DO WANT

bookstore in cathedral.

I wonder if Jesus pays the utilities.

greatest promo blurb ever

from inside the jacket of Mystical Life of Jesus by H. Spencer Lewis.

Formatting preserved for bonus hilarity.

Look at the Table of
Contents-
See the fascinating
chapter titles-
and-
Each chapter is complete.

Who among us has the inner strength to resist such a potent siren song?

studio portraits

with funny captions.

What did we do all day before the internet?

winner!

me: would you like a bag?

them: Um.....I don't know.

awesome super slo-mo ants

dig it!

RIP Netscape 1994-2008

AOL discontinuing Netscape.

I remember when everyone used Netscape except Unibomber-style crazies who lived in the woods and rode modified exercycles to power their computers.

This makes me feel old.

Viva Pelf

LA Weekly top ten play.

Now all he needs is a movie sale to cap the year.

suggestions for a holly jolly christmas

Try to prevent your wife from getting violently ill for 15 hours straight.
Nothing dampens the holiday spirit like a downpour of vomit.

On the mercantile front, I got a sweet new waffle iron & some excellent dvds.
What were y'alls hauls like?

Oscar Peterson 1925-2007

RIP.

Merry Xmas Inc.

(click on photo for full glory- this is my xmas card next year)

Xmas, the annual x-ray of our consumer society.
Hardened cynic that I am, this year still had a few shocks for me.
The universal media adoption of the Black Friday tag for the day after Thanksgiving for one. A phrase more redolent of ruined traders leaping from on high than sugarplums, and an interesting burp from the collective subconscious of our superficial and unreflective corporate media.

Then came the wave of BIG SALES starting at 4am(!) on BLACK FRIDAY.
A few years back there was an SNL skit making fun of the Mach 3 razor. If three blades is better than two, then surely 4 is better than 3, 5 is better than 4, etc etc. (proof that satire is a tougher gig than it used to be, not long after the Quattro four blade razor came out, follows by the Fusion five blader).
This is the same kind of deal. If you're going to open at 4am, why not go to the logical extreme and just open at one after midnight on Thanksgiving day, like those nerd-friendly late night movie premiers.
I fear the first THANKSGIVING DAY Christmas sale is an inevitability.

The third was a wave of ads (Best Buy being the most egregious offender)offering up a corporate consumer fantasia of flatscreens & console games as a replacement for the messy complexity of family and friends, useful only as cardboard cutout gift-targets, something to be knocked over by the tee-shirt cannon. The most awful of these had a family doing a drive-by of Grandma, pulling up to the curb for a quick, grudging wave before peeling out for home, because, you see, they couldn't open their techno-wonder gifts until after the boring, obligatory family visit.

It was supposed to be funny, I guess.

That the desire for something more persists in the face of this corporate assault is heartening.
The annual screenings of It's a Wonderful Life, a socialist parable that loses none of its potency when sponsored by Pepsi & Ford. Dickens's savage attack on unfettered capitalism A Christmas Carol is a point of light in the commercialized darkness.

But the value of the season has to be mined by hand.
I had a good run when I lived with Bobo years ago, we'd throw together an Orphan's Christmas at Little Havana, which was a stopgap measure but one that brought me back to the holiday. The past few years we've carved out a cozy spot with with my bro n' sis in law and the Fiend. We take care of the family obligation stuff earlier in the week then bunker down with them for a Christmas Day chock full of those old timey virtues our culture pretends to celebrate while spiking the eggnog with rat poison.

This year I'm making overnight waffles for breakfast. On the drink menu are mimosas, French 75's & pomegranate cosmopolitans along with the de riguer mulled cider & nog. We'll screen our traditional holiday lineup with a few supplements. We'll all watch the Fiend open her presents & go crazy, we'll take naps, Tim will grill some sort of poultry for dinner to pair with Teresa's garlic mashed potatos & we'll all eventually fade out absolutely sated in body and spirit.

My christmas wish is that everyone's holiday be as full of joy and goodness as mine, shining like firelight though a living room window into the cold outdoors.

Game Review of the Year

courtesy Ivanus

its not very fun, though you can press P to urinate on an elk carcass which is pretty neat

stealth torrents

Deluge BitTorrent Client, an encrypted anonymizing client for Bittorrent.

When ISPs like Comcast persecute customers who torrent tools like this become necessary.

Chuck Norris sues, says his tears no cancer cure

bad news, Ivan.

Norris, whose real name is Carlos Ray Norris, claims in the suit he is protective of what his name is associated with. He has recently made U.S. headlines for backing Republican presidential candidate former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

Chuck Norris is so literate he can debunk his own statements before the end of the paragraph.

boooooooosh

Few of life's delights compare with watching the Fiend dance around the living room to the Tundra Rap.

christmas cheer for Woody

Circut Shitty crashing and burning.

Weng Went Rap

I think this is old, but just in case:

end of year awards: a new beginning

Since Team Fortress II *finally* came out, my interest in this year's vaporware awards is high.

Vaporware 2007: Long Live the King

attn ANNER

We're hitting a party tonight for visiting compadres James e Courtney, so don't wait up.

=D

Ships vs. Big Waves

The photos are from a nearby quaint fishing village notorious for it's dangerous harbor mouth.

Pogues escape the censor's knife

clicky clicky.

It warms my heart to hear Fairytale of New York described as a "popular Christmas hit".

Holy E.E. 'Doc' Smith, Batman!

Galaxy Blasts Neighbor with Deadly Jet.

YIKES!

from the "more is better" file

eeeek.

Actually, the only surprise is that it's a UK phenomenon.

the extra mile

Taking DT's dictum the pregnant woman is always right perhaps too much to heart, I found myself in the kitchen at 5am making a tray of tater tots for the wife, who was enthroned on the couch watching The Apartment for the 4,629th time.


Now I'm at work & tired. =(

uncommon sights

Walking to work this morning I passed a homeless fellow with a saber standing at attention in the middle of the basketball courts.

when fundies collide

Chick vs the Mormons!

Elf School!

More reason to love Iceland.

Since, according to Magnus, only 4% of Americans believe in hidden people, it seems quite logical when our small group attending Elf School questions the need for his institution. It’s obvious we don’t know the statistics, as our Elf Master is quick to point out. Today, 54% of Icelanders believe in elves and hidden people and a full 90% of the population "takes notice" of this shadow community, which is said to number anywhere from 7000 to 20,000 inhabitants.

I'd swap our fundies for their elf-worshipers in a hot minute.

remix

The wife despised this runaway hit and applied her own title.

mainstreaming

w00t crowned word of year by U.S. dictionary

w00t!

bobo home movies

!!!!

speech

Now this is how you deliver a Nobel acceptance speech.

Ask any modern storyteller and they will say there is always a moment when they are touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration, and this goes back and back to the beginning of our race, to fire and ice and the great winds that shaped us and our world.

The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

I shamefully confess never having read one of her books.
In my professional life Lessing is one of those well regarded writers you continually pass over, sinking passionate defenses of her talent by noting the leaden unsalability of her catalog, aside from the very marginal Golden Notebook (a copy of which sat on our shelves for a year before the recent Nobel buzz hit).

But that is a hell of a speech.
I'll pick up one of her novels the next time opportunity presents.

observations

Wandering through the mission plaza where our piebald Santa's Village squats every holiday shopping season it occurred to me children see only the dazzling lights and colors of the spinning carousel, not the empty faces of the dessicated meth addicts running the machinery.

And that America has a large population who never evolved past that stage of development.

book title of the week

attn IVAN e BOBO

Granny saved by eating her daughters poo.

What, you don't believe me?

The treatment involves liquidising a sample of faeces from a close relative of the patient, and feeding the liquid down a tube into the stomach.

I love how they spell feces.

Xmas Feel Good Story

Health problems of slaughterhouse workers attributed to ingesting pig brain mist.

Because I don't want Ivan cornering the market on holiday cheer.

netflix

Taking advantage of a free trial right now.

I'm liking the 'watch now' streaming video thing. The selection isn't huge, but I won't look complete runs of Kolchak the Night Stalker and Johnny Sokko & His Flying Robot in the mouth.

And the documentary section is outstanding.
We screened Hiding and Seeking last night. The production had a very casual home movie feel, but it packed a mighty punch.

I really liked the music, which was incongruously excellent for such a shoestring production. Turns out it was composed by avant jazz maniac John Zorn, and the band had Marc Ribot & Trevor Dunn in it. Wild!

fun with baby name books

last night's winners-

Dagmar

Cherokee

And my addition, presuming mixed sex twins, Comanche.

Cherokee & Comanche O'Farrell....can you feel it?


Also, Blodwyn is the new Emma.

Winterbells

cute xmas-y flash game.

I suck at it, as I do all flash games, but it's a fun time waster.

good news

Real news, not the usual bloggorhea.

Erin is six weeks pregnant, Hallelujah!


It was supposed to be under wraps until xmas, but the sound of her keeping a secret makes dogs howl for miles around and it wasn't long until people followed suit.
Arguably an even worse liar than secret-keeper, she fessed up to her nearest and dearest and now the ponies are out of the corral and trampling the carrot patch.

Address congrats to her facebook, which other than the iPod is the only technological achievement of the last 30 years that fails to excite her murderous rage.

there is a god

Hearts of Darkness finally available on DVD.

Best 'making of' documentary of all time, narrowly beating out Burden of Dreams, which started strong but faded when Les Blank ran out of money during the interminable production time.

sanity

Now this is how you fight piracy.

Some folk are finally getting the picture.

WE LOVE DEVRITSKO!

plz to watch more Black Books with us soon.

TIA.

in which we narrowly avoid being held hostage

By serial bank robber The Mutton Chop Bandit

Just before 3:00 p.m. this afternoon in downtown San Luis Obispo, a man wearing fake sideburns and a fake goatee calmly robbed a bank.

"He's around here somewhere," said one Central Coast resident, Lee Anderson.

This happened literally seconds after we made a deposit and left the bank.