The Mix Tape: Alive and Well

Hmmm. I'm at work three hours late, two bucks short, lightly hungover, and I have an Interview Committee meeting in an hour. If I retrace my steps, this is what happened.

After work I went and bought some shaving lotion by Murad. At thirty bones a pop, I'm referring to it as a shaving treatment and referring to myself as a Metro...you know what? Scratch Metro, I'm calling myself a homo for that purchase. Swear to god, though, it's a nice shave.

After that I actually went to the grocery store and I hadn't eaten all day. This is as close as I ever come to being stoned. I bought a bunch of broccoli and some bread and cheese for grilled cheeses when it rains, but managed to buy some stoner fare: Honey BBQ twists by Frito's, a DiGiorno pizza and some Hot Wings. I didn't remember purchasing them until I put them on the conveyor for the clerk with my twenty Yoplaits. I'm seriously so gay for Yoplait.

I went home and ate dinner and planned on staying in for the night until I found my muse. I remembered a bartender telling me to put up or shut up when I called the jukebox stale. I jumped on my computer and made two of the most elitist indie hipster mix CDs for the jukebox. So, I ran them down to the bar and planned on maybe having a beer and going home. That didn't happen.

I got there a little after 9:30 and the CDs were in the jukebox and playing in their entirety by 9:45. I'm vain and love my music, so it was like hanging out with a beer and my iPod. That's a nice time. So, I had to sit there and listen to the CDs and see how the crowd reacted. Love me daddy issues like that of a stripper. Oh, I also met two girls who have got to be strippers. GOT TO BE.

When you make a mixtape you have these delusions that it can change someone's life. Like someone is going to hear that lyric in "Exodus Damage" by John Vanderslice and their life will change. Mine did a little bit, but I can't expect the same from others. Here is the set of lyrics that I found ultracompelling when I first heard the song. I seriously almost teared up:

"so the second plane hit at 9:02
I saw it live on a hotel tv, talking on my cell with you
you said this would happen, and just like that, it did
wrong about the feeling, wrong about the sound
but right to say we would stand down

an hour went by without a fighter in the sky
you said there’s a reason why
so tell me now, I must confess
I’m not sick enough to guess

dance dance revolution
all we’re gonna get
unless it falls apart
so I say: go go go
let it fall down
I’m ready for the end

so you hope that one person
could solve everything
and for me, that’s you
sometimes that dream
is a sad delusion
but sometimes it’s true"

Seriously. That is good writing. Regardless, Antonio's Nut House has one of my favorite jukeboxes in the Bay Area now. I realize it is super phonicly narcissistic, but it is what it is.

Here's the playlist of one of 'em:

1. Fuck the Valley Fudge - Grandaddy
2. Ram It Home - We Are Scientists (B-side)
3. My Lunatic Friends - Deathray
4. Song to Say Goodbye - Placebo
5. Can You See Anything? - Veto
6. One - Sunny Day Real Estate
7. When the Sun Goes Down - Arctic Monkeys (Live)
8. Don't Go Down - Elliot Smith
9. Sleep on Needles - Sondre Lerche
10. My Ghettoblaster - Brant Bjork
11. The Bends - Radiohead
12. The Slow Descent into Alcoholism - New Pornographers
13. Meds - Placebo
14. Shake the Sheets - Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
15. Whatever Happened to Corey Haim - The Thrills
16. Velvet Snow - Kings of Leon
17. Photograph - Jason Falkner
18. Beautiful - Clem Snide (Christina Aguilera cover)
19. Son's Gonna Rise - Citizen Cope
20. You Are a Knife - Veto
21. Cigarette Smoker Fiona - Arctic Monkeys

Okay, here's the second:

1. Use It - New Pornographers
2. La Costa Brava - Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
3. Store Bought Bones - The Raconteurs
4. Fortress - Pinback
5. Finer Feelings - Spoon
6. Get Me Naked 2 Electric Boogaloo - Minus the Bear
7. Can't Lose - We Are Scientists
8. Well Thought Out Twinkles - Silversun Pickups
9. Dr. L'Ling - Minus the Bear
10. Reckoner - Radiohead
11. Big Dipper - Built to Spill
12. Sender - Pinback
13. Exodus Damage - John Vanderslice
14. Freeze the Saints - Stephen Malkmus
15. Apology Song - The Decemberists
16. The Pioneers - Tunng
17. A Call to Apathy - The Shins

I did hear good things about it, too. So, I hung out too late. Sent one semi-bitter/ill-advised e-mail at three in the morning. What happened was this. I was dreaming in an English accent again. Seriously, you do not want this to happen to you. It's miserable. I don't know how the English do it. So, I was up at three in the morning and couldn't sleep and a little out of it and I checked my work e-mail. It was 9:00 AM GMT, so I was technically working. When you are sleepy and lucid, your mind fucks with you. It's like living out your subconscious. That is a world that no one wants to be in. Could you imagine a world without emotional fences and boundaries and half-truths and lies for the benefits of others? I'll say it over and over. It is what it is.

So, 19 minutes until this meeting of reviewing 25 resumes and coming up with five imperative questions to ask candidates. I've got one that goes "If Eddie Munster's dad was a Frankenstein and his mom was a vampire; how was he a werewolf?" The second question I have is just to challenge prospective candidates to a footrace. Technically, asking someone to race counts as a question. Third question is "Quien es mas macho? Senor Burt Reynolds o Senor Tom Selleck?" Fourth question is "Do these pants make my ass look fat?" Fifth question is "What do you think was in the case in Pulp Fiction?

Shit. Done and done. Work is so easy. If you are reading this, I hope you are having a wonderful Friday or weekend. I care about you all deeply.

Update: I just went into the break room at work to grab a Diet Hansen's (so good and plastic tasting like a nice scotch) and I think someone at work has figured out how to microwave farts. Swear to god. It's either that or they are microwaving a dirty diaper and muddy, sweaty tube sock.

Work Stuff

First. Everybody stop loud talking. Use your inside voices. We are all in offices and I can still hear you planning your life outside of work all day over my iPod headphones. It has gotten to the point where it takes Ozzy at 85% to drown you out with the stock iPod headphones. Yeah, my bad for not ponying up for the Bose Noise Canceling headphones so that I can listen to M.Ward while you talk to your kids. I'm this close to closing my office door. This close. |------------------------|

Second. People that adjust their schedules to ease their commute are annoying me for some reason. First of all, it makes me have to come into work at seven because you have been here since four. Basically, you wake up for work when normal people are getting kicked out of bars and leave work when normal people go to lunch. The trickle down effect lands in my lap as I get off at four and have to shop with the blue hairs. I will die alone because even my last chance of grabbing an orange at the same time as some perfect representative of the female species that enjoys oranges has been ruled out because I am shopping with old people who can't park. Are these my peers? Would this be my jury? Do I need to fight aisle wrapping pharmacy lines to get to the bread aisle? Did you seriously just take a half day at 8:00 AM? This can't be real. I am done with laundry and dinner and in my jammies when my friends/friend are/is getting off of work.

Third. How hard can it be to maintain a comfortable climate in an office building? I can't feel my hands. I'm going to look like Bob Cratchit by Christmas. I'll have some fingerless gloves and a sweater on while I type and look at my breath. While I see the appropriateness of holiday decorations to boost morale, I feel that people should not be used as window dressing while they work and especially if it is not entirely their doing and instead some kind of secret HR department plot.

Fourth. Try this at work. In a meeting, casually put your thumb up on the edge of the table. Then, while actively participating in the discussion, see if anyone else puts their thumb up on the table. It's just a relatively accurate coolness gauge. You do, however, run the risk of being called out on it. If you do get called out on it, excitedly pronounce that you are President and point at someone and say "And you are asshole." If someone busts out a deck of cards and a twelve pack of Miller High Life, you've just won the meeting and qualified as President for a game of Asshole. That, my friend, is called winning at being awesome.

Fifth. I skipped soccer and drinking after soccer last night to install an Oracle database on my personal laptop. I felt about ten feet tall while I talked to my neighbor about how he lost six pounds drinking Gimley's vodka and lime juice instead of beer. There may have been a diet book deal in that conversation if we had written it down. He was wasted, but power to him. He invited me out drinking on Friday, but I told him I had a soccer game and really wanted to cuddle up with my newly installed database that I can do whatever I want with. Change is afoot and it feels pretty good. I plan on winning this thing.

Sean Paul Jones

I'll admit that I ironically subscribe to the genius of all that is Sean Paul. He is like a more aggressive and more legit Shaggy while still being watered down and not legit. You can, however, hear his music coming out of everything from Escalades to Berlinettas at stop lights from the left to the right of the United States as a whole. I'd like to add right here that not only are we the home of the Whopper, waterboarding and Wikipedia, but we are also the home of Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader, Deal or No Deal and Don't Forget the Lyrics. Anyway, here is what you hear when you sit at the stoplight next to Sean Paul fans. It made me laugh real hard this morning.

Good Ideas for Autoreply Messages: Vol. 1

In these days of spam and mailing lists and general Inbox maintenance, it is a good idea to put some rules in place or even use the autoreply function for certain messages like "Thank You" or "Good Job."

The question is, what do you put in the autoreply that conveys sincerity and alleviates the automation of the whole process? How do you inject humanity into a reply that you may have never even seen go out of your outbox? Well, I have it. It's right here:

"You just don't get it.
I am not communicating with you for your sake.
The e-mail was strictly in an effort to hope you leave me alone all
together.
I don't want anything to do with you and I don't want your help or your
best wishes.
I know its harsh but it's how I feel."

Just cut and paste that into Outlook and you are set. I've got it set for anything with "Viagra" in the body text.

All The Things You Are

Made it. The first leg of the holiday mental gauntlet is in the books with minor altercations and negative points. There were some not entirely positive things that happened, however, and because I try to be completely honest through a veiled guise of anonymity even though many friends read this and can finish my sentences when I try to relate a story that has been chronicled here. Therefore, I'll run down some of the things.

First negative point was Black Wednesday. It would've been smart to stay home for this one, but something drew me out. To be honest, I've totally figured out what it is and it's so lame that it shoots pangs of guilt throughout me whenever I tap into my subconscious and see what's really going on. Sadly, I get drawn out when I feel lonely in the hopes that I will find some kind of stimulating conversation with someone who is attractive and intelligent. My god, that is so sad. Too stubborn to join a book club or e-date, though, still. That's a whole can of worms, though.

Here is a clue for anyone considering this type of action because it must occur in other people. I've been informed that I'm not special, so at least three other people must have experienced this. It rarely to never works. Perhaps the reason I still do it is because it has worked in the past (at least in a temporary form), so I intrinsically know that there is a chance. Anyway, the clue is that it may not be a good idea and it will probably not work. At best, you will wake up the next day and feel like crap and realize you just wasted time and money and may have even said something horrible to someone. Worst quote yet has been "Hey butterface. You should really be nicer to people that are more attractive than you." That is the most vain and mean thing I have ever said to anyone, but she deserved it.

So, the negative point on Black Wednesday went down like this. I was at my goto bar and this thick neck guy and his two personal trainees were with him. They had incredible Rottweilerish backs. So, anyway the two trainees started talking to me about how much better real ones were when compared to fake ones. Seriously, I'm not a fan of this argument. To each their own. I don't care about how a TV works or where your breasts came from. Not really my business.

Long story short, one of the trainees grabs my hand and puts it on her breast as I say "That's really not a good idea." This was the spark that the powder keg needed as I was about to be jumped by Thick Neck. This culminated with a heated (his side) and disinterested (my side) argument that probably had an under the breath comment of why would it matter if I touched a dude's breast anyway which then pissed off everyone involved.

I'll also admit that, at this point, every one of my drinking stories is sounding like it is from the point of view of Holden Caulfield. That's not really where you want to be. So, anyway, this situation did not end pleasantly, but I did not get a bloody nose or anything, so it's merely a minus one. I did, however, wake up the next morning still pissed and decided that this stuff needs to stop.

The next day was Thanksgiving and I went to my broken home to be with family. I refused to touch a drop of booze as I feared it would Irish up Thanksgiving and instead drank Diet Cokes and Ginger Ales which were very pleasant. I exchanged pleasantries with my maternal grandmother who explained to me that Mitt Romney is spoken to by the lord and not, in fact, George Bush. I told her I really didn't know who to trust on that one and it was kinda he said/she said for me. She then relayed that the Middle East would play out the way that the bible has prophesied.

At this point, I was looking for anything to gouge into my chest warranting an exit from this nightmare conversation. I can't believe that we even share any DNA and really think that she would have been better off had my grandfather never taken her from Canada. America has not been good to her.

Regardless, it was the best food on record and was great to see everyone, for real. My mom gave me one of my old books from when I was three and my neighbor read it to me. Sadly, the theme of the story kind of matched my mood even though I didn't learn from it 29 years ago. It was Hucklebug and was about a little bug that runs away and then feels bad, but doesn't want to go back because he feels bad for the mistake that he made by running away. I might add that I ran away twice before I was eight and I still have problems with mistakes and learning from them.

So, crap, day after Thanksgiving, I just bummed around and then eventually went out to get dinner. All the places that I tried were closed for holiday parties and I ended up at my other bar. The definition of insanity as determined by Jung is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Started talking to one of the bartenders instead of getting tacos. Beer. Beer. Beer. Whiskey Shot. Beer. Beer. Smoke. I ended up "dancing" at one of my all-time unfavorite bars while drinking "handsomes" with a girl from my softball team. This didn't go well and they took my beanie as it broke dress code.

Saturday. Did nothing. I read some stuff from my programming book and watched a couple of episodes of Twin Peaks and four episodes of Top Gear, which is one of the best shows on TV that I know of. Be careful, however, because you will start dreaming in an English accent if you watch too much BBC. It happened last night and I slept horribly.

I ended up at a party on Saturday night with Pappy at Warner's house and saw some really good friends and had an awesome time rocking out to Rock Band. I have to buy it now and put a Rock Band together. Right now, my official profile is Gay Pete. He looks like a short, fat Dee Snider and his name is considered "not Classy" by the XBox Live program. Whatevs. He is badness.

We need a bass player, but I think we've got the guitar and drums nailed at this point. The name's up in the air, though, because we need to have a band meeting to discuss it. It was something like Anal Stripes at last argument. The redeeming thing of the night was that fact that I drank three beers in six hours and was considerate to mostly everybody. The gay guy didn't really care for the name of my Rock Band guy. Like that was in my control. That's his name. That's it.

So, starting Saturday night stuff started getting good. I tooled around the apartment on Sunday and did laundry and stuff and felt good about most stuff.

A couple of things here, though. I'm starting to sound like Colin Oberst, but I'm thinking about quitting drinking again. I realize it's horrible timing for it with the holidays and all, but when I tally up the points, the good ones rarely come after a few. Let me clarify that, having sex in a hallway of a Sheraton at four in the morning or having sex with a semi-stranger and not remembering their name in the morning are not good points. Good points are feeling warmth in your chest from meeting someone as you walk away and go home to bed or doing something really considerate for someone and not for yourself. Very rarely are these points scored even with a drop of alcohol anymore. All the good points come under the influence of conscience and intuition. I've given myself a mulligan on saying things that are offensive in the spirit of self-degradation or lightheartedness, but I really am getting sick of it. The regret and guilt will wipe you out when you are sitting by yourself wondering why you are still smoking and alone.

It's harder than it looks and it breaks down to loneliness and regrets. It's weird. It starts out with you feeling lonely. The next phase is the guilt because you start to think that you wouldn't be lonely if you hadn't blown it about 25 times. Basically, you feel like you were given what you want and bit that hand that fed it to you. That's not healthy, is it?

Oh, the other thing is that The Girl from a couple of months back had a boyfriend and that's probably why she went AWOL. It's some form of closure and I still wonder why I got and am still a little hung up on her. The thing about that question is that even having the answer to it wouldn't mean a whole helluva lot. So, here goes.

Update: Proof that iPod shuffle functionality can read your mind. "Textbook" by We Are Scientists came up on my shuffle right when I finished writing this. No one should have to relate to that song, but it happens. It's like sad girls and Faith Hill songs. Has it really come to this? Seriously?

Hyperlameity

Holy crud! Still tired from Oracle OpenWorld last week where I was made to feel real dumb, inspired to learn more, stranded at the CalTrain station with no way of getting a ticket (second time that's happened), and the recipient of an Oracle umbrella. My first umbrella since my ex took my Stanford umbrella a long way back.

So, last Monday, I made it to OOW around Noon. I had to run my gear to my sister's house in the Marina and then get back to the conference. I had a gig on Monday night in the Richmond district and wasn't going to leave my gear in my car. Four guitars later, you know not to leave musical gear in your car. Not only does it promote the theft of the gear, but is usually really bad on your windows.

First day of OOW can be summed up like this: Business Intelligence, Web 2.0, Dashboards, Green, Next Generation [any word here]. The night before the first day there had been a shooting at the Metreon because some kid didn't go down the escalator fast enough. Another action pushing the culture as a whole an evolutionary step backwards. Got home Monday and was exhausted after pounding Diet Cokes through the gig.

One note about the gig, is that the guy who used to play drums for the band showed up. I think he is aware that I clowned him and also have already stated that I'll never play with him again. I watched him tune his floor tom for a half hour one night while we were late for a start and he also wears socks with Birkenstocks and I'm sure by now the Birk's have evolved into Crocs. What a fucked up world we are living in when people can do this. Managed to get home around Midnight and get into bed whilst having one pair of clean pants left to wear the next day that were a little short, to be honest. Whatever, floods at a dorkfest shouldn't be too bad.

Second day of OOW. I had missed the cocktail reception the night before, but this crowd didn't party real hard, so everyone was pretty with it. There were over 40,000 people at this conference and sessions were held in a ten block radius that you could get to via an intricate shuttle system that must have cost Oracle a fortune. It was clear from the onset, however, that money really wasn't an object at the conference. Some highlights:

-They shut down Howard street between Moscone North and Moscone South to build a tent a block long where events were hosted and meals served. It was impressive.

-They had a customer appreciation event at the Cow Palace and booked Billy Joel, Lenny Kravitz and Stevie Nicks and Mick Fleetwood. They also had Envogue. That's pretty tight.

-They were running a fleet of full-on tour buses between the hotels and also their headquarters in Redwood Shores.

-They provided palatable lunches everyday. I had a Thai wrap that could very well have been unstoppable. I would eat it again.

-The tchotkes at the conference were some of the better tchotkes I've ever seen. I think it was Tuesday that I saw about twenty people walking around with Guitar Hero III from the NetApp booth. My Oracle bag is pretty nice, too.

That was the second day. Business Intelligence sessions and a little bit of PL/SQL in there. I went home Tuesday and managed to get some laundry done.

The third day was the day of the big concert at the Cow Palace and Larry Ellison's keynote with Michael Dell. The next day the concert was followed by reports of noise complaints from the event from as far as ten miles away. They must have just rocked. I think I still would have been more impressed by the keynote that day. It was bigger than some rock shows that I've been to and people were pumped. Pro tip-for the next 5 years, at least, "Green" is the thing. That is all anyone is fucking talking about besides dashboards, of course. I think I fell asleep at like eight that night. Walking around with 40 pounds of backpack and sneaking work into session breaks was taking its toll on me.

Now, by the fourth day, I was done. I bought a new book for $75, but it was to replace one that was stolen a while back and it's super good. It was a slow day as everyone had left or was tore up from the night before. I still went to a bunch of sessions and talked to some guy from the UK for a while about database development and footie. I wrote some random notes down in my notebook during one of the sessions, though. Here they are:

-Jawas in the exhibition hall. These are the old Asian people that comb the tradeshow exhibition hall for branded junk. They are easily spotted by their bags full of stuffed bears, thumbdrives, hats, mouse pads, key chains, etc...They will take anything and are absolutely unqualified leads. They also bug the shit out of me because I used to do tradeshows for a living.

-Keynote Speaker Cellphone Videotapers. At least four of these guys were in front of me during the Ellison/Dell keynote. I was concerned that I would catch their hyperlameity. I did, however, send a few texts during it and was genuinely impressed by an uninterrupted data migration between two 11g servers. I would never tell anyone that, though. Seriously, though, impressive.

-Personal Space Invaders. After two days of people walking right into me constantly and bumping into me almost twice as constantly, I started to believe that I may have become invisible. Could people seriously bump into me that squarely if they could see me? It defied all explanation. I also became a fan't of the person who gets on the escalator and puts a head in your ass. Seriously, this dude had his nose in my ass going up the escalator one day. Perhaps he was a budding proctologist, but he was violating my personal space in a bad way.

-Grown Man Stuffed Menagerie Makers. These are the grown men in jeans and sport coats with brown boat shoes and branded stuffed animals. I managed to spot one with three different types of plush toys and made a tiny little prayer to myself that he was going to bring them home to his son or daughter because it wasn't even really desk worthy.

-Escalator Standers. The rule is that if there is room in front of you, then walk. It's not a fuckin' ferris wheel. It is meant to speed your travel from one point to another faster than it would take to walk the stairs. It is to decrease time, not your effort, you fat fuck. Put down the cookie and start walking. Look what happened on the Metreon escalator (even though it's totally wrong and uncalled for). Escalator related violence is increasing at an alarming rate, so please follow the rules of the road, therefore, decreasing the chance of anyone experiencing Escalator Rage.

-Lunch Chasers. The lunches served were very decent, but they still came in a box. Is there any reason that you should be seen running across a plaza to get a ham and cheese sandwich? If you've done this, you should probably roll a ten sided di to see what damage you just took to your dignity.

-Beanbag Sleepers. These folks were definitely web 1.5, but they are still out in full effect. For some reason, if you are sleeping on an Oracle beanbag, you don't look homeless sleeping on a concourse floor. That's right. People are merely a shower, laptop and a beanbag away from looking homeless sometimes. I will kind of stick up for these people, though. The conference was super exhausting.

-BO Aficionados. There were dudes at this conference that brought BO to a new level. Sadly, every time I would get behind a guy that smelled of BO, I could only think of Sting. Why did he ever get into singing that as his thing? It worked the first time, but he throws it in everywhere live. BO is to Sting as "Dyno-Mite" is to ________________. A little SAT prep thrown in.

-Cookie Cutters/Collectors. These are the people that would cut in front of me at cookie time. Everyday around 3:00 or 4:00, they would bring out the coffee, cookies, and soda and people would go ape shit. It was like feeding time at the zoo. I have to admit that I found a tremendous amount of pleasure in watching the whole event. A couple of the days, I would jump in for a cookie and a dude seriously pushed me out of his way the way my grandma does at Christmas and Thanksgiving. I seriously thought about leveling some old Chinese guy over a cookie. Instead, I just let him get his handful of cookies and went for one when the frenzy had died down a little bit. The cookie was really good, though. It was peanut butter and not too hard or too soft. I cared for it.

-Tennis Shoes and Suit Wearers. I've been trying to pull off a variation of this at work, but no matter what you do, you end up looking like Rick Nielsen from Cheap Trick without a hat on. Sometimes, though, I've almost sold myself on the look. Black Adidas Gazelles can almost compliment some slacks better than dress shoes. It's a sense of aloofness combined with a projection of "I'm very serious about getting some work done today, but could still ride a skateboard home" vibe.

-PPT Slide Photography Enthusiasts. There was not one presentation that you could not get on a thumbdrive or download that was presented at the conference. There was, however, people that insisted on taking fuzzy pictures of the PowerPoint slides with their iPhones and e-mailing them to themselves. Was there something that I was missing that enhanced a PPT slide if it were caught in it's natural environment? Was it like seeing a lion on a safari versus seeing one at the zoo? Fuck these people.

That pretty much sums up my last week. I mean, yeah, Thursday night I got into a beer chugging contest with a guy named Bjorn from Germany and a guy named Edmundo from Mexico. We ended up bar hopping and I lost two credit cards and got stranded in the city, which lead to a night on my sister's couch and a commute of shame the next morning, but that's just a Thursday, isn't it?

Judo "The Art of Choking"

I've been following the Hans Reiser trial lately. I find it extremely interesting. There is sex, betrayal, shadiness, a Honda CRX, and Judo "the art of choking" involved. The San Francisco Chronicle has a blog that is updating very frequently as the trial progress. Here's the link: SFChron Hans Reiser blog.

On every side of this trial are high profile San Francisco Bay Area legal people. Prosecutor Paul Hora had the Sausage King of San Leandro case. In that case, a guy who owned a meat processing plant disagreed with some inspectors and shot them all. He died in San Quentin a year after he was found guilty.

William Du Bois is on the defense. He represented one of the dudes from the Newark Gwen case in the Bay Area. That was where a bunch of dudes had sex with this "chick" and then were super pissed when they found that she was a really pretty guy. The kid involved got 15 years to life for it.

The judge is Larry Goodman. He was the judge on a case out of Pleasanton. It actually involved a girl that I went to high school with. She was abducted by a couple while she was on her way to work, raped and dumped up in Tahoe.

Check out this gem:

4:08 p.m.: Oakland police launched a major surveillance operation of Hans on Sept. 18, 2006, 15 days after his wife went missing, Hora told the jury.

Cops tailed him in numerous undercover vehicles and even in a plane circling overhead. They followed him as he left a daylong child-custody hearing in Oakland, had lunch with a friend at Fonda restaurant on Solano Avenue and then watched as he was dropped off near his Honda CRX at San Pablo and Ashby Avenues. It's the car the cops had been searching for. Hans then drives the car to Monterey Boulevard off Highway 13 in Oakland, parks, gets out, circles the hatchback four times, fiddles around in the car and then leaves. A cop sees Hans talking to a cab driver who appears on scene. By then, it's nightfall.

When the cab leaves--and Hans is nowhere in sight--the cops radio each other excitedly, "He's in the cab! He's in the cab!" Police start following the cab and tail it as it heads toward the Oakland airport.

But wait! Hans isn't in the cab, the cops realize.

Then an officer sees Hans "sprinting up the hill" up Shepherd Canyon Road, looking nervously over his shoulder. The cops lose him in the Oakland hills and never see him again that night, Hora said.

But OPD still has Hans' car--and it's missing the right front passenger seat, Hora said. The seat was there when Hans was pulled over by Redwood City police six days earlier, the DA said.

So, read more at the blog. Their coverage is really good so far.

A couple of things:
1) I am officially denouncing the "Thank You" e-mail and putting a filter in my inbox to automatically delete it. Don't get me wrong; I'm appreciative that you are thankful for some kind of action that I performed, but it's not necessary to thank me over e-mail. It's enough that I've obviously been identified as someone with a small rig and erectile dysfunction that needs to make lucrative stock purchases everyday, but I need to do stuff besides delete e-mails all morning. So, from now on, I will assume that you are thankful and if you are not, then that's neither here nor there. I do nice things for people to make myself fell better not them. It's absolutely selfish of me.

2) Try and listen to SomaFM when you are stuck on the InterWeb at work. There is a really good Indie Rock station and the Groove Salad station is pretty good, too.

Profundity, Monkey Dancing, and Barbarella

I just died laughing. I'm not even going to explain how I got this link, but the tagline had me cracking up. The tag was something about Nick Rhodes from Duran Duran talking about the profound influence that Star Wars had on Duran Duran.

Welcome To Planet Duran Duran

Okay, they took their name from Barbarella, which is like the sexiest non-porn movie ever made. That movie still makes me feel funny in the same way that Erin Gray did on Buck Rogers. It's a feeling that is both natural and unnatural at the same time. Some day I will understand it.

So, anyway, Duran Duran definitely has a sci-fi link, but if you want to talk about profound influences on Duran Duran, you would need to at least put cocaine, disco, and homosexual financing on the list somewhere. Star Wars I think would fit in that list fourth or fifth and would probably fall more into the category of "pretty big" influence.

Star Wars was a profound influence on Coheed & Cambria, Kevin Smith, and Hardware Wars. Let's just get that straight.

Side Note: There is something that is so incredibly calming about listening to Sufjan Stevens. It's not real happy. It's not real sad. It's just calm. That'd be pretty cool to be able to do that. He must be like 42 seconds away from being used in a Target commercial if he hasn't yet. I just heard a Target ad where they took Jim Noir's song "My Patch" and changed the words for counting down to Christmas or some shit. Dude, it's not even fucking Thanksgiving yet. What the fuck? Should I be getting stuff for my New Year's Eve celebrations now, too?

Anyway, many people in America don't remember Jim Noir for his song "Eanie Meany" from Adidas' World Cup Promotion. Jim Noir is worth checking out. He's got some cool stuff. Yeah, corporate whore, but whatevs. If I could quit what I'm doing right now and not have to do it for a year to do a dog and pony show for Target, I would just ask you to point the way and then start doing the Monkey Dance.

Update: Finer Feelings by Spoon could be one of the coolest songs ever written. For some reason, this song is just really clicking right now. It's got such a fuckin' solid groove in it and the guitar plays just enough without playing too much. Everything is just perfect about it. Perhaps...too perfect? Finally, Ga (x5) had to be one of the best albums this year.

Here's a link to the Underdog video. Brilliant.

Also, you can't forget keepon dancing to Spoon's "Don't You Evah." One of the coolest bass lines ever. I love it, genuinely. If you don't like that video, you are evil. It's better than LOLcats.

If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home By Now

So, no soccer on Friday this week after work. You know what they say about idle hands. I managed to meet up with a friend for a drink after work. This shouldn't be a big deal, but it sure is nice to do every once in a while. It doesn't happen a lot anymore. I wore a pseudo-Friday night shirt and Friday night shoes so that I could go over to my bar that I like that sadly has turned into a nightclub of sorts on weekends. This means that I have to put on dress codeable attire. I have to admit that it does make me look more handsome. So, it may be a blessing in disguise.

By the way, these new Friday night shoes that I got are awesome. They are Kenneth Cole Reaction. I think the model is Punchual. They are super comfortable and have now become my official shoes of work. Comfy and cheap. That makes a good shoe.

So, hung out on the patio of my usual bar and was apparently doing a meet and greet with every late 20s early 30s single mom in the place. I'm not hating on breeders. I just found it weird. It was like someone had put them all up to it and I was the butt of some kind of elaborate practical joke. I'll admit, too, that the mom from Poland was super hot. Whatevs. Not dating or hooking up for a while.

Got home late Friday after counting tips with the bartenders and walking two of the cocktail waitresses to their cars so that we could all be robbed and assaulted together. Chivalrous, yes, but safe? No. A jacket over a puddle is one thing, but protecting two hot girls from whatever comes out of the dark at three in the morning is something completely different. I'm not calling myself a pussy. It's just that there were giant Samoan bouncers inside and they sent me out. The lesson learned is never make eye contact when someone asks for something.

So, Saturday morning I missed some pick up soccer in the morning and then sat there figuring out what to do. I decided I would get a burrito for lunch. That was my plan for the day. I went and got said burrito and even threw in a quesadilla because I was jonesing for one. The problem with the quesadilla is that it prevented me from being able to eat the burrito. These are the problems that I deal with on a daily basis.

I watched Deathproof in the afternoon. I was a little biased against it and I didn't want to like it, but wound up really caring for it. The soundtrack alone is worth the price of admission. I have to hand it to Tarantino, his soundtrack taste is impeccable and full of deep cuts. So, after Deathproof, I watched The Fountain. I really like Darren Aronofsky, but this movie was challenging. Themes of love, despair, and immortality. Conquistadors, monkeys and yoga bubbles. It's visually stunning and a cool movie, but a lot of it had me going "What the devil?" Went to bed at ten Saturday night.

Woke up confused about what time it was because my phone had autoupdated for Daylight Savings. I don't really observe Daylight Savings, but do respect those that do. I finally figured out that it was 7:30 AM for everyone else, but 8:30 for me so I jumped in the shower and started my Sunday ritual which consists of coffee and the paper. Starbucks Coffee was apparently not serving coffee on this particular morning. Seriously, why don't they just change their name to Starbucks froofy espresso drinks with whip cream, trinkets and baskets of Cranium games? Stick to the basics. They invented the 400% markup on a cup of coffee and then can't even manage to serve it. Fuck You, Starbucks! Fuck You all to hell for not having coffee on Sunday.

So, I went to the other Starbucks down the street and got coffee and the paper there. I'm a total ass hypocrite. I'm aware of this. I burned through one crossword puzzle in the pink section and then struggled with the second one for a little bit. Browsed the Target ad, the Best Buy ad, and the Cost Plus ad. I don't know why I browsed the Cost Plus ad; it's not one of my usual ads that I browse. Oh, wait, I got angry because the Christmas push was starting and Cost Plus had a bunch of Christmas crap on sale. I disagreed with that.

So, at Starbucks there were nothing but weirdos and I decided to leave and go buy a vacuum because I had been putting it off for months. Buying a vacuum is the most thankless fucking act in the human action palette. No Dyson. No special pet hair function. I just need something that didn't require a bag, was not too loud and could handle the twenty square feet that is my apartment. I got it and for those keeping score at home it is a Bissel Cleanview II Plus or something. I think it's a piece of shit, but I was using a hand me down that resembled the vacuum from Mr. Mom and that thing started attacking blankets and the kids in the movie. So, I upgraded out of fear more than anything else.

Because I can never have a typical Sunday ever, I got a call from one of the dudes on my rec league soccer team and they were watching a game in Palo Alto. I had to give him the team bag and some jerseys, so I swung by the field and then watched the game. I've been thinking about joining an all mens team and wanted to see the level of play. It looked like an injury league, but fun.

After the game finished we went to a pub and watched Ac Milan versus Inter and then the Patriots versus the Colts. We drank some beers. We had some ideas and weird conversations. Well, at least I did.

We were with a couple of refs from our weeknight league and I basically laid out every trick that I ever use and asked them how they could possibly call me on them. They said they could now that they knew what I was doing. They really did respect my heel to the groin move, though. I stole it from Wayne Rooney. After you collide with a guy, you get up and act dizzy and then fall backward and grind your heel into the guys NADSAQ. If you put your hands over your face at the same time, it's a real easy sell.

So, we talked about rec league soccer for probably way too long, but managed to come up with the idea of combining some players from various teams into a tournament team. At the time it sounded like some kind of Axis powers super soccer team and crazy, but this morning it just seems like a tournament rec league team. No biggy.

After that, I went out on the patio to smoke and ended up talking books with this dude for about a day. We ended up talking about Steve Erickson for a bit and then came up with the brilliant idea of a book club. Not like a book club of a bunch of women in their late 20s, early 30s, reading John Irving and Oprah recommendations, but an elitist and pretentious book club that is centered around Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce.

I totally lifted the idea from Tom Robbins, but whatever. At this bookclub, however, we never have to read Finnegan's Wake, you just need a copy of it to get in. Once you are in the bookclub, we just talk about whatever books we are reading and music that we are listening to whilst drinking beers in paper bags. I'll stick by that idea the morning after.

Finally, best idea of the day came late. I remembered this news article about celebrities and people of interest donating their hair to charity. It's a cool idea and fun activity. It got me thinking, though. Are there firemen out there without moustaches? Cops without moustaches? Gay dudes without moustaches? Do they not have them because they can't grow one? D'you see where I'm going with this? I could grow moustaches and donate them to people in need of them to fill a stereotype that they aren't living up to. Plus, I would get to grow a moustache. It's a win-win situation.

OMG, foot in the mouth quote of Sunday:

"Hey, your buddy's pretty fucked up, man."

"Oh, he isn't. He just has MS."


That's all for now.

Uhhh.

I might have wore a fake moustache before posting this to youtube, but whatevs. It's basically a guy making fart noises in his hands that sounds like Sweet Child O' Mine. A better description would be that he is jamming along with the recording using nothing, but his hands and a super-vexed expression on his face as he concentrates on his art. I bet this dude gets real old at parties. Seriously. Watch his face. He's getting into it.

Simon Says Embed!