If I had to spend all weekend with this damn track running through my head, the least I can do is infect the rest of your brains. Maybe then, according to the theories of the esteemed Lewis Black, if I share it with you, it will leave my brain and I will return to my normal state of insanity. Though I do find this relatively relevant given the Star Wars furor that’s currently engulfing the planet, so it’s not like I’m picking random music off my hard drive to suddenly become obsessed with.
Then again, anything’s possible. Right-click and save as, or I’ll wield my light saber in a manner that you won’t appreciate.
So, for all of you in the immediate Los Angeles area, I invite you to come see my singing group (yes, that includes me) perform this Thursday, June 2. We’re going to be putting on about an hourlong show starting at 8pm on the second floor of Powell Library on the UCLA campus in Westwood. (Here’s a campus map.) I’ve been told to warn anyone coming that parking in Westwood and walking from there will take you probably about half an hour, but there are parking structures on campus, including one close to Powell—it’s P4 near the top middle of the map, and the easiest way to get to it is from the entrance on Sunset Boulevard.
Spread the word. Attend, lavish me with affection, praise and presents (and phone numbers from the cute, single women in the audience). Heckle me, and I will skewer you openly while on stage. Don’t tempt me.
But seriously, I wouldn’t mind having some fans there.
How do you respond when someone is leaving a party, grabs the teddy bear she brought in with her and announces, “Oh, this. Well, my daughter died and I had her cremated, and the ashes are inside this. And I don’t like to leave her home alone on holidays.”
It gets worse. Even though the daughter was stillborn, she’s been lugging the bear around for a year and a half. And last year, she had a 1-year birthday party at a Beverly Hills hotel for the “kid.” The teddy bear was sitting at the head of the table, dressed up in partywear with balloons decorating the table and everything. (This, of course, begs the question… what does one buy a 1-year-old teddy bear with a dead girl’s ashes inside?)
Yeah. As one of my friends said, “Well, cross her off the list of women I might be inclined to ask out.”
Thanks to foxy Noxy, my template’s been changed to something a little more… fitting. Blue flowers were definitely not my style. But things are better now, and I’ve done some tweaking on my own to bring things back more towards what I wanted on the site design—which I can’t believe I was able to accomplish on my own without completely breaking everything. Hooray!
Now, I’m off to do some drinking, and then I have to do some baking. I’ve been invited to a co-worker’s barbeque tomorrow, and she said I can’t show up unless I bring my world-famous chocolate peanut butter squares. Thank God I can make them while I’m drunk, since I’ll probably end up making them at 2am while inebriated. Drunken Baking™ has usually turned out pretty damn good though.
Memorial Day Weekend. It’s once again upon us. And it means many things to many different areas of the country.
In the Northeast, where I grew up, Memorial Day Weekend is a time for immense amounts of barbeques. It’s a celebration that summer has officially started, and women everywhere are overjoyed that the rare time between Memorial Day and Labor Day has finally arrived so they can wear white pants without committing a fashion faux pas.
In the Midwest, Memorial Day Weekend is the time of that vaunted occasion, the Indianapolis 500. [Ed. note: To anyone who’s a fan of Nascar, you probably should skip to the next paragraph before you become mortally offended that I’ve insulted your religion.] Personally, I’ve never ever seen the appeal of Nascar. Cars going around and around on a track… going nowhere for a long, long time. If I really wanted to watch cars go nowhere, I wouldn’t have to watch it on TV—I could just head over to the 405 freeway. Seriously, people pay money to get tickets to this occasion where they’re being assaulted by loud engines and exhaust to watch cars go around and around and around? Nothing really ever happens, and the highlights of this several-hour-long race can usually be summed up in under a minute of highlights: This car blew up, that car flipped over, the pit crews did a stellar job, and this guy won. Hooray.
Here in California, especially Southern California, Memorial Day Weekend marks the beginning of the June Gloom. It’s a strange departure from our two seasons here (those two seasons being Summer and Not Summer/Rain). The marine layer comes in every morning and every evening, so we actually only get about four hours of sunshine and nice weather every day. The bigger problem—at least for me, personally—is that I’m fighting almost 30 years of weather instincts from growing up in the Northeast, where I see these kinds of clouds and every fiber of my being is screaming, “It’s going to rain! Take an umbrella!” Of course, it never rains because we’re in summer, so I’m either constantly having to remind myself that it’s really not going to rain, or I’m the idiot walking around with an umbrella while everyone snickers at me.
That said, I really do enjoy Memorial Day Weekend, and I’m getting together with some other Northeasterners to have a barbeque and celebrate the joy that is a three-day weekend. Hooray for the three-day weekend! I hope yours is as good as mine will hopefully be, and here’s some tunes to help kick things off right. Feel free to download them and put them on party mixes that you can burn to CD and bring to your Memorial Day parties and barbeques. But for the love of God, right-click and save as, or I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger!
DJ Zebra - “More Insane” (The JBs vs. Cypress Hill vs. Average White Band)
Cheekyboy - “Switchin Alive” (Will Smith vs. The Bee Gees)
I think I may have gone completely around the bend. I just submitted a story for next week’s issue of the newspaper I work for—and it was written completely in Yodaspeak. Co-workers were wondering why they were hearing hysterical laughter emanating from the area of my desk.
Now to see if it passes muster with my editor…
Coming tonight to a TV near you: Rob & Amber Get Married.
Will someone please explain to me why these two are getting so much attention? Why two hours of primetime TV are being devoted to their marriage, and why they’re getting their own Newlyweds-type reality show? As far as I can tell, they have no discernable reasons for being famous other than the fact that they are famous (so it’s kind of a vicious circle)—and they’re famous for being reality TV stars, which I think is a little pathetic that we’ve elevated them to such heights. They don’t have any amazing talents, they contribute anything to society… it’s Paris Hilton Syndrome all over again. I don’t know why they’re famous, they just are.
The guy at the next table over seemed to be looking over at us rather often when we were having our Star Wars vs. Star Trek debate (and the discussion that ensued of the nature of the Star Trek universe) during dinner tonight at the Cheesecake Factory. I’m sure that his line of thinking wasn’t so much along the lines of “why are they being loud and obnoxious,” but more of “these people look relatively normal… and yet they clearly shouldn’t be allowed to talk about these kinds of things in public.”
Before I collapse on my bed in a quivering deaf heap…
The KROQ Weenie Roast rocked, and it also helped that I had mid-orchestra just-left-of-center seats that were simply amazing. Jimmy Eat World, as per usual, delivered a kickass performance, though for some reason, I tended to drift off into thought during Interpol and didn’t pay attention to them too much. The Killers put on a great show, but who really did an amazing performance was Audioslave. Holy effen crap. Not only did they do their own stuff, they also did a few Soundgarden and Rage Against The Machine songs—and the air was electric during their set. It was just plain great. The Foo Fighters were all right (nothing to really write home about), but Motley Crue was just an indiscriminate wall of sound—all I could hear was bass and drums and that’s all. I’m glad I’ve seen them before.
And now, the quivering and the deafness and the glavin.
Natalie Portman’s acting sucked. Dialogue sucked, and most of it was pretty cheesy. Lucas likes the screen-wipes way too much. At least the action sequences were cool, and there were a fair amount of them.
***MORE GINORMOUS PLOT HOLES CONTAINING SPOILERS***
Anakin’s turn to the dark side was way too sudden and didn’t seem believable.
Did anyone else think it was kind of stupid that the Death Star was being built at the end of Episode III and that it took them 18 or so years to finish it for Episode IV, but it only took them a few months between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi to build 2/3 of another one? They should’ve just left that out of the end of Episode III.
Can anyone really believe that a new mother would just pull two names out of her ass like that for her two children and then just die? That whole thing about “she’s lost the will to live” was just too hokey for me. Wouldn’t she want to take care of her children? And their civilization and technology is so advanced that they have interstellar flight—there’s no such thing as an ultrasound to tell her she’s carrying twins and not just one child?
10 random songs from iTunes:
1. “Say No Go” - De La Soul
2. “Hey Dude” - Kula Shaker
3. “Award Tour” - A Tribe Called Quest
4. “Midlife Crisis” - Faith No More
5. “Brand New Low” - Treble Charger
6. “A Day in the Life” - The Beatles
7. “Judy Staring at the Sun” - Catherine Wheel
8. “Papa Oom Mow Mow” - The Rivingtons
9. “Last Train to Transcentral” - The KLF
10. “Opportune Moment” - The Sheila Divine
And, as usual, something extra for your troubles. Right-click and save as.
After a long day at work, I headed to the Sunset Strip for dinner and an artist showcase. What was cool was seeing some friends and former co-workers again, as well as spotting Parminder Nagra (currently on ER, most famous for Bend It Like Beckham) in the venue.
What wasn’t cool was feeling thoroughly outclassed by the complete bevy of gorgeous women at the venue, and there was also the woman standing in front of me at the showcase who had no concept of “personal space,” to which I told her at one point, “I know my shirt’s made of velour and is all fuzzy, but if you keep rubbing against me, I’m going to think you want my number.” What was even more annoying was the guy dressed as a character from the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” video who was desperately trying to get with the woman and kept knocking into me with his backpack. I swear to God, I almost picked a fight with him.
The night was saved, ironically, by my drive home. It gave me pleasure to blitz down Sunset Boulevard at 55mph, whipping around the curves and feeling fearless behind the wheel.
On the agenda this weekend: Star Wars Episode III tomorrow night with a close friend and a bunch of her co-workers, then the KROQ Weenie Roast on Saturday.
Speaking of Saturday… right-click, save as and enjoy.
DJ Zebra featuring Neimo vs. Franz Ferdinand - “Take Me Out Saturday Night”
U.S. Gives Anchorage $1.5 Million For Bus Stop
Excuse me? $1.5 million? So they can have heated sidewalks and electronic signs and an art-like design done by the Museum of History and Art? Screw you, federal government.
Last week, the government announced it was closing a number of military bases, including the Naval Submarine Base in Groton, CT. There are some of you who might know that I grew up 10 minutes away from that base and that my dad worked there for almost 10 years. So I speak with authority when I say that that base is the crux of life in that area and supports the entire community, and to shut it down would effectively spiral Southeastern Connecticut into a depression. Besides, in this era of a pro-defense climate, don’t we need to be prepared? Don’t we need to have the most well-equipped bases available to our forces, and don’t we need to have the best schools available to train our officers? Because that’s what the Groton base is—the most well-equipped sub base and submarine school on the East Coast.
So it rings hollow for me when my government… wait, it’s not my government, I didn’t vote for them… it rings hollow for me when the U.S. government makes all this fuss about having such grand schemes to do what’s best for the country and keep us safe, slates the Sub Base for closure and then appropriates $1.5 million for a dumbass bus stop. Then again, should I really be surprised given the idiots in charge?
So I braved the crowds at the movie theatre tonight—and went to see Crash. Honestly, I’m still digesting this one, and I’m not quite sure what to make of it. Then again, I seem to have had the same reaction to Sideways and ended up realizing that I didn’t really like the movie, even though after both movies, people in the theatre started clapping.
I took a long walk after I got home to try and clear my head and sort some things out, and I came across one of those giant things the police put on the side of the road to tell you how fast you’re going—the ones with the giant LCD numbers on them. This thing was going nuts—flashing random numbers from 25 on up to 42, just like you would normally see when traffic is going by… except there were absolutely no cars on the road, and the thing never hit 0. I know for a fact that my walking speed doesn’t approach 25mph, so I’m starting to believe that maybe those giant devices are just expensive random number generators, and some company suckered police departments around the country into buying them at an incredible markup when the technology used to construct these things probably costs about $15.99.
“My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.”
-- Harvey Korman, Blazing Saddles
So much is going on out there with the new mayor and the people throwing live grenades at our Fearless Leader and the judge debates and the kids bringing guns to school and the glavin. Meanwhile, Nox is asking me if I’ve been following Canadian politics, and I don’t even have enough time to concentrate on my own damn country’s.
But the news that really concerns me is that Paul Anka is releasing a CD of contemporary songs done in an old-standards method. Yes, that’s right, folks, Rock Swings will feature Mr. Anka’s take on such lovely songs as Van Halen’s “Jump,” Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun,” The Cure’s “Lovecats,” Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Billy Idol’s “Eyes Without a Face.” The apocalypse officially arrives—I’m sorry, I mean the CD will be in stores on June 6. (That’s 6/6—wonder if that’s a coincidence.)