Month: April 2007

In which salome and I discuss the ubiquity of hip roller derby

salome_st_john also if I NEVER see another roller derby photo again I will be so excited and I have friends in roller derby I AM SO SICK OF IT

substitute yup. we should franchise it to junior high schools and retire rich

salome_st_john oh christ best idea ever

substitute has the roller derby cute girls indie boys movie happened yet? it’ll be like the Singles or Breakfast Club for this generation of blurpsters. The Postal Service playing as our heroine goes for the gold. Pardon me while I have a small seizure, here

salome_st_john ONE BLEACH MARTUNI COMING UP

substitute GLOBBLE
The sounds of the 90s, the roller derby excitement of the millennium, and the girls you love: It’s Henry Rollins’ Saturday Night Derby show! With special guest host Ben Gibbard and musical appearances by AFI, Ozomatli, and Juliette and the Licks!

salome_st_john I just peed

substitute I’m going to hell, aren’t I.

salome_st_john luckily I’ll be driving

saturday night, 0125, perfect beans

As a kid I didn’t like beans, mostly. Green beans were okay, but the others were, ugh. Probably this was because of bad textures (my parents had a weird affection for blackeyed peas or red beans with mushy rice), bad flavors (often beans were served with… beans), and some genuinely bad beans. Particularly, overcooked lima beans and sad limp pinto beans contributed to this.

The lesson of my adult bean adventures is: over-season. Beans are great, but you have to treat them right. In this case I cooked 1 cup (dry volume) Great Northern Beans with: black pepper, green peppercorns, a bay leaf, saffron, two tomatoes, a little balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and a bit of epazote. They are fucking fantastic. What would be an overkill flavoring in most dishes is just enough with a cup of beans.

And that’s your saturday night bean update.

mr pharmacist

The pharmacy just before 6 am. There’s nothing like it! It’s a Hopper painting with bonus bad R&B muzak and the smell of floor cleaner.

I bet this is what Death will be. Slightly dirty white floors, sterile piped-in music, waiting on plastic chairs, bright and cheerful signs about terrible things, and waiting for someone in a white coat to do something about the god-damned pain.

Comic relief: my pharmacist was Mrs.Doubtfire again. It’s not that she’s transgender. This is Southern California and no one cares. It’s that she seems to have modeled herself exactly on La Doubtfire. I was wondering if I would be a victin of a walk-by fruiting as I left.

When the haze of the stupid pain pills disappears I am going on a walk. Yeah, you heard me. A god-damned walk! In the NATURE BITS!

story of my life, Lou

she understood when she was just 5 years old
there was nothin’ happening at all
every time she puts on the radio
there was nothing going down at all, not at all

then one fine morning she turns on a New York station
she don’t believe what she heard at all
she started shakin’ to that fine fine music
you know her life was saved by rock ‘n’ roll

you know despite all the amputation
you could just dance to the rock ‘n’ roll station
and it was all right

in which I annoy others with my own annoyances

  1. Youtube/other embedded video links presented without context, as a “click here.”

    Is this something I want to see? Is this something I have already seen? Is this something I really want to click on, thereby bringing my web browsing to a halt and flooding my bandwidth and possibly crashing my browser, or not? No explain, no click. It’s not like images which are basically amusing and load in 5 seconds.

  2. Use of regular LJ account to simulcast an outside blog.

    Why is this on my LJ friend list, if it’s a feed from a blog? If your blog has an RSS feed I can just subscribe to that. When it’s masquerading as an LJ friend, I have to click through to the originating blog and go through the post again, then comment there, possibly after registering or defeating the spam protector on the outside blog.

    Please, just don’t. Put a header on the LJ saying that you post at foobar.com now and just use this for reading protected entries and have a nice day and here’s my feed.

  3. RSS without the full content.

    I am not interested in the first ten words of your blog. I am not interested in your photoblog without the pictures. And I am really not interested in an RSS feed of your paid content that turns into a teaser when I fall for it and click through.

    If you can’t figure out how to use something like Feedburner to put ads in your feed, then you shouldn’t be trying to make money with your blog anyway. It’s involved. Get a paper route.

    If you have a photoblog and an RSS feed, and the whole point of the blog is to gape happily at the photos, no one will use the RSS feed if the photos are not in it. It’s just a tiresome tease. If you can’t afford the bandwidth to serve your photos, why do you have a photoblog anyway? Just have a bake sale.

  4. People who complain about shit on their blogs. WHATEVER, CAPTAIN RANTS-A-LOT!

Mi Casa es su Queso

casa de los gabachos gorditorifficos

This restaurant is part of my childhood. There’s no longer a cigarette machine, but not much else has changed. It’s “Mexican Food” as it was understood by Anglos in 1972 Costa Mesa. Hard shell tacos, refried beans with rice with every entrée, no surprises, and literally deadly quantities of cheese.

For adults there is a great emphasis on margaritas.

Mi Casa is not Mexican food. Most people who are aficionados of good food would not consider it to be worth considering at all. I like it. It’s my childhood, and there is nothing modern about it. No authentic cochinito en pibil, but no Chili’s waitresses with flair upselling me on the Chi-Chi-Tastic Balsamic Nacho Wrap, either.

They never lost the red leather booths or the hanging baskets at Mi Casa, or the sixty year old women in miniskirts and tights serving food, or even the original tables, which as you can see were from a Roy Rogers steakhouse circa 197… 1971, I bet.

Why yes, I would like another margarita, ma’am.