He's Not Really, Is He?

Jeff Goldblum is watching you poop.

Bridge and Arch

One of the best photographs I've taken. The Manhattan Bridge, seen from the park under the Brooklyn Bridge on the Fourth of July. Click on the image for a bigger view.

[Taken with a Lomo]

Friends? I Got No Friends.

[courtesy of Greg Storey and his excellent Airbag.]

I Heart Bruce Campbell

This will be the best movie ever. Ever. All other movies can just go home and wish they were this movie. But they won't be. Because only this movie will have Bruce Campbell playing Elvis. An old, fat Elvis. In a nursing home. Fighting an evil creature that apparently eats elderly people. With Ossie Davis as his sidekick.

As I said. Best Movie Ever.

Weekend

This weekend, I:

• Saw Bruce in concert

• Got my tickets for Radiohead in the mail

• Finally, FINALLY got myself a pair of Hulk Hands

And tomorrow, the Canon Powershot G2 I bought on eBay should be arriving via FedEx.

They say money can't buy happiness. And to that, my Hulk Hands say, "RAWR! HULK SMASH!"

Screw Karyn

Okay, so you're not too bright; I can accept that. You spent over $20,000 that you don't have because you like shiny pretty things, but hey, that's your problem. Doesn't bother me.

Then you create a website complaining about how you're so deep in debt that you can't see sunlight. Sure, that's fine, people complain about lots of things on their websites. Of course, YOU'RE asking that these other people help you get out of debt, because you were too dumb to realize that the little piece of plastic you were using to buy all your Gucci bags was actually intrinsically connected to a massive, extremely accurate, grudge-bearing accounting system that was eventually going to ask for what it was owed, and then some. And it was annoying to see that you wouldn't have to pay the price for your own stupidity, but still, I could deal with that, even then.

But then...then you get a book deal. And a movie deal. With you attached as the screenwriter, so you can "adapt your life story for the screen" and tell the world your true account of a moronic shopaholic who got a bunch of even dumber people to pay her dues for her. And with that, sister, you make my list of people I'd like to see get hit by a large bus.

Rise Up

The setlist for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band's performance at Giants Stadium last night, courtesy of backstreets.com, which also hooked me up with the fine fellow who sold me three fantastic tickets at face value:

Adam Raised a Cain
The Rising
Lonesome Day
The Ties That Bind
Atlantic City
Empty Sky
Waitin' on a Sunny Day
Darlington County
Worlds Apart
Badlands
Two Hearts
No Surrender
Mary's Place
My Hometown
Into the Fire
The Promised Land

First Encore:
Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out
Glory Days
Born to Run

Second Encore:
My City of Ruins
Land of Hope and Dreams
Rosalita
Dancing in the Dark

I stand by my belief that everyone needs to see Bruce in concert at least once in their lives...

Brooooooce!!!

It hit me this morning, like a bolt of lightning:

I have to go see Bruce Springsteen at Madison Square Garden.

Lance

A friend of mine told me about it over a couple of drinks, a couple days ago, and I refused to believe it. And then I told to another friend about it tonight, over a couple more drinks, and he didn't believe it either.

So I was just a bit surprised to find the printed story in a newspaper article I found on the subway ride home.

On Friday, in a 47 KM tim trial on the twelfth stage of the Tour de France, Lance Armstrong lost thirteen pounds in under an hour.

Thirteen pounds. He ran out of water two-thirds of the way through the course and sweated out almost ten percent of his body weight in under sixty minutes. And he came in second. And I don't even need to mention that this is a guy who was near-dead from cancer a couple years ago.

Lance Armstrong has officially reached superhuman status.

Lance, holding on to his lead over fellow superhuman Tyler Hamilton, who managed to win today's trial with a collarbone broken in two places, summed it up pretty well:

"I'm not overly satisfied with my performance," said Armstrong, "but it could have been worse."

GBV

I've loved Guided By Voices for years. Got hooked on 'em with 1999's splendid Ric Okasek-produced Do The Collapse: crashing waves of guitars, irresistible hooks, vocals threatening to pull down the sky. The album is a concentrated mass of pure pop, and it's surely no coincidence that the cover consists of what looks like multiple Volkswagen Beetles compressed into a cube. Then I began digging through their back catalog (and they've got one hell of a back catalog). Picked up Bee Thousand and Vampire on Titus, sucked in by album jackets listing an inordinately large number of songs, with titles like "Gold Star for Robot Boy" and "Superior Sector Janitor X," and became hypnotized by just how amazingly great all these songs were.

[And by "amazingly great," I don't mean polished, or radio-friendly, or tonally coherent, because GBV songs don't tend to be any of the above. They're messy pop nuggets that often manage to cover half the sonic landscape in under two minutes, somehow managing to drop you off where you started with your hair all mussed up wondering what the hell just happened, the musical equivalent of hopping in a stolen Porsche driven by your friend with Attention Deficit Disorder. That's what I mean by "amazingly great."]

The thing is, when your new favorite band has almost twenty albums to their credit, not counting the couple dozen side projects the lead singer somehow manages to churn out in his spare time, and you're working on a limited budget, and you don't have a brain the size of a planet, you're not going to get through their entire oeuvre, or even remember the names of most of the songs, great as those songs and their names may be. I got a couple oldies, then picked up the thread from there and bought everything after.

Then, on one happy day, eMusic came into my life, and the resourceful little gnomes that churn out "My Recommendations" somehow popped up with Alien Lanes, despite the fact that I hadn't got any GBV from the site previously, and wasn't even aware that they were on the list of featured artists. And now, while I'm not kicking myself too hard for missing this glorious work of pop genius, I AM doing my best to make up for it. So that's why I've been listening to "As We Go Up, We Go Down," which could have been a number-one hit by the Beatles in another dimension, pretty much nonstop for the last week.

Caffeine

It hit me around 8:30 or so this evening.

I had trouble concentrating. I couldn't focus. I felt jittery. I began to sweat even more profusely than usual (which, on a day when the humidity's at 97%, is a hell of a lot). The part of the brain that formulates responses to inquiries like "How are you doing?" or "Did you get my email?" started backfiring, so that a simple question suddenly required an inordinately long time to answer, and the answers that came felt vague and incoherent. In short, I lost my ability to deal.

Why? Where was this coming from? Was I having a mild stroke? Had someone slipped me a mickey?

And then, it came to me. As I had sat writing in the little cafe down the street earlier that evening, I had neglected to ask for decaf. My iced mocha had been fully caffeinated, and my central nervous system was responding like it had stepped on a fallen power line.

The thing is, I don't drink coffee. Ever. Or Coke, or Pepsi, or any carbonated beverages whatsoever. My morning drink is a glass of orange juice, if that. I never got the taste for coffee, and while I'll occasionally down a mocha Frappuccino from Starbucks or, more likely, a decaf iced mocha from the aforementioned cafe (my little blow against evil corporate monopolies), I don't do the coffee thing. And as a result, my caffeine intake is next to nil, and my chemical resistance to it is accordingly nonexistent. So when I DO get some caf in me, it hits me like a friggin' rocket.

I'm finally settling down now, but I've got a slight headache, and I'm still a little twitchy. So this is my reminder to myself that, no matter how tired you are when you grab something to drink while getting some writing done, DON'T GO CAFFEINATED. 'Cause, brother, it'll mess you up.

Hardware

Really, what a man needs to do a job right is a good set of power tools.

[kudos to Mikey C. for digging this up...]

Valdez

"Valdez dismounted and went to his knees over the man, raising his arm gently to look at the wound. The shotgun charge had torn through his side at the waist, ripping away his belt and part of his shirt and leather chaps.

'Sure you can.' Valdez lowered the Mexican's arm and gave his shoulder a pat. The Mexican winced and Valdez smiled. 'You ride to Mr. Tanner, all right? Tell him Valdez is coming. You hear what I said? Valdez is coming. But listen, friend, I think you better go there quick.'"

One Blog, Two Blog, Green Blog, Blue Blog

The new weblog I'm doing as a part of the beta-testing for TypePad is now active.

"But, sir," you say, "he barely writes enough for one weblog now. However can he fill two?"

Too which I smack you in the face and tell you to stop speaking like a prissy tart. Yes, it's been a bit dry around here lately. Passing the Apple certification test meant I no longer had to spend every evening staring at a computer screen, and I took such freedom to heart and went and stared at movie and television screens instead. But this was GOOD staring. It was research. And now I'm gonna write a proper horror movie.

Ha Ha

"'She held him by the waist with her thumb and forefinger and sort of bounced him down the street,' eyewitness Phil Urban said. 'He never left her grip, but it must have been terrifying for him. His feet touched the ground only every 20 to 30 feet or so. It was sickening to watch.'"

Tats for Toddlers

"So whether you're 8 months or 88 years old, if you're ready for a tattoo or a body piercing-the clear choice is Baby Ink!"

Great job, mom! Your child will be just THRILLED when she has to pay a couple thousand bucks to get laser removal of the fucking Strawberry Shortcake tattoo you gave her when she was FIVE YEARS OLD!

UPDATE: It's a joke, thank goodness. And a damn good one, I might add.

[found on toomuchsexy]

Panther

Two days ago, I got Kung-Tunes up-and-running on my Powerbook. Today, I installed a pre-release of Panther and knocked it dead. Killed Toast in the process as well: the application doesn't seem to work at all in 10.3. On the plus side, Panther is mucho neato, even with its "I'm so Beta" quirks and the aforementioned neutered apps.

In other news, I got selected as a beta tester for TypePad, the new weblog service from the creators of the ever-so-excellent Movable Type. And as soon as I've got some time, I'll get a new log going with that. Probably a photo log, so I can show off my cool Lomo pics.

In OTHER news, I think I've sweated out about half my body weight in the last week. This heat is knocking me around like a schoolchild, and the site of a perfectly functional air conditioner that's sitting useless on the floor of my dining room because I don't have the stupid frame for mounting it in the window is close to driving me nuts. It's laughing at me, I tell you...

"MTV sucks! We hates you all!"

Gollum was right; MTV sucks, big time. But as badly as they suck, they can, on rare occasions, come up with something brilliant.

Kung-Log

I just downloaded the blog-posting app Kung-Log, and now I'm testing it out. From what I can tell so far, it's the bee's knees, and should make posting here even easier than it was before. Next, I'll see if I can get Kung-Tunes up and running.

Oh, cool, the Kung-Log interface automatically highlights HTML tags. Sweet.

The Box

I don't do scenes. I don't do crowds. When I go out socially (which has been rarely as of late, as I've been studying my ass off), I strongly prefer to go somewhere I can sit and relax and talk without having to shout over the din of bad music and screaming Jersey girls. Socializing, for me, isn't about seeing, or being seen. It's about having a decent conversation amended by a goodly amount of the drink.

Which is why, in the summer, the Pizza Box on Bleecker Street is one of the best places on earth. Because, one, almost nobody knows about the large patio in the back, where you can sit on plastic lawn furniture and enjoy a peace that's incredibly rare in the city proper; and two, you can get bottles of Budweiser for two dollars a pop and slices of pizza for a buck seventy-five. So, if you and a mate decide to go have a slice or two and polish off a six-pack each while debating the relative merits of Mexican and domestic low-budget horror films, you can walk (or stagger) out having forked over a mere twenty.

Life is good at the Pizza Box. Just don't tell anyone about it, or I'll have to find you and kill you.

Now, I have to watch THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE again...