No Will Ferrell as Ignatius J. Reilly.

She looks kinda skinny for me.

Last night I was up until almost 5 am because my sleep schedule is trashed from night work and dopaminergic antidepressant medication. This is in itself depressing. I got to sleep probably around 5:30 and then woke up again at 9 to the clarion call of severe abdominal pain. Thereafter followed an episode over which, dear reader, I will draw a veil. Let’s just say an alien decided to leave my body.

Exhausted from the intestinal adventure, I went back to bed. I woke up thinking hmm it must be about 1 or 2 it seems late. No, it was 6 pm. So, I lost a day. Therefore I chose not to go see Built to Spill tonight because I thought another alien might well wake up inside me and I didn’t want that to happen in L.A., really.

So I just spent a couple hours at D’s and came home. I bought some wine at Hi-Time, where the usual yuppie guys were there explaining wine to each other. There are always two rich guys explaining to each other how great their taste is and how expensive the wine is that they drink. “Oh wow, Craig, look here. They have a 3 liter of the Futon-Pressé ‘89. That’s my favorite wine, really it is. I have cases of it. You should try it!” “Great, Sean! I personally like this Stürmbahnfuhrermilchen that only comes in casks and is delivered to your house by Gypsy slaves..”

Okay, guys. I’ll just sneak out with my really, really tasty $15 bottle of Napa Valley claret. I assume one of them had the $100,000 Porsche with the ugly chrome rims on it out front.

Last week consisted of DBD::Oracle, insomnia, miscommunication, good food, and Miles Davis. What will next week bring?

They shake your hand and they smile
And they buy you a drink
They say we’ll be your friends
We’ll stick with you till the end
Ah but everybody’s only
Looking out for themselves
And you say well who can you trust
I’ll tell you it’s just
Nobody else’s money–

Money changes everything
Money changes everything
We think we know what we’re doin’
We don’t pull the strings
It’s all in the past now
Money changes everything

– Cyndi Lauper, “Money Changes Everything”, from “She’s So Unusual”, 1983. originally written with The Brains in 1978.

My friend Jeff Schwager played this for me in 1985 or so and told me about Blue Angel and the Brains. He and I talked a lot about music and he taught me a lot. I wonder what happened to him. Last I heard he was the arts editor at Mr. Showbiz but that’s been dead for a while.

http://www.28news.com/stories/2004/08/040812disneydeath.shtml

if you are slowly crushed to death by a parade float while dressed as a comical animal, the price of your dying is that of a mediocre used car.

• Penne vodka.
• John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme”.
• VTEC engines.
• Jasmine blooming at night.
• Claret or Meritage.
• Billy Bragg doing “Garageland”.
• The noise my cat makes when she enters the room and notices that I am there.
• The Perl programming language.
• Sitting around D’s talking with the_silent_one.
• Clean, organized, well-labeled cabling.
• Suck.com.
• Clean, soft cotton clothing.
• Henri Rousseau.
• Lazy, endless afternoons.
• You.

13 in Santa Ana Stung as 120,000-Plus Bees Attack
By Joel Rubin
Times Staff Writer

August 13, 2004

More than 120,000 bees laid siege to a Santa Ana neighborhood Thursday afternoon, stinging residents, firefighters and news reporters, authorities said.

After living relatively quietly in a wall of a two-story apartment building in the 900 block of south Cypress Avenue for about two years, the bees poured into the neighborhood when boys threw rocks at the hives, fire officials said.

Firefighters responded to calls from frantic neighbors shortly after 2 p.m. and cordoned off a four-block area. They then tried to keep the bees at bay with streams of water until a professional beekeeper arrived about an hour later.

“It was pandemonium,” said Santa Ana fire Capt. Steve Horner.

“Everywhere you looked, bees were attacking.”

A mother and daughter, who were both stung multiple times, were treated for allergic reactions to the stings and taken to a hospital.

An unlucky jogger was caught wearing only shorts, Horner added.

In all, 13 people were stung, including seven firefighters and two reporters.

The beekeeper disposed of most of the 120,000-plus bees by subduing them with a chemical spray, then vacuuming them up.

About 500 pounds of honey was discovered in the apartment walls, Horner said.

Fire officials said residents had used foam in an attempt to plug holes used by the bees to enter the wall, but had never reported the problem to authorities.

• “Meh”.
• Photobooths.
• 70s retro mustaches.
• Personality tests of any kind.
• Jam bands.
• Knee-jerk anything.
• Talk radio.
• Children driving huge trucks
• “Building your brand”
• $200 toasters
• “Love”

Inexplicable Bondage Picture du Jour.

Probably work safe in that hardly anyone would be able to figure out what the point of all this was.

nickjb told me this evening that everyone at his library job received business cards. Apparently the City decided that they would get cards for all employees in all divisions simultaneously, so the order came down that library employees were to receive these also.

Since Nick is at the bottom layer of the Library hierarchy and shelves books, he is neither an august Librarian nor an honorable Clerk but merely a loyal Page. People in the first two categories received the usual box of 500 personalized cards, which only the Librarians will actually put to use.

The pages received a rubber-banded deck of about 20 cards, on which the name is blank.

After deep and lengthy consideration I can find no actual purpose for such a card. Nick cannot identify himself to customers with it unless he writes his name on it. Even so he has no reason to do this. He is a page; he shelves books and occasionally tells people where the fiction section or the bathroom is. In no situation will he hand a card to a Library customer and say “give me a call”. Unlike say a car rental agency or a medical clinic, a library has no customers who will need a card to remember the address or phone number of the place, either. It’s just not that kind of organization.

The nameless business card therefore represents a totally useless object in the pure Dada sense, like one of Man Ray’s objets inutiles. It exists and has the structure of a useful object but cannot be used for anything that it might represent.

This means that there is only one meaning of the card. It is to humiliate the pages and remind them of their lowly status. Like other Library employees, they are called upon to represent the organization, but they are not entitled to any identity of their own and must demonstrate this by displaying blank calling cards.

The card says: I am of no consequence. I think we all need one!

eyeteeth pointed out to me today that the I Love the 90s television show was reminiscing about 1997, which is only seven years ago. A highlight of long-ago 1997 was South Park. We agreed that it was in fact impossible to be nostalgic about South Park because it was still going on and hadn’t stopped yet.

My immediate thought was this: I demand from now on to experience nostalgia for events synchronously, exactly as they happen in a one to one ratio. I am therefore fondly remembering the old livejournal days as I type this and submit it via that great Internet experience we all shared back in ‘04.

Give me that real time rock ‘n’ roll!