don't fence me in

you know, people, there are a lot of things i love about life. 

rock and roll makes me pretty happy. and burritos are A+. and i basically have a constantly hard-on for kathy ireland '85-89 (even if she has big eyebrows. drew doesn't mind. drew loves you for you, kathy).  i like roleplaying, too(the kind that involves dice and hit points, not the sexual kind - actually, come to think of it, i've never participated in the other kind. do people get off on that? i mean, is porking a cop or a secretary any different than your girlfriend / spouse? how bizarre. i mean, sure, i can imagine a scenario where i come home and kathy ireland is dressed up all metal and we put on led zeppelin iv and screw like the heavens depends on it but really ... but really, that might be the hottest thing i've ever thunk up. wowzer. more importantly, this parenthetical has gone on too long.).

but there are some thing i don't like. namely, being bored. that's why my current job is so awful. i sit here at my desk watching one of my bosses get high and play xbox while the other one plays internet poker and watches "cops." i wish that i was joking.  i want to quit  so badly and take another job, any other job. hell, i've thought about applying to borders or some equally soulless cooperation where i can earn my living and go home at night and work on my stuff. it just feels like that would be a massive step backwards, and since i'm not gaining in traction otherwise, that feels like a big mistake. 

you know what i want? i want to leave this place for the country or at least someplace more normal. there just isn't hope in a city. what did maylene & the sons of disaster say? "i've travelled this country far and wide, but i'll always be a son of the south?" you can never get away from home and you can't go back there. 

it's a sad time in a young man's life when zen makes the most sense to him. 

oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above, 

don't fence me in. 

let me ride through the wide open country that i love, 

don't fence me in. 

let me be by myself in the evenin' breeze, 

listenin' to the murmur of the cottonwood treest, 

send me off forever but i ask you please

don't fence me in. 

what you meant to do, part I

welcome friends to a new section of my blog i'm calling:

"what you meant to do." 

here will i climb atop my soapbox and in all rightness declare a better decision on could have made in a given circumstance. and by better i mean better. so for instance: you had a star wars trilogy marathon at your house last saturday. what you meant to do was have a star trek, evens-only, marathon (2, 4 & 6). see how it works? let's begin. 

so, you bought a jethro tull album: 

what you meant to do was buy a gentle giant album: 

you dig yes. hell, you even like alan parson's project. but on this sunny saturday with nothing to do, you wanted some prog-rock with a medieval chant / church organ / acid jazz rhythm section kinda thing. like a foolish fool, you went with 'tull. now everyone thinks your not-altogether-awesome. but why did you mean to buy gentle giant? 

let's start with the obvious. just glancing at the picture provided above, one can quickly discern that gentle giant is slightly more ugly than jethro tull. and if rock and roll has taught me anything (besides TCB) it's that the uglier you are, the more you are likely to rock. rod stewart's been a sex icon for three decades and married a supermodel. janis joplin won the superlative for "ugliest boy" in high school. i rest my case. 

and don't think i'm pulling one of these it's-cool-cause-no-one-has-heard-of-it things.  take the aforementioned rthym section of Ray Shulman and John Weathers. the bass pops in perfect synch with each hit of the snare creating these funky breakdowns over Derek Shulman's meandering vocals - and all the while Kerry Minear on the organ is just comping away (and occasionally throwing in these slick little runs).  it's been done, for sure. but they are able to do it so well. as far as a comparison to Yes goes, it's definitely more Close to the Edge than Fragile (i'm thinking siberian khantaru and total mass retained in particular). meanwhile, tull is plugging away at pretty standard jazz licks with flute stabs here. 'tull always seems to loose it's edge to me. This Was is basically a blues album, Passion Play is an almost painfully repetitive and Minstrel in the Gallery had a great A-side but that damn 20 minute song about humpty dumpty and the birds and ... well, whatever the hell that was. 

in 'tull's favor Ian Anderson does have an amazing voice and range.  if this were a songwriter's competition, i'd have to give it to Anderson over Shulman. but in musicianship, experimentation within the genre - not to mention arrangements - the trophy goes, without a doubt, to gentle giant. 

i ffffound it

we are the robots. 

following up yesterday's short, ridiculously poorly written / organized rant about the internet, i thought i should share with (who?) you one of the best sites on the ol' information super highway. as soon as you're sure your boss isn't looking, go check out ffffound. it's essentially an open lexicon of photos - no organization, no blogging or anything. it's like finding a big moebius strip lined with photos; you search and search and then end up back in the same place you started. 

in fact, it's the most like surfing you are likely to find on the internet. you just cruise, seemlessly falling from nerdcore photos, to absurd japanese print adds and technical diagrams until you stubble onto photographs that are, for all intents and purposes, pornography and then, miraculously, emerge into a world of television pastiche and high art. 

it's like a little microcosm of life or something - or rather, the distilled stuff of life. pictures without context, art without ownership. you end up looking, trying to process what you're seeing but what you're seeing can't really be understood because it isn't an encyclopedia - it's just a pile of pictures. it's like when you play a computer in chess: it can't be thrown off or bluffed because it simply doesn't know what that means. the pictures you see are processed, but they don't really mean anything to you without an author or some context to tie it into. i would look at some picture of a star wars something-or-other and think "i like star wars" but i couldn't explain what the image meant to me because i didn't know the who / what / where / when / why. it was just an image, click and it's gone. 

wild stuff. or maybe i just like to wax metaphysics. 

tubes and lasers

welcome: to the world of tomorrow! 

the internet is pretty amazing for a series of tubes. i mean, sure, we all remember that senator who couldn't articulate at all - AT ALL - the internet in any vaguely recognizable way ("an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock"). but seriously, who can rightly explain the internet?

google image search, that's who: the internet is lasers.

personally, my favorite term was always information superhighway because if brevity is the soul of wit, surely al gore and some guy from south korean are surely the wisest of us all. check out this picture of the T1 backbone of the internet circa 1996. 

in closing this brief, non-sensical entry, everyone should go read this newsweek article from 1995 about why the internet will never amount to anything. of particular hilarity: 

"Yet (some expert who makes me look like an ass) predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure ... We're promised instant catalog shopping--just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?"

umm, amazon averaged $1,236,250.00 a month last year. how much did your mall make? 

amazon.com's income statement, 1997-2007 (source: morningstar.com)

(USD $MI)

watch out for that -

- flying ray? 

by now, we are all well aware of the dangers associated with breaching the habitat of the wild ray. if nothing else, steve irwin's untimely (but - let's face it - inevitable) death at the deadly whip-tail of a ray taught us to leave rays the hell alone. but this, as well as more recent developments have led me to change one of my fundamental beliefs about life. 

you see, many years ago, while watching discovery channel's shark week i decided that sharks were natures most evil creature - pure evil, in fact. they mentioned this one island that these man-eating sharks go to every year at the same time when a kind of bird goes there to lay eggs. when the eggs hatch the cute little bird guys all have to learn how to fly by getting up in the air and over the (now shark infested) water. thing is, these sharks leap outta the water and grab the little guys right outta the air. then - and here is the really messed up part - they don't eat them. they break their necks, bite off a wing or something and LEAVE THEM DYING AS A WARNING TO OTHER BABY BIRDS. pure evil, right? 

but, as i mentioned, my view has changed. sharks don't really kill alot of people - in fact, on average only about 20 a year. mostly they just take a leg or a chunk of flesh. so really, in the end, they are not so much evil as they are colossal assholes. although, they do sleep with their eyes open - a warning never to trust an animal that doesn't have eyelids (reticulating membranes don't count). 

having heard a story this morning about a woman killed by a ray, i now believe that the ray has taken the sharks place as a nature's most evil creature. a woman, just hanging out on her boat, is suddenly and viciously attacked by a ray that LEAPS OUT OF THE WATER AND TACKLES HER. apparently, there is a similar - in fact nearly identical - case from 2005 but i failed to find a link to it. i did however find this story about a man who was stabbed IN THE HEART by a ray. see, while sharks are built like torpedoes and full of teeth, your common ray is much creepier. utilizing a long poison bard he STABS YOU IN THE F***ING HEART. this brings up some crucial shark-to-ray comparison points: 

1. most shark attacks are due to sharks mistaking people for shit they actually like to eat - like turtles and seals and stuff. sharks don't like the taste of what is essentially a big hairless monkey. 

2. sharks tend to bite extremities, because they look meaty and delicious - can we really blame them? 

3. rays, on the other hand, seem to have an in-depth knowledge of human anatomy, that not only denote amazing powers of intellect, but also a deep seeded will to destroy all humans.  

in closing, i think rays are nature's #1 most evil thing. a close second is the sacculina carcini, which is only saved the number one slot by being slightly more awesome than it is evil. in contrast, i believe that dogs are the most A+ super nice animal on earth. as proof i submit this video of a dog leaping off of a boat to attack a shark. someone give that dog a medal. or some snausages.

i do apologize if all this talk about evil and animals killing people has bummed you out. as a way of apologizing, i present you with this awesome page where you can waste several minutes basking in nostalgia. 

lay them busters down

lemmme chin witcha bo. 

after my recent trip to washington state to visit a very dear friend i acquired a whole bunch of gangsta rap which i proceeded to listen to.  among feelings of straight illin', i realized just how unacculturated i am to rap culture.  i go through periodic periods of interest in hip-hop and rap and i always have to learn a bunch of words just to enjoy it. not that i mind, it just always makes me feel like such a honkey. 

i can distinctly remember listening to this scarface song back in highschool and having to ask one of my friends who or what OG was. he was kind enough to stifle his laughter. this time around though, i used my honkey powers of discernment to locate an online rap dictionary. now i'm gonna pump it, puff it, and pop it. additionally i will undoubtably pitch woo like a true OG.  also, if you haven't yet, you should really go check out the true story behind the regulators. 

next stop: east si-i-ide motel.  

so long, gary

gary rolls a natural 1. 

people, i'm sorry. you better sit down for this. gary gygax, the creator of dungeons & dragons ... is dead. the man who drew millions of pimply-mal-adjusted teenager into caffeine-fueled arguments about the differences between goblins and hobgoblins has gone to a better place. it's too bad he fumbled on his death save this morning but i'm sure a few heart attacks will weaken your constitution as much as a Venomous Vial of the Necromancer's Brew (-6 CON, fortitude save DC36 halves).

on the plus side, there is a slot open in Al Gore's team of space-time infraction fighting super nerds. 

but not all is lost, dear readers. for in the venice architecture biennale, a young architect named christian waldvogel has unveiled his plans to pump the molten metal out of the earth and use it to construct a "rounded, twenty-faced icosahedron" which we would all live inside of and which he dubs "earth 2.0." i will repeat, for those of you with extreme anterograde amnesia: 

"a rounded twenty-faced icosahedron." those of you familiar with dungeons and dragons will know this as a d20. for everyone else, that is a 20-sided die and the indispensable tool of any dungeon master worth his weight in geldings. 

gary gygax will live on - through the might of earth 2.0

come on in, it's time to party

why lasagna, i wonder ...

i've noticed that lately garfield, of all things, has been getting alot of attention lately. from the (almost passe now) lasagna cat , to the randomizer, lest we not forget garfield minus garfield and it's many imitations, it seems that the orange comic cat is the in thing to poke fun of. it's kinda of like american apparel in a strange way. "look!," adherents can say, "i am being ironic in my love of this past pop culture (or am i?!?!)." of course, being ironic about how much one loves garfield or how cool the fashion of the 1980s was, is a bit like when a kid is proud of taking a shit in the john - we clap, but they weren't really all that clever, were they? that having been said, i do quite enjoy garfield without garfield. i also own a t-shirt from american apparel, whatever that says about me. 

the important things to note when it comes to garfield are these: 

1.) it was and is a terrible comic strip.

2.) it was a slightly less bad tv show featuring lorenzo music as the voice of the titular cat called "garfield & friends." it also, to the best of my knowledge, introduced the idea that garfield wanted to ship nermal to abu dhabi - a fact that, in hindsight, is hysterical. also, featured a cartoon based off of creator davis' other strip, U.S.Acres. egg with legs = brilliant. the most important thing to come out of the garfield & friends show were two spin-offs: 

3.) garfield & friends: christmas special; and most importantly:

4.)garfield's nine lives.

garfield's nine lives was, simple put, amazing. for a child it was at times magical and entertaining and other times almost disturbing - i say disturbing because it took a character i knew and loved from the aforementioned cartoon series and warped him, bent him and in some of the stories even killed him. the whole experience was incredible. i still recall the sequence where he is mozart''s (or it beethoven's?) cat. just awesome as hell, really. 

in fact, i'm gonna stop typing and you're gonna stop reading and we should both hop over to youtube and watch it. let's do. 

so long, bill

strange timing. 

yesterday i had this sudden yen to read a whole bunch about william f. buckley, jr., one of my personal heroes. now, before i go any further, let me say this: whatever your views on his political philosophy (or any other philosophy for that matter), you have to admire the man's ability to courageously change his mind, value ideas and intelligence above all else and regularly engage his total willpower to world-shifting results. the guy is a badass. 

i read a bunch of articles and stuff. i even made this screen-print with the intention of making a william f. buckley, jr. t-shirt to show my appreciation for such a totally awesome dude:

then this morning on the radio i learned that william f. buckley, jr. had (in fact just this morning!) died. i'm no so much saddened by the whole thing - he had a good run and accomplished much more in his lifetime than most people ever dream of. his obituary mentioned among other things "television host," "philosopher", "editor in chief" of national review (the political magazine with the highest US circulation), and "trans-oceanic sailor." 

what a man. 

eww.

is juicy campus the grossest thing ever?

why, yes. yes, it is.

interesting v. boring

zondo action team is a go. 

well, more accurately, we're still doing the countdown. we're at t-minus several years but at least we're checking to see if the ship is fueled and stuff. and that none of the astronauts are drunk.  the website should be live and kicking soon too, what with the second round of mock-ups about to hit the team in time for it's weekly meeting. 

in other - perhaps more boring? - news, this weekend is the joint tony-and-drew birthday extravaganza. in a - perhaps more interesting? - upshoot of this being a leap year, the 29th falls directly between tony and my birthdays. the haps seems to be that we are going to the point break live show here in l.a. but who knows what will happen. my inclination is to buy a bottle of scotch and watch conan the barbarian and to hell with planning anything beyond that. if people - however boring or interesting - want to show up, well, that's their beef. 

alright. i'm out. later, cyber-boners. 

  

agnostically employed

killing time. 

today i was trying to figure out the best way to fill my time here at work. see, most people work at work. i "work." i'm in this strange position where i show up to work, immediately boot up my miniMac and my MacBook and draw on photoshop for 8 hours. somewhere in there i go get lunch and i usually break for a coffee about 4 or so. but otherwise it's me and photoshop. now, this is a great arrangement. afterall, i'm not actually doing anything. and i do get paid, so that's nice. but i really can't fathom why my boss keeps me around. 

he spends most of his day in his office working. i spend my day outside his office learning how to paint on photoshop. occasionally, the phone rings - it didn't at all today, incidentally. he doesn't need me to work here. in fact, he would be saving alot of money by firing me. which brings me to my main question: 

why did he hire me and why doesn't he fire me? 

i've begun to think of this alot like how an agnostic thinks of god. "who is this god fellow?" they'd say. "why did he make me? what is the point? is he even real? can he hear me?" in the end, they decide to cut their losses and coast through life doing the best they can until either: 

a.) they are confronted by a profound religious experience that clears the whole mess up for them. or: 

b.) they die. 

in this light, i move courageously forward with the following outlook: either

a.) eventually my purpose here will be made clear and i will learn and grow as a human being. 

b.) my boss will realize his mistake and fire me. 

so today i spent some time doing google searches of the best way to waste time at work. i found an article that estimated that $5,000 per employee per year is waisted on non-work-related internet surfing. and this during a non-work-related internet surfing activity! 

oh esky, you're incorrigible!

now people, i love esquire magazine. 

don't get me wrong here: i know it is at times nothing more than a base fashion magazine ("how to wear a white polo shirt with khakis, v.III" or whatever). but, like a good friend with bad habits, i love it still. it was a staple posting spot for capote and hemingway (yes, that hemingway) back in the day and it continues to be a source of useful knowledge, clever tid-bits and not-too-many full page glossy adds of emaciated dudes in tailored suits. now, all that aside:

at the end of an issue, they usually post little obituaries which are, at times, very funny indeed. i thought i would share this one with you because it made me laugh out loud:

"A Pleasant Conversation, 2 Minutes, Dies:

A pleasant conversation with a guy on line at the deli died Thursday.  It was two minutes old. Until its demise, the conversation centered on the day's unusually moderate temperatures. "It's the sort of day that makes you want to call in sick to work," the first guy pointed out. To which the second guy said, "Yeah, like how hundreds of Jews who worked in the Twin Towers called in sick on 9/11." It is survived by a tense silence." 

maybe it's because i watched so much mell brooks as a kid, but i love a good quip at how stupid anti-semites are. what a bunch of f***ing retards (anti-semites that is, not those making the quips.)

(to clarify: jews good.)

(to further clarify: nazis bad.)

working class dog

tonight i'm crawling out from in it. 

you ever listen to rick springfield? i mean you have, you just ... wait. who is "you?" what am i doing, assuming i have an audience or something? ha! ha! i kill me. let's try this again. 

so i listen to rick springfield from time to time - you might know him as the guy who did "jesse's girl." if you're really savvy, you may remember his song "love is alright" from wet hot american summer. and if you remember him as the dreamy dr. noah drake, you watched too much general hospital. at any rate, "love is alright," the aforementioned track of wet hot american summer fame, has become my working anthem. 

"i'm taking out my baby tonight,

daddy's little girl, it'll be alright; 

i'm working hard, i don't know why - 

i'm like a working class dog and i just get by;

tonight i'm crawling out from in it, 

tonight we're living on a dream, 

second by second by minute by minute;

love is alright tonight

we're gonna be alright."

maximum radical threshold reached. well ... andrew wk covering it would be m.r.t.r. as such it's somewhere below "awesome to the max" but slightly above "totally bodacious." you do the math. now that my diatribe about rick springfield is over (for now) let's move on to an actual blog. 

zondo action team is going live with a website in the next few weeks. eliot and i have been having meetings almost every night of the week to discuss our business venture. often times these meetings last two hours or more - we talk about finance, business strategy, allocation of resources, growth plan, market stability, target clientele ... in short, i have finally become old. i now care deeply about my finances, my investment strategies and, in general, being a good little capitalist. you can see my previous entry for more on this. regardless, it's a big scary world out there, and if you don't challenge it, try to make your own way and be the boss of your life, what the hell are you doing? 

this dog don't roll over. no sir.