Before you purchase that fly pair of shoes with the cool Asian characters on it, you might want to look through Hanzis Matter to make sure they don’t say “Self Doubt” on them.

One of the patio characters is Medicated Bob, otherwise known as Religious Bob or Blue Guitar Bob. He’s been a regular for years. Bob is a forty-year-old schizophrenic, beefy and tanned, who always wears religious t-shirts. His cycle begins when he’s well-medicated and he sits and reads placidly. Later on he stops taking his medications and he gets a bit preachy, and then a bit more preachy, and then really loud. At the end of the cycle he stops making sense at all, harangues people and shouts, and is finally asked to leave. His third nickname comes from a time when he had a blue (fake) cutout wood or cardboard guitar that he would play and sing along with tunelessly. One time when friendly_bandit was working at the newsstand Bob came up and started screaming out the names of the porn magazines until he was asked to leave. “Plaaaaybooooy! PEEENT HOOOOOUSE!! HUSSSTLAAAAAR!!!” You get the idea, I think.

Bob returned to the patio again today looking rested and well, no doubt on the early part of the cycle. As he was leaving I encountered him out front. “Hello!” he said, “I don’t think we’ve ever been introduced. I’m Robert.” I introduced myself in return and shook hands. He seemed to recognize my name. “Say, I’d almost think I went to elementary school with you.” “What school?” I asked. “Woodland.”

I asked him his last name. “L_____”, he said. “Yeah, I remember you! You were the speed reader in sixth grade!”

Holy fucking shit. The stocky schizophrenic in the religious t-shirt in front of me was Bobby L_____. The kid who was a scary fast sprinter, prankster, a bit aggressive and mean sometimes but mostly okay, just another normal kid. He and I and James and Jamie played tag a lot in fifth grade, and hung out eating Chef Boyardee ravioli and explaining sex to each other in sixth grade. I hadn’t seen him since. Until, of course, I spent the last 7 years seeing him on and off and having no idea it was the same guy.

What the HELL happened to Bobby? WHAT THE HELL?

A giant dominatrix teddy bear wearing a leather mask and brandishing hand-cuffs has been banned from sober Zurich’s street display of man-sized model bears, the project’s artistic director said Tuesday. While tourists pose for snaps next to a brightly-painted and benign array of models such as the ‘schoolteacher bear’ and the ‘skier bear,’ ‘Baervers’ — a pun on the German for perverse — has been deemed too steamy for the financial capital’s streets. The bear appears here in a yard in Zurich, May 24, 2005.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050524/od_nm/swiss_hardcoreteddy_dc_1

1. Backup to drive with the .Mac backup app is slow as hell now. No idea why, but it takes forever to do my firewire drive backup to the iPod.
2. If my wireless connection drops for even a second, my iDisk goes offline, iChat drops the AIM connection, and a couple of other apps shut down and I get the “Your network seems to be dead” annoy popup from the OS. There doesn’t seem to be any way to tell the network “please ignore very temporary dropouts, it’s wireless”. Incredibly annoying!
3. Spotlight is slow. Way slower than Quicksilver was. It doesn’t seem to cache *anything* as far as I can tell, so when I type in an app that I spotlighted earlier that day it still throws its pref file, its icon, all kinds of garbage before it announces that the “top hit” is the app itself. I’m finding it pretty useless.

This all sounds hatey but I do very much like Tiger as an upgrade otherwise. The fast bootup is particularly good on a laptop that restarts more often. I can’t say the widgets do much for me, though. The goodies for me are mostly “under the hood” with this one.

PUMPABIKE!, the bouncy bouncy people powered hydrofoil!

A fine list of TERROR from cockeyed.

http://www.cockeyed.com/citizen/terror/plans/terrorwatch.html

Terrorists might hijack a Sausage & Cheese cart and slowly destroy the economy of the mall
Terrorists might remove all the pictograph buttons from fast food cash registers
Terrorists might give president of USA a cat

Day 3 of Adderall, went up to 10 mg. Didn’t want coffee this morning. Kind of alert. I don’t think I need to go higher, may go back down lower. I can almost hear my eyes moving like in a Ren & Stimpy cartoon.

Bonus points for the writer being “Molly Bloom”.

Firefighters put out blaze in cockloft
Monday, May 23, 2005

A Jersey City woman’s summer clothes were lost but her home was saved after a one-alarm fire on Saturday evening, firefighters said.

The one-alarm fire on Suburbia Drive started shortly before 6 p.m., apparently when an electric lamp tipped into a plastic storage bin filled with summer clothes in the home’s cockloft, Jersey City Fire Capt. Andrew Johnson said.

In spite of the difficulties of operating in a cramped cockloft, Johnson said firefighters had the fire under control within 20 minutes and concluded the entire operation within an hour, “It took a little maneuvering to get up in that area,” he said.

There were no injuries to residents or firefighters and the only damage was to the clothes and some water damage to the woman’s house, Johnson said. A firewall prevented the fire from spreading to the roof or to neighboring houses.

“They were very lucky, because once it’s up in the cockloft, it’s already gone,” Johnson said. “Once it gets up there, it’s almost out of control.”

MOLLY BLOOM

So this guy I’ve never heard of wrote something for the SF paper about how he’s leaving the left to be a better liberal, or something. I had a bit of trouble figuring out what he meant, but I think he meant he wanted to have a headline about a headline about a guy who’s a writer who’s not with the left any more. He’s not Christopher Hitchens so I don’t think it’ll get him a lot of money. But anyway, here’s the “money quote” from his interview at http://www.thompsonatlarge.com/

Likewise, I’ll be glad to cheer when the Children’s Defense Fun gets around to advocating dedicated parenting as kids’ first and foremost need. Until then, I’ll keep saying to Dr. Laura: You go, girlfriend.

Leaving aside for a moment the question of why paying for kids’ vaccinations is forgetting about dedicated parenting, I have a tip for Mr. Thompson. You are an aging white man in a suit. You do not get to say “You go, girlfriend” to anyone at all, ever, much less to a freaked-out nonpsychologist religious fanatic entertainer who makes a living humiliating the suffering of others.

So I’m not going to try to figure out the convoluted reasoning of why you made your big life decision; I’m just going to write you off. You might be better off just getting a red sports car, a weave toupée, and a few blowjobs from your secretary if you want to feel a bit more free.