The Friday L.A.-based meme from LABlogs was about driving, and since I'm the road warrior, how could I pass it up? Besides, out of everything in Los Angeles, traffic is the one thing that really tweaks my melon. 1. How many hours a week are you stuck in your car? Luckily, my commute is short and goes on surface streets. 3 miles each way, 20 minutes. It's trying to get anywhere else that kills me. Last week, I spent an hour trying to go 12 1/2 miles from Century City to Burbank. Last night, I tried to go 10 miles from Brentwood to Hollywood and while I made great time and thought I'd be early, the second I turned onto Franklin, traffic was dead stopped and it took me 25 minutes to go one mile. That trip took me over an hour. 2. What music is in your car, right now? Both Sirius and XM Satellite Radio and a CD encoded with about 150 mp3s -- everything ranging from alt rock to old-school hip-hop to electronica to pop to mashups to hard rock to a cappella... You might say I'm a bit of a music junkie. 3. What do you do while stuck in traffic? Eat? Sing? Primal scream? Sing. Try to find something that I want to listen to. Swear at other drivers for being so damn stupid. 4. If you could give citations to other drivers for bad behavior, who/what would you ticket? Oh man. Where do I begin? I have said so many times that when I finally get my act together, exercise my powers as Evil Overlord and take over the world, the first thing I'm going to do is throw half of Southern California back in driving school. Among others, I'm ticketing anyone who drives too slow (especially in the left lane), people who talk on their phones while they're driving (or doing something else really stupid while behind the wheel -- see below), those idiots who don't pay attention that their lanes are ending and try to force their way in at the last minute, anyone who freaks out when it starts raining, all of those people who drive high-end cars so they think they own the road and can do whatever they want, those people who make the left turn after the light has turned blatantly red (I can understand one or two cars, but four? Do not pass go, do not collect $200)... I could go on like this for a while. 5. What's your favorite place/freeway to drive in LA? Any freeway late at night when it's free of traffic. Whenever I can get to 80 on the freeway, it's a good thing. Although I have a particular affinity for the 10 west of the 405. I know it's a short stretch, but it's wide open and it heads towards the ocean. I try to avoid freeways except after 11pm, when they're usually open, so I find myself on either Olympic or Sawtelle (depending on if I'm heading east or south) a lot. 6. What's your least favorite? The 405 going over the Hill -- both ways, but especially southbound. Okay, the 405 everywhere, especially since it's always crowded. The 60 out in Riverside where the air suddenly reeks of manure. 7. What's the craziest thing you've ever seen another driver do? Besides the idiot who tried to kill me a couple of weeks ago by coming over into my lane in the same spot where I was, despite my leaning on the horn? I guess that'd have to be the guy I saw reading a novel while driving. Eyes on the road, people! 8. What's the craziest thing you've ever seen left on the side of the road? A refrigerator. Since the traffic is the one thing that really gets me riled up about Los Angeles, here are a couple of anti-L.A. songs. These are also for The Pissed Kitty, who hates L.A. and all the general fuckwittery occurring here but, for some reason, has lived here for several years and hasn't left yet. Right-click and save as, yo. Bad Religion - Los Angeles is Burning Soul Coughing - Screenwriter's Blues You are lisssssstening... to Los Angeles...

1. It is not "putt-putt." It is "mini-golf." 2. Memo to CBS: Okay, boys... check your freakin' sources. Every journalist knows to do it. I'm not even a serious journalist -- I write about big, dumb stuff! -- but even I know to check my sources! If you weren't sure of how real those stupid National Guard documents on Bush were, you check them before you dump them all over the country! 3. Princespeak needs to be banned from the Internet. I'm talking "2 u," dorkus. And "all right" is two words. 4. What's up with these freakin' Jews For Jesus? Jews can't be for Jesus. If they're for Jesus, then they're Christians. The very nature of Judaism goes against worshipping Jesus as Lord. So if you worship Jesus, you're not Jewish. End of story. 5. I still don't understand the lack of Dunkin' Donuts in the state of California. Everyone knows their coffee is the best on Earth. And I still think their donuts are better than Krispy Kreme. And the closest damn Dunkin' Donuts is 350 miles away in Phoenix. 6. My best friend kicks ass. When she told me she'd still be my friend even if I flung monkey poo at her, I knew our friendship was solid.

Earlier this week, I got a letter in the mail from Columbia House. Remember them? The buy-a-CD/tape-for-49-cents people who you had to keep mailing cards back to or they'd send you CDs or tapes you didn't want? Yeah, them. Look, I've been out of Columbia House for like 15 years now. I've moved several times since then -- and now all the way across the country -- and my parents have even sold the house where Columbia House thought I lived. But somehow, they managed to find me after all this time and tell me that it's not too late to rejoin! Seems to me the choice is clear: We should've had Osama bin Laden join Columbia House years ago. Then, even if he fulfilled his membership obligation and bought his 12 CDs or tapes, they'd at least be able to find him right now, because after three years, our government still hasn't been able to.

When friends ask me what I look for in a woman, I sometimes joke that I already have the perfect relationship -- with my TiVo. TiVo is utterly compliant, easily takes whatever suggestions I make, implements them and has met my needs/requests and is waiting for me when I get home. Whenever it hears about something coming up it knows I want to watch, it gently asks first if I want to continue doing what I'm doing or, perhaps, do something more to my liking. (No, I don't really want a woman that servile. Well, only if she walks around in stilettos and a French maid outfit.) Given that, there are some life lessons that TiVo has to teach. 1. Sometimes, those who love you don't really know what's best for you. We've all gotten those horrific presents from relatives who love you very much, but just don't realize that a sweatshirt with a light-up crocodile on the front is not something the average late-twenty-something wears. Such as the case with TiVo, which is why I had to turn off the "Record Suggested Program" option. Contrary to popular belief, I'm not a gay Hispanic homemaker, so I don't need to watch 16 episodes of the Telemundo version of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition every week. 2. Sometimes starting relationships can be more work than maintaining it. Learning the quirks of your new attachment's personality can be a bit of a minefield because you never know what might set them off. You're basically feeling each other out until you get comfortable enough. Such is the case with TiVo, where getting it home and set up was hell on wheels. I had to hunt down the information that no, you really do need a phone line for TiVo's initial setup, even though the Series2 could connect through the Internet. Since I have no landline, I had to run a phone cord out my front door, up the stairs and into the apartment of my understanding and generous upstairs neighbor, who patiently allowed me to usurp her phone line for an hour and a half while TiVo did its thing. 3. No matter how hard you try to teach people, they just may not get it. Like me and computer programming in various languages like C++ or Scheme. That's why I switched majors to Psychology and earned the Most Useless Degree on the Planet™. But when my parents saw a show on TV that they thought I'd like, Mom called me the next day to tell me about it and said, "Well, it was on yesterday, didn't TiVo record it for you?" I had to explain to her -- again -- that time is linear and I can't go back and record something that already aired. On top of that, TiVo isn't recording everything at once so I can't just pick stuff out from the cacophony that is my channel lineup of Every Channel Known to Man™. Were TiVo to do that, it would blow itself up about 18 times a day, and that might get expensive.

And now, the news: They're Probably Pining for the Fjords -- a news story about a lawsuit over four dead Norwegian parrots. You know that there were probably about 6,213 journalists/secret-Python-fanatics-with-unfulfilled-desires-to-go-down-in-the-annals-of-history-as-a-great-comedic-writer just waiting for years for a story like this so they could use that headline. Broadcaster Goes Klingon -- the German-government-funded radio and TV broadcaster Deutsche Welle will now give news and information in, among other languages, Klingon. Okay, like German isn't scary enough of a language to hear? And it's nice that all these people have enough faith in humankind that we won't blow ourselves to tiny little bits before the 24th Century, but -- hold on to something -- Klingons aren't real. These people aren't speaking a dead language because it never existed, it's like gibberish that everyone understands!

Late-night TV has plenty of interesting commercials, and one brought me back a few years. An old friend of mine moved back to Boston when I still lived there, and we'd hang out every now and then. He decided that he wanted to get a bunch of friends together for a regular Poker Night, and he invited me -- and a bunch of his friends from college -- over to his place. He went to an Ivy League school (not the one in Boston). So one time, we all were at his place, and after we'd been playing for a while, my buddy gets this mischievious look on his face and tells us all that his roommate has a porn video and do we want to watch? The other guys' faces lit up, so my friend ran off to grab the video. He comes back and pops it in the VCR... and the title screen comes up. It's Girls Gone Wild. I had to hold back laughter as these guys were oohing and aahing over the fact that my friend's roommate had a Girls Gone Wild video and we were actually watching it. They were practically crawling all over themselves to get closer to the TV to watch these women flash the camera. It was almost comical in nature to watch these preppy boys consider themselves as being naughty and watching porn -- with Girls Gone Wild. But at least my friend made an indelible impression on me. Every time I see a GGW commercial, I always think of him.

Still suffering the aftereffects of last week's announcement by my co-worker that he's leaving. I guess it's more about my own personal realizations regarding where I am and what I'm doing as a result of it than his actual departure, though I will miss him. The funny thing is, I find that it's incredibly rare for anyone to say that they know exactly where they will be and/or what they will be doing. I remember when I was in the first grade, my teacher made us all write letters to ourselves that she would mail to us when we were graduating college. She actually kept track of us and where we'd be, and I got my letter when I turned 21. I think I still have it somewhere, although it's a little embarrassing for some odd reason. This little kid was writing in shaky block handwriting about how "future me" would be so rich and successful, already happily married by 21 and making the huge sum of $25,000 a year. Well, I suppose that kind of idealism is nice from time to time. Anyways, enough of me blathering. My thoughts are way too disjointed and incoherent to be, well, coherent. So here's some music instead. Right-click and save as, people. Adam Freeland - We Want Your Soul DJ Shadow - Six Days (Mos Def Remix)

A friend of mine at work resigned yesterday. To say he blindsided us would be pretty accurate. To say that I'm pretty upset and fairly pissed would be an understatement. Unfortunately, his impending departure also threw into stark relief my own career path at the moment and brought to head some questions and concerns that have been lurking around in the back of my head for the past couple of months. To say I have some hard decisions to make soon is probably close enough to the truth. And people wonder why I'm not sleeping and have been drinking a little more. Well, that and the heat's been keeping me up.

Since 9/11, we're still livin' And lovin' life we've been given Ain't nothing gonna take that away from us We're lookin' pretty and gritty 'cause in the city we trust Dear New York, I know a lot has changed 2 towers down, but you're still in the game Home to many, rejecting no one Accepting peoples of all places, wherever they're from Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens and Staten From the Battery to the top of Manhattan Asian, Middle-Eastern and Latin Black, White -- New York, you make it happen... -- The Beastie Boys, "An Open Letter to NYC"

Top Eight Reasons Why Today Sucked: 8. Headache persisted throughout day. 7. Still too hot, still too humid, still no air conditioning. 6. Had to write a 1,500 word column in 5 hours. 5. Had to battle over an hour's worth of traffic to travel 12.6 miles from Century City to Burbank. 4. Forgot where I parked my car in the garage at work and spent five minutes running around the garage, trying to set off my car alarm so I could find her. 3. Was shot down by two more women. 2. Watch ceased to function. 1. Forgot cell phone at home (for the second time this week! I think I'm losing my mind) and missed several calls from friends wanting to know where the hell I was and why wasn't I picking up. Top Five Reasons Why Today Kicked Ass: 5. Successfully finished 1500 word column with half an hour to spare. 4. Got compliments from people on past columns I'd written. 3. New co-worker mistakenly thought I was 33 or 34 because of my so-called maturity. Man, he really doesn't know me that well at all. 2. Flirted with cute Hooters waitress (who was not one of the aforementioned two more women who shot me down -- while I reeeeeally wanted to, I didn't break the unwritten rule of Fight Club: You do not ask out the waitress, especially at Hooters). 1. Watched my beloved Patriots beat the ever-loving crap out of the Colts while drinking beer with some good friends and co-workers... and a cute Hooters waitress.

I know it's early, and I know you finished school so you wouldn't have to take tests anymore, but hey, what do I care? Plus, it's multiple choice, which we all know is the easiest kind of test and actually can be fun if it doesn't involve math. (On a side note, I've never understood why we have calculus and trigonometry. I mean, they use letters. Letters. Letters are not supposed to be involved with math, numbers are! Plus, they even come up with imaginary numbers! Seriously! Ask any calculus teacher about i-squared! It's imaginary! I figure if you have to actually make up a number in order to solve your equations, the equation shouldn't need to be solved in the first place. Either that, or when you get some big-ass equation and they tell you "solve for the variable" which is some letter like "x," just tell them x = q and that q is your imaginary number that you made up and magically solves the equation.) Today's question: Keith woke up with a splitting headache because: a) He is becoming partially caffeine-dependent and hasn't had coffee yet b) It's 80 friggin' degrees in his apartment and stuffy as hell because Heat has suddenly descended on Southern California, and Keith doesn't have air conditioning c) He is sleep-deprived, having been unable to get to sleep until 2:30am last night and was up late watching Underworld (Okay, I know it's bad, but dude -- Kate Beckinsale is HOT while kicking ass in tight black leather! Hell, she's just hot doing anything.)

It never fails -- I'm exhausted, I crawl into bed, my head hits the pillow and my mind immediately jumps to warp speed and wakes me back up. Five random things about me: 1. I was born at 3:25am on a cold New York winter's night. Some say that's why I'm a night person. 2. I'm a sucker for a woman with an English or Australian accent. 3. When I lived back East, I used to wear a long black wool coat in the wintertime. Someone once nervously asked me if I had a gun under my coat when I was out once. Those who know me would probably laugh, knowing how completely off that is. But I guess a lot of people had Columbine on the brain, even years after it happened. 4. I've never fired a gun in my life. But I often wonder what it would be like. Strangely, I've never been to a firing range. 5. When I was on the radio, I went by the airname "Quinn" -- I got the name from a character in a Frederick Forsyth book I liked. If I ever have kids, I would like to name one of them "Quinn." I think it's a cool name.

So. An interesting weekend in Arizona. Not quite the shakabuku I had hoped it would be, but at least I return feeling like I've actually been away for a while. (By the way, for those of you reading that last sentence and wondering what the hell I'm talking about, "shakabuku" was defined by Minnie Driver in Grosse Pointe Blank as "a swift, spiritual kick to the head that alters your reality forever.) Remember when I told you about that girl in Seattle my dad wrote? I found out why he wrote her -- my mom was good enough to finally oblige me with an explanation. It seems that, following my dad's recent quadruple-bypass surgery, his cardiologist took a rather cavalier attitude with him and didn't pay as good attention to him as he should've. This resulted in some medication having some really bad effects on him including a lot of fluid buildup in his heart, and then the doctor outright lied to my dad about some test results. Thankfully, my dad was able to read his own echocardiogram and saw that he was in heart failure again and went to his primary care doctor, who immediately made some changes to his meds and sent him to another cardiologist. My dad is now getting better -- slowly. However, if he had just waited to see his old cardiologist in late September like the cardiologist had said... well, he'd be dead now. Literally. And all this made my dad realize that all he really wants to see is for me to be settled down and happy, and with his life hanging in the balance, he sent the letter to her because he thought there might be something there. There was death in the cards this weekend, and not just because it was being talked about in a rather tear-filled late-night conversation with my mom last night. On my way home this afternoon, I happened to glance back in my rearview mirror to see the old-school Chevy Blazer I'd passed a minute before blow a tire at 85 mph. After careening all over the road, the Blazer went off the side of the road and flipped over a few times. I didn't stop... I was already well past the accident scene and getting farther away every second at 90+ mph, and I could see other cars pulling over to help. Besides, what could I really do besides get in the way? I don't know CPR or anything. The sad thing was that it happened so far out in the middle of nowhere that it wasn't until 15 minutes later that I passed the ambulance heading east towards the accident scene. I told one of my best friends last week that I don't believe in the whole philosophy of saying "Why am I bitching about my tiny problems? There are worse things in the world." The way I see it, we all have our own universes, and some of them happen to intersect with other people's universes. In our own universe, we each have our own Way Things Are, and they may not apply in others' universes. Our own problems may not be huge in the Grand Scheme of Things, but they're big to us, and just because they're not Earth-shattering doesn't mean they should be disregarded. I basically had to adopt this philosophy after reading Nick Hornby's How to Be Good, a book that threw me into a philosophical hurricane that kept me up until 5am the night I finished it, trying to sort through all the implications of how much we can/want to/should do to help others. In other lighter-side-of-things news, there are some fucking idiots out there on the road. Not only that, they're egotistical, prideful idiots. Look, if you're cruising along in the left lane at like 5 miles over the speed limit and I want to go faster than you are, I'm either going to make an end run around you and pass you on the right or I'm going to flash my lights and tell you to get the hell out of my way. It's not your right to tell me how fast I should be going. Don't be giving me that Look of Death™ when I pass you. It's your own damn fault. Don't ride the left lane if you can't handle the speed.

Lots of stuff running through my head, but not so many words coming out. I think I need to disengage for a while. I seriously doubt that making the run to Arizona for Labor Day weekend will help all that much, but we'll see. But I will continue to fight the Forces of Evil the only way I know how: Beer... lots and lots of beer.

Okay. First, Osama bin Laden was the biggest threat to this country, and we were going to get him. In the exact words of our President, we were "gonna smoke him out." Then we didn't find him, so Saddam Hussein became our target because he was the biggest threat to us. And the war on terror was going to be won. Then yesterday, our President said the war on terror couldn't be won. But then today, he said it could be won and we will win it. And the Republicans are calling Kerry a flip-flopper? As with other divisive times that our country has experienced, music and pop culture continue to be an outlet for the masses. That said, my buddy Party Ben whipped up this little remix. Right-click and save as, peoples. Faithless - Mass Destruction (George W Mix) And please please download and fill out this questionnaire and e-mail it back to me. Much obliged, yo.