Solitary, poor, nasty, short and brutish? Just work harder, God will Know

which is just my way, on this effing hot night here in the only state that really matters, of introducing quotes from my favorite philosophers. And if you didn't AT LEAST get Hobbes out of my title, you should go back to Junior High and pay attention this time.

Anyway, here, the wit and wisdom:

"I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul." -Calvin

"If people could put rainbows in zoos, they'd do it." -Hobbes

"There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want." -Calvin

"There's more to this world than just people, you know." - Hobbes

"I go to school, but I never learn what I want to know." -Calvin

"If you couldn't find any weirdness, maybe we'll just have to make some!" -Hobbes

"Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice.

I'm rooting for ice.

Because when you live in South-Central Hell and you see this on the weather website at 9:45 AT NIGHT!



You just pray for ice...

ice cold ice....

And you want to kill the fucker who is claiming it "feels like" two degrees cooler.

Asshole.

I'm cranky.

Fanboy Goes the Final Step.....

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a complete computer illiterate and slavish follower of fashion. Consequently I am a complete Apple fanboy. But until today I had held out against the siren song of the iTunes store. In fact I had never purchased any digital music online, instead holding to the principle that hours wasted searching LimeWire and Torrent sites was a more economic way to get obscure 96 kbit/s renditions of scratchy songs from the past.

But today, with all the pride of a scairt dog, rolling over and pissing on itself in an ecstacy of surrender, I signed up for iTunes. Gave the mod swine my credit card number, home address, phone number, probably signed my soul away.

But BOTH Flamin' Oh's albums for only $9.99? Oh baby, no way I couldn't sell out. No freaking way. I got "I Remember Romance," "I'm the Gun," "So Cruel," and "Medical Mess," and all the other hits we used to swing to in Minneapolis.

I've got cancer, and VD
Diabetes and a broken knee
I wear glasses
Still can hardly see

I'm just a medical mess with only 6 weeks left...
(unintelligible ranting further obscured by shitty mixing)

I'm a bleeder
with a million cuts
I'm on a diet
with ulcers in my guts
I'm psychotic
I think I'm going nuts!

Sure, I sold my soul. But it was completely worth it.

DID MICHELLE MALKIN HAVE A STROKE?

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And that one is OUTTA HERE!

With all cares behind me and the promise of vehicular manslaughter ahead, I zoomed off for my date in the Sierra Foothills. All traffic reports indicated trouble on the usual routes out of town, which is always good news for me. I was heading into the Sierras, where my sainted mother once lived, and where my doughty and true sister still does live. This means I've driven the 'usual' route to (essentially) Reno, 8-million times and I'm always glad to experiment. So I headed towards the Benicia bridge, but cut off towards Antioch, up highway 12, right on highway 113, a quick cut over to Pedrick Road, and the a slice up to Highway 80 at right about Dixon. This only left the traffic jam entering Sactown and the inevitable one just around Rocklin, which I avoided by cutting over to Roseville Road and cruising by the train tracks. Then, a stop at the store to purchase firewood and victuals, and it was up to Colfax and the campground. The lovely BAG was already there and, predictably, sitting reading a trashy novel she had purchased the day before. The campsite, at Bear River Campgrounds, is very nice, and the only thing that worried me was the family in the two campsites to the right of us. They were of a nationality that has many children (and don't you disrespect their culture by denying it, you pig) and all the kids were there. So were the two pickup trucks, the two dogs, and the consumptive grandfather. The consumptive grandfather sat just across the border between our campsites, speculatively staring at the dirt, pulling off of bottles of Corona, and in small and sequential steps, hacking up about half a lung.

As soon as I arrived, everyone in the family but Grandpa Tuber Bucolosis packed into the two pickups and headed off. The BAG and I sat around and waited for the heat to subside. It did, and we eventually had a lovely dinner. In memory of our trip to Italy I had purchased the bits and pieces necessary to make a crude approximation of Prosciutto y Melone and we slurped this down. I had also purchased some pork and potoes, but eating the appetizer and French Bread filled us up, so we hopped immediately to making a fire and watching it. Always the highlight of a camping trip.

The "people of a fecund race" returned in full brood and began to set up their evening. The did this in the furthest away of their two campsites, and were just the best behaved fellow campers imaginable. I cursed myself for being such a racist pig (actually I had another beer) and at about 10 that evening the BAG and I fell asleep in the calmest campground in America. It was beautiful.

Grandpa TB, strangely, continued to spend almost all of his time on our side of their campgrounds, separated from the rest of his family by 30 yards and two pickup trucks.

This is also where the dogs were chained at night, but I refuse to believe this actually has any comparison value.

Work Week from beyond Heck

So when you take a Monday off and still get an email early Monday morning saying that you need to meet with (certain faculty members) and RIGHT NOW ON THIS DAY(!) but then (certain faculty members) don't bother catching up with you until 4:15 on Tuesday (for a meeting that was scheduled at 3:30) you perhaps have an inkling it isn't going to be your week.

And when they tell you they need a presentation folder, 4-color, full-bleed, designed, layed out, printed and die-cut and ready to go in two weeks, you know you are in trouble. And when you finally sit down with (certain faculty members) and they have no photos, no text, no input of any kind, well.. then you don't know what to do.

This was that week. Fortunately one of (those faculty members) turned out NOT to be a faculty member and thus understood that "product" (as we call it in the biz) comes as a result of "work" (as we call it in the biz) and in order to "work" on "something," you must have that "something" handy. And this lovely person showed up every day this week and worked, and was only late once, and that time it was because she was being driven by (a certain faculty member). So we worked and worked and worked. I spent long nights sorting through stock photos and actually spent half a day gallivanting all around the greater metrop0litan area taking photographs of educational instutions and businesses. The first night I spent til about 10:30 sorting through online stock footage. On two days I was up at 4:30 in the morning and at the computer, pounding out succesive versions of the thing. On the day I was driving all around the greater metropolis, the general theme hit me of the thing hit me, "The World Begins Here"/"Home away from Home" and from that the highly efficient (woman who is not a faculty member) and I hammered out five concepts that would go into the piece and we were more or less away on design.

By the continued miracle of the woman (who is not faculty) and with the help of my boss Mike(cromanager) who had some really pretty good input, we got the thing to the designer on Friday about 2. It was a complete grind of a week, and all normal work went by the wayside, but we got the thing done and Mike(cromanager) let me take some of my comp time off to fly to the hills.

With grainy eyes, a mighty headache, and a generalized feeling of ill-will towards any tiny, furry critters that I might see trying to sneak across the road in front of the lesSUV, I am off and up those damned hills, to camp with the BAG.

Marginalized German Female Romantic Poet looks for Like-minded Goth

When the literati gather to discuss the canon, particularly the poetic canon, they often overlook historical and literary realities that help create that canon. I have here, particularly, misogyny in mind and the correlated pedestals and gutters into which women in poems, and of poetry, are symmetrically cast. On pedestals or in gutters, the work of female poets is easily ignored.

Such is the historical predicament of German female romantic poet Kattan Mous. For too many years now, Kattan has lingered in the shadow of her brother Anony, who is represented in poetry collections across all genres. Little is known of Anony Mous, and even less is known about his sister Kattan.

This is unfair, for Kattan was a genre-bender from the outset – in many ways defined the future of women in poetry. The first female poet to affect clothing in all-black, she also took her coffee and lovers in that fashion. A pioneer in the field of mascara-application. gaol-house tattoos, Gaulousies, and misery, she is perhaps best know in literature for her only written work, a seething poetic contemplation on mortality and dirt (We are told it is incomparable in the original German).

A DAY AT THE BEACH
Kattan Mous

I looked into a grain of sand,
And saw the earth, an orb
And lands
In a great universe absorb
and expand!
To include perhaps, even more lands
And lands and lands, and lands again!
And when I look, more lands within!

A solitary walker, me!
I swooned, I me, I reveried!
The lands include and bound the seas,
Beneath all of which, I understand
There lies more land,
And land, and land!

And each land promising only bliss.
Not sculptured garden or Arcadian myth
And then, at last I understand
We come from land
To go to land.

Can a little sister get a hand?
(REPEAT CHORUS IF YOU'VE GOT ONE)

Unfortunately (from a critical perspective premised on the unimpeded gaze of male hegemony) Kattan was not suicidal, lesbian, or cruelly beautiful. Lacking any of these key ingredients to a place in the pantheon, she was forgotten after her untimely death, age 93, at the hands of a mercury-based black nail-polish.

We are asked, "who did she influence?" and the tragic answer is no one. Consigned to the trashbin of literary history by the withering male gaze, she disappeared upon death, if not earlier. With this essay I hope to move Kattan from disfigurement to transfigurement - to find Kattan a place in the new canon, the canon of "forgotten" poets - poets with asyncopated rhythms, poets who deftly rhyme "moon" and "june," poets without love except from those whose fetish is to love the unloved (Kattan is rumoured to have dated Wordsworth), poets without the skills to pay the bills,

Kattan Mous, We barely knew ye!

Apologies to all Three Readers

One of the three of you noted that comments didn't work, so I've had to change to a canned template and start effing with it. Which is exactly how comments got lost the last time, so I suppose this only proves I'm either

A) Optomistic I can learn from past mistakes
B) Stupid
C) Living in an Illusion
D) Both B and C Which adds up to Republican

which is a lie, because the real answer is..

E) About to go to bed before my eyeballs fall out like that creepy scene in "The Time Machine" where the guy is in the machine and looking out into the cave and like the dude dies and then he gets all leathery like Clint Eastwood or Ann Coulter and his hair gets thin like Clint Eastwood or Ann Coulter and then he gets all shriveled up like Ann Coulter and then, like, his eye falls out. And everything.

Beach Bug (The Completion Backwards Principle)

Had to do an online school thing today, so took advantage of that to take the whole day off. Left for Felton yesterday (place has sporadic wireless) and worked up the coast today. Took a standard picture of a dumb bird which as everyone knows is a picture I take all the time and never get right.

This is an ongoing trauma.

As we headed from beach to beach we decided not to go down onto the beach on which some sort of hominid hunting/gathering was taking place. I did snap a quick shot of the the lovely naked man foraging in the water, apparently for food. There were no clothes anywhere in sight, we were the only car in the parking lot, and I was just a bit concerned that the super-genius life I've been leading has softened my once godlike physique to the point that I have now become below Mr. Neanderthal on the food chain. And if he offered me some kind of crud he pulled from out of the creekbed?

I'd rather eat Korean!

So we wandered on and checked out Butano State (?) Park which looks like a truly excellent place to camp. No RVs at all, no showers, and vault toilets. These are the kind of conditions that drive out the lesser camper and that's what we like. In addition, only 39 sites in the whole campground, which must at least reduce the chance of horrifying late night party noises wafting in from all sides.

Then it was up to Alice's Restaurant where, unnacountably, a really red firefly took a bizarre shine to the radio antenna on the car behind me. I raced to the car to get the camera. For the first time EVER an insect, bird or animal was still there when I got back with the camera and I snapped these photos with the long lens.

Then I had a delicious burritto and we returned to the Hell that is San Jose, and the certainty (for me at least) of work tomorrow.

While we ate, since I had the big old 400mm lens out I was interupted by a waitress who wanted to know about digital cameras. The big lens seems to be an invitation for waiter/resses and bartenders/resses to start conversations with me. I rather like that, actually, because in general I'll never see them again, I think (hope) it means my food won't have any bodily fluids in it, and I can usually give some good general advice. All in all?
A better day than if I had gone to work.

Korea.. The food of the future ("Ice Cream of the Future" still sucks)

So Michael Bauer, fresh from attempting to poison his innnocent pooch, notes that:

A couple of months ago, I attended the first-ever flavor conference held at the Culinary Institute of America in St. Helena, where for three days a group of scientists, chefs and journalists convened to talk about what's happening in the world of cooking.

Greg Drescher, the organizer of the event, kicked off the program with a very provocative idea:

"Anglo-Germanic palate is in slow decline, and Latin and Asian flavors will change the landscape."

And this, predictably, makes me think of another reason that Korea will shortly rise in the estimation of the US. It has a cuisine that suits us.

As always (and Koreans would hate this) I think of Japan. When we think of Japanese food, what would most US citizens come up with?

If you said "sushi," you, like me, are part of "most" US citizens. Sushi is the most Japanese of exports, although cartoon chicks covered with the semen of multiple masturbators (and possibly tentacles) are rising on the charts. But what percentage of US citizens actually "like" sushi? The farther you press into the flyover states, the lower the percentage drops.

But what percentage of US citizens love them some the Barbeque (BB-Q in the vernacular)? I'm up at 90% or so on this one. And the Koreans make themselves some kicking BBQ. With the bonus that a good Korean BBQ joint lets you cook it at your own table if you want.

What's that you say?

"Not very exotic?"

Right you are. It's only BBQ. And sushi, right up to the poisonous varieties and the ones covered with the eggs of gutted fish at the top of the endangered species list? It's as exotic as cysticercosis with a bit more fun involved. But Korean food will bring you the exotic food, it will just be in a million small dishes surrounding the main one. That means you can look like you are eating exotic food while you are really eating cooked beef or pig.

It's a dream for the US.

So this, out of order from the arguments I was going to make -- full of intent, logic, and meaning, is one small reason I think that Korea may be the next Asian "flavor of the month."
And since the last one, Japan, has enjoyed a 'month' that has lasted almost 40 years?

I want to see what happens....

Oh, yeah.. that "ice cream of the future?" It's something called Dippin' Dots and it has been the "ice cream of the future" since I was a youngster, which was long into the previous millenium. I first saw it at the Santa Cruz boardwalk, where conventional ice-cream and cotton candy had much more appeal for me. If you want to invest in the future of the past (Did I just quote the Moody Blues?) you can check them out here.