green apron monkey

it's true

The tranquility of the house is threatened. The playstation is broken.

I will make it unbroken tomorrow.

Maybe then I won't come home to find The Neverending Story Part II on.

Sweet jesus that's a creepy movie.

I wouldn't be surprised if everyone involved in the making of it was a pedophile.

one too many mornings

I'm giving myself deadlines.

Next friday for the election year economics stuff. Hold me to it, dear readers. I am an inconstant soul.

"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by." -Douglas Adams

Life is busy, life is good, life is distracting. I'm hungover and underslept but really happy.

customer insanity file

• There is one customer who spends more time in my store than I do. She's this really crazy hawaiian lady that endlessly makes and cuts out construction paper leaves. Today she told me she had finished four hundred, and that her goal was a thousand.
• Another customer is frequently drunk when she comes in. She's a middle-aged woman and she is a horrible rambler, going on and on and on well past the point when anyone is even making eye contact with her. Tonight she started haranguing me about our lack of ashtrays. I pointed out that I didn't have any. That did not satisfy her. A young woman pointed out that smoking outside a restaurant was illegal in California. Enraged, the drunken customer repeated how long she had lived in California three times and decried both of us for being tobacco nazis. I just didn't have any damn ashtrays.
• After the crazy drunken customer left the younger customer proceeded to say dumb things about marijuana. She said that it wasn't carcinogenic (I'm pretty sure it's more carcinogenic then cigarettes). Then she claimed it was "good for you because it's medicinal." I'm pretty sure that is about the dumbest thing I've heard recently that didn't come out of the mouth of Mel Gibson. I rolled my eyes and informed her that medicinal usually meant slightly worse for the disease than for you. Then I apologized for the other customer yelling at her.
• Lots of Starbucks don't take $100 bills. The idea is if you traffic in smaller bills there's less to lose at a time. Well one toadhead launched into a five-minute harangue about the decline of western civilization because the barista said that they could get in trouble for taking it. He repeated the phrase "this is 2004" four times. It did not grow relevant with repetition.

perpetual sunshine of the spineless mind

parameters:
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind = ESSM

ESSM is an intricate, ambiguous story. It loses much of its punch when it does not surprise so I shall not divulge details. But I will give you a single point by which to navigate through the movie.

Memories can be painful, but without that pain we will not learn from them.

ESSM is a movie hung on two nails, Nietzche and Cognitive Psychology. The Nietzche is there in a background via a quote from Bartlett's. Throughout the movie there is a faint suggestion that that people have been running around, doing the same things and then having their memories erased, only to fall into the same pattern again.

Nietzche thought that the whole world might be like that, disintegrating and then falling into the same deterministic grooves and repeating the same things over and over again. Nietzche found this terrifying and thought that if he could get used to the idea then he would be able to overcome anything.

I think most people do find this terrifying. The worst thing about a series of bad relationships is that you can pick out a broad pattern to the mistakes you keep making. You find a tropism in you behavior and it is the most terrifying thing in the world. It reveals you as a an animal and not at your best moments as a dumb animal.

The other nail is not so pessimistic. Despite all the dystopic undertones, Kaufman's script finds hope in the connection between emotion and memory. He uses the Orwellian/Stalinesque ways that your brain reconstructs memories from the hard drive to suspenseful ends, but does not give in to any sort of vision of self as passive victim of its memories.

I think that as the cold war, and cold war era psychology both fade away there will be less call for dystopic fiction. Our stories about memories will be less like 1984 and The Manchurian Candidate and more like Memento and ESSM.

Yes, and I should drop a link to the great Slate article about the science of ESSM.

wherein i am no longer a hobbit

I like bulleted lists. I just do. I like colons and semi-colons too.

• I have moved out of the basement. I have my own room again. No offense meant to elex, but YAY!
  
• Yesterday I was told that people manning the register need to be sweeter. I poured sugar on my own head.
  
• I have found that it is a great fun to go to a photo rating site and make up stories about the people you see. Then rate them not by their looks but based on what kind of person they are in the crap you just completely made up. I am reminded that this is largely the way we elect presidents.
  
• Fog of War is awesome. It was moving, though not to the stone faced middle aged hippy crowd that I saw it with. Wet Hot American Summer is weird. The first bit of the movie is just a normal bad movie and then they shoot up heroin on the trip into town and it only gets better from there.
  
• Tom, Kylee and I are about to go see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It has a pleasing title.
  
• I'm working on something called Election Year Economics - A Quick, Dirty, Foul Mouthed and Pessimistic Guide. The tentative sections are as follows.
  
  
  • Part I: Budget Deficits and Interest Rates. Left gets right, right goes wrong and you get confused.
  • Part II: Offshoring. Dr. Ricardo, we meet again.
  • Part III: CBO Estimates Courtesy of Dr. Charles Shaw.
  • Part IV: Social Security, Medicaid, Entitlements, Demographics, a Couple Vicodin and an Evening with The Statistical Abstract of the United States.
  • Part V: Special Bonus Pessimism: Stephen Roach on Property Values.
• Johnny Logic says that some of my profile pictures makes me look like one of the nihilists on The Big Lebowski. Who will protect you from Ze Germans?
  

geekcenter

The Starbucks that I work at is starting to get my imprint upon it, which is to say that it has become considerably dorkier.

We now have a guy who can program in about whatever language you want and another who studied economics at Columbia.

The programmer is a dork in the most thorough sense. He has terrible taste in music, digs cartoons and is generally messy, brilliant and averse to being told what to do.

The Columbia guy is pretty experienced in financial matters and knew I would be impressed by the fact that he had taken classes from Robert Mundell (and I was).

The presence of so many dorks has also begun to attract a fairly dorky customer base. So over the course of the night we had several discussions about the merits of campy humor (Drop Dead Gorgeous was recommended as a case study), about Mundell's beliefs in regard to the gold standard (one hour and two articles later I'm still rather fuddled about that), and the relative merits of various emo bands. (Is Modest Mouse emo?)

So I guess what I'm saying is that my life has gotten much more enjoyable because I'm surrounded by dorks.

psa ptII

Who's going to see the Pixies?

Oh yeah.

I am.

Thanks ebay, for taking away a sizable chunk of my cash in exchange for the ability to see my favorite band.

reincarnation

Like Hindus, cars die and die again.

But sometimes they are touched by Yama Dharma and are kicked out of the dream life forever. This is the real death.

My car has died the real death. A faulty fuel pump has recked a nasty havoc upon the engine, turning an ugly but serviceable car into just an ugly one. The messenger that will bear it to a better place is WEAVE.

"What's WEAVE?" asks Tom.

"Women Escaping a Violent Environment." I say after a moment to make sure all the letters matched up with all the words.

"You aren't giving them a very good getaway car."

This is funny.

"They're just going to think that they can get away from their abusive husbands and it isn't going to start."

Maybe I should donate my BART card too. Just in case.

sleep

Whenever work gives me lots of shifts at different times during a week I get weird and cranky. I find myself behaving erratically and thinking thoughts that don't come into a normal person's head.

Yesterday a girl came into that store wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the logo from The Last Unicorn.

"I hate that movie." I said to her. No 'hello,' no 'how may I help?'

She became uncomfortable. Personally I think I think if you wear a t-shirt that pitches for a movie that starts out with a creepily animated unicorm talking for five minutes with a deranged singing butterfly, then you really shouldn't be surprised when random strangers tell you how much they hate it.

Myself, I'm not even sure that she knew it was a movie.

She made no defense of it. If I wore a t-shirt advertising my love for say Manos, The Hands of Fate and someone dogged me for it I would at least say, "how can you not love that movie for going out and proving decisively that worse movie could not have been made for any money."

Still, some people perceive this as hostile. My negative comment, not the wearing of the T-Shirt, that is.

I think about ten hours of sleep might have cured my hostility.

Go Here

Like an awful lot of people I find Wonkette to be hopelessly addicting.

Here's and example of why, in her coverage of the ongoing Massachusetts gay marriage debacle.
I like the Onionesque headline, particularly.

Gay Marriage Becomes Gay "Marriage"

first we take manhatten

I ate at a restaurant that I couldn't affor last night - Cortez. I do this from time to time, because I reallyy, really enjoy food. Good food with good company and a little nice alcohol is what I consider the recipe for right living. The greek did not get it quite right, to be worth living, life certainly must be examined, but it is best when considered over brandy and sauteed mussels.

It is a tapas style, Spanish inspired cuisine. I think what inspires most about the tapas style dining is the ability to ream you out of quite a bit of money without quite realizing it. All those nine dollar dishes add up rather quickly on your first trip to any given restaurant. The second trip is usually cheaper, when you already know what you like and don't like.

Still the food was pretty good, even if there wasn't much of it for the price. The Idaho Trout dish was far and away the best thing on the menu, even if the "Moons Over My Hammy" inspired fried quail egg and hamachi creation was the most interesting.

The highlight was the nine dollar manhatten that I had from the bar. I have never, never had a nine dollar drink that was worth every penny, but this thing almost made me come in my pants. And that's certainly worth nine dollars.

context

Some Backgrounds.

Emotional: Kylee has broken up with a long, long term boyfriend. She's going through that troubled post break up period where the idea of other boys sounds really good, but she can't quite stick with any of them. She is distraught, but I think not so much at the loss of a not so serious relationship.

Temporal: This takes place immediately after Kylee's second failed attempt to have a boyfriend after the long term relationship.

Spatial: On the futon in front of what is known as the great computer orgy/ area where we set our drinks.

Scene: Tom is already seated on the futon. Kylee sits down next to him; not too close but in the area. Tom proceeds to scoot over about six inches , and blurt out "Don't you pull any of your rebound crap on me."

Thank you for listening to my little story.

TomAbuse has been updated, due to a conversation in the Target parking lot.

There are lots of good exchanges that don't go on the page because they don't work much out of context. A lot of the out of context stuff does get funnier with context but I want it to stand alone in theme with the page. For instance, it's pretty funny to know that Tom was groping Thalisha's shoulder while they were waltzing when he said the word "scaaaapula" but I think it's pretty funny to know that somewhere there's a guy saying that word with a lot of emphasis on the middle syllable, whatever his reasons.

I've been tempted to start a segue page, full of excerpts of longer conversations I've had or participated in, in this house.

jesus horses

"gone, like my last paycheck
gone gone away
gone, like the car I wrecked
gone gone away
gone, like a fifth of gin
gone gone away
gone, like the shape I'm in
gone gone away
. . .

gone like a Nixon file
gone gone away
gone, like my landlord's smile
gone gone away"

-John Hiatt

I'm sliding on down to LowCal for a few days, mostly to watch my sister play softball. Since my wireless card hasn't arrived yet, I probably won't be blogging. So I leave you with a link to a work in progress, the out of context quotations of my roomate, Tom Call.

Perhaps you may find this amusing, perhaps not.

cross posted and out of context

The results have been tainted and the experiment has been compromised.

As per instructions, results were kept in a vessel well below room temperature. Apparently labeling was insufficient. The results have dissappeared, save for a small tainted sample that has dried to the side of a butter knife.

Warning to those that breach the experiment in this fashion: be assured that the growths you will experience under the next few days are benign. DO NOT CONSULT A DOCTER CONCERNING THESE GROWTHS. This will compromise the secret nature of the experiment and will cause you to be dealt with quickly and harshly. Try to ignore the resulting *visions* and try not to act surprised when they come true. Please, FOR THE LOVE OF SCIENCE.

shopping as performance art

We lynched a teddy bear in Albertsons.

My roomates were waiting for me when I got off of work. They killed time renting movies while I closed up and blasted The Clash halfway accross the parking lot. Neither of the cute girls were working at the video store, I checked.

When they were done, when I was done, we needed a trip to the grocery store. We needed provisions.

It was housed in a large plastic cage, with a number of other stuffed animals. I took it out and elex selected a stuffed cow. They did battle at our will for a time until that moment was over. Then as we were stuffing them back into their little cage I let go of the bear, while only his head was through. Then I noticed a little plastic chain dangling down. I tied it around his collar and proudly announced, "it looks like he hung himself in his jail cell!"

A middle aged guy that looked like Elvis Costello heard that and was amused by it. He went to get his wife so she could see.

When an Elton John song played on the muzak, we ran and pranced.

While selecting two for one loaves of bread, we decided against the wheatberry. Kylee cast the deciding vote, "it leaves weird skin in your mouth."

"I like that" said elex.

"You like weird skin in your mouth." I gave him my best sideways, measuring stare. The girls walking by us broke into juvenile giggles.

The thistles on our artichokes cut the checker's finger. We told her that all of our food was booby trapped.

We live to amuse random people at the south El Cerrito Albertsons.

lets not get too democratic

"You can call it pandering, you can call it representational democracy, either way they are into it." - Jon Carroll

John Kerry's Career Patrons

1. Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo $232,736
2. FleetBoston Financial Corp. $183,037
3. Time Warner $145,435
4. Hale and Dorr LLP $129,858
5. Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom $125,550
6. Harvard University $124,250
7. Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos Inc. $122,300
8. Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson & Hand/Piper Rudnick $121,550
9. Citigroup $116,656
10. Goldman Sachs Group $110,600

George W. Bush's Career Patrons
1. Enron Corp. $602,625
2. MBNA Corp. $597,041
3. Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. $564,404
4. Pricewaterhouse Coopers $485,448
5. Vinson & Elkins $476,400
6. UBS AG Inc $474,300
7. Credit Suisse First Boston $472,650
8. Goldman Sachs Group $409,449
9. Bass Brothers Enterprises $397,427
10. Ernst & Young LLP $384,154

Source: Center for Public Integrity

One source of campaign finance reform that I support in spite of it's glaring unconstitutionality, is that we ought to ban contributions from law firms. The reason being is that when a law firm lobbies, it lobbies for a whole plague of interests. When I see Enron or Bethlehem Steel on a list of donors, I have an idea what to expect from that candidate right away (corruption, deregulation and protectionism). Really the list of donors is almost better than a platform or position paper. A law firm, on the other hand, can be the host to a whole number of conflicting and silly causes that even fairly thorough research (as opposed to mine) won't turn up.

That being said, I am not a hypochondriac about politicians and special interests. While special interests do seek to pervert democracy to their own ends they also are the impetus behind much good legislation. Few worthwhile things have happened that weren't in someone's interest, and few worthwhile things would happen if we (and they) were barred from pursuing them.

As I hinted earlier, I'm a bit of a skeptic about campaign finance reform, because it seems to lead to an arms race between law and lobby, leading to ever more baroque regulations that don't necessarily make stop donations or make them easier to track. But, I am willing to give it a chance, perhaps through vigilance our public decision making process can become more concerned with the national interest than with the private ones.

But perhaps not, as well. There is no guarantee that a politician without help from a lobbyist will draft better legislation than one who would. Without the current system perhaps we would be even more susceptable to shifts in the whims of state and national sentiment (not an appealing notion, you must admit). People, when they get together to decide something, make some silly decisions. The kind of democracy we have tips the balance of what kind of silly decisions they make, but because we can never as voters be informed enough to make good decisions, then we are forever destined to make silly decisions.

Perhaps the best argument for campaign finance reform is that no group should be the permanent beneficiary of our public silliness. This would hasten a Polanyi-like entrenchment of interests against the market place. McCain-Feingold may well disrupt the activities of those benefiting from the current system, even if it does not deter new entrants and innovative forms of corruption.

the marketing department

The cornertable site has been bubbling lately, and people have been posting their work. I've added some links to the side so that you can easily navigate what has been added from this website. More will follow depending on how the wiki develops.

We have Neil Graf's various drawings in various styles and mediums, Dustin Delany's photography, Kylee's poetry discussion page and [sighing and shaking of head] Katie's porn

I stress that the wiki is open to anyone. If you have something pretty; drawings, short stories, prose poems . . . mpegs of yourself doing your latest performance art involving a blowtorch and some cappucin monkeys . . . sorry . . . go ahead and do so, it's fairly easy.

We also seem to have developed something called The Crumpled Post, as our assembled ne'er do wells will be doing journalism of a fairly unusual type. SlackBastard and Johnny Logic will be featured writers (I wonder if they know that yet). You are all now sources. Except for those who are contributors. I'm willing to bet there will be an indistinct line between those two occupations.

Lastly, this blog will be undergoing a transformation. Resistance Design will be giving it a new look.

enjoy.