Bizarre Behaviour at the Gym Part 3

Don't wear tight little shorts made of spandex. Especially if you're male. Especially if you're male and over forty. Especially if you while away your hours under the glow of a melanoma-forming solarium lamp. Especially if you feel compelled to let the spandex ride high enough up groin to split your nut sack in two, revealing the full form of your meat and two veg. Just don't do it.

I Can Has Balls?

Emasculated, androgynous wuss-pop? I love it. I put mustard on it and eat the shit. See how I love it.

Good news, mopesters, the navel-gazing quartet from Brooklyn, Dirty on Purpose, have dropped the bioavailability of their SSRIs to the point that has allowed them to spit forth a new slit-your-wrists worthy ditty. And they'll take absolutely none of your cash money for the pleasure.

Check it: http://www.rcrdlbl.com/artists/Dirty_On_Purpose/download/Leaving

Yep, hop on over to the oh-so-hip www.rcrdlbl.com (dropping vowels = tres hip) for your helping of corner-cringing slow-pop.

Early impressions: The crushed-scrotum vocals complement the morose melody like a stout cabernet sauvignon complements a slab of rare porterhouse. Deeelicious.

Bizarre Behaviour At the Gym - Part 2

I don't ever want to see an erect penis at the gym. Ever.

But of course I did, otherwise I wouldn't be writing this now.

The other day I was busy washing the stench off my body after a particularly sweaty workout. Having offended more than enough noses with the rancid odour of my sweat-soaked t-shirts, I've since learned to give my drenched workout garments a solid rinsing with Dial soap in the showers once I'm done. The anti-bacterial sales pitch of Dial ain't just a sales pitch, boys and girls.

So I was getting my scrubbing done when I caught a glimpse of the person in the shower stall opposite mine. As he pivoted to access a touch-to-reach part of his body I swear I saw a boner making itself known to the world at large. Nobody wants to be the guy in the locker room showers staring at another man's potentially erect cock, so I quickly turned away.

He pivoted again, somewhat self-consciously, making a half-hearted attempt to disguise what, in a second flash, was revealed to be an honest-to-goodness stiffy. Worse yet, he was looking back at me!

Look away and pay him no mind, I thought to myself. Dry yourself off and leave. Empty your mind. Empty your mind.

And I did.

The odd thing here is that the gym is located in San Jose, not San Francisco. You'd expect that kind of thing in the San Francisco gyms, but not in San Jose. I've never seen such a thing in the SF gym I go to, but then again, I never shower at the gym in SF. Perhaps there's a reason.

Bizarre Behaviour At the Gym - Part 1

I pulled my bike up next to the bike rack situated in front of the entrance to the 24 Hour Fitness gym (otherwise known as the McDonald's of gyms) at the Potrero Center in San Francisco. After securing the bike with two locks—I lost a previous bike to thieves at the same spot about three years ago—I started to make my way past the disabled parking spaces. Like most disabled spots, they're marked with the typical blue wheelchair logo right next to the door to the gym.

A minivan edged into one of the two disabled spaces. The blue wheelchair placard dangled from the stem of the rear vision mirror. Out bounded a spry, middle-aged woman of squat dimensions. She grabbed her gym bag from the rear of the van, slammed the tailgate with a loud bang and made her way inside.

Weird, I thought, that a "disabled" woman should be firstly, acting with such vim and vigour, and secondly, going into a gym. Sure, there's probably much, much more to her story than I can glean from a few seconds of observation in a dimly lit underground parking structure, but it struck me as kind of ironic that a person so in need of the conveniently located disabled space should be using it to go to the gym. Sure, disabled people can workout too; that's why there's this thing called the Paralympics, but this woman didn't even seem mildly hobbled. There wasn't even the slightest hint of a limp, gammy hip or twisted elbow. She just slung that bag over her shoulder and waddled her plump, but not obese—lest she be branded genuinely disabled—frame inside for a brisk workout.

Fifteen minutes later I saw her working up a decent sheen of lady-sweat astride the stationary bikes as she made her way through a circuit workout.

Pet Peeves - Fixie Bikes Part 2

I've ranted about fixie bikes before—those no-brakes fashion accessory bicycles that Mission hipsters love to park in front of Ritual Coffee Roasters on a Saturday afternoon. I'm a self-confessed curmudgeon about them... But I'm not the only one.

A couple of days ago I was parking my double caliper braked hunk of junk down at the Best Buy on Harrison Street. Peering down at the rack I copped an eyeful of the following:

Okay, so the photos taken by my mobile phone are blurry pieces of crap—definitely not up to Brit standards—but you get the idea. What I love about it is that it combines two of my favourite things: nerdy lolspeak and a heathly disdain for riders of fixies.

In the lower right-hand corner of the sticker an email address is listed. I contacted the person on the other end of the intertubes asking for a clearer image of the text listed below the main headline. Here's what I got. Behold, in all its glory!

You can click on the image for a larger version, or you can exercise your constitutionally enshrined right to be a lazy bastard and just read my retyping of the fine print.

fixed gear bikes are for people who live in plains states. welcome to san francisco, or wherever you are. fashion and peer pressure can make you do anything, even something as misguided as eschew gears in a hilly town. "obey your thirst." different, better advice: get over your bad self. don't forget to use lube. power down. stay healthy. if you keep it up, something inside you's likely to explode. BLAM! then where will you be? huh? well, right where you are now, but with an exploded body part. and nobody wants that. get there in the end, & our cardiovascular systems can still beat marketing execs' in a fair fight. above all, ride predictably. don't run red lights. participate in 4-way stops. PLEASE. it is frustrating when car drivers ignore us, but ignoring them is not the solution. and ignoring them and the traffic laws will get us killed. get home safe. look around at us. have empathy. believe me, some-bloody-body needs to.

Yeah, fight the power! I'm with her/him all the way except for that meandering middle part about brushing your teeth and exploding body parts. That was way too cosmic for my tastes. But the rest of it? Right on the money. I'm so glad somebody is out there changing the world, one pointless sticker at a time. I'm especially glad when said sticker fuels my crankiness, and with a lolcat twist to boot!

He Shames Men Everywhere

I just got off the phone with The Brit. That man needs to be retrained. He's making the rest of us look like unsympathetic, lazy, self-absorbed fools. Now he's a good mate of mine, and he's even been kind enough to bestow upon me the honour of joining his wedding party, but his perpetual over-achievement is making the rest of his gender look ugly.

Exhibit A for the prosecution: The Wedding Proposal. Read the thing, the whole thing. It's worth it. Discover the lengths a man will go to in order to demonstrate to the rest of his brethren that his notion of romance is 6.79×10⁶ times more epic and significant than anything that the rest of us can concoct. I mean, he flew the woman to Hawaii. Think about it. He orchestrated a chain of ultra-charming, spare-no-expense-because-you're-worth-so-much-to me, heart flutter-inducing events in the hopes—who thinks the outcome was ever in doubt?—of securing the life-long partnership of his favourite Cubana Gringa. It's just like the genre-killing 1991 release of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless album. With the release of one record the whole shoegazer music movement collapsed now that its pinnacle had been realised. The same goes with The Brit. Now none of us can ever propose to our respective significant others without receiving some remark about the lengths that stinkin' Brit went when the time came for him to pop the question.

And it gets worse. Between jetting around the globe for work, he lends himself to extensive charity work, preparing food for the local homeless shelters in San Francisco and constructing homes for Habitat for Humanity. And he maintains an active social life. Me? I think about doing these sorts of things and then kid myself that my life's already overloaded. But The Brit? Shit, that fucker slides straight off a plane, puts in a full day's work and then races into Costco to purchase the food for the homeless shelter's soup kitchen. Meanwhile I'm contemplating whether or not I should have a wank.

And oh yeah, he's marvellous photographer and an excellent chef. In fact the whole chef thing nearly backfired on him. A couple of years ago The Brit was desperately single and seeking ways to improve his chances with the ladies. Quite sensibly, he settled on two specific areas in which to improve and refine himself that might widen the scoring goal posts a little: cooking and dancing. While I haven't seen The Brit turn on his dance moves in a while, I have had the pleasure of eating a lot of his food. So had a number of ladies. He's good. Too good. He's so good that it was intimidating—both to me and to his female prospects at the time. Except of course for La Cubana Gringa. I'm not sure if anything or anyone intimidates her.

So men at large, get to work. We've got a lot of pastries to bake, tiramisus to construct and a pile of elaborate proposals to plan. Ah fuck it, I think I'll just kill myself now and avoid the hassle.

I've Seen a Few Before

I've been plugging away at my job in Silicon Valley for nearly ten years. By the time March of 2008 swings around the calendar will have clocked past the decade marker, and that's a long time. It's an especially long time to be working for the one employer. Sad but true, I've been slave to the will of the one corporation ever since I set food on American soil. I recently tried to change that state of affairs.

Right around Halloween, the household of The Brit, La Cubana Gringa and assorted other roommates threw a party. It was a rager, with my personal—and non-existent—costume prize going to the woman who dressed up as a box of Pocky. During the course or the evening I ran into the former Vice President of the department in which I once worked at my current employer. He departed the company under somewhat controversial circumstances, but that's a whole other tale for the telling. Anyway, he clued me into a Director of Engineering position at a startup that, unlike most startups people think of when they hear "startup", is making money hand-over-fist. They've got a staff of 25 and they're raking in annual revenues of around 17 million. What's the nature of their work? I'll answer the question shortly.

I was told by the former VP that they're carrying on like it's still 1999, and the job might well cast a lure strong enough to draw me away from a decade's worth of indentured servitude in Silicon Valley. The new job is in San Francisco, the pay very much on the high side and they're throwing all the usual and ridiculous perks once lavished upon the startups of old: massages, snacks galore, comped lunches, you name it. Colour me intrigued, I said, and then promptly forgot about it.

A couple of days later an email arrived for me. It was from the contract recruiter hired by the startup to stock the company with talent. After a brief exchange of emails we agreed to meet. The odd thing was that we agreed to meet on a Saturday afternoon at Puerto Alegre—a restaurant located near the intersection of 16th and Valencia that's well known for its margaritas. And one last thing, the company is in the porn business.

The porn business? I wasn't quite ready for that, but the more I thought about it the more I liked it. After ten years in the semiconductor trade, the thought of jumping ship for the land of boobs and balls seemed quite enticing. Instead of watching eyes glaze over as I tell people who ask that I manage a group of web developers for a Silicon Valley-based semiconductor, I'd suddenly become a source of insider information into the salacious world of shaved pubes and DVDA. Yeah, that sounds great. Now, whenever I go to Australia and hang out with my wine maker brother, I might actually stand a chance of sustaining more than a half second of anyone's attention after we're each asked what we do for a living. A Silicon Valley semiconductor manager doesn't stand a chance against a wine maker. Nobody gives a shit about electronic components, but just about everyone's got a stake in the wine business somewhere, and I'd wager nearly as many—whether they advertise it or not—have dabbled in porn.

So I met the recruiter at Puerto Alegre. He's a regular at the place and holds down the same spot every Saturday afternoon. He was calling the staff by name as he did his best to ensure that my margarita arrived promptly. It did. He then divulged the extra details about the company and not without a lot of spin. Yes, they're in the porn business but they're not a producer. They're more like a straight-up web company that just happens to have wound up a purveyor of smut. And he's got a point. The company, now revealed to be [REDACTED], has cooked up perhaps the most ingenious way of delivering video over the web. The greasy-haired producers in the San Fernando Valley supply their DVDs to VideoBox who encode the discs using a proprietary codec and then deliver the content to their fee-paying customers via a very slick Flash-based interface. The key there is the "fee-paying" part. Cast your mind back to the dim, dark, nascent days of the intertubes; it was the porn industry that first worked out how to extract a buck from the web. The porno peoples have been making money off the web for over ten years, while the major "legit" studios are still thrashing around, spewing forth failed, DRM-laden white elephants that chew through resources and yield nothing but a huge loss.

With the help of about three margaritas I managed to leave an impression. The interview was set up for the following week—the next Friday to be precise.

Clad in my ten year old suit that miraculously still fits me, I presented myself at the offices located near 2nd and Mission in SoMa. True to the words of the recruiter, the place was rockin' like was still 1999; snacks were in ready supply and the Dance Dance Revolution arcade machine languished monolithically in the center of the office, daring anyone to use it.

I met the guy running the show. He was bearded and overweight, but the beard was neatly trimmed, as if to say, I know I'm a fat slob but I still give at least a little bit of a shit about how I appear. The look of smug self-satisfaction hung on his face about as attractively as his fleshy jowls. I didn't really like the guy and I wondered whether or not I could handle working for him. He'd be my boss if I got the job.

But things brightened up as rest of the engineering team made their way into the office to meet with me. They were all smart, tech savvy and genuinely into the technology. The whole porn aspect of what they were doing was simply incidental as far as they were concerned. They were convinced that they were working a cutting-edge web startup. And I agreed. The high point of the interview sessions came when, feeling especially confident, I declared to the developer with whom I was meeting, "I've seen plenty of dicks going into pussies before. It's the technology that really excites me!"

Never again will I utter those words in an interview. It struck me only as I walked away from the building, mentally replaying the moments of the afternoon, that I'd just had a once in a lifetime moment. I suffer from social tourette's at the best of times, letting loose with all manner of inappropriate remarks under the cover of a funky accent. But in this instance the filter came off altogether and it was a strange relief.

Last night the recruiter called me. He said I didn't get the job. He said that while I was a cultural fit, my ten years of working in staid, large, corporate environment had left me ill prepared for the stress of a small startup. I agreed. During the interview it became clear that I would prefer to operate at a more abstracted level while the company wanted someone better able to stick his fingers into the code and make a mess. That's not me.

The recruiter put my name in his Rolodex and promised to call me when the next opportunity swings around.

They're NOT PEOPLE!

I've got two cats. Well, that's not quite true. I have a cat, a tuxedo-furred lump of fluff named General Zod, and The Great Organiser has a cat, Piet, and since The Great Organiser and I live together I therefore get to live with two cats. You get the idea. You're not stupid. It's also worth remembering that I do not live with any dogs, not even a small one that might conceivably fit into my tiny, shit-box sized, sub-700 square feet apartment. No dogs. Not one.

So Friday swings around and I dutifully go to check the mail. I get a stack of window envelopes and an armload of apparently important bank-related mail for what seems like about four of the dozen or so people who have at one stage in the past decade called my current address home. All the hunting catalogues that lodge in the mailbox for a certain Mr. Henning Schultz indicate to me that he must have enjoyed slaughtering a critter or two with high velocity projectiles. With a name like Henning Schultz that strikes me as being kind of appropriate. It just screams Schützenfest.

Nestled amongst the stack of crap was a magazine. Oversized and glossy, the publication was the premier issue of Wag Magazine: the rag churned out by the same business geniuses whose minds gave birth to the retarded baby that is Wag Hotels. The tone of the magazine and the mindset of the people behind it is made abundantly clear right there on the cover.

It would be impossible to produce a cover that reeks of any more nervous social status desperation and bizarre anthropomorphism. You're into wine because it's what all the well-heeled people at Mummy's and Mummy's new boyfriend's country club are into. Daddy doesn't do wine since Mummy divorced him after she found out that he had been fucking that "cheap whore" in Marketing who's half his age. He just does hard liquor now. But you're into wine and now you're going to project your wants and desires on that pet of yours. That dog really couldn't give a flying fuck about wine, Napa, or anything you're into except the food, but you think a black lab amongst the grape vines looks so cute that you're just going to have to take a photo and plaster it on the cover of your new magazine.

And then send it to a person who has two cats.

Each page is a window into a world of massive conspicuous consumption—the sort more often found in LA than in San Francisco. But scrutinise the biographies of the editor and contributors and you're left with the suspicion that those involved in this love letter from bored dilettantes are from the Marina: an outpost of excessive yuppiedom bunkered away on the northwestern side of San Francisco. They're all thirty-something women whose attempts at snagging that doctor or dentist have dragged on for about a decade too long. With the hopes of meeting their parents expectations of success in tatters, they've turned to the only creatures who won't dump them for a younger bit of fluff after the third shag: their dogs. Left with nothing else productive to do in their lives (there's always in vitro fertilisation, ladies) and no way to demonstrate to a world that once expected so much of them that they've actually accomplished something, they've assembled a document that illustrates everything that's wrong with the crass distractions of the obscenely wealthy, or at least those people who aspire to be obscenely wealthy.

Here are a few examples of how everything this magazine represents is wrong. People are being slaughtered in the Sudan but if you want to add a touch of period charm to your apartment situated just off Lombard and you're feeling particularly generous to your pooch today, why not buy her a doggy four poster bed? Fuck it, while you're at it, close that feature article on forced child labour in India, jump into your Benz and head down to Beverly Hills for a spot of doggy yoga and acupuncture. And since you're obviously so flush with dough, plonk down that six spare grand you were going to donate to the hospital for some gaudy white gold dog charm jewellery. And then spend a few hours trying to work out on which crappy, mass-market work of "art" by George Rodrigue you're going to blow a wad of cash.

It fucks with my head to think that there are people in this city, and indeed in this world, who are so self-absorbed that they think their dogs need as much high-maintenance pampering as their sheltered existences are used to. They're fucking dogs. They eat their own vomit and sometimes their own shit. They couldn't give a rat's arse about some San Diego chef who bakes gourmet doggy treats; they'll eat a slab of rancid bacon if you presented it to them. Save yourselves the money. And if you really want to do something useful with that cash that will actually do something that might bring some benefit into this world, donate it to a good charity. There are plenty of them: The Sierra Club, Doctors Without Borders, The Red Fucking Cross. Take your pick! Just stop making up for the spiritual and emotional bankruptcy of your life by trying to turn your dog into a carbon copy of yourself.

And don't send your shithouse magazine to me again. I don't own a fucking dog!

Long Time No Type

Yeah, I've been out for a while. There are a few stories to be told and they'll trickle out like a runny nose over the course of the next few weeks. The short excuse is that I was busy studying and feeling sorry for myself. A month and a half is enough time off, I think, and now I'm feeling the urge to throw myself back into the fray. I'll get back to covering a few of my favorite topics...

• Custom licence plates
• The Great Organiser
• Cat Wars
• Me

I found this rolling cliche in the parking lot outside my therapist's office (yes, I'm in therapy, that's got a whole lot to do with my extended absence).
I think the owner of the Mini is a pedophile. What else could KIDWRK mean?

(R)adelaide Rules

It's in. The Economist has published its annual list of most awesomely radical cities and the winner is some Canadian place that I've never been to. It's probably cold up there so exactly why The Economist saw fit to put it at the top of the list escapes me. But check it. CHECK IT. Number 6. Adelaide. Or, as we locals like to call it, Radelaide. So rad. And Adelaide is perched there one rung above the so-called jewel in Australia's gleaming crown, Sydney. Suck on that Sydney-siders! How does it feel to be trumped by dour, boring Adelaide with all of its human carcasses stuffed into barrels of acid and general love a decent grizzly or unexplained murder? Somehow the eggheads who compiled this completely bogus and inconsequential list figured that living in a city that touts a "freeway" that only goes in one direction in the morning and has to shut down, clear the traffic and then reverse the flow for the evening is a really, really good idea. I'll bet you twelve Aussie dollars that even Bogota hasn't concocted such a busted-arse transport concept and tried to pass it off as a success, and they're scraping the bottom of the barrel on this list.

An old mate of mine once explained his disposition towards Adelaide in a way so elegant that I've never heard it matched. "Adelaide," he said, "is a lot like pissing your pants in corduroy: it's really warm and relieving but you're still pissing your pants." The interesting thing is that he's right, and I knew it. Stay there long enough and you'll either wind up floating down the Torrens after a late-night attack or you'll just slowly feel any drive and ambition ebb from your body. You'll rationalise that being tucked away in the capital city of a who-cares state in a country most citizens of the world think is located somewhere near Hungary isn't so bad. You can still get a reasonably priced yiros down the road and there's plenty of Farmers' Union iced coffee available to mollify the symptoms of the inevitable depression and anxiety brought on by your slow descent into anonymous mediocrity.

But hey, Melbourne's nearly at the top of that list. I hear that place is okay. Their cricket stadium is heaps bigger than the one in Adelaide and they like footy there too. Not like Sydney. They hate footy in Sydney. Wankers.

Pet Peeves - Upside Down Eights

The lazy posts continue unabated.

I hate upside down eights. Usually they rear their top-heavy heads on petrol station price signs, screaming to the world at large that whoever shoves the back-lit numbers up there on the board can't tell his elbow from his arse. Or at least his head from his feet.

Upside down eights are glaring markers of a fundamental lack of attention to detail in the life of the person who saw fit to confuse the big loop with the little loop. "Check me out," they say, "I can't work out how to read a fucking number. Guess what else I can't work out? Lots of stuff, I'm betting."

So I was walking down San Jose Avenue near my house on the weekend and no shit, this is what I saw bolted to the front of a house...

It's your house! Your fucking $800,000 house! Get it fucking right! I can forgive a barely employable and savagely undereducated petrol station minimum-wager for mucking it up, but when you're attaching these things in a more or less permanent fashion to the exterior of your San Francisco love-pad you should probably take a second or two to see which way is up. It's not hard. Pretty simple really. Little loop on top. Big loop on bottom. Christ!

Pet Peeves - More Custom Licence Plates

This is what I do when I'm either too lazy or too busy to write a decent post: I submit a new custom licence plate.Ric's alma mater-sporting (another pet peeve I've not yet addressed) Benz was found proudly displaying its pedigree at the Park-n-Ride by the Black Mountain Road exit off 280. Keep in mind that the Black Mountain Road exit serves to feed the well-heeled through to the palatial grounds of an exclusive golf course. And there you have it: Ric likes to mingle with the gentry and whack off a few tees, if you know what I mean.

Thanks for telegraphing it to the rest of us via your custom licence plate, Ric. We really couldn't give a shit.

Pet Peeves - Custom Licence Plates

Oh man, they're at it again with their custom licence plates. This one makes no sense whatsoever. Can any of you decipher it?I'm at a total loss. Is it supposed to refer to Luciano Pavarotti, "You, Tenor!"? Is the driver of the vehicle a big fan of the Under 10 Experimental Audio Research squad? I'm flat-out stumped when it comes to grasping the connection between the San Francisco Giants and whoever the fuck U10EAR might be. Now I feel as dumb as the person who paid the DMZ for this useless licence plate piece of shit. I'm going to go and dip my head in a pot of boiling oil right now. thx bye.

Anatomy of a Friday Lunch

In my erstwhile life away from blogging, I'm a web development manager at a Silicon Valley tech company. About 50 miles' worth of freeway separates home and work, so when Friday swings around I generally choose to set up shop in the kitchen of my tiny apartment, hip-and-shoulder the cats off the table, and work from home.

One of the perks of the work from home on Fridays scenario is the boozy lunch with colleagues both former and present. Today I got the call-up from The Brown Hornet. Here's an anatomy of a Friday lunch.

Visualise a computer running Yahoo! instant messenger.

The Brown Hornet: Wanna get lunch?

The Polished Turd: Um, yeah, okay. Where?

The Brown Hornet: Somewhere in the Mission. Zeitgeist?

The Polished Turd: Sure, that'll work. If we're not into it I guess we can pick somewhere else nearby.

The Polished Turd: Anyone else coming?

The Brown Hornet: I can check.

The Brown Hornet: I'll be there at noon.

The Polished Turd: I'll check with a few others to see who's coming. See you then.

For those not familiar with the great watering holes of the City, Zeitgeist is a San Francisco dive bar institution. Boasting a great selection of beers on tap, including a few choice ales from the Russian River Brewing Company amongst others, Zeitgeist draws in a large crowd of thirsty punters, especially on a sunny afternoon.

I arrive on my bicycle a fashionable seven minutes after the appointed hour of noon. The Brown Hornet declares that has already ordered and that I should do so too.

"What do you want to drink?"

"Um," there are a lot of beers to choose from, most of which are exceptionally tasty, "how about the Mount Tam Pale Ale? That's a good one."

I fully expected The Brown Hornet to emerge with a pint each. Instead he's toting a pitcher and three glasses. As he drops the pitcher on the wooden bench in the expansive beer garden a few drops spill over the edge.

"That's probably more beer than we really need."

He's right. It is. The Brown Hornet goes on to explain that The Brit is likely to make an appearance at any time and put that third glass to good use, but this is The Brit we're referring to, and those who know him will attest that he rarely does anything either quietly or on time.

The golden liquid disappears as if there's a leak in the bottom of the glass. We discuss the departure of the incumbent CEO at my place of work—a place where The Brown Hornet spent about five years of his working life prior to absconding for a rival start-up—and our personal and career aspirations while the meniscus on the pitcher drops steadily lower.

Finally The Brit arrives, somewhat flustered and almost complaining about the mountain of work that's being heaped upon him.

The Brown Hornet and I have done a fine job of getting through that pitcher of high-potency ale. There's barely enough ale left to half fill The Brit's glass.

"Shall I get you another drink?" he asks, realising that his own thirst needs more slaking than the remnants of the pitcher can provide. Besides, there's a kielbasa sausage with sauerkraut and mustard on the way. I'm about two thirds the way through mine but The Brit's hasn't hit the table yet.

Mentally I run the calculations on how much beer I've already had, how much more I'm likely to drink in the company of The Brit, and how much I really shouldn't drink if I'm to return to my make-shift office setup in the kitchen. This would be the time to let common sense kick in, deny The Brit and be responsible. But it's a sunny afternoon at Zeitgeist. The beer's cold and the burgers hot. Ah, crap, who am I kidding?

"Sure, why not? It's Friday afternoon. I can handle another."

Donald Trump Trumped

OMGWTFBBQ!!1!11!!! Donald Trump could stand to take a few lessons. Holy shit for shit, I could stand to take a few lessons. My mind is blow'd. He doesn't have that much mass on his head to begin with. Somehow the dude has mastered string theory and torn a rift in the space-time continuum, and he's now drawing on additional mass from one of the ten or eleven alter-dimensions. There's no other reasonable explanation. I need to take a break before my whole being dissolves. This just isn't scientifically possible.

My Terrorists $tarve Osama's SUV

About the only thing more amusing in this world than a self-righteous licence plate is a self-righteous bumper sticker.

Driving back from LA yesterday I caught this little display of haughty superior-mindedness plastered across the back of, you guessed it, a Prius.

"My car $tarve$ terrorists, does yours?"

The use of the dollar signs drives the point home with alarming efficiency, doesn't it? I really wish I'd been able to snap a photograph before the vehicle tore off ahead of me at ludicrous speed. On the scale of superciliousness it even beats my previous favourite Prius bumper sticker for the top spot...

"Osama loves your SUV!"

It might as well read "America! Fuck Yeah!" I can picture Osama in his Pakistan border cave right now, hunched over his laptop and masturbating furiously while he downloads grainy pictures of big-haired Texan mothers driving their home schooled pre-teens to bible camp in the recent model year GMC Yukon Denali. He loves it so much.

Hairs would need to be split to find the difference between left wing and right wing bumper sticker propagandists. Leave either a self-satisfied Prius driver or an "America Über Alles", flag-waving monster truck driver to boil on the stove for a few hours and the residue left at the bottom of the pot comes out the same.

Don't Make Me Do It Again

I'm heading down to Huntington Beach this weekend and there's no way I'm getting in a plane. I'd rather drive the I-5 than put myself through the excoriating experience that now constitutes flying within the continental USA.

Adding up the hours and factoring in getting to the airport a couple of hours ahead of the scheduled departure, allowing for the inevitable delay at the gate, allotting for the stress of being herded like sheep through the dip at the security check, and finally suffering the me-first push-and-shove of the exit from the plane, I've decided to drive. We're usually most comfortable when we're the masters of our own destinies, or at least secure in the belief that we're the masters even if we're not. And that's the illusion served to the masses careening down the nation's highways. I'm buying into the fantasy.

Mr. Loverboy (of www.lacubanagringa.com fame) was due to join The Great Organiser and me for the ride down to HB. He was in Palo Alto. We were mere minutes away. My mobile phone rang.

"Hey, Polished Turd, how's it going?"

"Not bad. We'll be there in a a minute."

"Hey, you know what? I don't think I'm going to head down there with you tonight. They're setting up a crazy party here and I think I'll just get a plane ticket and head down tomorrow."

"Have it your way. We'll see you there."

Evidently Mr. Loverboy doesn't share my disdain for the American domestic airline system. Either that or his mental calculus told him that the benefits derived from a night of partying with college students (read: girls) outweigh the detriments incurred by flying Southwest Airlines to Orange County.

Can you blame him?

Movies - Live Free or Die Hard

There's not a lot to do when in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, so The Great Organiser and I took in a movie: Live Free or Die Hard. Despite being totally preposterous, it's honestly quite a lot of fun. The movie is supposed to be about John McClane, but he never really shows up. Bruce Willis gets called "John" throughout the film, but in truth Bruce is just Bruce and that's good enough for the purposes of an action film that pretends to be nothing else. In spite of a smattering of desultory gestures towards character development, Bruce is served up to the audience as a relatively complete package, bald head and all. The director, Len Wiseman, understands that Bruce is a known quantity; we know what we want from him and he gets down to business and delivers. It's not a perfect film by any measure, not nearly as perfect as the first Die Hard, which stands to this day as perhaps the definitive text-book action movie, but it meets its own expectations and even exceeds them. Pixel-driven special effects are ditched in favour of good ol' stunts and props and the script, despite being obviously written as a feature removed from the Die Hard oeuvre and later shoehorned into a vehicle for Bruiser, moves along at a decent clip. Think about it too much and it all falls apart but not to nearly the same extent as Transformers. In this instance it actually makes sense.

In Defence of a Simple Wedding

Hello there reader. I'm sure there's only about one of you so I'll stick with the singular for now.

There's a lot to be said for the simple wedding ceremony. Big, bloated, over-stuffed weddings, choking on their own excess while toppling over due to the top-heavy weight of their self-importance aren't too hard to come by. Chances are that one of your closest friends is planning one of those affairs right now. I'm calling for a savage cut-back on all that perfect venue, perfect dress, perfect flower arrangement, perfect catering, aaarrrgh-the-stylist-totally-fucked-up-my-hair mayhem. Withdraw for a moment, relax, step back and do it simply and do it right.

That's what The Great Organiser and I had the pleasure of enjoying in New Haven, CT, last weekend. If you're looking for an opinion or a critique on New Haven from me then it's in. The place stinks. Take one of the nation's snootiest universities, stuff it full of a handful of cashed-up stick-up-the-arse social rung climbers and surround it with a teeming horde of impoverished bottom feeders whose meager existence it is to dutifully serve their ivy league overlords.

For the record I went to university in Australia—Adelaide Uni to be precise. I managed to dodge the whole American cult of university thing and for that I'm eternally grateful.

The Yale grounds are pleasant enough in a tony East Coast sort of way, but the rest of the city is more or less a dump. Skip it if you can. The wedding, on the other hand, hit the mark. If you're going to put on one of these things, and if you're going to do it kind of on the cheap, here's what you can skimp on.

• The Bride's Maids' and Groom's Men's Outfits — Let them hear hessian sacks if they want, nobody's really going to give a shit and you'll still get to say "I do."
• The Wedding Dress — Sure, you think you look totally rad in all that taffeta but again, at the end of the day nobody else but you is really going to be all that impressed. More to the point, all the other women at the event, including your own bride's maids, will be sizing you up and whispering, "she looks kind of fat in that, don't you think? I can see her belly bulge showing. There's no way I'm going to look that cheap when I get married," to one another.
• Music — Don't hire a band. Go and get one of your buddies who fancies himself as a burnin' up the dance floor DJ to spin a few discs.
• The Ceremony Itself — Keep it short. We're bored already.

Here's what you should NOT trim, skimp or reduce. It's just not proper.

• The Reception Dinner — Never, ever, EVER let the reception dinner fall short. EVER! Everyone attending a wedding reception is required by the laws of weddings to leave both full to the point of explosion and quite drunk. The Great Organiser and I attended a wedding a year or so ago hosted by two very lovely people who, despite being lovely, made the monumentally stupid error of trawling Craigslist to source their caterer. Dumb move. Craigslist is great for anonymous gay hookups and busted furniture, not good for wedding catering. By the time our table was called—we might have been last, I can't remember—all the grub had disappeared. We ate scraps of bread. It was completely shitty. Get a decent caterer. Spend the money. Get everyone plastered on good booze and feed them more than their guts can contain.
• The After Party — Now you can kind of skimp on this one, and if you obeyed the above rule about the grub then you can economise on the grog by snagging the leftovers from the reception (you remembered to supply more booze than could be consumed at the reception even if every attendee were an alcoholic, right?). All you're going to have to do is get the right venue, and if you're smart about it you'll do it at a hotel near the reception. Go a step further and hire a limousine or a bus service to ensure the army of pissheads gets from its wine-soaked and completely fabulous three course dinner to the party without causing a string of road fatalities.

Do these things and you're assured success. Luckily for us, the kind former San Franciscans who invited us to flee our liberal lifestyle for one weekend hit the right notes. The ceremony was short, practically devoid of religious sermons and loaded with good food and booze. Congrats, newly weds, you did it right.

In Bethlehem, PA

I'm currently in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, soaking up the hospitality of the octogenarian grandparents of The Great Organiser. They're a kindly couple who seem determined to feed me every last scrap of food contained within the house.

"Would you look at that corn! Have yourself some more. Go on, have another one."

If there's one thing I've learned about ingratiating oneself to one's hosts, it's that one should always accede to the demands of said hosts to consume more of their food. I've been dutifully obeying the rule and so far my methods seem to be working.

Just as I was about to depart from work on Tuesday afternoon one of the people who reports to me decided he'd start kicking up a fuss. He's been known to do it in the past. Personnel issues arising on the afternoon before a red-eye to JFK airport demand one course of action—pass it along to your immediate superior.

I've kept track of the email threads and it looks like it's getting nasty. I can't wait to return to the office on Monday. Woot.

New Tunes - Van She and The Field

The music collection has swelled by a whopping two discs. Here are the initial impressions...

The Field - From Here We Go Sublime
The proverbial punching bag of the electronic music scene is trance. Produce music that vaguely approximates a drone set to a steady yet subterranean beat and it is likely to attract heaping mounds of derision from the loftier and more cultured minds of the house and breaks set. And in most cases it's well deserved. There's a lot of shit out there and there's a lot of shit trance out there. Rightly stated, The Field is undeserving of being saddled with the trance albatross. Skirting close to the minimalist school of bleep, The Field—apparently a one man act from Sweden—deliberately toys with repetition, paving an aural pathway that seems to promise a lively journey towards a clearly defined location, only to loop back on itself a few metres from where it all started. It's mildly infuriating but oddly enough it works. A week or two into the purchase it's found its way into regular rotation.

Van She - Van She
What are we to make of the eighties? At the time they seemed like an improvement over the cultural missteps of the seventies, but now that we're a generation clear of the era, the status of the decade is looking kind of shaky. The cinema was kind of naff, the clothes actually got worse, but at least we got The Smiths. So why is everyone trying their gosh-darned hardest to evoke the crappest parts of the ten years that gave us Bros., Milli Vanilli and Martika? Van She, in their defence, seem to be taking the piss—sort of. On one hand they're winking at the audience while they belt out a few thinly veiled retreads of early Depeche Mode, but on the other hand their blatant channelling of old synthesiser sounds from 1982 hints at a belief that they're transcending something more than musical; to them it's an ironic fashion statement. Played within the framework of kitsch, Van She get away with it, but they're seriously deluded if their high school variety of irony is anything more than a flash in the pan. But I'm listening to it right now and it ain't half bad.

Still Childless - There Are Reasons

My thirty fifth year of walking this earth is bearing down upon me and thus far I've managed to dodge the whole breeding, spawning, fatherhood thing. Of course I'm now of an age when more than just a handful of my friends are impregnating one another and ushering in their own private bundles of joy into the world. I'm simply not one of them and neither is The Great Organiser. That's not to intimate that such an eventuality has been forever stricken from the cards for us, it's just that we've got, well, other priorities. And if what I've seen of parenting so far is to be believed as the norm, I might wait a while longer.

Take The Big Gay Wiggle (not his real name) for example. Whilst he's somewhat biggish he's neither gay nor one of the Wiggles. He and his wife—coming up with an appropriate name for her has been tough; we'll call her The Counsellor—had their first child about two years ago and it all went well; from The Counsellor's womb emerged a happy little bub and The Big Gay Wiggle could be found at parties demonstrating his ability to cradle an infant in his left hand while he counter balanced with a beer in the right. Parenthood seemed grand. It was possible to take the baby to a barbecue and still chug a shitload of booze.

The Counsellor herself had been taking more than her fair share of swigs from the baby Kool-Aid bottle. Judging her attitude towards motherhood, you'd think that their newborn was shitting lumps of opium into her nappies and her parents had been eagerly scooping it up and smoking it. They were that high on parenthood.

"So when do you think you and The Polished Turd will become parents," she imploringly asked The Great Organiser on one of our return visits to Australia.

"Um, it's not really part of any plan we've got right now. Besides, there are plenty of adoption-worthy kids out there who need good homes."

That kind of response brings the blast door slamming down extra hard on any further conversation with a new mother. In one fell swoop the mother's entire life for the past year has been rendered inconsequential. A well orchestrated recover is possible, but it takes a conversation genius to execute it. Moreover neither the The Great Organiser nor I could be bothered.

Compare the parental disposition one year later. When The Counsellor's attitude towards motherhood the year prior gets taken into account it should come as little surprise that she and The Big Gay Wiggle decided to throw themselves at the mercies of procreation once again. The weird part was the circumstance. The Counsellor hadn't had her first period since the birth of her first child and she was waiting for it to come around. And she waited. And she waited. And she waited.

She got bigger.

She got fatter.

The Big Gay Wiggle placed his hand on her nascent bulge whilst out at nature park and remarked, "Shit Love, I felt a kick."

She was five months pregnant.

Just after The Great Organiser and I lobbed into Australia their second child was born. The attitude was completely different and we'd have been forgiven for thinking that the Kool-Aid had been replaced with vinegar.

"We're done with that one. We didn't see it coming and we've got a few things to sort out now."

Yeah, I bet you have.

Then take last Saturday night. Whitey and his lady and daughter are doing what so many people who fall pregnant whilst living in San Francisco: they have their baby and then promptly flee for the 'burbs. It's a sad state of affairs for new parents in this city and the parents can't be really held to blame entirely. The school system is in disarray, the housing is cramped and it costs a boatload of cash to live here. All's well when you're pulling a fat wallet salary, but when that baby's mouth starts to beg for food why not do a bunk for Oregon?

The Great Organiser and I put on a spread for them on Saturday night. Things were going along just fine when the shorty decided the coffee table would be a great thing to headbutt. In the words of The Big Gay Wiggle's mum, "babies are really hard to kill. I mean really, REALLY hard to kill. You can pretty much drop them on their heads and they'll bounce right back up into your arms." She's probably right you know, although I'm hardly one to judge. None the less the baby was by now a writhing, bellowing mess, and the ice pack, despite arresting the swelling, made her irritation even more pronounced, thereby bringing Whitey's dinner to a close. He'd barely made it a third of his way through the plate.

The rest of the guests—there were two others visiting, one of whom supplied more bottles of awesome wine than were really needed—sat back, enjoyed our childless state of being and proceeded to polish off as much of the vino as possible.

We slept well that night, awoken not by crying children hungry for attention, but instead by warring cats.

It Came from Japan - Thanko

There's a lot to love about Japan: Godzilla, Gatchaman, really big robots duking it out, really big monsters duking it out, and perfectly sized food portions. Over the course of years, Japan has done a marvellous job of gauging the paranoias of society at large and repackaging them as adolescent entertainment with a not-too-slight dose of smut thrown in for good measure.

What then should we make of Thanko? If you're not familiar with the company, their catalog of products rest upon a fascination with the USB port that more than borders on sexual; it's a downright fetish.

Clock a few of these gems.

First up is the Visomate—a device that goes "Pee! Pee!" all over your face whenever your posture slips and your glazzballs stray too close to the monitor. You could probably sell that to the Germans just on the porn factor alone.

Next in line is a device tailored especially for the needs of a certain Cubana Gringa. The USB ass cooler seeks to, well, cool one's ass through the magic of the USB port.

I'm hardly short on for a bit of fleshiness hanging off my lower spine, and when you consider the rampant miasmas that emerge from bowels of my being, I for one would be the first in line to give one of these devices a spin. I'd probably fork over double if it came with a sachet of baking powder to neutralise my noxious anal fumes. The issue here for all of us with some junk in the trunk is that all that junk tends to hold a lot of energy. Screw directing a fan to the face on a hot day, it's the tush that demands all the attention. Maybe the eggheads at Thanko aren't as insane as they seem.

Rounding out the trio is perhaps my favourite of all Thanko products: the USB ashtray. Extended, four-days-without-a-break sessions of World of Warcraft demand the consumption of ridiculous numbers of ciggies, or so I'm told—I'm neither a World of Warcraft play nor a smoker—and that's where this nifty device comes into play. It plugs into your USB port, sucks in your cancer-ridden smoke and emits slightly less cancer-ridden smoke. Genius. It might be worth becoming a dirt stick addict just to justify owning one of these things.

To be honest what I really want, and it's not made by Thanko (for shame!), is the Robotech Sex Thruster. Slap the name "Robotech" onto anything and there's a good chance that the nerd inside me will be drawn to the product like a cat to a fresh litter box.


Yeah, bolt that thing to the table top, get your lube tube in hand and slam the throttle forward. Apparently flesh is now obsolete in Japan.

We're Apparently Full

All of that custom licence plate stuff from the other day helped me cast my mind back a few years to when I paid a visit to Townsville, Queensland. Amongst Australians, Queenslanders are second only to Tasmanians in the national objects of derision standings. This photo should help you understand why.

You see that orange/yellow map of Australia just above the naked woman? Let's get a closer look at it.

"Fuck off we're full"!?! If there's any country in the world that could stand to absorb a couple of million people it has to be Australia. German tourists routinely disappear without a trace after embarking on "short walks" in and around Coober Pedy. It's possible to literally drive for days on highways in Australia without passing another car. Nut-job religious types flock to the great Australian expanse in order to escape the human world and discover "God" somewhere out there in the Outback.

Check the list of countries ordered by population density. At the top is Monaco, with a density of 23,660 people per square kilometre. Australia is six shy of the bottom at number 224, supporting a density of 2.6 people per square kilometre and rubbing shoulders with such people-packed nations as Mongolia (1.7 people per square kilometre), Western Sahara (1.3 people per square kilometre) and Greenland (0.026).

This should make it abundantly clear to everyone on the whole freakin' planet that there is absolutely NOTHING full about Australia—nothing! Walk in and take up some space, please. There's loads to share.

And real Aussies do indeed drive utes. Just ask my brother.

For My Mum

Yesterday was my mum's birthday, God bless her.

A few years ago I was at a party where everyone was crowded around just outside the back door of place while they took turns at slagging off their parents. Either the mum, dad or both of each person was in some way a retard, asshole or directly or indirectly responsible for a critical flaw in the person's personality. Their parents either made them bitter by withholding necessary affection or made them gay by smothering them with too much. They either held them back by not providing them with sufficient resources to get a leg up in life or broke their spirit by cracking the whip too hard. Maybe they just sent mixed signals about what it meant to be a good parent.

I couldn't take part in any of it. The fact of the matter is that I'm not a mental case. Don't read me incorrectly, I'm hardly perfect, but when it comes to all things parental I haven't got too much to complain about. I kind of like my parents, and when taking a retrospective view of the decisions they made in rearing three kids in Australia, I can't fault too many of their choices. They managed to churn out three more or less stable, successful adults. We'll overlook for now the little part about none of us being married or with children, despite all three of us kids now being in our mid-thirties. That's a separate post.

More than anything else, my mum helped mold my expectations about women in society, and she did it for the better. Coming from a working class background, my mum wasn't really expected to do much with her life other than hold down a job as menial as, say, a receptionist or typist, and that was if she opted to work at all. A quick inspection of my grandmother's life reveals that she was content to spit out a few kiddies and call it quits right there. Instead Mum opted to become a senior chemistry teacher at high school. So there you have it, Mum was the science-type person of my house and Dad, also a teacher but in his case of such "soft" stuff as geography and history, was—and kind of still is—the comparative luddite. Want to know something about maths? Ask Mum. Need help with fractions? Ask Mum. Want to see something really cool done with magnesium? Ask Mum. That's not to say that Dad was crap, but compared with Mum it just wasn't his bag.

One of my favourite stories of her was from when she was teaching at Cabra College, a Catholic high school in Adelaide. At the start of the day she gave her students a cup of beetroot juice to drink. The students were then informed to pay close attention to the colour of their bodily secretions as the day wore on. The kids loved it. Each time they took a piss they'd check the shade of what was emanating from their urethrae. That mum of mine has a great insight into the minds of teenagers. I think the kids really respected her after that whole beetroot juice episode.

The ramifications of being imprinted by such a woman at an early stage live on. The reversal of society's established gender roles seemed more like the rule to me than the exception, and putting an enjoyable spin on science probably had a lot to do with me winding up working in that arena. The older I get the more I appreciate the things my parents did for my brother, sister and me. I hope you had a happy birthday, Mum. I hope you'll have a lot more.

Cat Wars - Are They Really Over?

I called the official end to the cat wars a week or so ago, but I think the armistice declaration might have been somewhat premature. There have been a series of border skirmishes and flare-ups, usually centered around Chumbles' inherent skittishness and 'fraidiness, that have caused us to reinstate the forced time-outs, separations and sin bin sessions in the hope that Chumbles' anxieties will finally subside.

For a while there it seemed like we were on a complete reversion back to open hostilities, but the photo says otherwise.


There's hope for us yet.

The Alleys of San Francisco - Juri Street

Let's give the pet peeves a rest for a while. There are plenty more of them hanging out in the eaves, waiting for their turn to shine on stage, but they can stay there a little bit longer. Their time will come.

Something that I love about San Francisco, aside from the restaurants, weirdos, odd weather and architecture, is the number of tiny alleys and side streets. There must be hundreds of these little-known byways dotting the city, each one a secretive nook with private tales to tell that get overshadowed by the much-storied Valencias, Polks, Gearys and Markets.

San Francisco is second only to New York City in terms of its urban density, and that's what lends it so much of its charm. Stacked on top of each other are the homeless, the urban yuppies, the Mission hipsters and the migrant Latinos. It's noisy, boisterous, overwhelming and invigorating. By taking a turn down one of the narrow alleyways you're abruptly wrenched free of all of that overpopulated mess. Everything seems suddenly quieter. You can hear the plastic food wrapper buckle and bend as a fog-propelled breeze pushes it along the gutter. The voice of an angry mother as she chastises her infant son is borne aloft the scent of homemade enchiladas, lifted out of her kitchen window and left to waft into the tiny street. Much more of an opportunity presents itself to pause, look up, and watch the tendrils of fog twist and dissipate overhead. The big, depersonalised city slows down for a few moments, ceases to be an assault from every angle and miraculously becomes personal.

Take Juri Street for example. Located right around the corner from where The Great Organiser and I live, it's a pokey little path that rests right alongside the equally pokey Juri Commons.

It's small, quaint and a welcome oasis. I expect everyone on the street knows everyone else, and in my mind I can picture all the residents getting together on every third Sunday of the month for a Scrabble tournament, or something equally as dorky, while they sip cups of tea and discuss their improvement plans for their slice of San Francisco. Truth be told they're probably swapping sex partners, doing lines of coke every other night and filing restraining orders against one another, but I'm allowed my idealised fantasy. There's something reassuring about imagining that in this weird city there's a place or two where some measure of normalcy reigns. But that's a fantasy, isn't it?

Pet Peeves - Custom Licence Plates

Still feeling curmudgeonly and peevish? I am. Despite being Australian—we're supposed to be the most laid-back people on the planet—there's a lot out there in the world that grabs my goat. That goat can be kind of gruff and angry sometimes.

On the chopping block this time around are custom licence plates. I hate them for a number of reasons. Firstly, they're a crap form of expression. You're constrained to a set of seven characters, of which most combinations have already been snagged, so you're going to have to fight the laws of the English language pretty freakin' hard to come up with something vaguely original. Most of those "original" end products are so bastardised as to bear little resemblance to the word or concept they were initially supposed to represent. I'd kill to have a good example at my fingertips right now, but I don't.

What I do have is this, and it brings me to my second point.

It would seem he or she—let's be real, it's a "he" isn't it?—has his 450 HP, and I don't think he's referring to a Hewlett Packard computer. It couldn't be made any more obvious unless the plate was bordered in pink neon, and that's been known to happen.

What we're asked to assume here is that the car is capable of spewing forth around 450 horse power. That's a lot of horses. He's evidently very proud of it, and why wouldn't he be? He's probably blown untold sums of money jamming an air-forced filter here and a muffler expansion there just to extract a handful of extra horsies out of the motor. And he wants you to know it too. As he hits the 280 during rush hour and starts dropping the foot on the pedal as he weaves through the banks of traffic, he wants you to look on in in amazement as he streaks past in a blaze of red. He wants you to clock the licence plate as it disappears into the vanishing point and think, Jebus, those were a whole lotta horses that just flew past and it seems like that red Supra is the car that's got 'em—all 450 of them. The licence plate tells me so.

This is the part that disturbs me the most. When did our cars become such an extension of our personalities that we feel obligated to customise what is perhaps the least customisable part of the car in order to advertise to the world at large an inconsequential aspect of our lives? Nobody but the driver cares how many horses are in that car. Nobody else is impressed. You forked over $100 extra or whatever to the DMV so that you could engage in perhaps the lowest form of self expression. The money would have been better used had it been donated to charity.

Coming up soon: Mini Cooper drivers and the vehicular extension of personality.

Pet Peeves - Fixie Bikes

You've seen a fixie before. They're those bikes ridden primarily by hipsters around the Mission District. They have no brakes and run via a direct drive mechanism—no slack-legged freewheelin' for our well-heeled trendy types, just a lot of arse-over-tit skid stops and plenty of more-fashionable-than-thou looks at the stop lights, assuming they bother to stop at the lights. And that's kind of rare. Stopping is kind of difficult on a fixie. But everyone cool is riding a fixie these days. Why aren't you?

This is a fixie. No brakes. No gears. Only hipsters ride them.

Well, if you're like me then you're avoiding them on account of the fact that they're the hipster analog of the oversized jeans worn by would-be gangsters that belt loosely around their mid-thigh region. Okay, the analog falls apart when you consider that fixie bikes are a mode of transport whereas half-mast gangster jeans are a, erm, um, I'm not sure what they're supposed to achieve. But they're a fad, just like the current eighties revival that's compelling far too many young women to wear leg warmers and inflict a kind of Flock of Seagulls attack on their hair.

Roll into the haughty arrogance that comes with being hipper than anyone else on the street the kind of sanctimony expressed by far too many bicyclists. You're both pushing the limits of fashion AND kidding yourself that you're saving the planet. It's a great mix. The end result is perhaps the most obnoxious group of riders on the road, SUV drivers included. With all that in mind you can imagine the kind of laugh that came blurting out of my mouth when I noticed the following bumper sticker on a car as I belted my way down Page on my single gear clunker bike. It's not a fixie. There is a difference. The sight was enough to make me use my brakes (yeah, brakes, fixie riders, they're handy things), turn about and take a snap.


If driving a beaten up black Jetta around San Francisco means there's one less fixie on the road then I'm with you, whoever you are. Keep fighting the good fight.

Farewell Whitey — Farewell Good Night's Sleep

Whitey is running for the hills—or maybe from the hills since he lives in Bernal Heights. I'm kind of confused right now. Like a lot of people who get knocked up and spawn in San Francisco, Whitey and his partner have come to the conclusion that this charming, compact, urban outpost of the weird, wonderful, strange and sometimes dangerous ain't no place to raise a bub. They're doing a bunk for a rural sector of Oregon, about one full bladder's ride outside of Portland.

Saturday night was my send-off for him. He and I shared a house down by 25th and Hampshire Street for the better part of five years. We witnessed our neighbour, Francisco, scream "chupe mi dick!" at the top of his lungs at his estranged girlfriend in the wee small hours. We witnessed the very same Francisco's car leap into flames as a result of what he maintained was a mysterious vendetta. Whitey and I concluded the sudden torching came about due to the dodgy wiring he'd used as part of his homespun custom stereo installation. We'd staggered back home drunk after a solid session of boozing it up at Treat Street Cocktails, shoving each other into trash cans and shop screens as we stumbled our way back down 24th Street. He deserved a decent farewell.

And that's what we had. Our attempt to get a table for two at Suppenkuche was abortive—apparently the place does a roaring trade even up to 9:15pm, whence the waitress stopped taking any further names for tables—so we made our way down the road to Absinthe. To cut a long story short we imbibed sufficiently, eventually closing out the bar at Zeitgeist. With the bar now closed Whitey managed to zip over the road to the convenience store to snag a sneaky pint bottle of Jim Beam. It went down a treat.

So of course I came home a little on the sloppy side. The Great Organiser was very much The Great Expression of Tolerance this time around, and she even humoured me as I crawled under the covers. I didn't wake until 11:30am the next day.

And that was my undoing. Remember the sleep-debt payoff cycle? Well, it clobbered me with full force last night. With the clock striking 10:30pm and the movie finished I did my best to get some sleep. The remnants of the hangover will lull me off nicely, I thought. I was wrong. The clock kept ticking past midnight and beyond. Then it was 1am. Somewhere in between I drifted off into a hypnagogic half-sleep, coming fully alert sometime around 5:30am. The damage was done and I battled my way off to work.

Now it's 7:30pm on Monday night and my brain is mush. The higher order functions have fled me and I'm going to retire to a bowl of whatever The Great Organiser is cooking and senseless episode of Gatchaman. I'll see you in the dreamworld.

Yet Another Movie - Transformers

I'm going to come charging out of the gate with my commentary on this film; its awesomeness is matched only by its astonishing stupidity. Make no mistake, Transformers is a Michael Bay film, and if your memory of schlocky summer blockbusters needs any refreshing a few of his towering contributions to the cinematic art form include Armageddon, Bad Boys and Pearl Harbor. Yes, Pearl Harbor—the film that, despite sexing up what was a lightning strike on a dormant fleet into a drawn-out 45 minute bullets & bombs slugfest, managed to shit all over the legacy of the thousands who died via perhaps the sluttiest love story ever to grace the screen.

Señor Bay's oeuvre is pretty much defined by variations on the concoction outlined above: hot chicks in slutty romances, really huge explosions and no regard for story, plot, character development or—God forbid—causality. Transformers is in no way a departure from Mr. Bay's established aesthetic; the special effects signal a milestone achievement, the audio engineering is completely immersive and none of it makes a lick of sense.

Here are some of the points that made me feel like I left fifty or so IQ points in the movie theater.

Why does freezing the robots immobilise them when they're apparently capable of functioning in the cold depths of space?

Why is the network breaker locked when it is needed the most? Shouldn't it be readily accessible in the event of an emergency?

Why is Soundwave so adept at taking out secret service agents on Airforce One but really struggles when in combat with a small group of cryptographers?

Why are Sam's parents so oblivious to the presence of four 40 foot tall robots in their back yard?

Why does shoving the cube into a robot's chest kill it? Why shouldn't it miraculously transform the robot into something new since it was established that the cube can bring machinery to life? For that matter why shouldn't the cube imbue the robot with so much power that it becomes a super robot?

How can a 75 metre tall cube transform down into a cube about the size of a computer monitor? What happens to all the extra mass?

How does Bumblebee know how to activate the cube's transformation when an army of scientists who have been working on the problem for nearly a hundred years have no idea?

What purpose did the blond Australian woman serve aside from providing window dressing?

I've barely scratched the tip of the iceberg that represents all of the plot holes and gaffes that riddle the film. They're manifold and overwhelming. Oddly enough Michael Bay has been engaged in a war of words of sorts with the producer of the film, Tom DeSanto, over writing credits. Considering the ridiculousness of the story, one would expect them to be fighting over who gets to distance himself most from the mess, but no, they're each trying to hog their share of the glory.

And glorious it no doubt will be once the receipts have been counted. Transformers is the kind of silly summer junk that packs the seats at megaplexes, and I'm counted amongst them. Calculated, profit-maximising entertainment targeted at delivering the highest spectacle to intellectual engagement ratio will always sell, and as the weeks progress expect the coffers of Hasbro and Paramount to balloon. The kids are putting mustard on it and eating it up. Watching really big robots beat the living shit out of each other is going to be fun no matter what, but does it really have to be so stultifying?

The sequel is slated for a 2009 release.

Pet Peeves - The Upside Down Eight

I'm a man of many opinions, some might say too many, and stashed away in that peanut brain of mine is a litany of pet peeves. One of my favourites is the gas station upside down eight. By the way, I gave up clinging to referring to gas stations as petrol stations a few years ago. Some battles are futile and when it comes to how one refers to the location where one procures fuel for one's vehicle it's best to adopt the "when in Rome" approach. For the record I still call aluminium "aluminium". The fact that America persists in referring to that particular metal as "aluminum" hints at a cockup as vast and as far reaching as the one that instituted the use of the word "entre" as an umbrella term for the main course instead of the starters. You'd think that the translation of the word from the French would have given the progenitor of that mistake a decent idea about its intended use.

Anyway, so I hate upside down eights on gas station pricing signs. The little loop goes on the top, the big loop goes on the bottom. It's not hard to sort out. Just take a look at the number: little loop top; big loop bottom. If you can't work something as simple as that out then there's probably a whole raft of other aspects of your life that are seemingly simple to most but confound you at every turn.

And I won't hear any of those "we're free to be creative with our use of language" arguments either. Those sorts of arguments usually come from people who can't muddle their way through the use of such newly dispensable stuff as, um, grammar and punctuation. Hey, if it's too tough to work out just jettison it wholesale and write the exercise off as an act of creativity. Guess what, folks, you have to know the rules before you break 'em. James Joyce knew how to handle direct quotes before he resorted to that whole hyphen thing.

Ratatouille - Good Viewing

I took in Ratatouille on Sunday night and left the theatre a very satisfied movie goer.

Last year's Cars was the first Pixar movie I'd decided to dodge at the cinema—it looked a little too trite for my tastes, but I've since been told that it held up pretty well. Ratatouille, on the other hand, was not going to slip past me. The main reason for that is the director: Brad Bird.

The Incredibles was a masterful achievement, doing what Pixar does best by embedding relatively complex subtexts beneath a visually stunning layer of computer wizardry and well paced action. Moreover the script was polished to a gleam, and the characters evoked a genuine visceral engagement. It touched upon themes of exceptionalism—about how when everybody's special then nobody's special. It's a theme that Brad Bird has further built upon in Ratatouille, and much like The Incredibles he's done it with a deft hand that skillfully avoids the kind of violent message bludgeoning so often found in almost any other big budget animated film.

The choice of a rat as the protagonist is an interesting one. Rats are nearly universally reviled as the harbingers of death and disease (thank you, Black Death), so the use of a rat as both the main character and as an aspiring haute cuisine chef throws a prejudicial gauntlet down squarely in front of the audience. It's a direct challenge to the viewer's preconceptions of assigned stations and roles. Rats are horrible, pestilent creatures. Rats should never come near food or else they'll riddle it with their disease. Rats are borderline demonic and kept as pets by creeps and weirdos. To plonk one down in the middle of the kitchen of a schmicko restaurant is the ultimate heresy. We're just not culturally trained to readily accept a rat as a suitable subject for the kind of heartwarming anthropomorphism found in Ratatouille. And that's the film's primary genius. In order to accept Remy as a chef, so many of our other preconceived notions about how hereditary elements factor into our development in life are called into question. One of the main theses of film is that ultimately one's pedigree counts for nothing, and when all is said, done and counted it's the merits of the individual that really spell the difference between one who can cook and one who can be a celebrated chef. Linguini, despite being Gasteau's son, is an awful cook. Remy, despite being a rat, is an outstanding chef.

I'm digging too deep, I know.

There's an awful lot to say about this film—wet fur is evidently the latest effect that impressed the animators at Pixar the most; the character acting, especially by Skinner, is better than most living, breathing people; the commentary on the tension between personal limitations and aspirations is powerful yet not forceful—but it's more than space will allow. Just as with The Iron Giant and The Incredibles, Brad Bird and Pixar have delivered another near-perfect kids film that's more than suitable for the shorties, but serves up a whole lot more for the older set as well.

Update: Brad Bird and Patton Oswalt appeared on NPR's Fresh Air on 28 June. I was grateful to hear them discuss some of what I crapped on about in my post. It's also worth it for Patton's routine about Black Angus commercials. Check it out.

The Death of Punctuation (and Intelligence)

The intertubes have done many wonderful things for us. They've given us Mahir, lolcats, and lots of lovely, beautiful women. They've piped works of musical genius into our homes and offices and allowed us to shop for pretty much anything we like whenever we want.

But perhaps the most endearing aspect of the hyper-democratisation of the now-technified masses is the way in which the interwebs have given voice to those who previously had none. Sullen, semi-educated malcontents across the globe now have more outlets for their partially formed opinions than they can possibly address in one long, slow afternoon of unemployment. And it all comes wrapped up in some of the most elegant prose ever to grace either paper or pixel.

Take for example these nuggets of excellence from YouTube, which now serves as the primary opened spigot for butchered rants and hateful abuse hurled by anonymous cranks at faceless others from behind the comfort of a Windows firewall. It's all just a bit too easy for anyone at all to inflict themselves on YouTube, and the end result is the most dumbed down version of toilet wall taunts available to the species. At least with the toilet wall you were limited to a few brief lines; YouTube lets you write and write and write.

In this instance the topic of conversation is Gatchaman, which probably requires some explanation, but it's a nerdy path we're not going to walk down right now. Maybe I'll get into that some other time. For now keep your focus on the voice of the masses, not on the nerdiness of Gatchaman.

dude stop kissin ramosnef ass its not about us bein rude its about u not lookin at the show for what it is a good show its to many people in the world they always put dumb ways of thinkin in the mix its always got to be about race of she or he is fat or the sex of the person thats dumb its just people need to carin about dumb shit like that this world wil die out people carin so must about money looks race

Where do we start with this little literary marvel? Is it the total lack of punctuation that lets the writer's inner voice shine so brightly? Perhaps it's the complete neglect afforded the letter G at the end of any verb operating in the continuous tense. Best of all I like the obligatory newspeak substitution of "u" for "you". When you do that everyone knows you're hip. I'm mean ur hip.

i forgot to put stop in between to - carin in the last comment sorry but im not mad at u its just why care about that theres a big guy in g-force hell when power rangers came out did u know alot of black people was mad became the black ranger was a black guy that was dumb of them to think like that its was just a tv show people hid to make its about race

I was really, really tempted to shift the case of the block of text to upper case in order to lend it more oomph, you know? Anything in upper case is by definition more readable and packs more oomph.

What I like here is that our writer is attempting to make some kind of racial/social commentary vis-a-vis the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. For my liking the Power Rangers was just a stupid kids' show about stupid kids making stupid hand gestures while wearing stupid coloured tights in a stupid big robot. That's stupid stuff. But our comment poster has gone spelunking in the cultural depths of the Power Rangers and surfaced with a trophy. If he's so sharp when it comes to the Power Rangers imagine the social analogs he'd draw with the Ferengi and Romulans from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Our friend isn't done yet either. All the lack of capitalisation and talk of racial issues has gone and punched his buttons enough to get him to shift his razor-sharp intellect to the topic of obesity and weight issues. My personal favourite is the bit about the jumping jacks.

and dude just because a persons slim dont make them better i know alot of slim people who are very weak cant even do 100 jumpin jack how sad and the bad thing about it know some bigger people who can do 200 jumpin jack size means nothin its heart gatchman 5 got heart hes the best one like in voltron the yellow loin is a big guy he can take care of his self i like this cartoon because they show all people can do the job no matter of u slim fat a girl old or young its ass kickin time

Creeping into his screed is a version of the old "believe in yourself and you can do anything" maxim that Hollywood is so fond of milking, but the whole "Voltron's yellow loin" thing has me miffed. Since he's described as being a "big guy" does that mean his loin is ample and yellow? Perhaps he's jaundiced. Then he caps it all off with a spin on the "we're all awesome and capable in our own special way" cliche that gets wheeled out for an airing on just about any given Saturday morning cartoon. Exactly what he's getting at with "girl old" has me at a loss. It seems like an oxymoron but I'm almost certainly missing something, just like I'm confused about how anyone can be "slim fat". Maybe that's similar to when people say "bad" when they really mean "good". "Hey man ur lookin totally slim fat today." It's got a ring to it. At any rate I couldn't really care less 'cause it's ass kickin time and that's all I need to know.

The weird thing is that there's actually a kind of consistency to the spelling and grammar that's being employed. The rule states that if you're going to get it wrong, at least get it wrong consistently. Anything in the continuous tense gets no terminating G, caps are irrelevant and most words—we'll discount his "you" substitutions—are spelled surprisingly correctly. What blows my mind the most is that he's comfortable passing off this type of writing as legitimate communication. Somewhere since the advent of the Mosaic browser in 1993 and the introduction of txt msgs, the standards of acceptable written communication have dropped to the point where a 31 year old can wantonly jettison a few hundred years worth of established convention for the sake of expediency. From what I've seen and been told, this phenomenon is hardly unique to YouTube. Check just about any online forum. Moreover around 50% of the emails you receive from professional adults—we'll leave the current crop of teenagers out of this for now; that's a whole separate bag—almost certainly exhibit some of these traits. Commas? Fuck 'em. Full stops? Never needed them. Colons and semi-colons? Let's drop the anal fixation.

The more I think about it the more I'm inclined to give the man a medal for his interpretive use of the English language. He's riding a tide here. Through what amounts to abject laziness, he's found a way to subvert written English into an almost entirely new form, specially tailored to meet the needs of the write-now, press-submit, think-later demands of personal exchanges over da web. George Orwell would be proud.