London Fog

Wasn't there a goth band from the UK called London Fog? Whether or not that band existed we got a good dose of it now. I am working the evening shift here at the library. I can gaze out the window here in telelphone reference and barely make out the police station across the street from the Spirit Square parking lot which stretches before me like some pavement-covered flat area. The red-bricked old folks home is in the mist, its ten stories rise up like a squared peak. People move about on the
sidewalks, the fog having deprived them of their detail. Their colors gone, they are shapes and nothing more.

Superstar!

Today I made my performance debut. I do a voice on the Storyplace website put together by the library's children's staff. The voice I do is the character that the main character, Little Red Hightops, meets on the street. You can be wowed here.

My life is still being heavily affected by Tropical Storm Isidore. There was a light rain this morning when I was waiting for the bus. Will my suffering never cease? I had a hell of a time reading my book. I had to hold the book with one hand and the umbrella with the other. I got water droplets on my shoes and the first seat I almost sat in on the bus had a small puddle. Damn you, Isidore! Damn you to the gray waste that spawned you!

Tropical Storm Isidore

Today it was drizzling outside. As usual I am waiting for the bus. I have a dilemma, should I open my umbrella and keep this tiny bit of precipitation off me or should I continue to read? Standing at the bus stop can be boring even when you are readning. Just standing there under an umbrella just plain sucks. Today I got a little moist and kept reading.

I am currently reading a 'Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" by Mark Twain. Like all true Americans I have read both Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, that short story about jumping frogs and various quotes at the front of books and outside buildings. After seeing the Mark Twain documentary on PBS I realized that I had not read enough material by the person considered the first true American novelist. So far I have been able to determine that Mark Twain didn't like government and organized religion and royalty and other people.

Speaking of Tropical Storm Isidore that dampened me this morn, there is a Roman Catholic church in northern Michigan that dampened my spirits as a child called Holy Rosary. It was located at a crossroads outside a small town called Cedar. The crossroads was called Isidore! Wait there's more. The media has been referring to Tropical Storm Isidore as 'Izzy.' My favorite member of Gun 'n' Roses: Izzy Stradlin'
It's a crazy mixed up world.

Festival in the dang park

Jessica and me went to the park festival in Freedom Park called Festival in the park which Wendell calls Freedom in the Park. A co-worker's college enrolled daughter used to call it vegetable in the park. We call it Festival in the Park.

The first thing we did was get some teriyaki chicken on a stick. A stick full o' chicken costed five dollars and they gave you a butt load of chicken on that stick. It was like eating on of those turkey legs. I was happy. We strolled around, checked out the art, listened to some live music and cursed these roving bands of teenage mimes. Mimes are Satan's dingleberries, as we all know. These mimes were especially abhorrent since they were obviously still learning their craft. We counted four packs of four! That's a lot of goddamn mimes. Mimes of the Serengeti? What we needed were some rodeo clowns to come stomp their ass. Mimes, the wildebeasts of clowndom.

I am a big fat pig. I sweated my butt off yesterday at the park and it was only in the mid eighties. I need to re-evaluate my lifestyle. Staying up until three playing geetar with the gang probably didn't help. Big fat pig, me be.

Festival in the Park

I went to the Festival in the Park today which is taking place at Freedom Park. I went to see the singer/songwriter Christy Snow. I road my bike down there and it had been a while since I had been out on the bike and it kicked my butt for the first half mile or so. My body was begging me to stop and go back home and relax. I made it to the park though.

Christy Snow has a lot of lesbian fans, it seems. The ladies there were pretty butchy, not the classic type of American beauty that is glorified in our media. I noticed how content and happy most of them seemed. These ladies looked to me to be the big homely type of girl that used to get married off to the alcoholic old farmer down the road. Now they have a choice and can live happily among other women like them. Made me feel good.

Christy Snow is a good singer and very good guitar player. Her voice and her guitar work well together and she writes nice melodies. I was a little disappointed by her lyrics. They were competent but a little pedestrian. I'd see her again but I don't think I will be buying any of her CD's.

Little Sugar Creek runs through the park and there has been a lot of work done on it. The park service has removed all the concrete that used to line the creek in order to give it a more natural appearance. By doing that they hope to allow the natural ecosystem to thrive. It does look much more natural now and it is approaching beautiful. Now it is more than a drainage ditch and has the chance to be a real creek. That also made me feel good.

How do you live without a microwave?

How do you eat that macaroni and cheese you made the night before? How do you warm up your humus? What do you do if you leave a beer in the freezer and you need to drink it right away? Microwave popcorn? Microwave pizza? How about leftover pizza? What about exploding small frogs? Not having a microwave puts you one step away from savagery. You might as well spend your sundays spearing neighborhood squirrels and frying them up in a pit in your yard. You could invite Robert Bly over and he could bang a drum while you dance naked as you munch on blackened squirrel.

Hamburger Helper

According to the many years of advertisements I have sat through Hamburger Helper helps hamburger make a great meal. What they fail to mention is that grilling said hamburger and slicing up some tomatoes and onions, lightly toasting a bun, and slapping some ketchup and mayo on that bun also helps make hamburger make a great meal. Don't forget potato chips. They help also.

Being a single American guy I must prepare a dinner of Hamburger Helper every three or four months. Especially in the winter. In the winter it's the lazy man's chili. Sometimes I use ground turkey when I am feeling fat. Last night I prepared some Hamburger Helper. I made the one with potatoes and I used beef, not turkey, even though I was feeling kinda fat. Potato Stroganoff, I believe. The style of Hamburger Helper doesn't matter all that much since they all taste pretty much the same.

What I am trying to say is that Hamburger Helper tastes just as good the next day as a lunch dish as it does the evening before as a supper dish. A little tip from me to you. Don't feed that leftover Hamburger Helper to your dog, take it to work. It'll keep you warm while you are in the cold clutches of The Man.



TV good

They showed the Keith Hernandez Magic Lugie episodes of Seinfeld yesterday and the day before on cable channel 8. I hadn't seen those particular episodes in a while. God, that show just makes me laugh and laugh.

TV bad

There is only one thing I hate more than commercials: clever commercials. It drives me crazy when I see an intelligent, dramatic or funny commercial. All the combined talent and lifespan that is wasted in the quest to elevate the awareness of a product. Commercials are bearable when they are bad. When they are bad, those that made it weren't busting their ass. But when a commercial is brilliant a little piece of all who worked on it died. Except for infomercials. They are satanic art and those who work on them are serving sentences for evil doings in earlier lives. I am sure Hitler is a cue card holder for various infomercials.

The Big Takeover

This spring, up in Durham, I discovered a music magazine called The Big Takeover. I bought the most recent edition this weekend up in Asheville. This magazine seems to be the pet project of one Jack Rabid. I bought my first copy this spring because it had Iggy Pop on the cover. The editor interviewed Iggy. It was a fantastic interview. Rabid was intimately familiar with Iggy's career, asked smart questions, allowed Iggy to talk and alloted quite a bit of space to the interview. It also had a large number of reviews in the back. It has the most reviews that I have ever seen in any magazine. Even more than Mojo. They have a unique format for their reviews. The reviews are sorted by reviewer, not by band. This allows reviewers to write about the same albums occasionally, giving the reader different view points. Since this is a 'zine-style publication the reviewers tend to review music they like. There are very few negative reviews. If it's not reviewed, they probably didn't like it. If you like indie and/or alternative music pick up a copy of the Big Takeover the next time you are in a 'cool' book store. It'll keep you entertained for hours.

Last night I decided to make me a Big Takeover mix CD. I sat down in front of the computer for a couple of hours and scanned the reviews and downloaded a song or two from bands that looked interesting. I got a lot of good music and made a 79 minute long CD and listened to about half of on the bus this morning. I think there are a couple of bands that I will have to pursue later. It was a fun project, I actually got more material than I could use. Too bad you can burn more than 80 minutes on a CD. I need an mp3 player with a buttload of memory.

Idiocy in government

Kind of a pointless and redundant headline, I know. The more I put links to stupid government acts, the harder it will be to come up with an original headline. Maybe I'll just add numbers on the end. Keep a running count.

This report in the London Times outlines the administrations intentions to start a $200 million advertising campaign to convince people we need to go to war against Iraq.

The monies being spent on an advertising campaign to increase the mob's desire to murder is obscene in so many different ways. The mere fact that there are, right now, people sitting around deciding on how to put the best possible spin on killing others. "Let's see, how about we dehumanize them?" "No, no, let's glorify our potential actions." "Can we make it light hearted?" "Light hearted dehumanization? You mean like reality TV?" "Exactly!" "I love that! Run with it!"

$200 million is $75 million less than the annual budget of the Charlote public school system.

I have to imagine that this is unprecedented. Has there ever in the history of the world ever been a marketing campaign for war? How can you possibly portray this? I have an idea: How about a bunch of America-hating peace protesters walking around in a cordoned "free speech zone" somewhere in the vicinity of the white house, holding signs and chanting anti-war slogans. Then the camera zooms to a tight shot of a soldier standing off to the side and a single tear runs down his face?


Free Speech Zones

When we were up in Asheville this weekend I was reading an article in a monthly newspaper who's main concern was preserving the forests of Western Appalachia. A noble goal. The article mentions some protests that were organized during a recent visit to the area by the EPA. I was shocked to learn that protesters were limited to areas euphemistically deemed as "free speech zones." These ridiculous areas even exist on college campuses now. Notice that the student activity center is nice enough to supply their students a map to the free speech zone. Any protest worth its salt should be held not on the free speech zone but somewhere it can stop traffic and get people arrested.

I wonder if George Carlin is familiar with this term? He loves dumbass euphemisms.

I didn't hear nobody pray

Jessica and I went to Louisville, KY this weekend to attend the wedding of a friend of hers. We left Friday right after work and drove for eight hours or so and got in about three in the morning. I don't reccomend doing that. That's the kind of trip that requires three 22 year old guys with a case of beer, a carton of cigarettes and some speed. "Are we there yet" was the theme of that leg of our journey. I drove the second leg and only the White Stripes album "De stijl" played very loud kept me going.

Coming back yesterday we decided to drive to Asheville. NC from Lousiville so we could bum around Asheville for a couple of hours last night and this morning. I can't say enough good things about all the independent shops in downtown Asheville. I could have spent my paycheck there and still wanted more.

Getting to Asheville from Louisville was an adventure also. It was raining about the whole way. Not a bad rain, just showers interspersed with drizzle and occasional breaks in the precipitation. The Smokey Mountains during a rain spell are beautiful with the clouds wrapping themselves around the tree-covered mountain tops. What wasn't pretty were the three wrecks we saw. A couple weren't bad but one had traffic on I-40 down to one lane in each direction. From what I could tell a van clipped a semi and wound up upside down on the middle barrier. I don't want to sound like a wussy but driving on the interstates scares me sometimes. There are so many trucks and so much traffic it really can be dangerous. More than once I was tempted to just pull of the side of the road and breathe.