Someday they’ll all be President

It pisses me off when people post warnings about DUI enforcement online. They say stuff like “take a cab tonight if you’re going towards $TOWN” or “they’re running a checkpoint at Newport & Flower, pass it on”.

How about just not driving drunk? Ever? It’s not hard to avoid. You’ll be helping your friends the best possible way by not killing and maiming them.

If you can afford to go out and drink but you somehow can’t afford to cab it home then you’re just being a fucking sociopath. Stay home and drink, okay? Helping the other sociopaths mow us all down isn’t nice.

bang bang, i’ve got mine

One of my favorite states of being is the sweaty, slightly congested, and fully satisfied glow after eating a good curry. That’s the state I inhabit now after making a pot of chicken curry and eating a couple of servings of it over basmati rice. The rice cooker makes perfect basmati if I press the “quick cooking” button.

Today I was driving through the Edge of Civilization portion of South County (Foothill Ranch, Portola) which is a set of brand new shiny suburbs and malls. At one point I looked at the car next to me at a stoplight. It was a brand new Mercedes sedan, with one male occupant in his forties. He had perfect hair. He was smoking a cigar, which being a nerd I recognized as a Hoyo de Monterrey Prensado Oscuro. And his car stereo was blaring… …an evangelical sermon. Acres of Diamonds, people, Acres of Diamonds.

I saw a blue Mustang with the plate: MEMERY too.

Like passing a needle through the eye of a camel

  1. Ursi linked me to 249 WAYS TO ENJOY TOAST, and really who can argue with the beauty of toast?
  2. Flood Maps is a Google mashup that shows you what your coastline would look like if the water got higher. Here’s my neighborhood after a 7m increase: BLUB BLUB. Bye bye Huntington, all of old Newport, etc.
  3. In other climate news, Maciej Ceglowski reports on huge fucking glaciers totally fucking collapsing with a fucking gigantic crashing noise. Fuck!
  4. I am playing with Platial and so far I really like it. It’s a mapping site where you can annotate locations with your tags and photos and share them.

Do not, repeat do not put another dime in the jukebox at this time.

  1. The always reliable Exploding Aardvark pointed me today to the best rock video ever made: Bring Me The Head Of Rooster Alfredo, by Kill Lizzie. Wow. (Quicktime)
  2. Via The Null Device, a darkly hilarious list of intellectual property craziness. My favorite: A French director had to pay $1,300 after a character in his film whistled the communist anthem, “The Internationale,” without permission.
  3. New frontiers in advertising: The popcorn machines have been replaced with the Bread of Life.
  4. Now that we’re facing the most serious challenges to infectious disease management ever, it’s a great time to cut the funding of the Centers for Disease Control.
  5. Oh bother! It’s Apocalypse Pooh. (iFilm, insane)
  6. If you’re both morbid and bored (borbid?), I suggest browsing Wikipedia’s excellent List of Unusual Deaths.

Good evening! Hi! Hello! How are y’all? Gonna ask you to do one thing for me tonight, that’s all…

There are times when I suspect that the entire purpose of the existence of the United States of America is to create the strange set of events that led to the career of Aretha Franklin. Now is one of those times.

I would also like to thank the Internet for letting me download the entirety of Don’t Fight The Feeling: The Complete Aretha Franklin Live at the Fillmore West 1971 which is out of print from Rhino Handmade and costs $250.

Music Quest

There was a band in the 1980s called Big Daddy. They did 50s-style covers of top 40 hits. This may sound like a bad idea, but they were great. I especially liked their versions of “Sussudio” and “I want to know what love is”. Their stuff was unsurprisingly on Rhino Records. They had an album called “Cutting Their Own Groove” that was particularly fine.

Anyway their stuff is 581% unavailable. People sell their vinyl albums and their one or two CDs for an average of 70 bucks.

If anyone has digital files of them, or vinyl, or has seen some, let me know! I hunger for novelty.