That was tiresome.

Flat front left tire on the Long Beach Freeway in the beautiful city of Commerce this morning. Inconvenience; grime; noise; moderate danger; expense. Saving graces:

* The useful and free Freeway Service Patrol tow people, who rather than just taking me off the freeway so I could change my tire safely, changed the tire for me with high powered tools in about 90 seconds.

* Modern cars, which can take a front left tire blowout at highway seed without becoming the Grim Reaper’s Whirling Gondolas to Hell.

* Working spare.

Things that are apparently hard

  1. Keeping an accurate “new voicemail” flag on a mobile phone. (See Note 1)
  2. Sending a text message from a phone. (See Note 2)
  3. Monitoring the temperature at a data center and keeping the A/C running. (See Note 3)
  4. Receive and file paperwork, first entering it on a computer database. (See Note 4)
  5. Render a web page. (See Note 5)

Note #1: This has been true since the first mobile phone I used. Voicemail flags stick for days, or never appear. The flag will pop up two days after a message is left. Sometimes the victim must reset the new voicemail flag by leaving voicemail for him or herself and then deleting it. How can this be?

Note #2: As long as I’ve been using SMS, it has failed to send about half the time. The signal bar will show full strength! yay! Then, when an SMS is sent, the phone will tell me that the message in fact cannot be sent. A few minutes later, caught in a lie, the phone admits to having no signal at all and starts trying to find one.

Note #3: Thermometers are cheap. So are loud bells. Summer happens every year! So why is it always the customer who discovers it’s 80 degrees Fahrenheit inside? Isn’t this job #3 after “not on fire” and “power on”?

Note #4: You’re an insurance company. What is it you do there, exactly?

Note #5: When the page causes a browser to look up DNS for five or six ad services, and won’t render the page until this is done, DNS then blocks and the viewer either never sees the page at all or gives up in disgust after a minute or two. I can’t see how this benefits the advertiser or the website owner or anyone, really. Why even use hostnames? Why a duck? Why not a chicken?

FIREBALL SUICIDE SHOES

They’re gasoline-powered inline skates! Via McClatchy’s China Rises newsblog, which says:

The skates have a 25cc engine and a small fuel tank behind the right heel, and are controlled by a handheld throttle. But there is no brake! The only way of stopping is a waist-level shut-off button that kills the motor. Skaters likely then go sprawling.

Imagine what happens in a crash: The plastic fuel tank catches fire and the skater quickly gets crispy.

What’s Cantonese for “ACME”?

good morning. well, morning.

It’s 0432 and I haven’t slept. This is almost entirely my fault for the luxurious and gin-fueled nap I had too late in the day.

So of course I’ve been Wikipeding. I was looking at information about actors, because I remembered hyniof pointing out years ago that David Lynch cast the antagonists from West Side Story as antagonists in Twin Peaks, and sure enough it’s Richard Beymer and Russ Tamblyn.

This reminded me of Amber Tamblyn, and of a “literary magazine” I saw at the B&N recently. Don’t remember the name of the thing, but it was very glossy and hip. It billed itself as some kind of “community project” and the front matter was touchy-feely and sweet in a way that reminded me of eTarded ravers.

And among its writers was Ms. Tamblyn, who also considers herself a poet. She’s not.

Also, the magazine had a picture of an anonymous pretty girl on the cover, which isn’t typical for literary magazines. For a moment I thought about submitting a William Carlos Williams poem and seeing if they noticed, but snark is a lot of work sometimes so I just had a Fatburger and went home.

I also read a lot of pages about Tolkien stuff on the Wikipedia and was too tired to correct typos. This reminds me that back in the day when I was an L.A. music lizard, Exene of X had this husband post John who was a poet or something. He’d show up at clubs and I think I saw him read, not sure. He was sort of annoying but mildly, and he had an unforgettably Scandihoovian name. And then I forgot all about the guy until he popped up as Aragorn in the film version of The Lord of the Rings and suddenly that weird Viggo poet person from the club scene was the object of 15-year-old-girl lust and mountains of slashfic. Now that’s just plain strange.

Similarly it’s weird when I hear Gary Calamar on the radio because he managed this band who were friends of mine in my early 20s and kinda hung out with us and had been the manager of the Licorice Pizza record store where they’d all worked. So he was Gary, that nice guy who was always doing something or other musical, and now he’s some kind of media presence. I bet he’d write better poetry than Amber or Viggo, too.

Maybe I should try sleeping again! Let’s see how that works.

I know what I need

To master the challenges of the future, I require a Hyper Lethal Mini Robotic Attack Helicopter or two.

Enjoy the breathless prose of the war-machine lover:

Developed to be utilized as a tactical hunter/killer unmanned helicopter (mini-helicopter) a.k.a. unmanned combat armed rotorcraft (UCAR) for search-and-destroy missions and convoy security/force protection missions, the weaponized NRI AutoCopter Explorer robotic helicopter is a high-tech, high-speed, hyper-maneuverable and highly-weaponized harbinger of death and destruction from above–for the enemy, that is. It will be able to fly in in on enemy targets–both ground and aerial targets–at over 100 mph and engage those targets with forty (40) 12-gauge shotgun rounds or various types of 3-inch (3”) fin-stabilized FRAG-12 HE (High Explosive) grenade rounds at 300 RPM (Rounds Per Minute) out of the twin-AA-12s. The operator/pilot will be able to fire each gun individually or both guns simultaneously, depending on the situation. Oh, and did we mention that it (AutoCopter Explorer) will also be easily transportable in the back of your van (or SUV)?

Of course because of various dumb rules I can’t get one, so they’ll just be sent to suppress urban uprisings abroad and at home. Ho, hum.