Maybe Trent Lott (who’d always be good for a laugh if he weren’t so powerful) should choose his words more carefully. Quoted in an AP article today he states that the “American people, and the people of Vermont for that matter, did not vote to put the Democrats in control of the Senate.”

Interesting. Brings to mind the somehwat commonly-held opinion that the people of America may not necessarily have voted to put a Republican in the White House either…

Funny how these things work out…

I visited my ocean today.

A lot of people who live in San Francisco seem to forget that we pretty much live at the beach. It’s true, even though SF is not really a “beach town” and even though our beaches are very often cold and foggy. Neighborhoods near the beach are not among the most popular and “in demand” areas here, possibly because of that very fog as well as the distance from downtown.

San Francisco orients itself toward the bay, and people on the east side of Twin Peaks have this semi-irrational fear of anything to the west of it. It’s much the same fear that San Franciscans in the northeast quadrant seem to have of just about anyplace outside the quaint little 15 square miles or so of unchallenged assumptions and pretentious coffee joints they call home.

But all the same, the Pacific Ocean keeps right on being our western border, even though much (maybe most) of the city keeps right on ignoring it. But me, I like to go visit my ocean once in a while.

I’m not really a beach person, but at the same time, I am one too. The idea of lying on a hot beach, baking in the sun, is about the closest thing I can imagine to hell. I do not swim and I do not surf. But I do like being at the beach when it’s cold or foggy or stormy, and especially at night. It’s not a nature thing for me; I like shabby, run-down beachfront buildings and piers, and the sound of waves. And yes, I like watching surfers change into their wetsuits in the parking lot too.

On a few rare nights when my apartment six miles inland was like an oven, I’ve actually even had sex on the beach here, which is something most natives won’t admit to.

Today I visited my ocean down in Pacifica. I had to return to my car for a jacket. There were no sunbathers and no volleyball players. There were also no fashion victims nor speed freaks nor cell phones. There were just about fifty quite pleasant and unremarkable people watching their dogs and fishing and strolling by the pier trying not to get too cold.

My ocean and I had a nice visit. I sort of didn’t want to come back. And I was sort of glad that most of San Francisco was ignoring the seahore today, just as expected.

At this point I’ll just duck in and acknowlege that I am in fact alive. I just don’t have anything particularly interesting to say. Sorry…

There’s something sort of nice about wandering in to the front room to check email at 9:15 PM and realizing that you haven’t done so since 11:45 PM the previous day…

Not to mention the fun of realizing that, once you finally sat down in front of the computer, it was just in time (three minutes to spare) to win this auction that you’d almost forgotten to bid on…

I’m abandoning said computer again now to go read a book. Time spent online today: 26 minutes, including the time it took to type this…

It might make a good litmus test to see how compatible I am with someone else. There are certain movies I can watch over and over again without ever getting tired of them. Taken together, they probably say an awful lot about me, but I’m not really sure what it is.

Anyway, here’s a list of some of my favorites which stand up to repeated viewing:

• After Hours
• After Hours (see, I told you…)
• Rosemary’s Baby
• Vertigo
• The Birds
• Fargo
• Citizen Kane
• Mildred Pierce
• Prick Up Your Ears
• Sorry Wrong Number
• The Long, Long Trailer
• Sunset Boulevard
• Midnight Cowboy

And a second tier. Think of these as the ones I might watch once a year rather than twice:

• Double Indemnity
• Atlantic City
• The Grapes of Wrath
• Drugstore Cowboy
• Coal Miner’s Daughter
• The Towering Inferno
• Stranger than Paradise
• Roadside Prophets
• Breakfast at Tiffany’s
• Ed Wood
• A Raisin in the Sun
• Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
• Laura
• Sid and Nancy
• Harold and Maude
• Come Back Little Sheba
• Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
• The Crow
• Gone with the Wind
• Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert

Analysis? Think we’re meant to be together? Think Alfred Hitchcock or really desparate characters are over-represented? Think I need to contemporize? Wondering how “The Crow” made the list? Got a list of your own? Post it here or on your own site (and let me know for the obligatory free link)…

Some pictures my mom sent me recently. You can click on them to see bigger versions if you’re really bored. I drew these about a month before my sixth birthday. Hmmm. Old supermarkets and dumpy motels. Funny that my interests haven’t really changed all that much since 1970…

It’s weird the things you notice and remember as a kid. Like the Better Business Bureau sign and the way the letters in neon signs all connected together. And I apparenty had this real obsession with different kinds of doors…

Anyhow, I think I did a pretty good rendering of Belk’s “Big B” for a five-year-old and I like my A&P. Pity I couldn’t quite manage to spell “Woolworth”…

Yeah, the apostrophe thing (where people use apostrophes in inappropriate situations like “apple’s” and “video’s”) annoys me no end as well.

A related pet peeve of mine is signs in stores (and text on websites) which feature certain words enclosed within decorative quotation marks which have no grammatical reason for being there. Like, for example, when stores put quotation marks around the words “on sale”. Are they trying to be ironic?

I blame the fine folks at Ma Bell for this ugly trend. If you look back at old telephone directories, you’ll see that Yellow Pages ads offered certain boilerplate text options such as “for information call” or “your nearest location”. These were always printed in italics and quotation marks above the phone numbers. And there was never any reason for it to be so.

So next time you go to the corner store, and they have the word “apples” in quotation marks above a display, you might (just for fun) ask the clerk what they REALLY are.

While I’m at it, I may as well take on another one which has been nagging at me for years. This one is mostly a southern thing: people who think that, just because the word “license” ends in an “s” sound, it must therefore be a plural word.

I never really noticed this, until (surprise) I got my driver’s license at age 16. That day, one of my aunts called and asked “did you get ‘em?”

Baffled, I asked “get what?”

She answered “your license.”

I choked back the urge to answer that, yes, I’d gotten several, all in different names and colors, and that this acquisition would prove very useful, what with my plan for a life of crime and all.

At the time, I looked on it as her own personal peculiarity. But as the years went on, I realized that about a third of all the people I met in North Carolina had somehow gone through life thinking a license was a “them” rather than an “it”.

Just had to get that off my chest and today seemed like the day.

Consider this your official reminder to call your dad today…

I seem to be having one of those really bad periods of email writer’s block again. Yeah, I know it’s a monthly occurrence, but it seems worse this time. So if you’re waiting and waiting for an answer, please don’t hate me. It’s coming. Really…

Coming tomorrow: why I didn’t eat hamburgers at the block party on my street this afternoon after also not eating crawdads at the Crawdad Festival…

My God. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear I was reading The Onion…

So I accidentally stumbled across this on Bravo. It’s supposed to be a depiction of “real gay life” (what ever that’s supopsed to be) featuring a bunch of annoying little wankers who work in upscale gyms, go to circuit parties in Florida, and engage in something called “Faggot Feud”. Hold me back. My pride is bursting at the seems…

I expected something a little better out of Bravo, and remind them that (a) shows about homosexuals who do interesting things are good, and (b) shows about homosexuals who do little other walk around “being gay” are terribly boring…

Anyway, I’m hot and tired and cranky and overloaded with work I don’t feel like doing, and the only salvation for the evening was finding the Two Fat Ladies (it’s been a while) after I scurried for the remote…

Other things I was going to write about but have decided to skip for the evening:

• Lottery Fever (or why I’d rather bet on horse races)
• Applesauce (or how something made from apples can have so little nutritional value)
• Annoying commercials for prescription medications (or why I think I’d rather just urinate thirty times a day)

Haven’t done one of these in a while. It’s always worth a chuckle or two, and it works nicely when I have absolutely nothing else interesting to write about. Here are some current bizarre searches that people have done from within Planet SOMA and The Other Stream. Keep in mind that people had to have already made it into the site before performing these searches.

The obvious missplellings are among my favorites. I’m not talking typos here. I mean repeated searches for things like “masterbate”, “masterbation”, and “masterbation free”, among others. The best this month is “los angles a place dineyland”, with “hermofidet”, “lesbean girls”, “cesa charvez” and “junipsara” receiving honorable mention.

I’m still trying to figure out if “anyl” (which pops up a lot) refers to “anal” or “amyl”.

I also love the people who think they have to type everything all run together with no spaces (”blackwomenpics”, “nudewomenpics”, “1on1sex”, “nudesex”, “sfgaydatingservice”, and “sanfranciscogaypride”). Maybe they’re just native German speakers, but you have to imagine these people spend a lot of their online hours feeling very frustrated.

People who don’t quite get the concept of where they are have entertainment value too:

• live sex scenes with lesbians
• asian pussy
• brother and sister sexy gallery

An then there are the bafflers. These are just plain strange:

• bar fluid
• one more scoop (four searches for this)
• 77032
• 77325
• giarlam
• fark
• brick circles in the street
• asses sexyyyy
• orgy thumbs
• dogfart
• person that found castro street

I’d really like to help te person who thought I had the universal truth about “the real secret of piltdown”, mainly so I could ask what a “piltdown” is. Maybe he or she was also the one who thought I knew the top-secret “truth about the 1980’s”.

But to the person who searched for “www.gltb organizations.com”. Please note that there are no spaces in URLS, unlike in the normal English phrases mentioned above, and that addresses also work much better of you type them into your browser’s address bar rather than into a search query box.

John Lee Hooker and Carroll O’Connor in two days. That pretty much sucks.

This may be a record for me: I set up the hosting and domain name and started working on it for the client on Monday night and it was online, with said domain name resolving correctly, on Thursday morning. If only I were getting, say, one per cent of the sale price…

This is so cool. It’s almost July and it’s raining outside. Those of you who are not familiar with California’s seasonal climates can be excused for not understanding how odd this is, but I’m loving it…

But God forbid there should be thunder or lightning.

High point of the weekend: not getting charged for my taste-free meatballs at dinner Friday night with Dan and Jamie.

Alternate: Simpsons marathon Saturday night.

Low point of the weekend: getting anywhere near Civic Center yesterday even if it was just to catch a bus to the Mission for a burrito.

Alternate: standing in line at my corner store behind six very proud and very chemically-enhanced idiots who couldn’t make a decision or count money if their white tank tops depended on it. But they looked fabulous. Really.

Tedious activity of the weekend: creating many banner ads for TV shows I probably won’t watch.

Alternate: walking to the Mission upon realizing that no bus could cut through all the parade-related traffic.

While, as I said, it’s unusual for it to rain in San Francisco this late in June, it’s definitely not so freakish as to justify that red, scrolling “weather alert” which was running on the Weather Channel earlier, warning people to watch out for slick roads, etc.

Jeez. The rainy season ended in April. We’re not so fucking stupid here that we forget how to cope with a SIXTH OF AN INCH of rain after two months, are we?

Jeez, Jack Lemmon too? It’s been a bad week…

It’s been a pretty sucky week for me too, but that’s a subject for another journal entry and I’m just too tired to write it now…