The Polished Turd

Vibram FiveFingers Part 1: The Adjustment Phase

2009-08-05T00:30:00.000-07:00

Leading up to my trip abroad, I came across an article on Wired.com reviewing the Vibram FiveFingers: http://www.wired.com/reviews/product/pr_vibram_fivefingers_kso. For some time I've been interested in running shoes; they're usually sinfully ugly and bulky, any genuine innovation in this space beyond adding a Nike-esque set of springs in the heels is welcome. Vibram finally came up with something new that in fact harkens back to something old: running barefoot.

The article caught my attention particularly for the reason that I would soon be travelling, and lugging around a massive set of running shoes is not that an attractive a proposition. The FiveFingers are very compact and require no socks, thereby clearing luggage space for all manner of junk acquired on a trip to Australia and Southeast Asia. The only major drawback is that the FiveFingers get a lot of weird looks and they take some adjusting.

And oh, do they take some adjusting. I picked them up just before I left from the lone store in San Francisco that actually carries them. They got their break-in on the treadmill at the gym and the instant result was calf agony. Generally speaking, my calves are in good shape, but after about two mile's worth of running in the FiveFingers it felt as if my calf muscles had completely seized up. I place a lot of trust in my body—aside from my hair follicles—and let the lactic acid clear over the next day or so. Given sufficient time, I figured my calves would adapt to the new gait imposed by the shoes. The next day I took the FiveFingers to the gym again in an effort to build up the leg strength. Gradually I got there, but that's when the next phase of adaptation set in.

Something clearly spelled out by people familiar with the FiveFingers is that they will stretch the tendons in your feet. Moreover, there are muscles in the foot that don't get worked in the same way when using standard running shoes as when using the FiveFingers. There's a whole lot more going on when essentially getting around in bare feet, and the result is a lot of discomfort. I followed the rules and slowly built up the mileage. While on the trip to Singapore and Jakarta, I dutifully squeezed in a couple of miles a day, providing my feet with ample time to explore what it takes to run in the FiveFingers. My arches ached after each workout, but it felt like something good was happening so I persisted. Towards the end of my week in Jakarta I felt confident of upping the mileage, so when I lobbed back in Sydney I took on what is perhaps my favourite run in the world: the Bondi to Coogee run.

The Bondi to Coogee run clocks in at about the 7 mile mark, I think—I've never measured or timed it but that's what it feels like to me. Slipping on the FiveFingers I took to the trail yesterday. I felt strong, full of energy. The miles slipped past and at each potential turnabout I forged ahead, reminding myself at each point that the run is an out-and-back, and that each mile I run on the outward bound leg is the same number I'll have to run on the way back. But I felt good so I did it.

During the latter third the foot soreness kicked it. Unlike most running injuries I've encountered in the past, the pain wasn't something that felt catastrophic; rather it felt like the strain or tightness one might feel in the quads after a long period of disuse. It was obvious that I'd finish the run well, but the next day would be full of agony.

And that's what happened. I awoke this morning with feet that burned slightly above the arches. Placing my full weight on them was difficult but possible, and after an hour or so of ambling about I felt much better. I'm confident that I'll eventually reach an adequate point of comfort, but for the time being I'll have to contend with more tendon and muscle stretching.

Tomorrow I'll head out for another run, althought this time I'll peg the mileage back a little. The lungs are willing but the feet are week.

Lunch at the Hawker Stand

2009-07-23T19:50:00.000-07:00

The week in Singapore has largely gone well; the weather has remained consistently steamy and the need to wear undershirts has never quite been so critical. Amongst the facets of Singaporean life that have become most clear are the following: the country is run like a corporation and there's little else to do here other than go shopping and eat. The latter point is not necessarily intended to disparage Singapore, the country is a tiny island and there are only so many ways to create entertainment in such a confined area. To that end, Singapore has decided to make air conditioned malls its primary attraction—and, of course, its hawker stands.

On more than one occasion I've made the right decision to ditch the comforts of a climate controlled restaurant for a hawker vendor. The food is usually of a better quality and the price clocks in at about a third of what one would pay at a place more attractive to pampered western tastes. Nonetheless, a few of the people travelling with me on this trip continue to shun the more authentic experience in favor of comfort. So be it, they can have their trip and I'll have mine. For example, take yesterday's lunch. We had a few minutes on our hands prior to visiting the SingTel offices near Orchard Road. On a nearby street lay a strip of restaurants capped at the end with hawkers. We strolled the length, surveying what each place had to offer: Thai, curries and supposedly good Japanese food. Then we reached the hawkers. Kway teow, laksa and murtabak, they had pretty much everything I wanted to consume. While my enthusiasm for planting my backside on a plastic seat in the midday heat as I slurped down a bowl of laksa was evident, it wasn't shared by the rest of the group. "We're going to go to the Japanese place," they said, "we don't think we can handle being outside."

"Fair enough," I replied, "but I'm going to eat here." They left me alone. Was I unhappy that I'd been ditched? Not a bit. For $3 I snagged a bowl of laksa and relished every minute of it. The clams swam in a perfectly spiced coconut milk gravy while I did my utmost to stop the noodles from whiplashing the sauce onto my white shirt. I failed in my efforts to remain clean but accepted the orange marks an occupational hazard. The meal met every expectation.

Once the meal was done I went in search of the rest of the group but couldn't find them. I had no idea where they'd gone. As we reconvened after lunch we traded tales of what we ate. It turns out the rest of group chose the Thai place instead of the Japanese restaurant. The service was sluggish and the food was expensive and of poor quality. Somewhere inside me a vindicated voice shouted "yes!".

In Singapore Part 1

2009-07-19T08:23:00.001-07:00

I made it to Singapore today. The flight from Sydney was pretty uneventful, and that's the way flights should be.

Just after I rolled into the hotel I heard one of my classmates call out to me. She and another classmate on the trip were planning to visit the night safari, which on the surface seemed like a cheesy thing to do, but as it turns out, it's actually pretty interesting. Singapore's done a good job of arraying a pretty broad selection of Asian beasties, ranging from rhinoceroses to leopards. Sure, the price isn't exactly cheap (S$32 for the tram tour) but it's ultimately worth the dosh.

Tomorrow morning's schedule is free; we don't have to be anywhere until 1pm, whereupon we'll be visiting a local law firm. Great, bring on the lawyers.

Right now I'm knocking off my third can of Tiger beer. There's a 7-11 over the road selling six packs for about S$15. That's a fair price and it sure beats the hotel's minibar.

It's Good Friday! Let's Bake!

2009-04-10T12:51:00.000-07:00

So as an expat Australian I'm forced to suffer certain indignities. One such transgression is the criminal absence of hot cross buns from the store shelves in the week leading up to Good Friday. Now I'm hardly a religiously observant man, but when Easter comes around I want my fucking buns! It's like Christmas without the Christmas pudding. It's just not right. Cats would chase dogs and we'd be living in Bizarro world.

Right now, stage one is complete. The dough has been mixed and risen once. The individual buns have been placed in the pan and are now slowly rising, ever so gradually puffing up via the miracle of chemistry into their final fluffy shapes. More to follow...

Mitch McConnell vs Pan's Labyrinth

2009-03-25T09:37:00.000-07:00

Something's been on my mind ever since both the success of Pan's Labyrinth and the emergence of Mitch McConnell on the national political stage: Mitch reminds me a hell of a lot of the saggy-skinned, kid-eating monster from the afore mentioned movie. Check the pictures.

And then there's the monster from Pan's Labyrinth. Who can tell them apart?

More On the Transfer

2009-03-16T19:21:00.001-07:00

Last Tuesday I had the interview to transfer to the full time program. Unlike interviewing to gain acceptance the first time around, this little exercise in self-indulgent blather about oneself was much less nerve wracking—much more a general chin-wag. All told I think it went well, although if I did what I was supposed to do and impressed the person with whom I interviewed, I'll be left having to make a decision and that's not something I'm necessarily looking forward to doing.

The problem is that I kind of like my current predicament; I've got oodles of time on my hands to dive into my studies and I feel a strong connection with the rest of my class. Switching to an all day, full time regimen will ruin both of those little comfort spots. The playing field will be levelled and I'll no longer be the sole person in class who's done the homework and researched the cases.

Then there's the prospect of actually finding meaningful employment once again. After taking the last week or so off to focus squarely on annihilating the exams I sat last Saturday, I cast a couple of applications out into the ether today. There's no reason to believe that they'll illicit a response any different to what has transpired in the past: silence. You know, were it not for all the pressure of study I'd probably be quite depressed right now.

And when is that ridiculous Selective Service status letter going to arrive? I can't keep paying for this education out of pocket like I've been doing. It's killing me.

Going Full Time

2009-02-09T22:14:00.000-08:00

It's been seven months and something has to give. Since June I've been on the warpath, searching for a better way to fill the hours between 8am and 5pm without any luck. In fact today I uncovered a job opening at Adobe. With the help of an inside operative I discovered the status of the job: an offer was about to be extended and the person was going to take it. This is a common script, one that has played out for me over and over in the wake of my layoff.

So what's next? The MBA studies have keep my brain afloat and lent purpose to what might otherwise have been very aimless and purposeless days. Perhaps it's time to embrace that frame of mind to its fullest extent. Perhaps it's time I jumped off the weekend MBA train and went full time. It's something I'm seriously considering.

Honestly, I'm doing more than considering it—I'm going to do it; apply that is. Around five transfer spots are made available each year for evening and weekend students who for whatever reason would like to make the hop. Don't think of it as a sure shot, it's not. The transfer requires the completion of forms describing the reason for the request, explaining in detailed terms exactly what the prospective full time student might bring to the program. While the powers that be are considerate enough for forgo another round of GMAT examinations (rejoice!), the process is tantamount to a re-application. But I'll do it.

I'm not actually required to accept should I be offered the transfer, but at this juncture I'd probably take it. The tuition fees are significantly cheaper—I could claim in-state rates—I'd be out faster and the career launchpad provided by the program that much more lifting. With the rate at which I'm not finding any interest in my resume that last point is amongst the most attractive. Watching my limited funds dwindle away is far from pleasant. Retreating to the cloisters while the current financial tempest wreaks its havoc might be exactly what I need.

The Seventh and Deadliest Sin

2009-02-06T21:09:00.000-08:00

I guess I'm allowed to swell with pride every once in a while.

I had the chance today to catch up with one of my former direct reports. He was laid off at the same time as me. Although nobody could ever actually prove this in a court of law, anyone considered to be loyal to my former manager was excised as part of the layoffs. This former direct report was one such person. We'd worked together for about 10 years. I'd in fact played a strong hand in hiring him back in 1998. He's good guy.

For Rocko—as we'll call him—luck appears to be swinging his way. After wandering for seven months in the unemployment wilderness he's throw himself at the depressed and depressing job market only to find that he's got a potential taker: Adult Friend Finder. It's basically a prostitution service with a bit of an extramarital twist thrown in for good measure. The good news is that they're hiring and Rocko's due to front up for an interview on Tuesday. He asked me to provide a reference and I'll be geniuinely honoured to do it.

You see, I get a kick out of doing that sort of thing. Another one of my former direct reports, who for identification purposes shall be referred to as Carne Asada, recently landed a web analyst position with the 9th Circuit Court in San Francisco. Carne Asada was assigned to my corporate care back in about 2002. With no college degree under his belt he'd been performing what amounted to clerical duties at the old company. He was a blank slate but he showed aptitude and enthusiasm and those characteristics are what I think really count.

Did he want to go down the path of becoming a back-end developer? Not really. How about front-end? No, not particularly. Ultimately Carne Asada took the path of web usability analysis and the kid's pretty darn good at it. He led the charge at the old company, shoving the web interface kicking and screaming out of the nineties and into the not-so-nineties. But let's not get ahead of ourselves, the site still needed a lot more work.

At any rate he was pretty good, but he had no college degree. The lack of a degree was always going to present a professional barrier, so I urged him to undertake a certification program offered by Human Factors International. He nailed the exam and got the cert.

Like the rest of us he got the chop back in June and I was kind of worried about how things might work out for him. I needn't have been too concerned. I provided a reference for him with the 9th Circuit and he's just wrapped up his first week. It makes me proud; proud in a kind of paternal sort of way. I had a long-term impact on someone else's life and that gives me the warm fuzzies. I'll gladly do the same for Rocko. Sure, he wasn't as much of a protege of mine as Carne Asada—I started managing Rocko much later in the game—but I derive an immense sense of pleasure from helping other people succeed. In light of that management's probably the right game for me.

Moreover, what goes around comes around. Even though I'm still thrashing in the open waters of unemployment, there might soon come a time when one of the people whom I helped to find work is in a position to return the favour. Should it come I won't refuse it. It's a tired old cliché, but you really do reap what you sow.

Wish me luck in my operations mid-term tomorrow.

How Many Recruiters?

2009-02-05T21:46:00.001-08:00

Here's a cultural subset who've become a somewhat regular part of my life since being given the chop at work: recruiters. They're a strange breed, collecting resumes and frantically doing whatever they can to add that one extra contact to the LinkedIn profile. Some are good. Some will take the time to actually read a candidate's resume and attempt to come to a set of reasonable conclusions about what that person has done and most likely wants to do in the future. They're kind of rare. The majority simply run a few quick keyword scans, leap at any matches, no matter how tenuous, and start making calls.

Well I'm glad they call. It's good for the ego. When the days at home alone grow long it's kinda sorta nice to get someone on the other end of the line asking if you're interested in a position, even if it's something that's totally orthogonal to your current career direction. At least you feel loved.

Well, this morning I received a call about a web development manager position. The scenario went something like this.

The phone rings. It's not a number I recognise but it might be about a job. I answer.

"Hello sir, is now a good time to talk?"

The voice is accented and female. By the sine curve intonations my guess is that she's calling from India. A lot of recruiting companies are now located there and use IP phones to obtain US-based area code phone numbers. I think that's a decent strategy. I really don't care where the recruiters are calling from. All that matters is whether or not they've done any work before they call.

"Sure, now's a good time."

"I wanted to find out if you're interested in a web development manager position in Mountain View, California."

Ah, yes, the Mountain View job. I know all about this job and how to end the call quickly.

"Is this position at a company called Skyfire?"

"Yes, sir, it is."

You see, most recruiters don't like to tell you which company they're representing when they first call you. For whatever reason, the big reveal isn't executed until some further sign of commitment has been made. But in this case I knew what was coming my way.

"Yeah, I thought so. My resume was sent to them a couple of days ago by another recruiter. They took a look at it and apparently thought that my skills tend too far towards management. They wanted someone with a more hands-on coding background."

"Oh, I'm sorry."

"No, no, don't be sorry. They're well within their rights to pick and choose."

These conversations are pretty commonplace. More to the point they've happened nearly a dozen times over the past week. Skyfire, is a company that produces a mobile web browser—I used it for a while on my shitty, old Windows Mobile 6 phone while it was in beta—that tries to bring a fully-fledged browser experience to handheld devices. It's actually not a bad product. The company might actually have some legs. They're obviously on a bit of a hiring spree and in order to meet their needs they must have reached out to every recruiting firm in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. Within the span of a day I fielded multiple calls and emails all asking the same thing, all pushing the same position. Therein lies the sad jaundice of our ailing economy. When every starved, bony-ribbed lion pounces on the lone carcass in the desert, fighting for the scraps, you know that times are tough. Skyfire is one such carcass.

At any rate, they didn't care for me so what does it matter? I'll must mosey along and seek love elsewhere. Any takers?

Anatomy of the Day of an Unemployed Man Part 1

2009-02-04T19:13:00.000-08:00

Being unemployed can really suck. The bank account is ever dwindling as the sum total of your life's work slowly ebbs back out into the economy from which it came. Unemployment checks help stem the losses but there's an itchy feeling under the skin that receiving a dose of cash injection from the EDD tends to leave. I think it's got something to do with the stigma of being a leach on society. Sure, I know, I put into the system for over a decade so it's only fair that I be allowed to draw something back out, but it's still not the sort of thing that generally boosts one's ego. Quite the opposite, in fact. It would be a mark of shame if only there weren't so many others drawing from the same communal largesse.

Nevertheless, my impecunious predicament is gradually spiralling downward, compounded by a bleak job market punctuated by layoff after layoff after layoff. Like I mentioned, I've got plenty of friends in the EDD club. Despite the overall shittiness of the employement landscape I've thus far remained resolute in my efforts to find work. Word to the wise, the resolve is beginning to crumble, but that's a separate post.

So how do I go about accomplishing this commendable goal of rejoining the work force? How does an unemployed man's day get filled? Surprisingly easily. Shaking off the effects of a night's sleep interrupted repeatedly by feline shenanigans usually starts at about 8am. Then there's more coffee from the magical siphon and the "productive" part of the day begins. Honestly it's productive. There's less Guitar Hero involved than one might think.

A good chunk of my morning was spent tracking tailoring my resume for a job I found posted on McAfee's site. The job involves serving as a Web Marketing Manager; a role similar to what I did at my former place of employment. I could probably run rings around the job, but that's now what really matters. What matters is getting access to the right people. Submit the resume without any target softening at the intended company and it disappears without any word or trace. Trust me, this is how the job market currently works. Fortunately a former direct report of mine, someone whose career I had a strong hand in developing, picked up a contract job there about 6 months ago. He's my mole in the organization. I'm relying on him to ensure that my cover letter and resume find their way to somebody who might actually care.

But there's a snag, and it only dawned on me when I was at the gym a little earlier this evening. The cover letter is a revision of a cover letter I used for a cold-call job submission at Hotwire, a job for which I actually received a kindly worded "piss off, you suck" response. Even getting a "no" from a submission should be chalked up in the success column. Ninety percent of the time I don't even get that. The snag in this instance is that I forgot to change the reference to Hotwire in the first paragraph. Visions of the recruiter or hiring manager barged into my brain. His or her eyebrows twist and furrow while my hopes of gainful employment are tossed into the "not on your life" pile. Quickly phoning my mole I discovered, as I expected, that he'd not really done much to shop the thing around, so time was on my side. I've got the chance to put the right name in the letter.

To be honest I don't expect anything to come of my efforts. Just last week I went through the depressing agony of finding a job at Apple that was appropriate for my background. Kicking my intelligence network into full gear I wheedled my way into a phone screen—which went exceptionally well—only to be told via email, after a too-long wait for a good response, that the hiring manager was opting for an internal candidate. "He quite liked you," the email read, but that doesn't really count for much when there isn't a job hanging on the end of that stick. The hiring manager got a "gee, you're a nice guy, perhaps you'll give me a job later" email that will never illicit a response. It's good to feel loved.

These experiences temper my expectations, and with McAfee it's no different. They lack the glamour of Apple. They lack the Jonathan Ive shininess and rabid fan base, but they're hiring and they've got a revenue stream. Perhaps they'll take me on.

How else does a bum pass his day? Getting his homework done. I'm taking two classes for this supposed part time MBA that's bleeding me about $4,000 per month. One of which is Operations. Unlike the rest of my class mates I've got ample time to study the living shit out of the subject. People want me in their study groups since they sleep assured at night that when they show up for the meeting the next day they can feel confident that at least one of the team members has made some decent headway with the problem sets. My GPA rises up in testament to the power of having more time than the rest: 3.925. There's plenty of time for that number to drop. And in the meanwhile, as the layoff announcements keep flooding in, the ranks of students suddenly exposed to too much time continues to swell. I'm not so lonely anymore.

Urgently Needing Roots

2009-01-15T12:02:00.000-08:00

For any Australian this sort of thing is both unfortunately and funny. In the Australian vernacular "root" has a meaning directly analogous to "screw" in the American vernacular. So the plumbing section of the yellow pages takes on a whole new dimension if you know your way around Aussie slang. Gems such as Mr. Rooter, Super Rooter and the above depicted Urgent Rooter just leap of the page and swim around inside the reader's imagination. Rooter Bong on the other hand just defies explanation.

Bruce Beresford's 1981 film, Puberty Blues, does a great job of putting the word in context. Scoot forward to 1:30 and take in the root reference, particularly relative to the mention of the panel van (and that's a whole different discussion).

And while we're at it, any Aussie can't look past this...

To help those a bit in the dark understand the humour, "coit" is an Australian slang term for one's anus.

Self Righteousness On the Back of the Car

2009-01-15T11:45:00.000-08:00

I love a good dose of self-righteousness plastered across the back of a vehicle for all to enjoy. It must feel great to soundlessly roll around the hilly streets of San Francisco while the electric-hybrid motor does all of the heavy lifting. You can glance out of your window, hold your nose high and think to yourself, damn, I'm awesome! I'm driving a hybrid. Sure, if I really gave a shit about the environment or the funnelling of funds to those evil terrorists I'd give up driving a gas powered vehicle altogether and switch to biodiesel or just ride a bike but no, that's too much effort and would eliminate too much of the god-given convenience rightfully mine as citizen of the United States of America.

Let it go.

For some odd reason it really irks me that people feel compelled to fly their "I'm better than you" flags in the most cowardly ways possible. While darting about city streets who's likely to apprehend the hybrid driver and attempt to engage her in a debate about the merits of her decision to still consume gas while hypocritically splitting hairs about which gas powered vehicles Osama Bin Laden purports to love or hate? I think that's what shits me most about bumper sticker propaganda; the purveyor of the propaganda is rarely there to defend his position. You slap your statement in place that only people whom you've passed or who are behind you can actually see. And even if they did care to call you on your crap you're too neatly sequestered away in your hermetic coccoon to be reached. It's the very definition of passive aggressive behavior. And even if someone did you actually penetrate the defensive barriers you'd probably be petrified of the results.

Lay Off the Botox, Please!

2009-01-08T10:07:00.000-08:00

Ladies, gents, everyone... Think carefully before you start jabbing syringes full of Botox into those ruffled furls of flesh on your forehead. Case in point: Laura Tyson.

Laura's an accomplished woman; former Dean of the Haas School of Business, former Dean of the London School of Business, blah, blah, blah. The list goes on. She's also a not-so-secret Botox fiend. Watch the following video and compare the degree of expression emanating from Laura's face versus Rachel's.

Those eyebrows don't move! They don't shift, edge or budge one angstrom left, right, up or down. Meanwhile, Rachel's facial expressions are going every which way, as is her style. Hang on, at about 30 seconds into the clip Laura's high arch brows tick up a touch, revealing for the first time a crack in her frozen countenance. And those Saint Louis Arch type brows... Always a tell-tale sign of a grand or 12 forked over to a scalpel wielder somewhere in one of the snootiest burghs around. Perhaps I'm simply too young at this point to fully appreciate just how youth-oriented our culture has become, but why do it? Getting loads of plastic surgery doesn't make the recipient necessarily look younger, it just makes the recipient look like she or he has had loads of plastic surgery. Like Sylvester Stallone's mum. Urrrgh! Looking at her gives me the willies.

It kind of looks like her face is made of putty, doesn't it? I wonder how much Play-Doh has been injected into those cheeks?

Now let's give credit where credit is due; Rachel Maddow is probably 10 or 15 years Laura's junior, so The Beauty Myth probably hasn't quite caught up with her yet. Or maybe Rachel's self esteem is a little more robust. Who cares? Just let those eyebrows roam. Set them free. Allow those furry caterpillars to crawl up and down. It does a face good, even a professorial one.

A Doomed Strategy

2008-10-26T14:58:00.000-07:00

John McCain screwed himself. At this point the games is pretty lost due in no small part to his poor positioning within the electorate.

If you're John McCain, you're facing a Republican base that's not particularly jazzed about your rather centrist track record. The base slaps you with the RINO moniker and claim they'd rather sit out an election than cast a vote for you. Curiously enough that centrist attitude puts you in good stead with independents; the same people who probably would have voted you into office had George W. Bush not pulled nasty, racist stunts in North Carolina back in 2000. But that's all water under the bridge now. Your solution: pick Sarah Palin. She's a dicey pick but she stands a good chance of winning over all those women, and you just might get a crack at making history with your presidency, trumping the half-breed in the process.

But it didn't turn out that way. Sarah Palin wound up revving up the base and only the base. Injecting an air of creepiness into the campaign, the woman you picked to excite the female vote has instead become a masturbation fantasy for die-hard Republican men. The women you sought to bring into your camp with the pick are just kind of grossed out. And you can't really blame them. Meanwhile you're forced to go along for the ride, feeding the racist sentiments of a base that represents and ever shrinking percentage of the American demographic. By the time you become aware of the monster you've created it's too late to back out.

On one side McCain is forced to distance himself from the naked hatred and racism boiling over from his ostensible base, while on the other side he's forced to push back against Obama in order to secure the independent vote. Caught in a vise, McCain is getting squeezed and the poll numbers reveal it.

We've got just over a week to go and much can change between now and then. Just wait for the White House to release a judiciously timed Bin Laden video. But this is not 2004 and the zeitgeist has mostly moved on. It's hard to see how McCain can release himself from the situation he's created.

It Burns Me Up

2008-10-22T16:51:00.001-07:00

Politics is my baseball. I don't much care for most American sports aside from the perennial squabbles between the Democrats and the Republicans. My only wish is that a third party were more viable, thereby making the spats more interesting. Getting to the point, right now we're in the middle of the American political World Series. I'd say we're getting to around the seventh or eighth inning, the Republicans are down by about four or five runs and they're looking pretty tired.

Anyway, the last debate spat forth a particular remark that didn't get picked up in any of the many media channels; in most instances it slides right past those paid to care about such things. Perhaps they were too distracted by all the other memes and catch phrases that emanated forth from the mouths of the aspirational. But I caught this one and it really burns me up...

Why do some anti-abortion types refer to their opponents as being "pro-abortion"? I think John McCain mentioned it his previous nationally televised chin-wag with That One. I skew pretty left of center when it comes to my political beliefs and I know a lot of people who would prefer not hunker down and get greasy with the anti-abortion/pro-life faction. The thing is that not one of the friends I keep would consider his or herself "pro-abortion". I can't think of a single woman who's so pro-abortion that she deliberately gets knocked up just because it's fun to drop a fetus or two on the floor every once in a while. That's pro-abortion. She's most likely pro-choice, meaning that if a woman really feels the need to do something with her body then she's free to do it, even something as unpleasant as an abortion. That doesn't mean she's really into it. It just means free to choose for herself. Nowhere implicit in that concept is any notion of being pro-abortion. To use that term is to conflate the issue at hand. In fact most people waging war over abortion are really arguing about two very different concepts that just happen to intersect on some pretty dangerous ground.

All this abortion garbage is, as George Lakoff has gone over, just a surrogate for control over women and enforcing a strict social order. At the core of it is a desire to ensure that women stay in their gender roles and remain largely subservient to male masters. When a woman is free to choose she's free to choose in the absence of any male oversight, and I think that makes a lot of people really, really scared. The rationale goes something like, "Shit, if women start making decisions for themselves what might happen next? And why stop there? Women making decisions for themselves is about as crazy as a black man becoming president of the USA!"

The Microsoft Tech Support Rabbit's Warren: Down We Go

2008-07-30T12:55:00.001-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, lost in my unemployment funk, I ran an experiment in customer service. Here's how it went...

Microsoft Vista includes with it a suite of shitty widgets, gadgets or whichever name MS chose that hadn't already been snagged by Apple. I'm pretty fond of the clock gadget since I've got friends and family members scattered across the globe. Courtesy of the clock gadgets I'm spared the task of having to remember time zones. I needn't explain more.

Ordinarily they should look something like this:

Its a clock. Pretty simple, huh? Big hand points to the minutes, little hand points to the hours.

Well, I booted my system on night to find that the clock instead looked like this:

Totally unreadable, but the clock gadget is hardly a necessary component of the operating system. Other gadgets, such as the Contacts gadget and the System Monitor gadget exhibited similar corruption.

I poked around on the web for a while, searching for any documented evidence—and more importantly fixes—relating to this kind of problem. There were a few, I tried them and none of them worked. Later that night the corruption miraculously disappeared after I did what amounted to nothing. The Microsoft fairies has swept through my machine and righted all wrongs. I could go to sleep a happy man.

The next morning I fired up my machine to find the corruption, like a nasty case of genital warts, was back in full bloom. My fixes had failed, even my attempts to roll back to a previously working image of my discs had met with poor fortune. Then I had an idea.

These components come native with the OS, I thought, so Microsoft should be able to solve the problem. I'd never contacted Microsoft's customer support line before; I've always had a natural aversion to dealing with Microsoft in that manner, but this time my logic went something like this:

It's not a critical component of the OS
Microsoft should be able to support their own software, even if I'm sure they can't
The problem is going to be a tricky one to resolve since it involves the corruption of a set of files—these sorts of problems always push tech support staff to their limits
I'm unemployed and I've got loads of time to waste on such a fruitless exploit

So I rang the hotline and got routed to the land of blue, multi-armed deities.

"If they can't fix the problem you won't be charged the $60," I was informed.

"Let's do it," I agreed. And down into the rabbit's warren I went.

The first tier tech to whom I spoke was a very personable woman. She patiently listened the problem I was encountering and asked me a few probing question. Had I restarted my system? Yes. Had I attempted to use the gadget restore feature? Yes. Had I checked for solutions online? Yes. Had I attempted to re-register my DLLs? Yes. We could both see where this one was going. "Would you mind if I took control of your system?" she asked. Of course I didn't mind. She then directed me to open IE and navigate to a particular page that would invoke an ActiveX control that would in turn let her view my system. That's when things went pear shaped.

"I'm telling it allow the ActiveX control but nothing's happening," I told her.

"What are the menu options you're seeing?" She then described a list of menu items that should have been visible but in fact weren't.

"The one you want me to select isn't there," I told her. "Shouldn't this be easy?"

She let that remark hang while she laboured further with me on trying to get the remote control app installed. This tête-à-tête continued for what was about another twenty minutes, neither of us getting any closer to solving the problem, we were too embroiled in trying to solve the problem of installing the tools that were supposed to help us solve the original problem.

"I think your tech support needs tech support." If she found the remark amusing she didn't let me know it.

A few minutes later I told her I'd solved the problem; not with the corrupted gadgets but with the installation of the remote control app.

"How did you do it?" she asked.

Heh, I thought, this is going to be great. "I used Firefox."

Yes, Firefox worked better with Microsoft's website than Microsoft. Oh the irony.

What then transpired was about two more hours of being repeatedly put on hold while the pleasant yet overwhelmed tech support agent ran my issue up the food chain in an effort to get to the root of the problem. Her final solution was to have me download third party clock gadgets that would in fact work, despite the fact that the native Microsoft gadgets remained corrupted.

"No, no, no," I told her, "that's not a solution, that's a workaround. I called to get a solution to the problem, not to be told about a workaround I already knew about. You're going to need to try harder."

"I'd like to transfer you to an escalation engineer."

"Okay, let see what else can be done. Thanks."

So there I was, two hours lost for nothing, and I'd been shunted to another part of the call center. The next person assigned to my problem was nice enough, but beneath the veneer of concern was a hint of resentment. After all it was 1:30am where he was and I'm sure he didn't care to be dealing with these problems at this time of night. In an effort to break the ice and get him to deal with me on a personal level—really build a stake in the issue—I told him that was soon to travel to India. I asked him about southern India, the place where I'll be going, while we ran a series of hard disc checks. He really didn't give a shit. Okay, I thought, we'll have it your way.

His way was ultimately just like the first tech's but longer. After a further three hours of aimless meandering the final solution was proposed: reinstall the operating system.

Think about that for a moment within the context of the "deal" proposed by ringing Microsoft's tech support in the first place: they either fix it or you don't get charged. What the OS reinstall represents is a bogus deus-ex-machina. No matter which problem you have with Windows, Microsoft can always, as a final resort, declare that your only remaining solution is to reinstall the OS. We'll take our sixty dollars now, please. No shit I can always reinstall the OS. The reason why I called was to fix the problem WITHOUT reinstalling the OS. The corrupted components shouldn't corrupt in the first place. And if they do, then Microsoft should be able to fix them without placing undue burden on the affected customer. Apparently that's not the case.

And neither was I surprised. For years the tales of Microsoft's tech support have swirled around technology companies. Most of us working in the tech industry are savvy enough to support our own equipment without having to resort to hotlines. On this occasions the reasons for my deep-rooted suspicions of Microsoft's tech support were confirmed. The company itself is as needlessly complicated as the software it produces, so much so that the software itself is in fact a replication of the complexity of the company played out at a different scale. It's all one big mess with a powerful marketing arm. If you get caught in the labyrinth, like I did, don't expect to find an easy way out.

The Cut

2008-06-10T18:22:00.000-07:00

My employer finally got around to enacting some layoffs. They've been a long time coming.

Ever since the company's inception, layoffs have been eschewed at every turn. "It's not a part of our culture," or so went the mantra. The company weathered the catastrophic downturn of 2001 without retrenching a solitary employee and the corporation was probably better for it. It maintained the warm fuzzy reputation that had hovered above it's corporate head like a halo since the day it was founded.

Now that's changed. There's a new sheriff in town and he's got different ideas about these things. The shareholders demand value, and that means heads must roll. Mine was one of them.

I'd been lurking the hallways of the company for over 10 years. Plucked out of Australia after finishing my studies in electrical and electronic engineering, I arrived for my first day of work sight unseen. My first role at the company was as a lowly hotline engineer. Sometimes cranky users of the company's products would phone in to rant about whatever was on their minds at the time. Like the bedridden elderly, most of them simply wanted someone to listen to their tirades. Treat the person first and the technical issue second. Most of the time I never got to step two.

Wind forward ten years and I'm a Senior Manager of the company's web site, an aspect of the business that it hardly considers central and with the new broom sweeping through considers largely expendable. I'd liken to situation to a dysfunctional romance, one that kept itself going based on the memory of glory days long in the past. The company hadn't broken up with me yet and I lacked the stones to break up with the company. Finally someone took action.

The writing was on the wall long before we were dragged into the executioner's chamber. The Director to whom I reported was being conspicuously dropped from any discussions of the future state of the company and its web site; the Senior Director to whom he reported had espoused her views of a smaller, leaner web group at the company. To be honest I tended to agree with her approach. So when the hammer fell on over 60% of my team it came as no surprise. Most surprising was the people the powers in charge sought to remove. Two of the developers on my team prop the site up in ways that senior management will only truly understand once they're gone.

But as I've repeated to myself over and over under my breath in an effort to reprogram my mind, it's not my problem.

My problem now is how to fill my days until business school starts at Berkeley in August.

Corporate Life - The Exodus

2008-01-22T20:42:00.001-08:00

The department for which I work underwent a sort of reorg a couple of weeks ago. Marketing absorbed a huge chunk of sales and support. My career started out in support, staffing the hotline and troubleshooting the bullshit problems of pissed off engineers. Always fix the person first, then fix the technical problem. It's always easier that way.

So now we're a honkin' big organisation, full of over-inflated egos that demand perpetual assuaging and reassurance. Those of us in the rank and file, namely me, spend our time scratching our heads in an effort to work out why the hell the move was executed in the first place. Better alignment? Maybe. A parting gift from the outgoing CEO to his man with marketing plan? Now you're getting warmer. Redundancies? Ah, we're starting to hit the mark.

Even still, when I strolled into a meeting this morning I was kind of surprised to overhear that the VP who came over to Marketing as part of the shift was splitsville. Yeah, not more than a month after the move was made official she bailed. There are a couple of rumour sources in the company that I like to check on this sort of stuff, and in this instance he knew nothing concrete. Bear in mind that he reports into this woman's organisation, so the cone of silence around the exit wasn't exactly shocking. Two hours later it was confirmed.

This kind of thing is going on all over the place now. Nobody should be reclining back in his or her Aeron chair, picturing the long, safe career at the company that stretches out ahead. It's time to put the spit shine on the resume, kiddies, nothing is certain anymore.

Corporate Life - The Exodus

2008-01-22T20:42:00.000-08:00

The department for which I work underwent a sort of reorg a couple of weeks ago. Marketing absorbed a huge chunk of sales and support. My career started out in support, staffing the hotline and troubleshooting the bullshit problems of pissed off engineers. Always fix the person first, then fix the technical problem. It's always easier that way.

So now we're a honkin' big organisation, full of over-inflated egos that demand perpetual assuaging and reassurance. Those of us in the rank and file, namely me, spend our time scratching our heads in an effort to work out why the hell the move was executed in the first place. Better alignment? Maybe. A parting gift from the outgoing CEO to his man with marketing plan? Now you're getting warmer. Redundancies? Ah, we're starting to hit the mark.

Even still, when I strolled into a meeting this morning I was kind of surprised to overhear that the VP who came over to Marketing as part of the shift was splitsville. Yeah, not more than a month after the move was made official she bailed. There are a couple of rumour sources in teh company that I like to check on this sort of stuff, and in this instance he knew nothing concrete. Bear in mind that he reports into this woman's organisation, so the cone of silence around the exit wasn't exactly shocking. Two hours later it was confirmed.

This kind of thing is going on all over the place now. Nobody should be reclining back in his or her Aeron chair, picturing the long, safe career at the company that stretches out ahead. It's time to put the spit shine on the resume, kiddies, nothing is certain anymore.

New Tunes - No Wait, These Are Old

2008-01-21T20:27:00.000-08:00

I've been spending on music again, such is my wont. For reasons I can't adequately explain, This Mortal Coil leaped into my head about a week or so ago. I'm not sure why. Their main hit was a version of Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren", which The Cocteau Twins' Liz Fraser warbles forth with her usual hyper-produced gloss. The first time I heard it was probably back around 1990 or so; my brother and I were getting into all of that stuff at the time. We taped most of Triple J's Hot 100 for that year, which was an attempt to collate the listeners' favourite songs ever. The list was peppered with plenty of alt-rock gems from the eighties, most of which rounded out the top ten. Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" took the top spot, but the video tape spooled out its final millimetre three songs before it aired. We never got to catch it.

Seventeen years later (ah crap, it's been that long) I'm drawn back to it. Unsurprisingly it holds up. TMC were ahead of their time, just as were the bands from which the members were drawn.
Right now track 9, Barramundi, is concluding. Lisa Gerrard is belting the notes out of her considerable pipes and my ears are loving it.

I've missed you, This Mortal Coil. Let's slip on our gothiest outfits, blot out the sun and talk about spiders in a dark corner. It's good to have you back.

Back to the Corporate World

2008-01-07T20:23:00.000-08:00

I took three weeks off from work over the Christmas/New Year break. The company I work for was closed from 21 December until 2 January, but I took both the preceding week and the subsequent three days off. My parents were in town. I kind of had to do it. Everyone at the company was compelled to take three vacation days on 25, 27 and 28 December. We're in cost-cutting mode right now and we've been in that mode for a really long time. A really long time.

Budgets are getting slashed across the board. This quarter my department's budget is down 4% over last quarter, which in turn was reduced about 4% over the quarter before. It's a cycle that's been going on for some time. Each quarter we tell ourselves that the next quarter will be rosier, better but sure as we all need to shit, the next cut comes around. We're left little else to slash now. There are no more training dollars, no more money left for entertainment or travel. The only things left are essential services and heads.

Which leads me to the rumour I heard today: layoffs. You won't have to scrutinise the coffee grounds too deeply to come to that conclusion. When you've cut just about everything else but people and your CEO is calling for a significant ongoing reduction in costs then what else can you cut?

But it's not going to happen on the current CEO's watch. He's too avuncular for that.

Which brings me to my next event at work today: I met the new CEO. He's an affable enough guy. My first meeting with him left me impressed. He talked about the need to boost sales, which is true and I told him we're all looking forward to some new leadership, which is also true.

I reduced my inbox from about 400 unread emails to about 200. Our intranet was given a new lick of paint and it's not particularly good. I ate a salad for lunch.

Bizarre Behaviour at the Gym Part 3

2007-12-12T08:27:00.000-08:00

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?

2007-12-11T13:39:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-10T20:49:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-30T10:28:00.001-08:00

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

2007-11-26T21:13:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-19T19:09:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-18T17:48:00.000-08:00

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!

2007-10-29T21:39:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-17T13:13:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-30T10:40:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-27T16:40:00.001-07:00

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

2007-08-22T12:03:00.001-07:00

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

2007-08-16T16:52:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-10T14:36:00.001-07:00

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

2007-08-09T08:43:00.001-07:00

If you haven't guessed already, I'm pretty bald. Starting at the tender age of 19, my precious, thick, luxuriant locks ripped the ejector cord and left my head. While there's absolutely no shame in going bald—it happens to the best of us—there's a heaping pile of shame associated with what a man does with the wispy-thin and bedraggled remnants of his once-sprouting and youthful-looking mane. A number of the actions I take in life are guided by a series of pointless mottos. Here's the one I use for baldness...

"If you can't flow with the 'fro then the hair gotta go."

It's simple—no comb-overs, no ponytails, no rugs or plugs. Shave it all off and march confidently forward in life.

I thought the rule applied across the board; no bald man could afford to ignore it. Then I saw this video.

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

2007-08-06T08:08:00.001-07:00

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

2007-08-03T15:16:00.001-07:00

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

2007-08-02T21:56:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-01T20:35:00.001-07:00

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

2007-07-26T17:39:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-23T22:01:00.001-07:00

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

2007-07-22T14:21:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-20T16:55:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-18T20:12:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-17T15:49:00.001-07:00

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?

2007-07-15T17:52:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-14T12:53:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-13T13:44:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-10T21:05:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-09T19:21:00.001-07:00

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

2007-07-07T15:59:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-05T10:32:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-03T08:10:00.000-07:00

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)

2007-06-28T20:28:00.001-07:00

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.

Cat Wars Part 3

2007-06-26T22:29:00.001-07:00

Fucko the Clown is back from a day trip to the pet hospital to have three teeth yanked out of his skull. Put in the context of the recent cat wars, how does that affect the cat versus cat power equation? It's generally positive. A day after Fucko the Clown—also known as El Pinche Payaso—returned from the pet hospital, the arbiters of the house have declared a cat wars armistice. Despite a few flat ears and hissy-breath from Chumbles upon Fucko's immediate return, the ensuing 24 hours or so have allowed each feline to decide that the tiny apartment is no Kashmir, and that the other cat is neither Pakistan nor India—you take your pick which.

Let's not overlook the fact that Fucko the Clown is getting a twice a day hit of some kind of pain reliever that's officially a controlled substance. Yes, when I fronted up at the pharmacy counter at the pet hospital I was confronted with a conversation that went something like this.

"And I'm going to give you these pre-measured pain killers for him. Do we have a copy of your driver's licence on file?"

"I don't think so. Why do you need that?" This is a pet hospital. What do they need with my DMV credentials?

"The pain killers are actually a controlled substance and we're required by law to precisely track who gets it."

Bizarre, huh? But when the stuff ends in "orphine" it's probably the source of a much better high than the shitty heroin sold on the corner of 24th and Folsom. Or at least that's what I'm guessing.

With the cat wars officially over I'm going to roll the dice of sleep and do my utmost to sleep as much of the night through as I can without being rudely interrupted at 4am by a blob of fur stomping across my chest, or by an ear-splitting cat screech baying for the feline on the other side of the bedroom door. May the force be with me.

What Could Be vs What Is

2007-06-25T08:55:00.000-07:00

Gay Pride, Dykes on Bikes, lazy beers at Zeitgeist on a sunny afternoon—I skipped the lot. The weekend is always marked at the beginning by the list of things one wants to do and ultimately modulated at the end by the list of things one wound up doing. The differential is often enough to draw a tear.

Check the past weekend...

What I Wanted to Do

Get a few beers at Zeitgeist on a sunny afternoon, either Saturday or Sunday; I'm not fussy.
Head downtown and do some shopping
Check out some of the Pride festivities
Play plenty of Oblivion
Catch a movie
Wash my car

What I Wound Up Doing

Separated the cats from one another and gradually reintroduced them, many times over
Went to Trader Joe's and bought food for the week
Rented a wet vacuum and cleaned the couch and arm chairs
Played a modest amount of Oblivion
Stripped those wretched doors of more paint
Lamented the differential between the list of things I wanted to do and what was now looking realistic as of Sunday afternoon

On the plus side The Great Organiser and I made our way to the LAB gallery for a performance of 10 Lanes Pizza Bowl. It's a bizarre and wildly experimental chunk of theatre that's probably best enjoyed after a healthy tug on the bong. As an added bonus, a group of four presumptively Italian tourists decided to make their presence felt in the crowd. One was a sweat pants-wearing dood of around 19 years of age who'd forgone the bongs in favour of a lot of liquor. He made for a restless drunk, and after a painful twenty or so minutes of interruptions he vacated for the restrooms, perhaps to evacuate his belly. His two companions of about equal age and their older "chaperon" remained. Time wore on and when he didn't return the venue staff played a short game of Hunt the Drunk. It was over quickly. After discovering a slumped body in the men's restroom the erstwhile chaperon was called upon to cart the incapacitated body out of the venue. The chaperon didn't exactly rate highly on the responsibility scale. Good looks, curly locks and a gives-the-girls-a-moisty Italian accent can't substitute for a dose of resolute action, but to his misplaced credit the chaperon tried. After dumping the drunken teenager out on the sidewalk with all the other bums who inhabit the 16th and Capp crack zone, the Italian Stallion attempted to smooth-talk his way back inside. He had the misfortune of attempting to charm The Great Organiser. Her shields were up.

"You can let me back in, of course. You are an American woman, yes?"

His tone implied that there was some kind of difference between them, him being Italian and all, that would allow him to grease his tongue with a slick layer of persuasive misogyny that his experience in female conquest had told him no American woman could resist.

"Yes, and you're an asshole. You need to leave."

The Great Organiser, when confronted with a situation that demands corrective action, can be ferocious. Without further remonstrations the Stallion was unceremoniously manhandled out of the venue by a burly female member of the staff while another one got to work on calling the police dispatch.

The rest of the performance concluded without incident.

Cat Wars Part 2

2007-06-22T10:28:00.000-07:00

The battle rages. Five days after the brown bag incident, Chumbles and Fucko the Clown can still barely stand to share the same air. Fucko the Clown remains sequestered in the bedroom, bawling his lungs out, while Chumbles has taken up post out in the living area of the apartment. Any brief incursions into their makeshift DMZ (otherwise called the hallway), be they intentional or mistaken, are met with bushy tails, tense feline muscles and a lot of prickling back hair, not to mention the growling and hissing.

The Great Organiser has put in considerable hours of research into their behaviour. The internet, ever the source of unbiased opinion, has identified the cats' problem as fear-induced aggression. We're following the prescription. Keeping the cats separated and hopped up on a cocktail of soothing pheromones has done a lot to mollify their temperament, but when one acts in a sudden manner during their scheduled re-socialising sessions it's as if somebody just announced that missile silos had been discovered in Cuba.

The soundtrack for all of this: The Offspring's Come Out and Play. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a horrible song—Chumbawamba's Tubthumping rates up there with it as two of the most annoying pop songs of the past 30 years—but when "you've gotta keep them separated" what else is likely to run through your head? It's almost annoying as the cats themselves.

A Poet Who Didn't Know It

2007-06-20T10:06:00.000-07:00

This dates back a number of years to when I lived in Santa Clara (don't get me started). Whitey and I were sipping coffee at a café in downtown San Jose. Whitey, a smoker, was sucking on a Camel Light. We were minding our own business when a dishevelled and evidently homeless woman walked up to our street side table. Without any prompting or warning she stared directly at Whitey and proceeded to state the following...

I'm Tiger Woods' golf instructor.
I'm Hollywood in San Jose.
You smoke lights,
I smoke crack,
Up in smoke,
Like Cheech and Chong,
Straight from the dumpster.

Once spoken she ambled away down the street. Whitey and I looked at each other in amazement. I hastily wrote down her words and made a point of memorising them.

Sometimes genius lurks where you least expect it.

Cat Wars

2007-06-20T08:44:00.000-07:00

When the two cats that inhabit my house finally die I'll probably wonder how I ever managed to put up with the torment.

My apartment is small—barely 700 square feet. Crammed inside that confined space are four living, breathing, farting, shitting lifeforms: The Great Organizer, myself and two cats. With all that close contact and exchange of matter between us—dander, skin flakes, bodily gases—you'd better hope we get along. Guess what? We don't. Well, two of us generally do—The Great Organiser and I are known to create some noise on occasion but we're still officially "lovers"—but the other two are a different story right now.

Those two are the cats, and for now we'll label them Fucko the Clown, the graceless larger of the two and sometimes the surliest, and Chumbles, the runt of the litter with an attitude completely out of whack with her compact size.

On Sunday afternoon I returned from a round of clothes shopping, bag in hand. The Great Organiser was sitting on the couch while I displayed my recent purchases for her. Nothing I bought managed to illicit too much of a response from her either in the negative or the positive. What did get a response out of her was the way in which the cats reacted to the bag. Made of brown paper, the bag was a little larger than the kind of bag you'd find at a grocery store. The handles were made of loops of twisted brown paper, lending them sufficient strength to support the spoils of a significant outlay of cash at the store.

"Check this out," called The Great Organiser while I was down the hallway putting the clothes in the closet. I shuffled my way back towards the entrance to our small dwelling.

Anyone with a cat can tell you that while it's possible to throw down no small chunk of change for cat toys, by far the cheapest and most enjoyable playthings for felines are boxes and bags. When anything arrives at the doorstep from Amazon, pluck the product free of its shipping container and leave the box open for the cats. It's as if the next four generations of video game consoles had been released at once and delivered directly to the pets. The amusement is seemingly endless.

The Great Organiser was motioning towards the formerly empty bag, situated close to the front door and lying on its side. The contents were no longer new clothes; it now contained Chumbles having the time of her life. Fucko the Clown hates to be left out of any fun that's being had by any other living being in the apartment, so he crept up on the bag, invisible to Chumbles, who had by now buried herself deep inside.

"That's pretty funny," remarked The Great Organiser and I had to agree. For whatever reason it always amuses me to see the cats get a kick out of something as mundane and ordinary as a box or a brown paper bag. Fucko the Clown was by now upon the bag, Chumbles inside.

With Fucko the Clown perched on top of the bag, pressing down on the trapped cat inside, Chumbles contorted herself in an effort to escape. She didn't get far. In her efforts to extricate herself from the enclosure she managed to ensnare herself in one of the bag's loops, effectively hooking the bag around her torso.

That's when the panic struck.

What had moments ago been a playful cat on mission of exploration into a brown paper cave turned into a writhing, screaming tempest of fur, claws and paper. I was dumbstruck.

"Get over here and help!"

The Great Organizer reacts much better to stressful situations than I do. She'd already leaped into action, lunging towards the blur of fur and paper that was spinning in front of her like the Tasmanian Devil from the old Warner Brothers cartoons. I couldn't do much but stand there and watch.

Before The Great Organiser could get a firm grip on her, Chumbles' violent thrashings had ripped the handle free of its attachment to the bag. The stress of her entrapment had caused her to lose control of her bladder, and with a spray of cat urine Chumbles darted off towards the opposite end of the apartment, paper bag loop still encircling her midriff.

At the time it all seemed hilarious, and even now it cracks me up to recall the image of Chumbles, completely engulfed in panic while she attempts to free herself of the bag. But it doesn't end there. After Chumbles had recovered and emerged from her hiding place, the loop now gone, it became apparent that Fucko the Clown had completely changed his disposition towards her. Whereas minutes earlier they'd been able to get along just fine, now he was growling at her and stalking her, treating her like an interloper in her own home.

That was on Sunday. It's now Wednesday and the animosity between the two felines has barely subsided. Suspecting the liberal showering of panicked cat urine around the living area as the culprit, The Great Organiser and I have removed the couch seats and bought an enzyme cleaner to rid the scent. Pheromones designed to assuage the anxieties of stressed cats have been sprinkled around to minimum effect and the two have also been separated. It's like reintroducing them to each other for a second time. Moreover they won't stop howling at one another, regardless of the hour. We're now three days into this routine, all because of a brown paper bag. They're at each other all the time. Sleep has become a relative concept and rude awakenings at three, four or five AM on account of hissing and growling are now par for the course. I'd do strange, strange things to remove the cats from my life and get a full eight hours of uninterrupted rest. Strange things. This morning, at around 4:35, I pondered a future in which both cats died a horrible and vicious death, and no pets were around to bug me for food or stomp on my head while I slept or howl at full volume at that other cat on the the other side of the door. It's a distant future, I know, but right now, with my eyes drooping from lack of rest, I'm clinging to that vision dearly.

A Dirty Little Secret

2007-06-16T19:43:00.000-07:00

No more long, protracted posts—it's time to shift gear and post something a little quicker and easier to digest.

I'm a gamer, meaning one of my main forms of relaxation involves mucking around on my computer playing whatever game has captivated my attention for the past week or so. These days it's Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

It's a huge game, and if you're brave enough to install it expect it to consume a massive segment of your precious free time. Social engagements will be broken, study neglected and meals skipped. It's that sort of a game. Today I must have blown about four or five hours or so, which was enough to prompt the Great Organiser to question whether or not my time spent playing has now become a debilitating obsession.

The truth is she might be right.

Oblivion is my dirty little secret that's no longer quite so secret, although it remains just as dirty. Right now I'm at level 26, which is still fairly modest for the game. With a total of around 200 playing hours available I've barely made my way through a third of it. The honestly scary part of it all is that I'm tremendously looking forward to the remaining two thirds.

The more I think about it the more I realise just how the right the Great Organiser is in her assessment.

Paradise Lost Down the Toilet

2007-06-15T09:19:00.000-07:00

WARNING - The following tale is downright gross and disgusting. And it's also absolutely true. You can blame La Cubana Gringa for reminding me of this terrible story and I'm posting it as a sort of response to her Curious Incident of the Poo in the Daytime.

I promise you the scat stories will stop very, very soon. I've just about had enough.

Back in early 2005 I was in Thailand attending my friends’ wedding. The venue for the nuptials was the Evason Resort located in Hua Hin, a few hours down the coast from Bangkok.

The resort was one of those swanky five star joints where everyone is waited on hand-and-foot. Lemongrass makes its way into everything the hotel does, from the scent in the hand towels in the restrooms to the fragrance of the soap—lemongrass everywhere. You can’t escape it.

After a night of putting away strange tropical drinks a few friends and I were nursing hangovers and lazily chewing on pastries from the opulent buffet breakfast at the beach-side restaurant. I’d just poured the first cup of coffee of the day down my guts. I call it the juice loosener for obvious reasons.

“Where’s a good place to take a luxurious dump around here?” I asked my friends.

They all had an opinion and the best recommendation was a relatively isolated restroom just off the path as you make your way from the hotel rooms to the restaurant we were currently stationed. My friends, all true connoisseurs of bowel evacuation, assured me the afore-mentioned restroom offered the best possible shitting experience. They would tell me no more and suggested I experience it first hand.

With the gradually angering turd starting to bash flat-top on my undies—three cups of coffee in rapid succession brings it on quickly—I waddled my way to the highly touted crapper.

My mates weren’t wrong. Walking into the restrooms I was presented with a worthy sight: neatly rolled towels in a basket; perfectly arranged moisturizers arrayed alongside a brightly polished sink accompanied by fragrant white lilies floating in a stainless steel bowl of clear water. Two cylindrical, brushed steel urinals stood proudly on a smooth concrete floor. Tracing a path around the perimeter of the room was what looked like a small crystal clear moat dotted with more floating white lilies. The moat ran in a rectangle around the edge of the room with the two urinals on the short end of the rectangle facing the water's edge and the two stalls situated on both of the rectangle's long sides. Sliding the stall door open I went inside and dropped my strides. Peace at last.

As I commenced my bodily evacuation process I surveyed the placid scene. A perfectly clean, lemongrass-scented toiled seat cradled my cheeks while lily-dotted water trickled lightly in harmony with my piss. It was as if the moat and my body were singing a harmony. Ah, what more could I want?

My moment of tranquil solitude was suddenly smashed by the sound of a boisterous intruder. With motions that implied urgency the intruder rattled on the door of the adjacent stall. Evidently someone else was already in there, enjoying a dump just as peaceful as mine. No luck there. Then came the rattle on my stall's door; his body casting an amorphous shadow over my cubicle's semi-opaque white screen.

“Ooh, fookin’ hell! Fookin’ hell!” he muttered with a tone of frustration, rattling the door once again. Oh great, I thought, he sounds like he's English.

Again he reached for my neighbour’s door, gave it a raucous shake and cried with a hint of pain in his voice “Fook! Fook! Fook!” Yep, he's definitely English and probably much older than me.

Paying him no mind I went back to wiping, making sure to smear as much of that lemony paper all over my behind. It smelled so nice.

Then all went quiet—eerily quiet. Good, I though, I can complete this crap without any further hassles. So after hitching my shorts back up I emerged to give my hands a good lemongrass dousing at the basin.

The scene then presented to me didn't entirely make sense.

A graying, once ginger-haired man was hovering over the urinal. His pants were down around his ankles and his hand was reaching down towards his nether regions. Ah fuck, I thought, it’s some old coot fiddling with himself. Quick! Wash your hands and get the hell out of here. I didn’t care to witness some old codger debauch himself any further. It was disgusting.

Scrubbing my hands down as fast as I could I made my exit, making sure to make absolutely no eye contact with the wanky old man milking his member in my place of peace. It’s fucking gross, but I was out. Free.

As I wandered back to the buffet, I spied the man leaving the restroom only a few seconds after me. Maybe I scared him or broke his concentration, I’m not sure which, but what I then saw made it all clear to me. As the desperate wanker walked off in a divergent direction it became apparent to me what had been going on: a long, distinct streak of his bodily effluent was smeared down the back of his pants. The crotchety coot had crapped himself. He wasn’t jerking his gherkin over the urinal, he was taking a dump. Too many Thai curries had got the better of his GI tract. His panicked sphincter couldn’t contain his curried-up bowels any longer and in a final act of desperation he’d dispersed his poop all over the pristine, lemony urinal.

Thoughts immediately sprang to mind. Should I tell him he’s got shit running down the back of pants? Shall I let him know that when he goes back to the lounge and sits down with his high-class buddies that he’s going to be stamping the velvet with his butt chocolate? Nah, why spoil the fun. More to the point I was too embarrassed for him. I couldn't bring myself to walk up to the man, tap on his shoulder and say, "Hey mate, you've got a dirty big streak of crap on the back of your shorts." It just wouldn't have been right.

Making my way back to the breakfast table I told the tale to my friends. They were enthralled and wanted to witness the scene of the crime. I obliged their interest and showed them the way. Sure enough, there in the urinal was some old codger’s crap. And just to prove how lazy he was, lying there in the middle of the concrete floor was his calling card: an orange-brown nugget of old man feces. I nearly collapsed due to my laughter. A couple of friends shrieked in a combination of disgust and delight.

About thirty minutes later I walked on past the restroom, casting an eye to see what had been done. It was cordoned off and inside a poor hotel worker was tackling the shittiest job going that day: scrubbing up after the loose-arsed limey. I couldn’t have felt more pity.

A Restaurant Disneyland

2007-06-15T08:48:00.000-07:00

San Francisco could probably be best described as a restaurant Disneyland. It's a cosy, picturesque city in which many of the residents vacate the city limits for their high-paying jobs in Silicon Valley and return in the evening to compete for precious parking spaces and stuff their faces at any of the thousands of local restaurants. The choice is endless. More so than just about anywhere else in the world, the ratio of eating establishments to the total population in San Francisco seems to be extraordinarily high. It's nearly impossible to walk more than two street blocks without coming across either a taqueria, a burger joint, a pupuseria, a noodle house or a cafe. Moreover most of the places serve food that's more than kind of decent. Much of it is excellent. In need of some spirited debate? Corner a San Francisco resident for a few minutes and start peppering him or her with questions about which taqueria is the best. For added fun take a position on one of them, any one, and hold to it. Your sparring partner will probably dive deep into a lengthy discussion on exactly what type of carne asada constitutes the perfect burrito, and what proportion of beans to rice to salsa produces the perfect wrap. It's an art, a science and a passion. This is the city of good eating.

Burritos and tacos aside, it's not just the lower end of the restaurant scale that gets all the attention in this city; the mid-range restaurants are also of a high standard. Compared with somewhere like New York City, there's probably fewer genuine fine dining restaurants, but that sits well with me. Who but the most obnoxiously rich amongst us can really afford to spend $180 per person on a meal on a routine basis? Where I think New York lacks is in the middle order. The world's best pizza is available in abundance, but when it comes to a finding tasty plate of something-or-other pork loin on a bed of God-knows-what with a who-gives-a-shit reduction, all for about $40 a head (booze extra), San Francisco has the world beaten.

And the good part is that most of these places are right around the corner. Just around the bend from my place on the corner of Mission and Valencia lies Blue Plate. Falling squarely into that mid-range, they dish up American comfort food with a seriously trendy bent. This is Mission fare, so the wait staff are hipster fashion plates and the decoration a showcase for whatever art movement is currently the buzz amongst everyone cooler that you or me, but the service is usually first rate and the food outstanding. I've probably eaten there six or so times and nothing has ever gone awry. Until Tuesday.

Bookings are essential, so the Great Organiser and I had a slot set for 7:45. We were on time, even a little early. Seating was prompt and within a few minutes of our arrival we found ourselves at a table near the back of the restaurant.

This is actually worthy of some further consideration. In Blue Plate terms "back" is a relative concept. The restaurant is in fact a former residence. At some stage in its not too distant past it was a home for either one or many families. As you make your way through the place it's easy to determine exactly which part of the former house is being used for what. In our case we were sitting in what was probably once a rear lounge area or perhaps even a laundry with an entrance to the back yard. And yes, they seat people out there too under those large umbrella-style gas heaters. The back door was wide open for the convenience of the service staff and that's how they got their first ever black mark from me.

As the sun sets in San Francisco the fog comes rolling in, and accompanying the fog there's always a stiff, cool breeze. Often it's more than a breeze and on this night the open back door was funnelling all that wind straight onto our table. The wait staff, usually extraordinarily attentive, remained somehow oblivious to the blast of cold air that was reaching into the tables of their diners. The votive candles resting on the table flickered in protest and we hoped that one would go out, signalling to anyone who cared to look that something was amiss. It never came to that and after an extended period they got wise. It probably could have happened sooner.

I'm a meat eater and I like steak. In my opinion a good steak should have plenty of pink to it. A good show of the pink ensures there's still some flavour left in there, so accordingly I ordered my rib-eye medium rare. The chefs are seasoned pros; if they can't get a steak right then they probably shouldn't be in the kitchen. When the plate arrived—it looked marvellous, a nice cross pattern seared across the face—I took the serrated knife in hand and sliced through the centre. It was overdone. Another black mark.

Setting my disappointment aside I soldiered on with the meal. Even a less than perfect dinner at Blue Plate is far from horrible. With my overdone steak nearly devoured—I have no trouble eating the stuff even when it's not done to my liking—I let my mind wander towards dessert. Taking their American comfort food theme to the sweets department, Blue Plate usually dishes up a number of variants of such things as cobblers and cakes. They're generally delicious and picking only one or two can be tough. This time around we grabbed two. As it turned out the first one we ordered, the one the Great Organiser really wanted to get stuck into, had been hoarded by the large table of business people right behind us. She was not amused. Black mark number three gets chalked on the board. The substitute dessert arrived very quickly indeed, but for some odd reason the minutes kept ticking past before there was any sign of the second. It took some prompting on my behalf to investigate the whereabouts of the second dish. Such lapses are rare for Blue Plate; it's never happened in the past for me but that didn't preclude them being awarded their fourth black mark for the night. Too bad.

So this is all lazy whining on my behalf and it makes for a pretty boring post. The point being here that Blue Plate does a great job and I love their food. I'll be going back there before too long and I expect they'll be back on their game. None of us a perfect after all, but this is a competitive restaurant city, and if you don't win far more than you lose you'll see your patrons heading down the street to that new place that everyone's talking about very, very quickly.

Polished Turd Rating Schema

2007-06-13T14:48:00.000-07:00

This blog is called The Polished Turd, and not without good reason. There's not much more I'd rather do with my free time other than get out the can of Kiwi Parade Gloss and spit shine a freshly laid body-loaf into a glistening sheen. That's my definition of satisfaction.

But don't be fooled, scatology is a serious science. All living critters must shit so it should come as no surprise to anyone that we as a species have devoted untold hours to analysing the effluent that emanates from our orifices—case in point: The Bristol Stool Chart. Hailing from perhaps the shittiest place on Earth, Britain, the Bristol Stool Chart seeks to categorise each brown stain that makes its way out of our backsides. In my estimation they've done a good job. A quick audit of my recent trips to the can—an exercise in which I usually straight-up disrespect the toilet bowl—reveals I normally hover around a type three, sometimes a four or even a five on a bad day. It depends on how many curries I ate the night before.

Henceforth I'll be using the Bristol Stool Chart to rate my posts. As my devoted readers, I encourage you to use the same system when the time comes for you to pass judgment on my writings.

Was the post kind of loose and lacking substance? Pick number seven.

Was the post fragmented, disjoint and hard to understand? That's a one.

Was it light, a fluff piece with a few rough edges? That one's easy—go for number six.

Perhaps it went down easily; all smooth and slippery—number four all the way.

For the adventurous amongst you try a little mix-and-match. If the post presented a clear-cut argument but ultimately revealed a few surface cracks as the screed progressed feel free to wax lyrical and ascribe it a solid core of type five with a late type three finish. The possibilities are endless.

You get the idea. Visit the link, do your homework and start applying your ratings as you comment. Your friends will be impressed with your newfound scat knowledge.

It Ain't Natural

2007-06-13T09:04:00.001-07:00

Gyms are really, really weird places—totally bonkers strange. The whole idea of a pile of people showing up in an enclosed place to do what we're genetically and historically supposed to do outside flies in the face of the natural order. But for some odd reason we're compelled by a supreme act of will to trundle along to these places on a routine basis and offload our energy.

That in itself is strange enough. We now live in a society so overstuffed and surrounded by excess that we have to work hard NOT to get fat and bloated. In the relative scheme of things it wasn't really all that long ago that having a surfeit of energy stored in one's body signalled to everyone else in the village that you were a smashing success. A fat, rippling gut meant that you had the wherewithal to get your hands on more of the good stuff than your fellow resource competitors; it meant that you were king of the heap; the best, the smartest, the winner. You got it and they didn't and sporting a plus-sized frame served to advertise your awesomeness to all the losers grovelling at your feet.

Now if you're a fatty you're lazy—prone to too many hours in front of the TV scarfing down the family sized bag of Doritos while an old rerun of Elimidate plays out in front of your glazed-over eyes. Your sloth-like, sedentary behaviour results in an ever-increasing waistband which in turn signals to society at large that you lack the wherewithal to get off your expanding butt and do anything worthwhile with your life. You're a lazy slob and you deserve to be ridiculed for your lack of discipline. Although in a society where nearly everyone is a lazy slob the logic of that position quickly falls apart, but stacked up against our worship of all people thin and pretty and young you can understand the underlying sentiment. Our collective solution: pack a bag full of shorts, tank tops and iPods and beat a hasty path to the incubator of the weird and desperate—go to the gym.

Being kind of weird and desperate, I visit the gym frequently. For reasons still not quite known to me—I'm sure it's somehow Oedipal, but let's not dwell on it—I like to keep myself in decent shape. I'm not musclebound and sporting nary an ounce of fat, but I do my best to keep ravages of time and gravity at bay. We all do, don't we girls? Given a good week I'll get to the gym each weekday and sometimes on the weekend. I'll get in there, break a quick sweat and spread my smelly man-stink all around the machines and the people furiously operating them. And that's the best bit: the people.

As I mentioned, gyms are unholy and unnatural places. Logically they should attract the unholy and the unnatural, like the bleached-blonde woman who must be somewhere in her mid-fifties or so who has clearly spent too much time and money getting her skin stretched and her boobs pumped. She'll strut into the gym, eyes darting left and right in an effort to catch a glimpse of whomever might be mentally undressing her very sloppily thrown together physique. The sad fact is that she thinks she's turning the head of every man in there (and perhaps a few of the women too) and in a way she's right; the only problem is that they're turning their heads away and not towards. What a train wreck.

Then there's Mr. Universe. Some people, they're usually pretty easy to spot, are clearly on the juice. Mr. Universe is clearly on the juice. Around noon each day he's in there, his football-sized biceps and melon-round shoulders working in unison with his protruding chest as he heaves the biggest weights available. The odd thing is that he's only ever in there for about the same duration as I am: an hour. I was puzzled. How could this twenty-something hulk of a man balloon to such a size on such a lean workout regimen? He looks like he could easily front up to a weight lifting competition and win. Easily. It has to be those BALCO vitamin shots.

For about a week I'd been hoping to get a chance to quiz him about his routine—fire a few shots across the bow and see how he reacts; probe the armour for a chink or two. On Monday, after my workout had wrapped up, we were both situated in the same locker area.

"Mind if I ask you a question?"

"Sure, go ahead."

"I see you in here pretty much every day about the same time that I'm in here. You seem to put in about the same amount of time into your workouts as I do but you're clearly in much better shape than I am."

With that remark I thought I could see his left pectoral muscle quiver at the compliment. His right one ticked in sympathy. They were happy.

"Yeah," he said, "I've been doing this a long time. And genetics has a whole lot to do with it."

And anabolic steriods, I thought to myself.

"How long have you been working out?" he asked.

"About four years," I replied. It's the truth.

"I've been at it for about ten, " he informed me without inflecting his words with the kind of smug self-satisfaction I was expecting, "and I'm just the kind of guy who puts on muscle mass easily."

Yeah, and I bet you're the kind of guy who finds steroids pretty easily too, huh? I thought it. I didn't say it.

Humbled in the presence of his mighty musculature, I mumbled out an ill formed response. "Yeah, that genetics stuff is right on. I just don't seem to add muscle very easily. Plus I do mostly cardio at lunch with some weights after work."

"Well," he confidently stated as his deltoids arched up like a couple of open drawbridges, "some people are no-gainers."

I heard it right. He was calling me a "no-gainer". By extension he was throwing himself into the gainer camp with all of his Schwarzenegger wannabe buddies and casting me out with the feebs. So be it. I'm a feeb. I can take it.

"So you only do one session of weights a day?" This was my attempt to call bullshit on him.

"I do some cardio in the morning and then the weights in the middle of the day."

And when do the 'roid shots happen, huh?

The conversation was done. He'd fended me off pretty well and it was clear from his now-dismissive body language—with a frame that big the only language his body knows is a form of yelling—that we were done.

"Well, it looks like you've got a routine that works for you. Well done."

It was over. There were no obvious puncture wounds, no clear signs of chemical enhancement abuse. Within a few minutes my kit bag was packed and I was meandering back out to the main entrance of the gym, ready to return to work. As I walked out I made sure I kept my chin up, my stride long and confident, while I did my utmost to detect out of the corner of my eye who was paying attention to this handsome man as he made his way out.

And the Crowd Roars

2007-06-12T22:23:00.000-07:00

This blog officially has an audience. You could count that audience on one hand. More accurately, you could count the audience on one finger. That lone, lonely member of a very, very small club is La Cubana Gringa. Thanks, Gringa. So long as I can be sure that there's at least one of you out there I'll keep churning out the piffle.

Get Back On the Horse

2007-06-12T14:57:00.001-07:00

When you fall off the horse you have to dust yourself off and get back on.

In the wake of my GMAT meltdown I took a much needed break. A little introspection often goes a long way and in this instance it really did the trick. I've got a tendency to focus a little too intently on matters such as test taking, and this time around I really worked myself into a mess. The time pressures imposed by the test format; the performance expectations I'd placed on myself—the list of factors all added up to a very rocky frame of mind. Now my head has cleared, my feet are back on Earth and I'm about half way through GMAT Study: The Sequel. This time it's no more Mr. High-Strung.

If only that was 100% true. In actual fact there's still a measure of anxiety lurking inside of me and it's always likely to be there. Just look no further than my dad. Roger's no stranger to sliding into a frantic state of mind and he himself apologized for passing along his anxiety gene to his offspring. Thanks, Dad, but it's really not your fault. Or maybe it is, but he can't be blamed, can he? He can't help who he is anymore than I can.

In many ways it has felt like I was returning to square one on this whole test preparation kick. My initial method that was based upon blindly charging into revision armed with nothing but an over-inflated sense of confidence and precious little understanding of exactly how one takes standardized tests—I've never in fact taken one in my life; something that blows the minds of most of my American-born friends who are veterans of thousands of multi-choice exams. God bless the American education system and it's slavish reliance on standardized tests. The ship demanded a course correction and I ponied up for the Princeton Review series of books. They're none too shabby and instill a healthy sense of confidence, although I suspect their questions aren't quite as representative of what the GMAC concocts for the actual test. The Princeton Review's questions seem to test what the Princeton Review teaches quite well but might fall short of striking the same tone adopted by the GMAC. I suppose that's why the student is advised to pick up the official revision guide and use the Princeton Review techniques on real questions in order to shore up some knowledge. It's sound advice and I'm following it.

So I'm back in the saddle; not necessarily breaking into a gallop just yet but I'm moving along at what I'd consider to be a comfortable canter. There's still a lot of work to accomplish—lots of practice tests, getting the pacing right, developing swift recall on the problem topics—but at least the road seems more smooth and predictable. I'm even starting to enjoy the ride.

Smile, Someone Loves You

2007-06-11T10:24:00.000-07:00

Glancing back over my posts in recent times, it's apparent that nearly all of them skew towards the negative. I didn't call this blog The Polished Turd without reason, but perhaps a bit of cheerfulness wouldn't go astray.

Come Fly with Me

2007-06-08T17:36:00.000-07:00

Let's talk on cellphones really loudly. Let's power dress. Let's attach our wireless electronics to our belts. Let's advertise to the world how important we are by attaching more than one. Let's strut down the concourse with obvious purpose. Let's pretend to think it's not obvious. Let's hope other people are noticing. Let's position our luggage next to a seat so as to preserve our personal space. Let's make sure we're the first in line. Let's cut in if we're not. Let's ignore the half-mumbled complaints of those around us as we edge our way in. Let's make a point of fidgeting as the jetway gets backed up. Let's block the aisle with our belly bulging from too many expensed meals while we shove, shove, shove our oversized luggage into the overhead bins. Let's argue with the flight attendant who points out that it won't fit. Let's finally be seated. Let's tilt the recliner back as far as it will go. Let's imagine that there's no seat behind us. Let's fall asleep and snore loudly. Let's have a nice flight.

It's Coloradical

2007-06-07T14:34:00.000-07:00

I'm on a business trip to Longmont, Colorado. The mountains are spectacular, the people agreeable and kind and I really don't care for it all that much. There's something about this particular part of the country that sets me off and it leaps into dreary, banal life the minute the car approaches the center town on the 119 approach.

Longmont is relatively new, spurred into growth from the embryo of an old rural town by the encroachment of a satellite tech industry. Searching for a cheaper place to drop a pile of engineers, a handful Silicon Valley tech companies demonstrated prudent financial wisdom by opening offices in the sprawling plains seated at the feet of the Rockies. Mimicking the outer reaches of greater Sacramento, the cookie-cutter homes plopped out on the bleak expanse by the over-enthusiastic rectum of the house shitting machine nestle up as close as humanly possible to a crop of newly sprouted strip malls replete with an Applebee's, a Staple's and a Best Buy. Just add a multiplex movie theater chain it's called a community, or maybe even a city. Just don't nestle up too close, of course, lest that precious buffer zone around the house that keeps the family "safe" be sacrificed. There are dangerous people out there who want what's inside and they'll do evil things to get in. Evil.

I keep the trips short, zipping in the night before and vacating without so much as a cloud of dust behind me the next evening. It's a sullen view of a part of the country that must have some charm buried somewhere, but so long as Longmont remains determined to reinvent itself as a bland facsimile of Anaheim I'll elect to keep my distance and visit only when I'm ordered.

Break On Through To the Other Side

2007-05-28T11:43:00.000-07:00

Here's an equation that doesn't balance in my favor: cheap, flimsy interior doors—it's high quality merchandise; cardboard is used to provide support between the layers—and a couple of cats whose plaintful bleatings are enough to penetrate even the hardiest earplugs. Trust me, every brand of earplug has been tried and none of them have proven themselves able to attenuate General Zod's early morning laments at his apparent lack of food. Besides, the doors themselves are the kind that Home Depot flogs for the lowest possible price, so along with providing negligible sound insulation they're also as ugly as a boil on an old man's butt.

The Great Organiser, intrepid as she is, stumbled across a salvage yard in Berkeley a couple of weeks ago. It's filled with just about anything that can be wrenched free of a house that some over zealous contractor decided needed to be eviscerated of its original charm, just like the place I live in. Pluck it free of its fixture, mark it an antique, slap on a hefty markup and then set it out to display in the salvage yard. A sucker will be along any minute to eyeball it, decided they're equipped to strip and refinish it in completely unrealistic time frame, and fork over the exorbitant price. On Saturday that sucker was me, with a little help from the Great Organiser.

Exactly why it would take us upwards of four hours to select four doors escapes me at the moment, and I've had two full days to ponder it. With measurements in hand it really ought to be a straightforward task to size up a few likely candidates, confirm the dimensions and plonk down for the purchase. Where in that simple set of procedures is there latitude to blow four hours? It's got me miffed. Perhaps the early switch from Victorian doors to five panel God-knows-what-they're-called doors precipitated our downfall. It was like something ripped from a Kafka novel; staring at long hallways lined with racks of old doors shedding their century-old lead-infused paint—tasty stuff. It drove me slowly nuts. But ultimately we prevailed and with four doors strapped to the top of the car we made our way back across the Bay Bridge, the securing straps humming in the breeze as if to confirm our relief at being done with the ordeal.

But that's not the truth, is it? The ordeal isn't nearly done. Getting the doors was just the first challenge in what is starting to become an Odyssean adventure. There's four of those things sitting outside right now, waiting to have their twelve layers of paint removed. And that's the real trick; they're sporting enough layers of paint—latex, acrylic and sumptuous lead—to warrant an archaeological dig in order to find the wood hidden beneath. The Great Organiser, being ecologically minded, ditched the proven yet highly toxic Jasco as the preferred paint stripper in favor of a citrus-based gel. In the past few years it seems as if citrus cleaners have become the panacea for all our ills. No doubt there's someone online who's flogging a citrus based ointment that is assured to make my hair regrow. I should check it out. Now when it comes to removing decades' worth of paint the orange peel extract just doesn't cut it, and heavens, we tried. It'll take off about a layer or so of anything latex based but beyond that it's slow going at best. Surveying the gradual progress I informed the Great Organiser that I was returning to the hardware store to pick up a heat gun. Seventy five bucks later I was back and wouldn't you know it, those things actually do the job; bugger the detail work, that's a job for our old friend Jasco. I've since bought a liter or so of that stuff too.

Stacked like dominos ready to totter over, the four doors are now leaning against each other in the back yard, begging for the hours upon hours of further attention they're going to need if ever they're to migrate their way into the house. Towards the end of Friday afternoon I wrote a brief email to a colleague at work wishing him a good weekend whilst mentioning that I was looking forward to some relaxing. Yesterday, whilst blasting away with a heat gun in one hand and a spatula all gummed up with melting paint in the other it occurred to me just how blatantly false that statement had turned out to be. What I'd hoped would be a chance to recharge the batteries over the course of three days turned into the beginning of a home improvement project that threatening to consume whatever free time I care to think I might have. I guess I've only got myself to blame.

It's Probably Not Worth It

2007-05-28T11:22:00.000-07:00

Were you considering watching Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End? If not then you've probably made the right choice. It makes even less sense than Spider-Man 3 and that's an achievement in itself. Characters switch allegiances based on motivations buried so deep in the frantic on-screen madness and mayhem that any attempt to keep track of it all just makes for a nasty headache. I gave up trying after the second apparent double cross, which supposedly wasn't a double-cross after all, or was it? I couldn't tell and more importantly I didn't care. By that stage I was content to settle back into a seat that, after about the one and a half hour mark, was slowly turning my bum numb and enjoy the spectacle. And Johnny Depp. Without him there'd be nothing to watch but a lot of genuinely amazing special effects. From a technical perspective the these Pirates films are masterpieces, but when judged as satisfying summer entertainment all but the first installment falls horribly short. No pun intended, but how did they run so far aground after such a fun start? Cynical, money-minded bean counters at Disney might have much to answer for, but realistically the blame probably falls at the feet of the producers who sought to over stuff the last two films in the franchise in order to create what they thought would be the consummate summer film extravaganza. Well kiddies, sometimes less is more.

More Bother Than It's Worth?

2007-04-30T17:46:00.000-07:00

There's little to report at the moment, not that I have any readership that actually cares. For some odd reason I got the notion of completing an MBA stuck into my head. Of course getting accepted into a program requires sitting the GMAT, a test that I can only recommend if you're really hell-bent on this whole "business" thing.

The GMAT—and getting into business school—has become all consuming of late, and that's probably not a healthy frame of mind in which to exist. Having tried a practice test on the weekend I realized that when it comes to the maths component I'm kind of underdone right now, despite what I might have thought a week ago. I lack sufficient familiarity with the problems which in turn gets me bogged down. In short I'm slow when it comes to the number crunching, although with a lot more practice I ought to be able to turn that around. Just like any sport or skill, it all comes down to practice in the end.

Beyond that just how much time should I really be dedicating to this pursuit? To what extent is it really worth the bother? My career is doing well—so long as you discount the fact that I haven't worked professionally for more than one company—and in most respects my life is chugging along just fine. At the end of the day what's it really going to accomplish? Will I suddenly attain a heretofore out-of-reach degree of career mobility? Will I be catapulted into the upper echelons of high-tech corporate structures? Nah, I seriously doubt it. Perhaps I'm better off not worrying about it—pull back, chill out, take a break.

Whatever the case I've hit the point where some perspective is needed. Tonight I'm home early with the books and study materials stashed safely at my desk at work. Tonight it's all about skipping the gym, sliding off the shoes and relaxing for a while. It feels good, doesn't it?

Grindhouse: Thoughts

2007-04-25T20:00:00.000-07:00

Julia and I caught Grindhouse last night and I feel compelled to offer a few comments. Firstly, Robert Rodriguez turned out a great effort with his guns-and-gore fest, Planet Terror. Robert's got a sound understanding of what makes trash cinema so enjoyable. Planet Terror dishes up the perfect measure of violence so over the top you have to laugh, comical, pustule-squirting gore and troubled, buxom women. I'd swear the cinema management was pumping the scent of tasty barbecue ribs into the theater in order to heighten the experience. I'm serious, the smell of barbecue. See the movie and you'll understand why it makes sense.

Then there's Tarantino's entrant, Death Proof. There's no question that Tarantino can make good films—Pulp Fiction; Reservoir Dogs; even Kill Bill; they're classics—but this time Quentin has let himself go to seed. The output of toils in this instance reflects the character he self-consciously plays in the film: sleazy, lecherous and altogether too self-impressed. Death Proof runs about 45 minutes too long—it's a 90 minute movie—due to forced attempts on Tarantino's behalf to jam in protracted scenes of his now-famous dialog and a general incoherence of the plot—what are the drivers motivations? Why should we care about Jungle Julia and her slutty cohorts? Ultimately Death Proof plays like a mildly amusing, and admittedly viscerally enjoyable, female revenge masturbation fantasy of a tired, old man. I expected more.

New Tunes

2007-04-20T19:09:00.000-07:00

Add the following new tunes to the collection...

Guns & Drums — Low
Noumena — The Drift
Loney, Noir — Loney, Dear
Mosaic — Love of Diagrams

Here are the early impressions.

Guns & Drums - Low
Everyone's favourite Mormon snorecore band step away from their The Great Destroyer signature-sound departure and return—sorta—to whence they came: expansive, wankst-ridden, introspective songs peppered with Alan and Mimi's distinctive harmonizing croon. But this time it comes with bleep. I guess Low got the indietronic memo and have now added a layer of circa-1994 ambient synth sound to their product. This one's going to take some listening, as Low usually does.

Noumena - The Drift
They're a local act who were brought to my attention by one of Julia's colleagues at the LAB gallery. Their brand of post-rock/freeform-jazz crossover is wafting out of the speakers as I type. Unlike most of the post-rock ilk—throw the likes of Mogwai and their stable-mates, Explosions in the Sky, into this category—they're given over to heavy use of brass, especially trumpet, which has the effect of distinguishing them from the rest of the pack. Still, they've evidently spent long enough swapping song writing tips with their more guitar-crazed peers; tracks clocking in over a healthy ten minutes are more the norm than the exception. That's fine with me, there's a lot of layered complexity in their music—more than enough to keep me engaged for the next week.

Loney, Noir - Loney, Dear
This one's the crowd-pleaser. The first few bars of the disc reveal Loney, Dear to be ear-candy: a kind of aural confection that is so easy to enjoy so quickly that you're left feeling slightly cheap for being persuaded by its charms without so much as a fight. I'm waiting for an internal backlash to start but so far there's no sign. Despite near-constant rotation in the car CD player, the shelf life of Loney, Noir seems to be getting extended with each listen. That's what I suppose anyone should expect from an act that sounds like a helium-huffing Simon & Garfunkel.

Mosaic - Love of Diagrams
I caught them the other night at Slim's and they put on a good show. Perfect it wasn't, but in the context of the environment and where they were listed on the bill I thought they performed more than admirably. Mosaic picks up where their debut Matador EP left off, even promoting two of the EP's tracks to fully-fledged album status. Love of Diagrams wear their influences on their sleeves and I'm cautiously waiting for it to become a tiresome shtick; so far they're holding on. Early listens of the album haven't hit me square in the face with raw energy the way the EP did. For whatever reason the album seems more restrained, and that acts as a detriment. A few more spins are required here before final judgment falls, but at this stage my position remains neutral.

The Sleep Debt Payoff Cycle

2007-04-16T08:24:00.000-07:00

There's a thing in my life known as the sleep debt payoff cycle. The way it works is during the week I run myself into a sleep-deprived state courtesy of a schedule that has me arising at 6am to leave for work. If we lived in an ideal world I'd get to bet at no later than 10pm each night, affording myself a comfortable and doctor-prescribed eight hours of rest. In reality that never happens. Invariably there's something else I find myself doing that keeps the clock ticking way past the witching hour, whether it be updating my iPod or ensuring Julia gets a bit of my attention (she deserves it). So come the weekend I want my rest and a I want a lot of it. Sunday morning swings around and bed seems like the best place in the world. I'll let myself drift in and out of sleep for hours on end, allowing myself to be just plain lazy. It's great and I know it's going to come back and bite me the arse eventually. That "eventually" is Sunday night. I couldn't get to sleep—not for hours. I spent most of the night barely dipping deeper than a light slumber, awakened by any slight movement of the cats who routinely park themselves at the end of the bed. The alarm goes off at 6 but I'm already awake. The new week has begun and the cycle starts anew. It's a cruel joke.

The hours I keep are largely a function of my job and for that I can really only blame myself. Nobody forces me to get up at 6am and nobody forces me to drive 50+ miles to work each day. There's a huge element of personal responsibility immersed in this problem and it's incumbent upon me to fix it. I'll just stop going to work.

Love of Diagrams at Slim's

2007-04-15T11:08:00.000-07:00

Smile a smug grin of self-satisfaction if you're hip enough to be at the venue for the warm-up band. Last night Ted Leo and the Pharmacists played at Slim's, but I was there for the backup act, Love of Diagrams. Any of my cooler-than-thou hipster credentials weren't really all that well earned since I've never heard any song by Ted Leo and Pharmacists in my life; I wasn't snubbing them; I just don't know about them.

Our arrival was timed perfectly. Not more than twenty minutes after we had our tickets checked and hands stamped in verification of our age did Love of Diagrams take the stage. "We're from Melbourne," the lone male member of the group, Luke, called to the crowd eliciting a small chorus of acknowledging cheers. Those were probably the other Aussies.

Scruffy hipsters, scruffy hipsters—the group looked typically ramshackle, sporting the kind of urban-trendy look you'd find anywhere on Brunswick Street: unkempt, greasy hair and recycled boutique clothes. They fit the mold. But when they opened with the first few bars things fell into place. You could accuse them of being too aware of their image and you'd probably be right, but they've even got a woman beating the skins and that wins big extra points. Rarely do you see a woman behind the kit belting out the rhythm. There are too many male drummers in this world and it's time that changed.

So what about the music? Love of Diagrams do a great knockoff of early eighties post-punk—all heavy bass riffs, discordant guitars and half-screeched vocals. It's clearly a conscious effort on their behalf to resurrect one the superior musical eras of the past and for the better part it works. On stage the approximation to their recorded material more or less hits the mark, they're more raw and more energetic. Notes get missed, the balance on the vocals is off kilter—probably more a function of the cruddy acoustics at Slim's than anything else—and they fumble a couple of songs. None of it really mattered all that much and the now-full venue seemed to side more with acceptance rather than rejection. The set was short at around forty minutes, leaving barely enough time to rip through a catalog that really could use a longer airing on stage. Perhaps their best song, No Way Out, remained inexplicably absent from the playlist and that's a loss. It would have made the perfect closer.

There was no point sticking around for the headlining act; I'd got what I came for and besides, the Great Organiser was about to fall over from tiredness. Getting older will make you do things that your twenty year old self would hate you for: stand at the back of the venue and admire the band from afar; have only one beer; leave early. If that's what being a 30+ attendee at a rock gig is all about then I can live with myself.

SF - Highway 101 - Southbound - 2am

2007-04-14T10:44:00.000-07:00

The Great Organiser's got a position on whether or not you should take any of the freeways feeding into or out of San Francisco after midnight: don't do it.

We were both about ready to fall asleep. I'd had almost no rest the night before and the plane flight from New York was delayed, causing the Great Organiser to drive laps around Oakland airport for 45 minutes before I eventually emerged from the terminal. All we wanted was to get home and get to bed.

Being able to drive up to the toll booth on the east side of the Bay Bridge is a rare treat, so we thought we'd dart over both spans in record time. And we did. But approaching the Potrero Hill crest of southbound 101 our decent clip was arrested by a swerving cop car acting to bring us all to a near-halt. The Great Organiser immediately began remonstrating about the drunks that tend to take to the road around this time of night, and how had she had her wits about her she'd have exited the freeway at the first opportunity. She was right. We should have ditched the 101 as soon as the chance presented itself.

We slogged our way through the congestion until the Cesar Chavez exit came around. Not far before it lay the scattered bodies of two cars: one a large white SUV and the other a silver Camry, their front ends nicely mangled. The cops had cordoned off the area with their usual pink flares and every passing motorist gave it all a good stare, us included. The scene smacked of a DUI.

When we finally made it home I poured myself a glass of wine and went to sleep.

Airport = teh sux0rz Part 3

2007-04-13T16:36:00.000-07:00

At least on JetBlue they give you actual snacks. Weird, isn't it, how the so-called "full service" airlines now offer a lower grade of service than the budget airlines? Riddle me that one, Batman.

Airport = teh sux0rz Part 2

2007-04-13T16:13:00.000-07:00

So now I'm back in the departure lounge, this time I'm parked along a worn-carpet pathway, heavily trafficked by the kind of floe of humanity that makes up most of the people you find in any given airport. Well, this is JFK so you're likely to get just about the broadest cross-section going. And it's ugly. JetBlue purports to offer free WiFi, but it's free only for a certain period and the download speeds are glacial; a harsh-voiced service representative is barking orders to the oblivious to make their way to Gate 10 lest they miss their flight to Ontario. That's Ontario, California. Yep, there exists such a place. Screaming children are pestering their tense parents for more of the high calorie, low nutrition "food" that is supposed to constitute a meal here in the departure lounge. The kids are pacified with an offering instead of snacks, and the mother and father wonder aloud whether or not they should use an offering of juice to coerce the kids to use the toilet. The child offers a response in the form an open-mouthed cough, ejecting a spray of god-knows-what into the air. Lovely, huh? And I haven't even tried to board the plane yet.

Label Me Weaksauce

2007-04-13T15:58:00.000-07:00

Label me weaksauce if you must, but I'm not sure I could handle living in New York City. Perhaps it's too many years living in San Francisco, enjoying something that approximates a dense, urban lifestyle without the oh-so-New York need to hip-and-shoulder everyone in the path in order to make passage across a busy street. Perhaps it's because I was stuck in the tourist-infested hotel district of Midtown, swarming with overpriced delis and enough gullible tourists ready to fork over the exorbitant prices. Either way I'm not sure I'm cut out for it—at least not at this stage of my life. Being squarely on the wrong side of thirty has shoved me into a social set a few degrees removed from the ambitious twenty-somethings, scrambling desperately to leave their mark on the most important city in the world. With the burning desire to remodel the shape of the planet fast seeping out of me, I think I'll take the lazy facsimile of the urban jungle and cool my jets in San Francisco. I'm not strong. Give me a greasy burrito from the local taqueria, a couple of alcoholic transsexual bums sprawled on the sidewalk and a stiff bank of fog rolling in off the Pacific.

Airport = teh sux0rz

2007-04-12T12:32:00.000-07:00

Why do airports have to suck so much? Right now my arse is parked in the waiting lounge at Oakland Airport, forced to share personal space with a couple of sullen looking teenage latinas and an elderly gentleman who seems to feel the need to have the speaker on his mobile phone turned up loud enough to share his cute-talk conversation with his granddaughter with everyone within a 20 yard radius.

It never used to be like this, did it? There must have been a period somewhere in the past when travelling on a plane didn't involve being herded like cattle into holding pens, undergoing borderline rape by the security staff, being stuck in a cramped and overstuffed tube in the air for hours on end while the surly flight attendants "treat" you to a half-filled cup of water and a shitty bag of peanuts. They'll tell you it's service. There's huge opportunity for the rail industry here—huge.

They're calling us to board now. I can hardly contain my excitement. The carrier is JetBlue, and whilst I'm sure they're going to offer me 36 glorious channels of DirecTV, I might also be lucky enough to get stranded on the tarmac or upwards of 10 hours with now way to get off.

All hail the airline industry.

Art Brut Is Good Stuff

2006-03-21T08:46:00.000-08:00

Every now and then there comes along a band or an act or a performer that really knows how to command the limelight and entertain the crowds amassed. Last night Art Brut flooded the stage at the Bottom of the Hill with an aural assualt of ramshackle, punk-infused British brattiness and it was simply lovely. Forget for now the two barely-dressed men whose sausage-sharing antics and programmed rhythms passed as a support act, Art Brut were the stars of the night and they shined. The set was short, as described, but sufficiently energetic and earnest to leave the audience anticipating the next song even if it was one of their newer efforts and not one of the polished and well-rehearsed moments off the album.

Thanks for a good time, and on a school night too.

Giving Comfort to Terrorists

2005-11-15T08:09:00.000-08:00

I love a self-righteous rant and few people are better at getting red faced and strident than Bill O'Reilly. In the wake of last week's local elections Bill had the presence of mind to state, "Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead, and if al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead."

Thems is fightin' words. Bill's opinion of America's preeminent hotbed of lefty, lezzo, homo, pinko liberalism has never been in any doubt, and for that reason the urge to dismiss his remarks out of hand as those of a loud-mouthed flame-thrower are made that much easier. Never the less, another Bill—in this case his last name is Maher—was dragged over the coals in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks for thinking beyond the knee-jerk reaction of let's-hurry-up-and-kill-a-pile-of-Muslims by actually suggesting that perhaps US international policy might have played a part in fomenting the kind of sentiment that ultimately steers extremists in the direction of the World Trade Centers. He was apparently "giving comfort to terrorists".

Now it's Bill O'Reilly's turn. Inconsequential? You betcha. Hypocritical? Right on.

San Francisco Real Estate Part 3

2005-11-13T19:09:00.000-08:00

The hallway is done. There's only one more room left to paint.

I really couldn't be happier. This protracted business of shifting into my first proper home is one that should really reach its conclusion sooner rather than later. When I open the door when I come home at night I want to see not a haphazard arrangement of partially unpacked boxes left to gape back at me as a reminder of all things not yet done; I want to kick of my shoes, grab the cat and plonk down on the sofa with a glass of wine in hand. That day is coming soon but I'm not there yet. Just one more room to go.

The noise dynamics of the place are just now being revealed. Currently the sounds of a party that's been going on across the back fence for the better part of five hours is wafting up through the cracks around my door. They're mostly women, lesbians by the looks of things, and they're fusing Mission hipster fashion sense with a healthy dose of "que onda vato" cumbia. The booze, sucked down from the piles of beer bottles that litter the area around the party-goers, has worked to throttle up the amplitude of chatter and laughter. My neighbour, Jill, let me know via a yell across the back porch last Friday night that the noise generated by Far Cry was too much to allow her to sleep. I wonder what she thinks of this.

But that's a dense urban environment for you and it's one of the aspects to life in San Francisco that I thoroughly enjoy. We're all in it together. As hackneyed and cliched as it might seem, black, white, gay, straight, whatever, we're all piled on top of each other, forced to endure the racket and stench we all generate and yet somehow we get along, minor squabbles aside. Unlike the masses farmed out in the secluded, fenced-in fortress homes of suburbia, urbanites tend to learn a kind of acceptance that comes from jamming in the ear plugs to dull the noise of the dog downstairs and not worrying about it. Generally speaking we're not afraid of the "other" - anyone dramatically different from us. Those sloppily dressed punk lesbians with their home cut hair and too-loose jeans, they're okay; in accordance with their stereotype they're usually pretty good at keeping the local bars alive and ensuring that the organic produce market gets business. And the hippy looking guy with the dreadlocks next door? He runs the daycare during the week. What's not to like about that?

So I've settled in now, I guess and the neighbourhood has had its predictable effect of making me spout a tired retread of the old "can't we all just get along" spiel. I couldn't be happier about it.

San Francisco Real Estate Part 2

2005-11-07T21:47:00.000-08:00

One month has passed and untold cans of paint later the place is starting to feel like a home. The operative word in that sentence is "starting". Anyone with half a brain will nod a head in knowing agreement when reminded that this whole move in bizzo is at least a six month process. One down and five to go.

The colours chosen to eradicate the reminders of a cheap and shoddy interior spray by the previous owner are bold, and that's nearly an understatement. The obnoxious green in the hallway has been plastered over with an equally obnoxious greenish yellow, the living room is now a radiant orange and the bathroom honestly glows red. That, and a so-hip-it-hurts Formica table is about all I have to show for one month's worth of night in, night out labour. Where has the time gone?

A visit from my father, of course. Parents are obligated to fuss over their children whenever they take any kind of grand leap up the ladder of maturity. Purchasing this place was no exception. Dad, affectionately known as the Rog, made his first landing the Friday I moved into the property - 14 October. His stay was part of the inbound leg of a journey that would take him across the continent to DC, New York City and Princeton. I immediately put him to task.

A house guest with a vested interest is a wonderful thing - nearly as wonderful as a girlfriend with vested interest. With the work day comfortably in the past you can swing open the front door and take in an eyeful of the changes that have miraculously taken place in your absence. Usually my dad would be standing there, a little soft around the middle and bald headed, peering back at me with a wet paint brush in hand.

When all the work stretching out before you seems endless and insurmountable even the smallest accomplishments completed during the hours in which you're away count like evolutionary steps. There's one more job struck off the list, one less coat to be applied that night.

There's still a lot more to go. There's a cat that won't shut up and that way too trendy Formica table sits out in the kitchen area with no chairs to make it feel important. And I don't own a vacuum cleaner. But I've got a cat tree that came for a bargain, more cutlery than I've ever seen in one location and a vintage Danish lounge set that smells like stale urine. Care to pop over for a visit?

San Francisco Real Estate Part 1

2005-10-04T08:25:00.000-07:00

I've bought a house, or rather I've bought an apartment in part of a TIC in San Francisco which constitutes one quarter of a house. TIC stands for Tennancy in Common, which is kind of like a co-op in New York City and essentially means that while I'll have my own apartment, all four TIC members are mutually responsible for the one loan. What that basically means is that if one or more of the other people on the loan decides they're too strapped to cough up the cash one month then the rest of us have to find some way to cover their delinquent arses. Welcome to San Francisco real estate. Ultimately the goal is to get the house through the condominium conversion process, but that involves a lottery that can take upwards of eight years to pass. We're chained to each other now, married together by our idiotic desire to buy a chunk of dirt in one of the most overheated housing markets in the country, if not the world.

Coughing up large sums of money is nerve-racking. Yesterday, as part of the closing process, a wire transfer was made from my Morgan Stanley account to some mysterious number at Wells Fargo. It really could have been anyone's. I'm giving them over $100,000 - nearly all of my wealth - to some nameless money grubber at Wells Fargo. Holy shit, it shouldn't be that easy to gut yourself of everything you earn. Well, I suppose it is. That's why we have casinos.

Ikea = Hell

2005-10-03T21:33:00.000-07:00

Don't ever try to return anything to Ikea. Just don't do it. If you have something in your hand that you think might be nice, say a lamp that looks like a block of Lush soap with an LED and a plastic monkey pulled out of a bag of chips shoved up inside it, then don't get it. You'll only have to return it a month later.

Tucked away in the far reaches of the Swedish tundra lies a bunker filled with bald-headed scientists devoted to analysing the extent of human endurance when placed in a stark, white room furnished with pine slat benches, staff trained to move with the exact oppose of the type of efficiency promised by the McDonalds-of-Furniture Ikea system, and no clock. No clock. Its absence couldn't be more conspicuous. If you had a clock ticking away in front of you you'd be acutely aware of the fact that the line simply isn't moving, and that number 47 has been sitting up there on the display for the last half an hour! And that's at 8pm on a Saturday night! Why does it have to be so hard? Why can't we just get our money back in a few minutes and get back to what we really want to do: shop! Those bunkered dorks high up in the Gulf of Bothnia need to pull their heads out of their collective arses and realise that if we weren't sitting around on our numbing butts we'd be back in the store shopping for shitty pine furniture with names like Plopp and Farrt. Ikea can take its bland, generic contemporary bedcovers and production line art for the masses and shove it up its arse.

Next time I'll go to the Container Store.

I'll Do What You Tell Me

2005-09-29T20:03:00.000-07:00

Since moving to the USA back in 1998 my writing efforts have taken a slide. Such a slide in fact that I haven't really done much at all in the past eight years aside from write a few scathing emails to coworkers and attempt to woo unknown women on Nerve.com. Well that's all changed.

Two weeks ago my 32nd birthday swung around and my girlfriend, the Great Organiser, decided that as a gift she'd invest in my personal betterment. She enrolled me in a creative non-fiction class at UC Berkeley.

Each minute of my days seems to be carefully measured, starting with my 6am wakeup routine and ending when I finally drop the landing gear and climb into bed sometime around 10pm. A class over in Berkeley was the last thing I needed. But I'm a dutiful boyfriend and despite The Great Organiser's offers to cancel the class and exchange the gift for something else I kept my holy crap, when will I ever find the time comments to myself, smiled and told her not to worry. I'd do it. Offers of that kind are never actually meant to be accepted. They're the cheques you're never supposed to cash, at least not unless you want to go home alone when the birthday party's done and wank over that oversized collection of porn you've downloaded over your 3Mb/s cable modem connection.

The issue at stake here is complacency. The holy crap reaction is precisely the kind of reaction that's been going on ad-infinitum ever since corporate America got a hold of me and beat out the spontaneous creative drive. All the best intentions were never going to overcome the signup fee and the commitment to drive back early from San Jose to San Francisco, quickly change, scoff some hastily-prepared food down my gullet, charge down 24th Street and then jump on a Richmond-bound BART train. If an external motivator comes in the form of a girlfriend with my personal development interests in mind then I'll take it. She's only looking out for me and in a way that I can't seem to do for myself.

The part about finding the room in which the class was held is not worthy detailed description but uncovering its whereabouts took a while and involved repeated trips back to the Union office where I was treated nicely but given just enough information to make a real cockup of each successive attempt to find the classroom. But I found it of course.

Wandering in with a nervous wave of my hand as if to absolve myself of my tardiness I quickly surveyed the room - lots of women, almost all women, and there's the instructor, presiding over the class from behind her desk. In an effort to reinforce her status amongst the hip she was wearing those 1950's grandma type glasses with the pointy cornered rims. They've got a proper name, I expect, but I'll be buggered if I know what it is. Spilling out around her shoulders was a frizzy mass of hair that might or might not have been set that way by design. In any case it matched her image and with that settled in my mind I sat down. Almost directly opposite me sat a man sporting the mulligrub beard, the kind of shirt sold to tourists too self-conscious to pick up the Red Bull t-shirt at a flea market somewhere in South East Asia and socks with closed-toe Birkenstock sandals. We're in for a beauty, I thought to myself.

It's introduction time and around the room the conch shell gets passed. There's the young Indian mother who wants to write a childrens book that explains Hinduism. She's got her four year old daughter in mind and the instruction, Heather, seems to think there might be a publishable buck or two in there somewhere. I'm inclinded to agree. Kids are suckers for multi-armed, elephant-headed, blue-skinned gods. The other ladies are an assortment of overly ambitious types, all seeking to set the world ablaze with their literary genius. "I know I'm gifted," yep, thanks for telling everyone here. If you were truly gifted you probably wouldn't be resorting to after-hours classes. Women struck with a starry-eyed sense of grandeur about themselves never seem to be in short supply at places like this. Pump a couple of undergraduate years worth of Simone de Beauvoir and Dostoyevsky up their arses and they come out the other side thinking they're the female Arthur Rimbaud. "I'm interested in genre-bending. I want to write an existentialist piece from a woman's perspective because I really like existentialism but it's never been done from a woman's point of view. I studied literature at college and I consider myself a feminist." Okay, so maybe she sees herself as more of the XX spin on Jean Paul Satre and I saw myself as running for the door. Full points must go to the instructor, Heather, who in the most polite yet excitable way possible told her that existentialism left the building with Maynard G. Krebbs.

Sitting last in the ring of soon-to-be-recognised creative non-fiction giants was a blonde-haired women, garishly dressed and fresh from a flight from Virginia. As her story was told - and yes, fist raised to the air, she's a feminist too - she recounted the tale of her aunt murdering her six year old niece (or nephew, I can't recall which). It was genuinely riveting stuff and Heather seemed to agree. "That's a book," she was told by Ms. FrizzyHairPointyGlasses. No shit. There'll be more about this basket-case of a family situation as the weeks unfold.

So the homework? Write about my birth. Some of that was done back in 1987 when I wrote my "autobiography" for Mr. McKinnon in year 9 English. It go me an A back then so I don't see why it can't stand for a friendly reconsitution some 18 years later. The other thing to do is get back into the discipline of writing, something that's been sorely lacking in my life for those afore mentioned eight years. Start writing a journal, I was told. Well, if you consider blogging a journal here it is.

I'll do what you tell me.