lol but serious too

dear april bowlby:

hi. marry me?

pros:

i'm a great listener
a hard worker
great guitar player
chivalrous
easy going for the most part
enjoy ankle-splitting walks on the beach
have a sexy voice
and have been told i'm excellent at oral sex
have excellent manners
i rarely let the bathroom get out of hand, dirt- and scum-wise
i also have a good fashion sense and never wear white socks to bed and/or during teh sez; hell, i rarely wear socks at all, let alone white ones

cons:

i've been known to have lazy spells
can be argumentative
depressed (but i try to hide it)

kthx

ps, we would have beautiful children together. just a thought.

kthxbye

pwned lol

"You think it's a no-brainer -- it's five buttons, it's really easy," Flores says. "But when you dig into the guts of the game, it's really very complicated. Trying to make the note timing feel right is very tricky."

totes. it takes pure skill and coolness to push those little plastic buttons on that little plastic guitar hero guitar. those real guitars-- w/ strings and frets and tuning and intonation and which require rhythm and creative acumen and calluses and hand coordination and notes and fancy stuff like that-- are fucking babies' toys.

i've been a fool, devoting most of my life to playing and making music. i'm not nearly as cool and talented as guitar hero players. like these guys:



via wired.

dear glenn beck:

if i ever meet you, i promise you, i will hand you your fucking ass. i would happily serve jail time for beating your pathetic, lilly-livered, privileged bitchface into the ground. in fact i'd turn myself in and wear that distinction as the badge of honor that it is. and no, i'm not joking.

on that note, today sucked. the farmers' market is held every wednesday and today (technically yesterday) was no exception, but it was a decidedly lesser affair. two vendors were absent on account of road closures and foot traffic was noticeably lower than normal. that thick, stagnant cloud of dark smoke blanketed the land all day, complete w/ a steady slow drizzle of ash and that creepy glow of orange light that coats us like an amber shellac. the stink of burning matter is becoming so commonplace we hardly notice it anymore; it's only that vague reserve of memory and the clenching in our throats that tells us this stench is most definitely not as right as rain. we went from hurricane-force winds to a dead fucking calm. and now this acrid, smoldering, claustrophobic canopy envelopes us.

juan, a kid in his early teens who works for one of the vendors, pointed to the moon and asked me, "is that normal?" inquiring about the piercing, martian hue the moon has been veiled in. "it's cuz of the smoke," i said.
"oh."
"why? you scared?" i joked.
"heh. a little."

the matter of time

this guy, john ziegler, is, objectively, the biggest douchebag in los angeles. i fucking h a t e this guy. three days into this wildfire calamity and he's already turned his radio show on super-right-wing KFI into a fucking partisan wasteland for his right-wing ideology. i've been listening to KFI since sunday b/c they've had full, pre-emptive coverage, and all of their local hosts have kept it blessedly ideology-free, save for this asshole who turned it into a "democrat this," "liberal that," blah blah and even somehow managed to throw in a few remarks about how californians are "better" than "those people" in new orleans b/c of how we've handled this. never mind that the two disasters are very different, under very different circumstances, etc.

ziegler was the subject of an elaborate* piece by david foster wallace for the atlantic monthly entitled "host." typical of wallace, not much in respect to psychology was explored, which is unfortunate, b/c ziegler is an absolute narcissist, dripping w/ contempt for his audience, for people in general, and especially for anyone who dares disagree w/ his absurd political ideology. i was looking forward to wallace dismantling ziegler, but alas, it never happened.

ziegler has been fired from three previous radio stations. the first two terminations were over racial jokes about black celebrities (i guess b/c racial jokes about white celebrities are boring?) and the third b/c he was chuckleheaded enough to make comments about a woman's (whom he happened to be dating at the time) physical characteristics. of course, b/c john ziegler is a right-wing talk radio show host, he is incapable of taking any responsibility for his actions. when it comes to liberals, women, minorities, homos, etc., it's all about the lack of personal responsibility amongst these types, but if you are a right-wing talk show host, you're somehow above such pedestrian strictures. it wasn't john ziegler who was to blame for getting john ziegler fired--three times!-- it was political correctness! yes. political correctness. 2007 and people are still blaming political correctness for everything that's wrong in society. if you get fired from three separate places of employment, i dunno, is the problem maybe you? maybe? not when it comes to john ziegler. b/c, you see, john ziegler is the real victim here. sure, minorities and women and liberals and whoever else like to act as if they're the victims, but it's really joe everymen like john ziegler who are constantly being short-changed. he's a talk show host employed by clear channel. on a flagship station. after being fired three times. for being a douche. he's sitting pretty. in los angeles. after being fired three times.

i mean, it's obvious who the victim is here. right?

oh yeah, ziegler is a racist fuckface, as well. last week he launched a semi-defense of james watson's comments that black people are intellectually inferior to white people. ziegler decried watson's more obvious proclamations, but he then went on to say that agree w/ watson re: africa not being as evolved as other continents or something like that. never mind that evolutionary biologists have completely dismissed watson's comments whole cloth as being the bona fide racist swill that they are. ziegler at least half agrees w/ the man.

it's no surprise, i guess, that ziegler waited all of one day before using these fires as a springboard for reasons #569-76 of why liberals are scumbags. it's just that, jesus, all the other right-wing hosts on KFI, who are doubtlessly strident in their douchery, have somehow managed to avoid making this a partisan issue thus far. in a sea of assholes, it takes a certain charm to stand out. cheers to you, mr. ziegler.

*yes, i know the adjective is redundant when discussing wallace, but it's there anyway.

500,000

awesome: fema is on the way. i don't know about you, but i'd welcome the return of the santa anas before i'd welcome fema. i mean, what are they going to do? stand around and be incompetent? that's what we need.

the fire down the street, known as the santiago fire, got worse today as a spot fire just sort of up and erupted. sunday night was a little hairy: we watched the flames burn their way across the foothills, north to south, as the winds kicked up a choking amount of dust and ash. didn't sleep much that night, mostly b/c the fire broke out about 30 mins. before sunset, crews were already stretched thin from the malibu and canyon country fires, little was known about the fire, and the conditions just seemed to deteriorate by the hour. things seemed to get a little better yesterday, as 30% containment was announced, but the fire kept spreading south and more and more communities were being evacuated. today, that spot fire caused a ruckus and the first in a series of homes in this fire were lost. b/c of this, the media attention ramped up and we finally got some aircraft relief. frankly, b/c of the lack of house fires, orange county has received little outside help; it's to be expected, especially considering the status of san diego, but still, if you live here, it sucks. it took an unfortunate turn of events for aid to get ramped up here.

speaking of san diego. shit. they're being eaten alive down there. last i heard, a half million people in california have been evacuated.

things are actually looking a lot better outside my window. what a difference aircraft makes. there's been a sizable plume of dark smoke just sitting there all day, accompanied by an eerie amber glow in the sky and raining ash, but now it's dissipated quite a bit (i had the day off, so i've just been chilling at the house). one good thing is that the santa anas have finally settled the fuck down. i usually like the santa anas, how they clean the atmosphere out and bring out the glory of this landscape, but this was ridiculous. i've never seen santa anas this intense, which was the general consensus at work yesterday, as well. i knew it was bad sunday morning when the mountains and foothills were obscured by dust. then i heard about malibu, canyon country, and santiago, and things just got worse by the hour. sunday will go down in infamy around here. shit, even yesterday. there is so much superstitious bullshit surrounding the santa anas-- that they bring out some sort of collective insanity, that they're the cause of all sorts of inexplicable preternaturalism, that they can even cause earthquakes-- but shit, yesterday seemed to bore this silliness out. my boss and i ran some errands around lunchtime and people were acing like they had done lost their fucking minds. erratic driving, on-the-corner proselytizing, general freakery, and a palpable tension, etc., all set against a backdrop of clobbering winds, dark walls of smoke, and a slow burning in your lungs. it was like a goddamned lynchian dreamscape by way of jodorowsky. today was no less weird, particularly w/ this amber glow hanging in the sky, and it was damned hot. i checked the temperature: 99 fucking degrees. in late october. yes, this is southern california, but shit, 99 fucking degrees w/ 8% humidity? we've somehow managed to find ourselves inside a furnace.

without a doubt, this is the most significant wildfire i've ever seen. i was born and raised here and nothing in the recesses of my memory can touch this. not even the laguna hills fire that went down when i was in junior high. i even noticed a few neighbors packing up and leaving. prompted me to make a half-assed plan myself; fortunately, i've not yet had to implement it.

btw, posted a few pix at teh flickr (i love how you don't have to lolify "flickr").

shit

shit, the power went out for a minute. it got a lot worse in a really short amount of time. my brother just called and said a friend of his about a mile from here was evacuated.

things working against us in this scenario: very strong, erratic winds; rapidly worsening conditions; and the real possibility that embers can be spread far and wide.

in the very least this area will be covered in ash come daylight.

holy fucking shit

so i look out the window and i see a massive plume of very dark smoke billowing like the wrath of god himself. this picture is jack shit compared to looking out the window and seeing this maybe a mile or so away. i can see the flames from my bathroom window, but it's too dark now to get it on camera. fuck.