Back to the Corporate World

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

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

I Can Has Balls?

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

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

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

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

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

Bizarre Behaviour At the Gym - Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I did.

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

Bizarre Behaviour At the Gym - Part 1

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

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

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

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

Pet Peeves - Fixie Bikes Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He Shames Men Everywhere

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

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

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

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

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

I've Seen a Few Before

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They're NOT PEOPLE!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long Time No Type

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

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

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

(R)adelaide Rules

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

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

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

Pet Peeves - Upside Down Eights

The lazy posts continue unabated.

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

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

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

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

Pet Peeves - More Custom Licence Plates

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

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

Pet Peeves - Custom Licence Plates

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

Anatomy of a Friday Lunch

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

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

Visualise a computer running Yahoo! instant messenger.

The Brown Hornet: Wanna get lunch?

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

The Brown Hornet: Somewhere in the Mission. Zeitgeist?

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

The Polished Turd: Anyone else coming?

The Brown Hornet: I can check.

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

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

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

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

"What do you want to drink?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Donald Trump Trumped

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

My Terrorists $tarve Osama's SUV

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

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

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

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

"Osama loves your SUV!"

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

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

Don't Make Me Do It Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you blame him?

Movies - Live Free or Die Hard

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

In Defence of a Simple Wedding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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