Waiting in line at the pharmacy last night, I saw a strange object attached to the wall:

What the hell is this thing?

Dinner with bikupan at Kappo Honda:

Hamachi (yellowtail) sashimi;
Ika-maru (whole grilled squid);
Yaki-Onigiri (grilled rice cake with eel. I ate Nicolette’s portion by “accident”)

Good sake.

Mmmmmmmmmm. This place reminds me a lot of the Modern Club in Vancouver. The squid dish was almost identical to the squid fimmtiu got for his Landing day when I was there.

Place was packed with happy noisy Japanese people, including a middle aged woman with pumpkin smiley faces all over her socks.

I didn’t get the chicken cartilage on a stick or the natto or the gizzard because I’m scared of those. I did eat one of Johan’s shrimp heads because he wouldn’t, though.

Looks like all the gawker feeds stopped providing images today, or something. Thanks guys.

I had a reasonably good day. No, let’s correct that. I had a wonderful day because I am a rich white male and I live in Newport Beach, CA. Someone I know who lives in Moscow, Russia was last week attacked by wild dogs. That doesn’t happen here. Plus, the weather is better.

I’m also glad that I don’t live in Shenzhen, China. Jack’s uncle wanted him to go work in a hydraulics factory there and live in some mercury-encrusted lean-to in a town that’s more of a shithole than Shenzhen even. He’d be production manager probably and get to deal with things like “The #8 homphulizer blew up and killed 32 workers. Hire some more” etc. Instead, Jack is going to sell cars in Portland, Oregon.

Finally I’m glad that I don’t live in more nearby Norco, California where realitylost informs me one cannot go out and eat seafood. There just isn’t any. So she and I went out to the Crab Cooker tonight and hoovered up various fruits de mer.

i’m excited about going to San Francisco for a few days in May. Boooiiing.

Finally, a moment of unseemly levity:

Senator Chuck Grassley (R.-IA) wishes to pass a bill making credit card debt bankruptcy-proof, so that going through personal bankruptcy will not help those who have excessive card debt. Fairly standard big-money idea, and of course the credit card people are slavering for it.

Jeff points out that it’s a bit worse than that, though. Senator Grassley is not just fiscally conservative. He’s a fundamentalist Christian moral conservative who follows the strict evangelical line on gay marriage, abortion, sex in general, etc. But he won’t apply any Christian principles to debt. A plea from a Christian attorneys group to consider the biblical arguments against usury falls on deaf ears. Why? Because Chuck doesn’t want to mix government and religion! Why, that would be theocratic!

I can’t listen to Christian lawyers because I would be imposing the Bible on a diverse population,” Grassley said. “I’ll bet those lawyers wouldn’t want us to impose the principles of forgiving debt every seven years. If that were the law, nobody would loan them money.

Jeff’s full story, which I recommend for anyone interested in the current “religious” conservatism, is here.

This in a nutshell is why I left the Christian community. Hypocrisy is always part of a religious experience. But the people in my country who call themselves Christians are so puffed up with false pride, so in love with money, so ready to spend others’ lives for their own comfort, so hateful, so greedy, so imperial that to be an apostate is a great blessing to me.

We have met Antichrist, and it is us.

And he’ll take on anyone to get it.

Odd that Iceland is so happy to take him in. I guess they’re okay with anti-semitic racist nuts there? Certainly Bobby would feel comfortable surrounded by Vikings; the vast Jewish conspiracy can’t get him there.

Meet our new U.N. Ambassador, a man of whom Jesse Helms said that he’d want him standing next to him at Armageddon.

Our foreign policy is about to get a really bad mustache ride.

Art about cars from Australia, via Autoblog.

…but all too often, when I consider the pattern of my life, I realize that much of my strength is devoted to avoiding any clear perception of what sort of existence I have, so that with luck I don’t think too much about the life I’m leading until it’s over.

I may well have posted this story before. Not sure, not gonna try to search.

When I worked at the newspaper, years ago, we had personals. There were all sorts of weird things about this. We had to reject the many NAMBLA personals, for example, and deal with the outrage of potential child molesters who were denied the opportunity to rent new catamites. We had to deal with the paper’s tradition of free personals about nothing, in which a kind of mini Usenet/LJ of odd characters socialized and fought via mailed 3×5 card and free weekly paper. And then there were the dating personals.

As a free weekly in the pit of sin that was Los Angeles in the 1980s, we pretty much had a category for anything seeking everything else. There was a lot of pervy amusement to be had. Most of it, though, was men seeking women per the usual pattern. After every issue we’d get a torrent of mail that went to any woman at all who advertised. And the men seeking men was a huge moneymaker, since “traditional” personals didn’t accept that at all.

Sometimes we’d have uneven columns and holes in the pasteup. In most sections of the paper we’d run a small house ad or something similar, maybe a freebie for a long time advertiser. In the classifieds section, we filled them up with fake personals.

At first a couple of the women in the production department put in their own personals. This is how we discovered that the same guys send the same letter and the same picture to any woman who advertises at any time, ever. After a few weeks of this we had a “Wall of Shame” in the production room with ten in a row of the same 8×10 glossies and lovelorn notes. The pictures were real “keepers”. I remember one gentleman in a cowboy hat and Speedos in front of his trailer, and another with a Tom Selleck moustache and a combover leaning on a Mercedes. That kind of thing.

And this was born the Great Personals Competition. Anyone who wanted could enter, and write their own fake ad. Whomever received the most responses in the first week won.

I don’t remember most of the ads. I do remember the top two. #2 was courtesy our classifieds guy’s girlfriend:

Buxom blonde twins, 19, seek man for threesome. Pillow fights, tickling, and whatever else follows. Age, looks not important.

That got a tremendous amount of mail, falling out of the box and annoying the secretary. But it wasn’t #1. The winner, the classifieds guy (and talented cartoonist) himself, wrote:

Affectionate but diffident male gymnast, 18, seeks father figure to explore gay lifestyle. Hairy or a bit overweight a plus.

The amount of mail generated was truly heroic. The wall of shame was entirely covered with hopeful men, straight and gay, thinking they’d hit the motherlode of fantasy fulfillment. And then we all went downstairs to the Two Guys from Italy and drank, because that’s what we did there.