movie was great -- a little depressing, mind you, since it is about religious zealots waging intractable war against each other over an utterly undesirable repulsive piece of land -- but everyone is quite good, with and without beards. Katharine bailed after the movie, but I swung by Degraw and Ted and I went out to eat at Los Pollitos Dos, which I'd written off as not being that good because their burritos (my barometer of quality for Mexican restaurants, for better or for worse) are not super good. But it looks like everything else on their menu is super good. So Ted and I talked, laughed, wept (a little), then went home and drank grapefruit juice and gin, which is pretty tasty.

And then this weird little thunderstorm happened.

Katharine'd planned and executed a killer birthday party for Emma on Saturday at an OTB that was practically located on 53rd & 3rd, though on the inside it looked like every other OTB in the world, which is to say, a cross between an airport and a hospice. We rented out a room and ate chicken things and bet on horses for like three hours, which is really fun, though I lost every single goddamn time. The final race of the evening included a horse named Sleazebiscuit. Surprisingly, he neither won, placed, nor showed.

Last Thursday I went to go see Emma's dad Jon Katz do a "reading" from his new book on dogs (no Hellmouths in sight) at the Barnes & Noble near my apartment in th' Slope. He's got a great presence and it's always fun to hear him talk, but it looked like there were people in the audience that kind of thought of him as a dog guru, including a woman sitting directly in front of me who was wearing what looked a like a blue prison jumpsuit and had a real serious wispy moustache -- the kind where the hairs are sort of translucent but they're fuckin' long, bra! She looked a bit like Scorpy.

The Rase is away on business basically all week again. I hope you guys will come over and hang out so I don't go crazy with loneliness and fear. Still having trouble with the truckbed segment in Call of Cthulhu. Send food / water. Kthx.

Get Your Own Box

Razor and Sarah came over last night and I cooked the shit out of some salmon, using this recipe I found on epicurious.com. I just kind of saw the recipe and liked the look of it, and I was a little worried that it wasn't going to come out well, but it totally did. So we ate some good food and drank wine and beers and Billy and Sarah played and liked The Warriors. But there must have been something off in my cooking (or maybe it was that I ate most of Sarah's plate), because I tossed and turned all night emitting gasses and having strange, brief dreams, including this one:

I'm scheduled as the opening act for an afternoon show by The Gaping Abyss at some dive in the heart of some desolate expanse of Queens, but I have no instruments and can't remember any songs to play. Chris keeps giving me pep talks, assuring me that I'll get up on stage (with a beat-up awful acoustic guitar he lends me) and the songs will just come to me, but I'm freaking out -- to the extent that my ass sweats through my pants and leaves a big gross sweat-stain on this tablecloth I'm sitting on. Sick.

When Sophie got up this morning at like... 5:00 AM to catch her business flight to NC, I woke up and felt completely awake and anxious, entertaining all sorts of grim fantasies in classic Julian style: "Why am I so awake so early? I haven't gotten any sleep at all tonight, practically!!! Am I finally going crazy? Is this what crazy feels like?" But, of course, as is literally always the case, I fell back asleep in 5 minutes, only to wake up at 8:00 AM feeling groggy and awful, totally wanting to get back into bed.

I'm getting pretty far in both The Warriors and Call of Cthulhu, such that both games have gotten too hard for me to play without cheating. It's inevitable.

My Halloween costume was kind of a bust. Like I said, JAYNE COBB HAT never showed up, so I sort of improvised with this white t-shirt that said "I BRAKE 4 REAVER GIRLS." Which doesn't even make sense because Jayne hates Reavers and isn't even in a position on the ship where he'd be "braking," period. I know that, people. But what really drove the point home that the costume wasn't gonna be a success was this pair of fancy-pants Park Slope teenagers hanging out outside the 11th St. Deli: "I brake for raver girls? What the fuck?" I was ashamed, and safety pinned my jacket up for the duration of the trip to Katharine's.

Which turned out to be a wise decision, since the train was hopping with mean teens looking to poke fun at: The goth-looking lady in the avant-garde "F Train" costume; a particularly unfortunate looking brother in full white-face and covered in band-aids who was going as "Marv" from Sin City (fake chin putty and all); and many more. I'm thinking about going to the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade tonight, so, you know... there'll be more of that.

Say What You See, Gareth

Holy shit! Did any of you guys smell this yesterday? I caught a few whiffs of it late yesterday at work and at home in the evening, but I wrote it off as the final stages of a nervous breakdown (olfactory hallucinations? Those can't be a good sign!) and just went to bed and cowered under the covers praying for death until I fell asleep. But guess what -- not crazy!

"It's like maple syrup. With Eggos. Or pancakes," he said. "It's pleasant."

Oh, indeed it were.

Kitty threw up twice yesterday, once under The Rase's bed.

So I spent most of last night playing a couple of new videogames I recently acquired, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth and The Warriors. They're both great! CoC is actually quite dark and spooky although I was distressed to learn last night that I'm already about 20% done with it. There'd been a bit of FUD surrounding its release, and I was getting myself set up to duly purchase it and then be disappointed. But it's great! Like I told Tom, I met a little girl in Innsmouth (sportin' the "Innsmouth Look," naturally), who told me if I wanted to speak to her mother, I'd have to go up to the attic, because that's where she's kept. "Why's that?" asked Jack. "She bites," said Ramona Waite.

The Warriors is simply incredible, visually. I will say that there doesn't appear to be too much to the "gameplay" -- it's mostly punch-kick-grab-punch, though all the little "mini-games," such as uncuffing your compadres or throwing up a tag on a wall, are sweet. But the art direction and level design are just... wow. It's some serious Taxi Driver shit, guys. And it's not like it's a total departure from the sort of low-res, blurry rendering from the GTA games. They're definitely using at least a derivative of that engine, but there's been so much attention paid to making things look filthy and decayed and, you know, pre-Giulianian, that the whole thing feels very detailed and polished.

It's Saturday now -- I'm about to go to Katharine's Halloween party. What am I going as? Jayne Cobb, erstwhile mercenary of the good ship Serenity. I bought a knit cap on eBay ("JAYNE COBB HAT") that's apparently a replica of the "cunning" one he wears in The Message, but guess what: JAYNE COBB HAT ain't getting shipped here 'til Monday evening. So... Jesus.

Ramones Mania

Now I remember why baseball sucks -- it takes a perfectly good network, like Fox, and replaces all the good programming with fucking... baseball. So I'm finally (sorry!) watching this Ramones Raw DVD that Devin bought me as a birthday present the year before last, and you know what? It's totally fucking engrossing. It's basically a compilation of home movies the band made while touring in the U.S. and abroad, along with some totally sweet live footage for songs I think they didn't do live that much (including one of my personal favorites, I Can't Make It On Time). I think the best part is how dumb it at all is -- literally a double-digit percentage of the footage is of members of the band posing in front of some local edifice or pointing at a funny sign and waiting nervously to have their picture taken, starting to smile, not sure if the picture's been taken yet, glancing back and forth awkwardly, etc. And then there's the fucking terrifying footage from inside their car of them getting mobbed by fans in South America and Europe. My only complaint is that most of the stuff is from the post-Dee Dee era, so it's got C.J. in it instead, and that guy... he's not, you know, a Ramone.

Some other highlights:

• Gilbert Ramone
• Joey and Marky's appearance on Steampipe Alley, hosted by Mario Cantone
• Dee Dee's perverse insistence on taking a detour to go shopping for a Rolex in Valencia
• Holy shit, Joey wearing a fucking Dickies t-shirt!

Because I'm A Fucking Caveman

So yesterday, The Friends and I drove up to this place called Wright's Farm in Gardiner, NY, and went apple-picking. Katharine and I had devised the idea the previous weekend, and during a boring Monday or Tuesday at work I googled a bit and got some people on board. The weather ended up being completely perfect for our plans -- there'd be pretty much non-stop rain up in tha Tri-State for the past two weeks or so, but it cleared up completely and the temperature rose to 70 degrees during the afternoon. I'd never gone appling before (at least, not that I can remember), and it turned out to be a whole goddamn lot of fun. I took some pictures with the dij:

Tom's so happy he just doesn't know what the fuck to do.

The donut-making machine, as seen through the window of the store. The donuts get sort of squirted out fully-formed from this mechanical mixing bowl and then slowly floated down this stream of simmering oil, which cooks them along the way.

The ground was kind of marshy from it having rained the past 2 weeks straight, and lots of apples had already fallen off the trees. Alternately gross and pretty.

A ladder going nowhere; has Farmer Wright been raptured?

Sadly, on the last day Ted became feral.

Here's how it works: You pay like $5 and they give you a bag and send you up to the orchard, which is like a square mile of rows of apple trees, and you just fill the fuck out of your bag. I can't tell for sure, but I think they had about three types of trees -- there were yellowy-green apples, shiny red ones, and then these sort of dusty-looking pinkish-red ones. Maybe those last two are the same kind, I dunno. There were also a whole crapload of apples that had fallen off the tree, and which I guess they recommended you not pick up, so we whipped 'em at each other. Some of them were all mushy and rotten. After we filled up our bags (and took an embarrassing number of vanity photos), we headed back to the store area to drink cider and eat cider donuts, which taste about as much like cider as Apple Jacks do, but are also just as tasty as Apple Jacks. I snagged a jar of raspberry applesauce and we got a couple of jugs of fresh-pressed cider to mull with rum back in Brooklyn, and then we hit the road again. So, in closing, I've told you about picking apples in upstate New York, and if you like apples and picking apples, I hope you will consider picking apples in upstate New York the next time you go on a weekend trip to Gardiner, NY.

When we got back, some people took naps; I played X-Men Legends on Tom's old new X-Box. Then we went over to Katharine's to make the cider. There was some confusion over how to add the mulling spices we'd bought -- it comes in these nice looking little pouches that almost look like teabags, but it turns out that you're supposed to untie them and just empty that shit into the pot. The cider was really good, and we all drank some while we watched the first two episodes of Extras, which is reasonably funny. Then everybody went to a bar, except me -- I went home, because fuck that.

M-Biddy pulled the ill drop-in on Wednesday and we hit up the 12th St. B&G for some type good meat dishes. Tom came over and Luisa comped us Stripes at his behest, which turned out to be... not so good, though it did feature this choice bit of dialogue (from the "bonus" material, approx.):

Harold Ramis: I don't want to shoot anybody, I'm a pacifist!
Bill Murray: So you're saying even if some guy's raping your sister and you've got a gun, you don't do anything about it?
HR: This is my sister we're talking about; you practically raped her yourself one night.

Friday I went out with my boss and some co-workers to this really great New Orleansian restaurant called Stan's Place over on Atlantic and Bond -- they snagged their chef a month or so ago from Louisiana after he was left homeless by Hurricane Katrina, and apparently he's still sleeping on one of the owners' couches. Whatever the story, that guy can cook. I ate a whole goddamn Cornish Game Hen stuffed with some kind of oyster-mushroom compote. Jesus. Everyone should go to that place because they just started serving dinner and it's been pretty empty so far, according to my boss, who is a repeat customer.

I gotta get a new digital camera, I'm telling you. This old Olympus 360DL from 1998 homphs down batteries like nobody's business, plus the pictures it takes, while fairly high-res, have his weird prismatic washed-out quality to them, like the lense is covered in a thin layer of dirty soap. It would be nice to have something a little bit better, maybe that could focus itself and do some of that digital zoom shit.

The apartment is full of flies. It's really weird. I've emptied the cat box and taken out the garbage and done the dishes, and they keep showing up. The fly-swatter's been doing overtime -- I killed like 4 yesterday and twice that many this afternoon, even a couple of them fucking on the side of the fridge. I wonder if my downstairs neighbor is dead.

The Public Gets What The Public Wants

...but I want nothing this society’s got
I’m going underground

Apparently this song, which they use as the lead-in to the first hour of the terrible, terrible Majority Report on Air America, is by The Jam. This is a great song; I've been listening to it and others on my own personal 'The Jam' radio station on Pandora.com. I wouldn't have known who it was by if if I hadn't come to Emma's friend Khalil's DJ debut on Saturday at the Laila Lounge in Williamsburg, no easy task, considering it was the gorram end of the world out there. I aimed to hop the G at Smith & 9th, 'cept the F was skipping to Jay, and... fuck it, it's a boring story. But here's a thing that happened on the F train I was on that got it stuck in the station for an extra 15 minutes:

A bunch of what I can only describe as Brooklyn townies -- chubby white kids in backwards baseball caps and sports jerseys, their faces so squished by cheek fat that they squinted -- were horsing around in the last car of the train, where I was, and one of them gives another a shove that sends him stumbling up against the smoked glass window in the door to the conductor's booth. To everyone's surprise, the plate of glass just falls out of the frame, revealing that the booth is empty. After recovering from the shock ("Yo, I think my ribs is broken! This kid broke my ribs, son!"), they begin to hatch a plan:

"Does the intercom work? Get on the intercom and say some shit!"
"Say 'This is a soul train to Queens.'"
"Hahaha soul train!"

So yeah, one of the little creepuses turned on the intercom and muttered something about that train being, in fact, The Soul Train, amid much tittering and gibbering. When the train pulled into Jay St., the doors opened briefly and the perps ducked out, carrying the glass from the window with them ("I'm'a hang this up in my room, son!"). So did I, and after the doors closed a second later, I saw a pathetic-looking MTA official wearing orthopedic shoes and those goggle-style coke-bottle glasses hobbling frantically towards that last car.

Fuck, it's cold outside. Am I right?

I gotta get a new toaster oven. The one I've got now is the one my dad bought me as a graduation present, and about which he said something like, "This is the Rolls-Royce of toaster ovens, Julian" -- typical dad B.S. It's a fine toaster-oven, though, except that ever since I moved into this place, the goddamn door won't stay shut. Something about the spring and the expansion of the frame when the toaster gets hot, I don't know; you can force the door closed at the beginning -- it makes a terrible cracking noise -- but then it bursts open like half way through the toasting cycle.

The Rase and I have now watched the whole of Firefly. I'm a little depressed that there's no more of it, because the more I watched, the more I loved it. Creepy synchronicity: Both The Rase and I loved Jayne Cobb, hated all the women on the show. Well, that's not true; that Saffron chick was kind of cute, if a pain in the ass.

Here's a thing that happened to a friend of mine (name redacted to protect the guilty): We were walking around my neighborhood, shopping for an ashtray for this friend's apartment, and at this friend's request, we stopped at this little tchotchke boutique on 10th and 7th called Toto, that was obviously not going to have anything like an ashtray. Nonetheless, my friend asks for one, and the shopkeeper manages to locate a very nice cheap little bowl that really didn't deserve to be used as an ashtray. As she's ringing us out, she says, "...no, I'm not going to say anything; you know what I'm going to tell you." My friend turns to me and says, perhaps a little more snottily than necessary, "What'd I tell you? Everybody does this: 'I'm not going to say anything, but you know you're not supposed to smoke.'" The shopkeeper becomes visibly flustered and says, "Well, it's a little different for me... you see, my father and brother died from smoking-related illnesses." And with that, she begins to cry a little bit. Jesus Christ. Deep inside, you know you're him.

You Foodies Make Me Sick

Last night I dreamed that I'd traveled to Mars as part of a photojournalist expedition to locate and photograph what life forms there were that could be found. In the dream, Mars was really lush and cool, and a bunch of humans -- holdovers from previous expeditions -- had set up apartments there, so there were comfy accomodations for all of us. We did manage to find one apparently indigenous life form, a practically naked woman not disimilar to Pris, who took a bit of shine to me. Unfortunately, like Pris, she turned out to have a bit of a murderous side, so I had to high-tail it out of there before consumating our relationship. But I remember thinking, in the dream, that I'd have a lot of sweet pictures to post in my 'blog. But I don't.

A couple of restaurants:

• Melt (not Milt, which would be pretty funny), over on Bergen and 5th was supposed to be great, according to my boss, who is an incorrigible "foodie," but the pistachio-encrusted cod drizzled with minty pea puree that I ordered kind of made me want to puke on Friday.
• Bogota, on the other hand, on 5th and Degraw, is pretty goddamn great. My entree came with a side of cilantro-garlic mashed potatoes, which I'm pretty sure I want to eat every day.

Last week, K-Flo got me and some others into this movie premiere party for Jenny McCarthy's new movie, Dirty Love. The movie is apparently loathsome, but the party was fun and the drinks were free. And the venerable Gawker photog, Nikola Tamindzic, was there to take these pictures! We are not in any of them, but basically everyone who was sitting near us got snapped. Insider info: Jenny McCarthy is shorter in real life.

Yeah, so in my ongoing efforts to be more spontaneous, yesterday I was walking by the Prospect Park Green Market, and decided to take a stroll through the baked goods section. All of the stuff was pretty warm -- I'm thinking it was baked that morning -- and this peach pie with a cool vine-and-leaf dough filigree caught my eye, so I bought it. Well, Tom et. al. didn't seem that interested, so I brought it home to Sophie, and we had some with our evening tea. It fuckin' sucked! Very bitter and un-peachy and swarming with cloves and cinnamon. Sophie reckons whoever baked it used an apple pie recipe and just swapped in the peaches, and I reckon she's right.

I played a bunch of Sid Meier's Pirates! over at T's place -- Captain Jerk Jenkins managed to rescue his long-lost sister and uncle who'd been sold into slavery by the Marquis de Montalban, but then he got bored.