Thursday Night

Should I have found it more disconcerting that there was a large pigeon flying around the Safeway tonight or that no one much seemed to care that there was a large pigeon flying around the Safeway tonight?

Ahh, Thursday night. Which means I can sleep as long as I want tonight and watch a surprisingly good bunch of movies tomorrow. Even better, it means a visit from Mark tomorrow evening, along with presumably the traditional Friday night dinner with Dan and Jamie…

I had more ideas for filling this space tonight, but I’m going to get horizontal now, and I’ve yet to purchase a wireless keyboard…

Randomly Monday

Pretty damned good weekend: a visit from my favorite boy, I nearly tripled my DVD collection, and I have a new mouse. Yes, everything’s listed in order of priority, and the mouse is definitely at the bottom, as I haven’t decided if I like it yet or not. Dreamweaver doesn’t seem to care for it much at all…

Y’know, as a confirmed hermit, it’s really unusual for me to spend so much time with any one person. It’s even more unusual for me to find myself wishing I could spend even more time with him. I’m not sure what this means…

OK. I have a pretty good idea what it means…

Random thoughts for a Monday afternoon:

  • I need to avoid spending significant parts of two consecutive days in Berkeley; I’m stifling a significant desire to beat up some hippies right now. Yes, I turn into a reactionary right-winger every time I’m in Berkeley. Any sane person would.
  • The lack of communication skills and systems may be the single largest cause of inefficiency in corporate America today; I realized this today as five different people showed up for a training class at five different (incorrect) combinations of time and address. I had the correct time but the wrong address. My co-worker (with the same supervisor as me) had the wrong time AND address.
  • Leave it to the Examiner to present a decade-old issue as hot breaking news. Wow. Fags are doing too much speed and it’s causing problems. Who knew?
  • A new almanac is a wonderful thing.
  • Zippy is back in the Chronicle. Yay.
  • Why do so many commercially-released DVDs have such low audio levels? I’m talking REALLY low here.

Great Week

Monday just keeps getting better. There was the miscommunication (already mentioned), getting locked out of my apartment (forgot about that earlier), and now, upon going out to move my car, I just realized that my battery’s dead because my trunk caught and didn’t shut all the way yesterday, causing the light to stay on for about 30 hours…

It’s shaping up to be just a great week. I’m going to bed now…

Lousy Logo

Supposing you have a client for whom you’ve been working for several years. Suddenly this client decides out of the blue to change its logo. You see this new logo and realize it looks like something created by a little old lady on a computer she bought yesterday, using Microsoft Works with nothing but pre-installed Windows system fonts. In short, it’s amateurish as hell and it’s really ugly, like something that should only be printed on a cheap plastic sign for a nail salon in a strip mall in Fremont.

Considering that image is very important in this client’s industry, how do you make your feelings known to said client? Or do you? Would it be pushy to suggest that you could spend about five minutes and come up with something much better? For free, if necessary?

Sweeps

John Edward does a psychic reading (or whatever the hell kind of reading he does) on Ricki Lake, who says “I was traumatized by that”, probably more than once. Oh God, spare me…

The promos for February sweeps have started…

Between that and watching John Walker Lindh’s parents tell everyone how much their son loves his country and (earlier) how he’s just a boy (at 20) and not responsible for any of his actions, I’ve almost lost my lunch twice today. And I haven’t even had any lunch yet…

Email and work today. Mark tomorrow. Needless to say, I’m looking forward to the latter more than the former…

Our Mayor Is an Idiot

San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, quoted in today’s Chronicle:

“You know I do talk to God regularly. I get down on my knees and I pray and I pray — and then God comes to me and says, ‘Yes, Mister Willie?'”

I’m not religious, and therefore I can’t really call this “blasphemous”, but if I were a politician who (a) was widely regarded as extremely arrogant, and (b) derived a large part of my continuing support from African American churches and religious leaders, I think I might have caught myself before making this particular little joke…

Having had some religious indoctrination as a child, I can tell you this is several points more offensive to your average Christian than John Lennon’s “bigger than Jesus” comment from the 1960s. If this were just about anyplace but SF, the death threats would have commenced immediately…

Here, of course, it was the last paragraph of the second section of a running column. Which would probably be appropriate, if it weren’t such a fucking stupid thing to say given Willie’s position…

It never fails to amaze me how often Willie Brown, who basically defines the cliché of a crooked, corrupt machine politician, can show so little political savvy sometimes. He may not have to answer to God, but he could find himself answering to a great many pious little old church ladies (who used to be among his most enthusiastic supporters) soon…

Anyway, great weekend, crappy Monday, and I hope I’m not coming down with a little bug. No snow is expected tonight in SF proper, for those of you who are keeping score. But I did just have a self-inflicted power outage when I made the mistake of turning on the microwave and the space heater at the same time…

TV Truck

So NBC, faced with what seems to be a woefully inadequate new affiliate in one of the largest TV markets in the country, is now considering doing it the old-fashioned way: delivering its programming to certain San Francisco neighborhoods via truck

I remember summertime when I was a kid. The NBC truck showed up every afternoon about 2:00. It was a glorious sight with that peacock logo and that hypnotic bell playing the NBC jingle. All the kids in the neighborhood would crowd around, hoping they had enough change in their pockets for a “Sanford and Son” or maybe a “Chico and the Man” or two. Sometimes the driver would throw in an “Adam 12” rerun for free…

But then there was that scandal in 1982, when the new driver invited one little boy inside the truck and gave him a “Love Sydney” for free. After that, Greensboro banned door-to-door delivery of network TV programming, athough I think some syndicated shows are still delivered by bicycle in areas with low cable penetration…

it’s nice to see a big, cosmopolitan city like San Francisco return to such simple old-timey pleasures, though…

Randomly Friday

It’s February and I finally have a new calendar, albeit a rather uninspiring one. Last year, I had “Historical Maps of US Cities” at home and “Wallace and Grommit Go to the Movies” at work. This year I waited too late…

No Mark this weekend, which will not be my favorite way to spend a weekend, but will nonetheless allow me to catch up on lots of deferred maintenance, general cleaning, and maybe even some actual creative pursuits. Assuming I have the motivation and attention span to get moving on any of it…

I could spend the weekend crying in my Cheerwine about not winning any of the assorted web journal awards, but that’s not terribly likely simce, well, I just don’t care. I’ll probably just buy a new TV instead…

Congratulations to Becky for 20,000 hits (yes, I was the one), to Rick for a pretty swifty recovery, and to Mark for hiring some help and hating work much less…

My Book

One night about five or six months ago, I was in this used bookstore near 9th and Irving and I saw the most amazing, rare used book on the LA freeway system. It was a tad pricey, and right at that moment, when I was at my most freaked out about the whole hospital thing and my finances and everything else, I couldn’t make myself buy it. I really wanted it and I regretted not buying it for months…

Tonight after dinner with Dan and Jamie, we happened to wander by the very same bookstore. It was going out of business this go-round and everything was a third off. And the damned book was still there. This time, I had money, I felt much better about life, and the book is now in my living room…

It’s a small thing, really, but it feels a little symbolic somehow of my much-improved state of mind since last summer…