The Last Record Store

Shopping Is Patriotic

Worried about being forgotten?

If you're worried about being forgotten after you've turned to dust, here's an idea:

• Monogram your garbage bags and/or place a calling card in the bag that's made of something that will biodegrade very very slowly.

At some point in the future someone might just be going through your refuse thinking of you.

Everyday Sightings

La Pieta

Irritating Human Behaviour - 1.0

I decide to walk across the street to K-Mart to procure a small space heater and a bottle of bleach. I could drive to a more civilized place, but I'm not into the holiday traffic.

As I head towards the heaters in the basement there's an old woman cancelling the purchase she just made and the store guy's trying to explain to her that since she bought whatever it was on credit it would be refunded in credit, not actual money. This doesn't seem to be sinking in.

Looking at the open cash registers I notice that a few employees are keeping the lights off on their registers in order to avoid being so busy. Which to choose? The register where the employee is absent and customers scan the store for a sign of their return - or - the register with the woman with the overflowing cart of paper products... Toilet paper, paper towels, paper napkins... The rule in these places is that no matter how good the situation in a line might look, you're damned no matter where you go. I go one register over and start whistling Dixie - not figuratively, actually, whistling Dixie...

About four feet in front of me is a podgy boy of about five or six - unnaturally podgy - grabbing onto his sisters head with both hands - she looks to be about four - and he keeps mumbling something that sounds like, "Brains! Brains!" He does this over and over.

What I assume to be their "parents" are just a couple of feet in front of me. The father is podgy as well and seems to be sporting some sort of greasy mullet variant. He is holding what looks like three or four packages of bed linens. The wife, silent, looking depressed is very much pregnant.
Have these people ever heard of birth control? They don't look like overly devout Catholics or like freaky evangelists.

The parents take no notice of what I assume to be their children. They have some sort of whispered exchange and the bemulleted one throws the packages of bed linens on the floor and walks for the door. The children are still busy playing whatever zombie pretend game... The wife kicks the packages back in line and stands there. The mullet heads back.

At this point I'm wondering if I'll have to head with witnessing some base display of domestic violence.

It's their turn in line and the mullet puts the packages up on the counter. The UPC codes get scanned and the wife pays for the goods. They walk out the door and I start to put my stuff on the counter. The little girl is still standing there leaning against the counter staring in the direction of her presumed parents. It takes her fifteen or twenty seconds to realize they've gone out the door and finally walks off after them.

I hear the beep of my UPC code being scanned. "Would you like the extended warranty for and extra $4.95?"

"No thanks."

Hangin With Bush

I had a dream last night that I was walking down a leafy tree lined street. There was an unruly mob going somewhere and I decided to have a look where they were going. Apparently it was an anti-war protest and they were going to the White House...

The mob gets there and crashed through the gates and proceeded inside. I took some stairs 'round the back to get inside as it seemed less crowded and ended up in a room face to face with GW. A good portion of the mob was there chanting about something or other, but not taking any notice that the object of their derision was right there...

I noticed that Barney was in the room and so was my mother-in-law... The best course of action seemed to be just to play with Barney. I was just thinking about telling GW just for the record that because I was playing with hid dog didn't mean I didn't think his policies were daft - but I woke up before I got around to it.

Welcome

Please, have a seat.

Dogs 43A&28A

Have you noticed?...

The LED's that auto anti-theft alarms are using are now blue instead of red.

Another day at the office...

Synchronicity of the Rake

Walking the dogs tonight I spotted two forgotten rakes within six or seven houses on the same side of the street in approximately the same place in front of each house.

What are the chances of two diferent gardners forgetting their rakes on the same street on the same day? The odds against it are staggering!

Oh, that's the spot!

You know you've gotten the right amount of Novocaine when your nostril is numb and your lower eyelid is tingling...

Docs @ Woodlawn

No, this shot wasn't set up.

NPR Letters- Real Surreal

It's kind of surreal to turn on the radio just as Robert Siegel is reading ones letter on NPR's All Things Considered.


Letters: Pluto, and a Cemetery
All Things Considered, August 24, 2006

Each Thursday we read from listeners' emails. Pluto's demotion from full-fledged planet to "dwarf planet" has brought in a lot of letters. We hear your creative suggestion of a new status for Pluto. Also, comments on a mixup in a cemetery, and new lyrics for the old musical "The Fantasticks".

Listen Here

My letter here.

alces alces & H2O

Irritating Intrusion 3.0 - John Wyatt of Cinespia on NPR

TO: All Things Considered
SUBJECT: ATC 08.18.2006 - Movies Under the Stars, Surrounded by Tombs

I happened to be listening to the above referenced piece last Friday and there was one thing which stuck out like a vandalized headstone in the cemetery.

Ina Jaffe interviews John Wyatt who's been running the Cinespia movie screenings at Hollywood Forever for five years. If in this time he had bothered to take an interest in learning a bit of the history of the cemetery the first thing out of his mouth would not have been, "This is Hattie McDaniel's Grave."

I don't feel I'm being knit picky and perhaps neither shall you after I point out the following.

The marker at Hollywood Forever is a cenotaph, a monument erected in honour of a person whose remains lie elsewhere. The reason for this is that even though it was the expressed wish of Ms. McDaniel that she be buried at the Hollywood Memorial Park (now Hollywood Forever) the previous owner Jules Roth had a policy of not allowing burials of African-Americans in the cemetery. Ms. McDaniel was buried with all the honors deserving at the Angelus Rosedale Cemetery in 1952 where she is to this day.

In 1999 after the his purchase of the Hollywood Cemetery, Tyler Cassity wanted to set things right and offered to have Ms. McDaniel's remains moved to the renamed Hollywood Forever cemetery. The remains were not moved from Angelus Rosedale, but a cenotaph was erected in her honour.

While this may seems a trivial matter, it is quite an ignorant and irritating mistake for a cemeteryan or an enthusiast of Los Angeles history to hear - both because it is blatantly wrong and because it erases an important part of history which shouldn't be forgotten.

A correction would be much appreciated - or better yet Ms. Jaffe should do a piece on the historical importance of Angelus Rosedale.

Angelus Rosedale Cemetery

Life Parked in Los Angeles 1.0

Life in Los Angeles - Holy Krishna!

Ever since the Krishnas were banned at LAX I just haven't seen them around... Maybe it was that coupled with the waning gravitational pull of the 60's search for a guru.

I was out for a smoke a few minutes ago and what comes walking by on the opposite side of the street but a Krishna! Cymbals banging, stopping to try and chat up pedestrians passing him by. As I took another look, there was a large Rolls Royce right next to him on the street, which made me wonder if his guru was following him to make sure he was doing his work.

More and more there are little things that make me think Philip K. Dick was right about his depiction of Los Angeles in Blade Runner. We have talking cross walks now, but not flying cars - yet.

Life In Los Angeles - So exciting! So glamorous!

I really wanted a nibble - it's that five o'clock hump at work. Pretzels and coffee just won't do so I go to the third floor to check out the vending machine for some sort of exotic sugary sweet. I find some sort of banana pancake for $1.25 - seems kind of steep to me, but I don't make a habit of it, so it's all right.

On my way to the vending machine I run into Kevin and he asks if I wanna walk across the street where he's gonna buy a coffee from Starbucks and check his lottery ticket.

I normally don't step foot in Starbucks - I wouldn't think The Man's coffee if they paid me - but I generally make an exception so I can bullshit with Kevin - Kevin of Jimson Weed Gazette fame...
He gets his cup of the coffee that's ruining America (and the planet) while I people watch. Closely shaved men in tight t-shirts with nonsensical "tribal" tattoos... Blah blah... Free samples of "iced" coffee. Right.

We walk around the corner so Kevin can check his lottery ticket in the little scanner thing they got at the magazine stand - I didn't know they had those scanners. I wonder what they do if you won? No one ever wins...

Hey! There's Dustin Hoffman looking at the magazines! Yup. Wearing shorts, sloped over, nose to the ink. I remember hearing somewhere that he's pretty anti-fan, so I try to encourage Kevin to go bug him. Kevin's checking his lotto ticket - I have to hold his extra cup of coffee so he can dig the ticket out of his pocket. Normally I wouldn't touch that plastic cup of overpriced bile, but I make an exception.

"That's Dustin Hoffman there," Kevin leans in and says as he swipes his LOTTO ticket. I assume he didn't win.

"Yup that's him there. Why don't you go bug him? I'm sure he's appreciate it."

Mr. Hoffman is just standing there, unmolested by anyone. Must be a slow tourist day that the Farmer's Market. Perhaps he's there for a meeting at CBS or something. I can't imagine anyone going to the magazine stand in the heat just for the fun of it.

As we walk away Kevin turns back to have another look - maybe he didn't think it was him. I usually never forget a face, so I know it was him.

Another exciting day in the big city.

The "Tar Pit"

Took the dogs out for a walk last night - perhaps it was the heat.
The "tar pit" had a pungent odour - more so than normal.
Little burbles along the sidewalk - gotta watch out for the paws and feet.

Los Angeles Drive Time 1.0

Typical drive on Los Angeles freeway...

CSUN May 28, 2006

CSUN

Spooky, deserted campus...

Someone's gotta defend our electronic rights...

Find out more about the case here.

Sliding Doors

Driving to work past the sliding doors.

Pitmatian

Pitmatians are very good listeners...

May Day Celebration

Kingdom - Animalia - an animal

Phylum - Chordata - with a spinal chord

Class - Mammalia - that breast feeds its children

Order - Lagomorpha - a rabbit, hare or pika

Family -Leporidae -a rabbit or hare

Genus - Chocolatus

Species - crispus

Vehicular Manslaughter is a Manly Trait...

I'm driving back to work after dropping the hearse off at lunch. Not too much traffic and the weather's nice. I stop at the corner and prepare to make a right hand turn. The light is green in my direction, but there's a young man - I presume walking home from school for he's got a backpack and it's after 3 o'clock - he's crossing the street.
I wait for the fellow to step onto the sidewalk and slowly start to inch along. It's always good to check the right hand mirror just in case someone is trying for that quick sprint across the street on the flashing red hand or there's a bicycle on the sidewalk trying to get across... Nothing in my mirror - I move a little quicker.
- H O N K ! ! !
What the hell? Sounds like it's coming from behind me. I check around me just in case there's an old woman with a walker slithering into the intersection as they're bound to do as if materialized from a cloud of smoke. Nothing.
- H O N K ! ! !
Now what? I look in the rear view mirror and there's a man in the car behind me gesticulating as if there's a fire under his ass.
- H O N K ! ! !
All right, I guess he's in a hurry. I check the rear view mirror again just to make sure that I've identified him as the honker and then I start into my right hand turn again.

It's a beautiful turn. Smooth, precise, slow - as slow as I can make it while still moving at a safe speed. The street is narrow, which means that unless one makes a really tight turn, the best and smoothest turn in made into the left hand lane - not up to California Vehicle Code, but it's the best of the options. There's light traffic just before the end of day rush - as I smoothly complete my turn I straddle both lanes till I'm straight out of the turn and then slide to the left hand lane - smooth as silk.

In the meantime I'm peeking into my rear view mirror. The man behind me is going ape-shit! He doesn't know which lane to veer into. He's right on my ass - I'm sure he just wants to punch the accelerator, but can't. He's got nowhere to go. I'm smiling inside.

Honking at me in a situation where patience and great care is required will only succeed to redouble my resolve to be just that much more careful and patient.

Finally, I'm in the left hand lane on my merry way... I can hear the guys engine revving behind me as he punches it and is beside me. He slows down and shakes his fist out the window and leans his head out shouting:

You drive like a woman!

Yikes! Them is some strong words.

I wait till he passes me and looking in his rear view mirror. I throw up my hands in my best M. Butterfly impersonation and act like I'm shaking in my boots and squealing.
I've found that when other drivers are trying to give me some macho vibe of alpha male challenge the best way to get back at them is to totally confuse the hell out of their Cro-Magnon brains. Usually totally gimping out works best - the spastic chicken, the palsy shakes and if they're within hearing range, some beheying noises or cawing shrieks really throw people for a loop.

Mr. Speedy zooms off and about a couple hundred or so feet ahead he slams on his breaks for the red light. I take the same route to work every day and I know that chances are, if I'm going real fast, that light will be red and I'll have to stop anyway, so why bother hurrying to do noting?...

Irritating Intrusion 2.0 - Brownfield don't "get it".

I rarely bother to write to papers like the LA Times because I figure they probably don't give a crap - but since I made the effort, here it is below. It's in reference to:

May 5, 2006
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK: Guess who came to dinner
*Stephen Colbert's tart tongue inside Beltwood keeps blogs buzzing.
By Paul Brownfield, Times Staff Writer

Dear Times Calendar,

I think that Mr. Brownfield completely misses the point in his May 5, 2006 Critics Notebook piece, "Guess who came to dinner". I happen to be the "kind of loser" (according to Mr. Brownfield) that watches C-SPAN on a Saturday night and by the end of Stephen Colbert's speech my wife and I were laughing so loud and hard that our neighbours could hear us. It wasn't just that we found the humour funny, because it certainly was - we were also laughing because the presentation, in the dry, no nonsense C-SPAN way was perfect for the occasion and Stephen's presentation of sarcasm, satire and irony - something seemingly lost on Mr. Brownfield. We were giddy with joy as well - witnessing the first time in a long time that someone was calling it like it was (and is), not just with Mr. Bush a few feet away and unable to escape, but with a large portion of the D.C. faux-glitterati in attendance as well.

I know that Mr. Brownfield seems to be star struck with celebrities like Ludacris and Pittsburgh Steeler quarterback Ben Roethlisberger who were in attendance - but to my wife and I, it didn't make a difference seeing the trademark C-SPAN tight shot cutaway to Lawrence Fishburne laughing - it was the shots of Mr. Bush turning red with anger (as turning red with embarrassment doesn't seem possible at this point in his tenure) that impressed us.

It is a good thing that the clip of Stephen Colbert has taken on a life of it's own on the web and that bloggers are giving gut felt responses (both in favour and against) because from Mr. Brownfield's piece it is clear that reporters like him lack the sense of irony to report clearly on why this obscure speech at a Saturday night D.C. corporate dinner - only watched by "losers" on C-SPAN - has gained such momentous buzz. It is precisely because Stephen Colbert played to a room full of stiffs "watching to see if the CEO deems it OK to laugh" and it made no difference in his performance. Anyone who is a regular viewer of the Colbert Report knows that he didn't pull any punches and was true to his character - and this is exactly why we do watch his show every night.

Sad to say, but there is a lot more "truth" between the lines - and sometimes directly in them - presented within the dry humour of the Colbert Report, and it's kin, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart - when compared to contemporary pop-reporting striving to be fair and balanced which always seems to best succeed at timid self censorship. Had Mr. Brownfield been a little more attentive he would have realized that a better comparison of Colbert's "D.C. kiss-off" would have been Jon Stewart's last appearance on Crossfire where in a somewhat similar spirit he said what needed to be said and thus spoke for more Americans than the media, you included, realizes or wants to admit.

Dentist's Office

Sinatra & Helicopters

Took a walk across the street to The Grove - the eight story parking structure affords a good view of the neighbourhood.

Walking through to the elevator Frank Sinatra plays on the hidden speakers and several cell phone conversations can be overheard. People making deals, people talking and saying nothing.

The fountain water show spouts up and plops down.

I count at least four helicopters and one piper cub plane hovering or flying around.

The traffic in the intersection is a mess. Busses diverted from their normal routs making sharp right and left hand turns together at a place where they weren't meant to.

Another half hour and I'll be walking home.

Consumer Guilt

Maybe it's trepidation at the purchase of a product that I don't deem necessary to existence - a giddy feeling - this could be a left over involuntary reaction from being born on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. There were few products there of any sort.
We found creative ways to play as children - a form of marbles, but with chewing gum wrappers. Chewing gum wrappers seemed so exotic - the bright colours - the fragrant smell soaked into them - one sniff and it smelled like a better, less drab place.
Yes, there is that giddiness - thinking about a product, doing the research, locating it and finally the purchase. Yes, in my logical mind, when thinking about it, it's guilt that I feel.
Guilt for supporting an unsustainable economy.
Guilt for purchasing something from a retail store that dehumanizes the consumer. Isles of strategically placed items. Being herded down a chute - like cattle to the slaughter - towards a cashier. Then, the walk of shame - where someone looks at your receipt before being able to exit - giving you the eye to see if you're stealing... The experience always gives me the creeps.
Guilt for not giving the money to a cause or to the poor or even just saving it.
There shouldn't be any guilt for spending money earned through labour - but it's an internal struggle I can't rationalize because the act supports The Man - and The Man always is looking for a way to take you to the cleaners and put your ass in an endless spin-cycle of want (not need) for bread and circus.

Kafkaesque - look it up.

I walk through this hallway several times a day. Sometimes it feels just like it looks.

The "I" in IT dues not stand for "intelligent"...

- Slowly crumbling vintage 70's technology.
I love the sound of an HP3000 and the quaintness of COBOL just as much as the next historian, but at some point, passing $17 million a year through it gets a little hard.
- "Senior programmers" with no interest in programing.
Why does that report print an extra blank page? He doesn't know and doesn't give a damn - and mind you, this is one of the few programs based on new technology that a 16 year old would eat up in 48 hours and consider a challenge to do right.
- Accountability? Please...
Don't even think that three months in IT time equals anything close to what we're used to in our dimension... Somehow IT's found a way not only to give one unmet deadline after another (and blame the failures on unseen forces beyond anyone's control), but to stretch out time to at least twice or thrice it's quantitative measure in human terms. When a project is not completed - or even worse, just done enough to be twice as cumbersome to use as what was in place before - the MO is to move on to another project and give it the same treatment. There's always plenty of saps in the building with work to impede.
- "What the hell do you need that for!?!"
This mantra reverberates in ones mind whenever some sort of application is needed. In the IT Universe the user doesn't know what's needed to do a job. Anything asked for is, in their minds, asked for as to inconvenience the IT Squires from doing what they do best (see my point above) - tending their gardens of daisies waiting for the weather to turn ever more favourable.
This alone - if only it were all that lies beneath the surface of IT - would make Kafka proud. Machines with enough complexity to have the potential for infinite combinations of incompetent human interactions.
It seems that the natural order of things in our IT Department is something akin to the best of Soviet style bureaucracy. An endless spiral of incompetence, anxiety, passive aggression and eunuch bravado. The whole vibe is like some kind of virus that turns the stout of heart into piddling clock watchers.
It's despicable and nauseating. I wonder if any of them have read Kafka?

Sound words of advice indeed!
- Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable. -Franz Kafka

Pizza Crust?

Kevin finds a new religion...

J'Accuse! Kill the spoilers!

Found this one here: Political Cortex - and the title caught my eye...

"Kate Michelman to Pull a Nader in Pennsylvania?"
It seems like the same old tired argument getting used for anyone who doesn't join the limp zombie line of DNC drones that seem to stand for less and less now a days. I wonder if the political strategy is to hope that the Republicans dig themselves into a hole they can't get out of? It seems that the Democratic Party is learning nothing from their repeated defeats... or perhaps they're not or never were the party that progressives thought they were. The only snowballs chance in hell seems to be more 3rd party or independent organization and this seems to be making itself more evident through the shutting down of any progressive Democrats that put up a serious and principled fight for anything... Wouldn't it be refreshing if voters turned out and voted for candidates and not the parties which seem to only have empty promises from behind obscenely funded smoke and mirrors for cover?
Here's the tripe below:
Kate Michelman to Pull a Nader in Pennsylvania?
By pontificator
03/06/2006 10:54:27 PM EST
This could be bad news. Catastrophically bad news. Former NARAL chair Kate Michelman says she may run for Pennsylvania Senate as a third party independent candidate:
How angry was Michelman?
The veteran activist, who has lived for almost three decades in Pennsylvania, might just jump into the Senate race herself.
"After Casey announced his support for Alito, I got calls from around the country," says Michelman in a Legal Times article on the fallout from the Alito fight. She tells Legal Times that she has been urged by Democratic donors and feminist groups to run this fall as a pro-choice independent challenger to anti-choice Republican Santorum and anti-choice Democrat Casey.
If Michaelman runs, she'll do nothing but split the Democratic vote and assure a Santorum victory. If she was really serious about furthering the pro-choice agenda, she would have gotten in gear months ago and run against Casey in the Democratic primary. Doing the third party spoiler thing now, by contrast, will return Santorum to the Senate, and therefore assure a continued Republican Senate majority. Such an outcome will not only set the pro-choice movement back, but also hurt progressive causes on civil liberties, labor, the environment, health care, and pretty much every other progressive cause you can think of (goodbye NSA wiretap hearings, hello retroactive authorization of unsupervised NSA domestic spying, for example).
Let's hope Michaelman pulls back on this foul trial balloon. No one is asking her to campaign for Casey. We're just asking her to do no harm.

Three years later...

...I've got an office and he's got a cubicle without any windows. Life is so unjust.
[photo taken 10-31-2003]

Excellent Weekday TV Watching

22:00 PST - G4 - Star Trek: The Next Generation
23:00 PST - Comedy Central - Daily Show
23:30 PST - Comedy Central - Colbert Report
00:00 PST - G4 - Attack of the Show

Assassination Vacation

[Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell - 2005, Simon & Schuster]

This is an excellent book and would have earned 10 out of 10 if it weren't for a couple of real annoying things about it - as it is, I would have to give it an 8 on the AArtVark scale.

An exploration of the assassinations of three presidents:

- Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth
- James A. Garfield by Charles Guiteau
- William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz

Sarah Vowell manages to dig beneath the history most were taught in public schools and dig up a plethora of fun and entertaining facts and coincidences about the assassinations of three now forgotten presidents (except Lincoln, he's on the penny). Some of them are intriguing and some are laugh out loud funny - personally I enjoy gallows humour and have a soft spot for the pie full of irony that life tends to throw in our faces every now and then, so this was an extremely enjoyable read. If you want to read good reviews of this book, go searching on the web to find some - you won't have to scroll long - I will present you with my annoyances.

There are a couple of things however which stuck in my eyes like a couple of sore thumbs:
- A minor point of contention for me that ran through the whole book was the sense that presidential assassins, though interesting footnotes of history, are dismissed as lunatics with no sense or purpose to their actions. I did not get the sense that Sarah Vowell believes that there might be any logic, no matter how twisted or deranged, to the actions of the assassin - as if merely the act of assassination by de facto negates any logic or purpose which might have existed in the mind of the assassin. I am bothered by this because without an unbroken chain of thought and motivation, I believe, the assassin would not carry out his assassination as if a thought spontaneously was planted in his mind by the Devil himself.
- The major thumb which caught me by surprise and nearly gouged my eye out - my immediate visceral reaction being to throw the book across the room - has to do with a specific paragraph starting on page 130 and continuing to page 131. It is there, that practically out of nowhere, and if I were to prescribe to the Vowell Assassination Theory, I would think the paragraph planted by the Devil himself, Sarah Vowell chooses to rip into Ralph Nader like an elementary schoolgirl pinching a boy out of sheer spite.

[...] With a century and change between the 1880 convention and now, I'll admit I rolled my eyes at the ideological hairsplitting, wondering how a group of people who more or less agreed with one another about most issues could summon forth such stark animosity. Thankfully, we Americans have evolved, or hearts made larger, our minds more open, welcoming the negligible differences among out fellows with compassion and respect. As a Democrat who voted for Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election, an election suspiciously tipped to tragic Republican victory because of a handful of contested ballots in the state of Florida, I, for one, would never dream of complaining about votes siphoned in that state by my fellow liberal Ralph Nader, who convinced citizens whose hopes for the country differ little from my own to vote for him, even though had those votes gone to Gore, perhaps those citizens might have spent their free time in years to come more pleasurably pursuing leisure activities, such as researching the sacrifice of Family Garfield, instead of attending rallies and protests against wars they find objectionable, not to mention the money saved on aspirin alone considering they'll have to pop a couple every time they read the newspaper, wondering if the tap water with which they wash down the pills is safe enough to drink, considering the corporate polluter lobbyists now employed by the EPA.[...]

I blinked my eyes at this - the whole machinery of enjoyment just ground to a halt. Here in one paragraph, all the evils of the present administration have been brought about by Ralph Nader who somehow, like modern day political Svengali, managed to bamboozle citizens like myself and my wife to vote for him! (Coincidentally, we voted for him again in 2004.) If someone flings this kind of poison ink on a page, I would at least like to know the logic behind it. I suspect there is none and for true blue Democrats, bitterness is the only thing to be held onto, because hope, especially now, is in short supply - and having given away their principles piece by piece over the last twenty or thirty years there's nothing to fall back on.

So there it is - an excellent book almost entirely ruined by one paragraph. I would urge anyone with interest in cemeteries, assassinations, history, humour and a taste for quixotic non-fiction to give Assassination Vacation a read. It'll be worth your while.

Now how do I use this thing?

Find out how he puts his camera to use at The Jimson Weed Gazette

The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

Got The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove by Christopher Moore for XMas - Never heard of it and never heard of the author - not that I can remember anyway. Just finished it and I'm quite thrilled that I've read it.
Normally I'm not one for reading any sort of fiction. Somehow, most fiction can't even hold a smoldering match to the miraculous hilarity that is the ass of a great non-fiction book - but this one sure did. One good indicator was that I got some great side splitting laughter out of it and I hardly ever laugh, let alone when reading fiction. [see the "Catfish" section starting on page 277 0f the paperback edition]
As far as comparing the book to anything - it gave me the same feeling as when I first read Still Life With Woodpecker - a Tom Robbins' book before he went droll.

• Yes, there is a lizard.
• Yes, there is lust.
• Yes, there is a melancholy cove.

Here is an excerpt that struck me as exceptionally masterful.

Catfish

A Bluesman hates to be told what to do. Authority rankles him, inspires his rebellion, and plays to his need to self-destruct. A Bluesman doesn't take to having a boss unless he's on a chain gang (for the chain gang boss ranks below only a mean old woman and a sweet young thing in the hierarchy of the Blues Muse, followed closely by bad liquor, a dead dog, and the Man)[...]

For background info check out Christopher Moore's website.

LACMA Construction In Progress

2006-01-02 LACMA Construction
Originally uploaded by AArt Vark.

I was rather annoyed by the King Tut exhibit at LACMA. It was neither a really good museum exhibit nor an entertaining freak show. It could of gone both ways and didn't go either.

• A really good exhibit of Egyptian rarities to gawk at and ponder.
• A fantabulous extravaganza on the midway complete with gigantic blow up Sphinx as the entrance and the docents dressed in "authentic" period Egyptian garb.

The exhibit ended up being a sort of half assed and uncomfortable affair with way too many people in all too small of a space, even on a slow day, not really facilitating any enjoyment of the artifacts. The only reason for attendance would have been to share a close approximation to the Egypto-ephemera in badly lit cases. Hell, the sarcophagus featured on the poster and adopted as the identifying logo wasn't even part of the exhibit! I hope they made a fuck-load of money off it to pay for this construction...
Now, the improvement of LACMA is something that I am looking forward to as it promises to really add something of value to the museum.
I was rather annoyed that the side street I took as a shortcut to work in the morning, S. Orange Grove Ave. was being taken over by the museum and incorporated in the new campus, but upon seeing the plans and models in the Ahmenson Building provided by Renzo Piano (architect of the new buildings and improvements) I've got to say I'm pleased... I'm also pleased that it's not another hack job given to Frank Ghery - maybe he's just become the architect I love to hate, I don't know...
If you're interested, take yourself on over to LACMA and have a look at the models and check out the construction site. The construction site is active, so there's something new every day!
If you're curious about Renzo Piano, Wikipedia is a good place to get you acquainted with him.

ZEN: Suds

Sometimes things line up in perfect harmony.
The little scrubby brush.
The water temperature.
The perfect suds.

Washing dishes becomes a pleasure. The suds flowing effortlessly. The water is hot and facilitates perfect cleaning - just at the point before it feels scalding. Rinsing produces a satisfying squeak of cleanliness.

The dishes line up like a jigsaw puzzle in the drying rack.

All is well in the world and the sink empties.