Year: 2002

Update

Y’know, I really should proofread once in a while. The earlier entry is now slightly edited so that it actually demonstrates a little bit of sentence structure. And makes some sense…

As of tonight, all the domains seem to have transferred successfully and email may be back to normal. I’ve even given Planet SOMA a very mild (almost imperceptibly so) facelift. The headlines which took so long to load have now been banished to an internal page and the counter (it was so, like, 1996, plus I couldn’t get it to add my total from the old server) is gone. The slightly ugly front page is temporary…

Looking forward to sleeping a whole lot tonight, and looking forward even more to the weekend. You have no idea how much I’m looking forward to the weekend…

I know it’s an easy target, but there’s still not much which is more funny than the “Pop-up Video” treatment of a Backstreet Boys ballad…

Let There Be Idiots

This is a scream (thanks to Juan Felipe). I have to admit that it takes chutzpah to do something really stupid and possibly illegal, and then to threaten a lawsuit when someone calls you on it. I’ve had moron spammers threaten me for reporting them to the ISPs too. Usually makes me tremble in my boots. Really…

Send this one to the “give me a fucking break” file. The man sells his own NAME to Gucci and later retires, wealthier than I’ll ever be, complaining that the fashion industry is more about commerce than art…

Please. We’re not talking about someone who puts together a really cool outfit to go out to a club here; we’re talking about a major corporation. Yes, innovation is more essential in the fashion industry than in most others, and there may even be something vaguely artistic involved once in a while, but if no one buys any clothes, there’s no industry at all…

I wonder just which specific artistic statement was behind those cheap Yves St. Laurent hankies I used to buy my dad at Penney’s years ago?

Of bloggers and codes

OK, I’ll bite:

B9 d++ t++ k s+ f i o+ x+ e++ l c-

But does it cause problems fro this code that I refuse to use the term “blog”? This is only partially due to the fact that it sounds like something I might cough up on a Sunday morning when I’ve been out drinking and smoking too much the night before…

“Dude, you’re spittin’ big ol’ chunky blogs all over the floor.”

Awww, I remember when I used to be able to drink…

Anyway, I’m gone to Fresno for the next few days, so don’t expect updates or email. I haven’t seen Mark since New Year’s Day. Needless to say, I’m rather anxious. I may even get to fondle his sexy new toy…

Post-weekend

Mmmm. Happy post-Mark glow. It was another quite wonderful weekend featuring a birthday party for Mark’s friend Amy, as well as a quite tasty out-of-season turkey dinner with his sister. Top it off with a truck stop lunch and a trip to Mendota (not to mention lots of time strategically intertwined at home), and it’s left me contented and tired…

The only down side was fighting my way through Tracy and across Altamont Pass on the way home. I stayed in the right lane, which was (as is so often the case in California) moving faster than any of the others, and I eventually made it. I rewarded myself with a Wal-Mart run in Livermore…

Now if I could just get rid of this new Coumadin-enhanced butt zit (yes, another one) which has been making my life miserable for five days, I’d be pretty well satisfied with life right now…

Happy Anniversary to Me

I forgot all about Planet SOMA‘s sixth anniversary today. I was rather happily preoccupied…

Thanks to Becky for remembering and for saying really nice things…

More on all the above tomorrow, probably, along with other exciting features and maybe director’s commentary or the original theatrical trailer or something. I’m bushed right now…

Why Bother?

Earlier today, I’d composed a nice long rant about why I don’t want to live in San Francisco anymore (largely because it’s expensive, pretentious, and a big time pain in the ass), and I was trying to decide where to put it. Then I decided not to put it anywhere for now, because it didn’t cover any really new ground and almost sounded more whiny than ranty. But if anyone really wants to read it, let me know. I’ll send it to you, or maybe even post it, if enough people care. Which is doubtful. I’m not sure if I even care that much anymore…

I took a nice computer sabbatical tonight instead. I spent last week being really geeky, what with getting the last of the sites and domains moved, and trying to learn obscure Apache directives and all. It was a little rough on the eyes and the rest of the body (bad posture, extra nicotine comsumption, not enough sleep, etc.), so I’m not going to do it again this week. Tonight, I read the Sunday paper (yes, I know it’s Monday), listened to Steely Dan, and got reacquainted with the first Imperial Teen CD, which I found at Rasputin a week or two back…

But all the same, here I sit in front of the G4 at 10:00, remembering one bit of work I need to do tonight and also that I’d planned to flesh out yesterday’s journal entry. The former is almost complete; the latter will have to wait. But it was a great weekend. And Friday is only four days away…

Harry at 16

Quick thought: does anyone else find the fact that Prince Harry smoked pot and tried to lure girls to “wild parties” at age 16 to be huge non-issue? And is anyone else getting huge laughs out of all the overanalysis of this “troubled boy” and how big a part the death of his mother may have played in his scandalous horrendous descent into experimental teenage drug abuse?

Actually, I find it rather refreshing that a member of the British royal family actually managed to behave so much like a normal 16-year-old boy…

Response

OK, due to popular pressure (maybe that’s too strong a word), here’s here’s the rant about how I’d leave San Francisco in a minute if inertia and the weather didn’t continue to exert a certain pull. It’s not art, it makes no great statement, it’s not a dig at dotcommers nor yuppies, and much of it is applicable to any large urban area, not just San Francisco…

And no, I don’t really think it’s a great idea for 16-year-olds to smoke pot. I also don’t think that it is, by definition and in all cases, particularly abnormal nor indicative of some greater problem. Lots of 16-year-olds try it. Most of them grow out of it…

I’d already pretty much grown out of it by the time I turned 17. It takes some people a little longer, I guess, but still…

Urban Blah

Some days I have a morning like I had today, and I get to thinking that for half a dollar, I’d move out of San Francisco tomorrow. Maybe I’m just getting old and cranky, but being a resident of a large, urban area seems less and less worth the effort with each passing year…

it’s more pronounced since I’ve been spending so much time in the relative sanity of the Central Valley the last few months, but it’s been building for quite a while. There’s just not much here which excites me enough to compensate for the fact that living in a crowded, compact place like San Francisco is a bit of a pain in the ass…

I crave the ability to park within a block of my house. And to actually HAVE a house, rather than to pay rent which would cover a nice mortgage anyplace else. I fantasize about not having to stand in long lines everyplace and not ending up in a homicidal rage if I decide to go to the Safeway earlier than 10PM…

I no longer want to wait 45 minutes for buses which are supposed to run at 10-minute intervals, nor to be packed into these buses like sardines with people who never learned the basics of personal hygeine and etiquette. I’m tired of being panhandled twice in every block and of never being able to light a cigarette without some complete stranger walking up and assuming I owe him one too…

I am not impressed with the ability to walk to a corner store and pay nine dollars for a box of stale corn flakes and four dollars for a quart of curdled milk. I am also unimpressed with the array of pretentious and overpriced restaurants at my disposal. The fact that I can walk a block and have sex with a speed freak in a dark bar also holds very little charm anymore…

The cable sucks. The newspaper sucks. Getting from point A to point B is difficult enough, and dealing with point B once you arrive is even worse. There WILL be a line, no matter what the establishment, and it WILL be full of people in big, ugly square-toed shoes who have “issues” with everything from the service to the chemical content of their braised tofu to their parents, and will spend ten minutes discussing these issues in the most annoying and long-winded terms possible, everyone else in line be damned…

I want to pay reasonable amounts for groceries and gas (and housing). I want to go to Target on a whim without it seeming like an expedition to Mars, and with the assumption that I’ll be able to splash down somewhere near where I live when I get back. And I want never to get on a bus again unless it’s by my choice and at my leisure.

I imagine I’ll get arguments from the “urban sophisticates” who believe all civilization ends at the SF city limits (or even worse, at Twin Peaks and Bernal Heights). Tough. I don’t go to art museums nor to the symphony. I don’t shop at any of the trendy boutiques in Union Square. I frankly don’t care how much of a “gay community” I’m surrounded by. I don’t go to nightclubs with $15 covers and $20 cocktails. My lifestyle does not require a large selection of headshops, leather shops, and gourmet cookware stores. I do not crave constant interaction with “colorful” (read “crazy”) people, and I do not believe that stepping in human excrement or syringes on the street adds anything particularly beneficial to my life…

There’s basically almost nothing I do here which I couldn’t do just about as efficiently in any mid-sized city in the country. So why I am I here? Inertia and the weather. That’s about it, and they’re both losing their grip on me…

Barter

You have to love the idea of barter, which is the system by which I may ultimately end up paying my cardiologist bills. Design a website and get your ticker serviced in return. Everyone wins, right? I love my cardiologist, and I also love his slightly salty account manager for suggesting something I’d actually proposed up front six months ago…

For those who care, my condition has, as of today, been deemed not life-threatening nor terribly debilitating, and I could continue along with my life pretty much just fine if I kept up with the medication and blood testing. But that’s obviously not the ideal ssituation, which is why I’m getting so frsutrated at the lack of response from my potential new (and somewhat pricey) insurance carrier…

But if any of you were worried I might keel over and die at any moment, you can probably stop now. If I do happen to keel over and die, it probably won’t be related to my current heart and thyroid problems. That’s not to say that all the nagging (if relatively mild) side effects of the drugs aren’t continuing to get on my nerves. And I sure would like a beer. I meant to mention that to the doctor today…

All the same, it beats continually sweating and panting and dealing with my body thinking it’s on speed all the time because my thyroid doesn’t know when to say “when”…

Strange day. I didn’t expect to be reading two different articles about road reflectors in two different newspapers on two different ends of the country all in the same day…

Nor did I expect the Symbionese Liberation Army to lead the 6:00 news tonight. Can we maybe expect the 10:00 news to be all about Squeaky Fromme? Or maybe some newspaper articles about the controversy surrounding “Roots”. Oh, wait…