My girlfriend pointed out that we don't have pet names for each other. Now, we've only been dating for 3 months, and we've only been "official and monogamous" (her housemate's words) for 2 months, and she's still getting used to the "boyfriend/girlfriend" nomenclature, after being a very independent operator for years.
"Ham slice" is probably a non starter.
I doubt that "Oyster plate" would have legs, either.
What's your time line for pet names? BF/GF? Monogamy?
Are the time lines linked or independent?
As a rule, I don't use pet names. I have a couple of diminutives I use to show affection to people I'm close to-- Sweet Child and Kiddo, and occasionally Kid or Sweetheart. I use these with her, and with my best friends (male and female), and with my younger brother, and sometimes my pre-teen and teenage cousins.
Do you have favorite pet names? Are they unique, or do you re-use them with new lovers/partners/fuckbuds?
And do you have any suggestions?
Maybe Tulip? And Dumpling?
On Wednesday night, we brainstormed a few dozen on beer coasters, with a little bit of help from Courtney, who knows people in real life that I know in real life, which was so weirdly... real...
Are there any of you all left in Boston?
Anybody remember what's worth seeing in a quick weekend?
If I get my hands on the wheel of a car, any bridges to drive over or awesome/awful crossroads to travel down?
Any tips on getting a cheap ticket to Fenway?
Any excellent comic book stores, coffee shops, raw-food smoothie joints, or places to just stand and stare?
Neighborhoods I will get the shit beaten out of me for looking like a guy from California,
to say nothing of showing off my new tattoo?
Details on my timing and contact number in my journal.
Today is the anniversary of the President Dubya's folly. I'm going to try not to spew any rhetoric. Some people think it's just a boondoggle like any other, twice as bad as the bridge to nowhere but nothing to freak out about. That's why they take our money, right? Because they definitely wouldn't be so cavalier and stupid if these things were on their dime. Still, two very expensive and useless bridges would be more amusing and less dismaying than the 3 Trillion Dollar final cost that's been projected. Especially when we all need money, even the banks...
Other people bear the human costs, and are less able to shrug and say "mm'linda." Are any of us more than two degrees away from someone in active military service? We've read the stories about the failures at the Veterans' Hospitals, and seen the pictures of the IED shrapnel in the dust, and blanched at the accounts from Abu Ghraib. What kind of nation have we become, that sends mothers and fathers into harm's way, to suffer so much horror and cause it as well?
Alright, I'm veering into rhetoric and I don't want to. My thesis is this--The Iraq War is a horrible thing, that is enormously destructive to the United States. I defy anyone, from any political perspective, to present a cogent and coherent argument that the Iraq War as it is happening is good for America. It just isn't. And it's exactly the kind of thing President Dubya told us was a bad idea when he first ran for office. (Search for "nation building"). Of course, President Dubya doesn't know how to admit that he was wrong. But I'm asking for a cogent and coherent argument in defense of the Iraq War. President Dubya can't give me that, because there isn't one.
But it's happening anyway. This horrible thing is happening. And I'm not doing much to stop it. I drive my car a little less, maybe. I read about things, and like I said, I blanche. I'm voting for the candidate whose exit strategy makes the most sense to me. I haven't joined any of the support-the-troops activities around here. I don't go to the war-protests either. I talk to the kids I work with about government and war and seeing through the simple stories. I laugh at the Daily Show.
My point is that although I'm horrified, I'm not honestly doing that much. I'd like to change that. I'm looking for ways. Philosophically, I'm starting with a short manifesto piece from CrimeThinc, Your Politics are Boring as Fuck:
For how many of you is politics a responsibility? Something you engage in because you feel you should, when in your heart of hearts there are a million things you would rather be doing? Your volunteer work—is it your most favorite pastime, or do you do it out of a sense of obligation? Why do you think it is so hard to motivate others to volunteer as you do? Could it be that it is, above all, a feeling of guilt that drives you to fulfill your "duty" to be politically active? Perhaps you spice up your "work" by trying (consciously or not) to get in trouble with the authorities, to get arrested: not because it will practically serve your cause, but to make things more exciting, to recapture a little of the romance of turbulent times now long past. Have you ever felt that you were participating in a ritual, a long-established tradition of fringe protest, that really serves only to strengthen the position of the mainstream? Have you ever secretly longed to escape from the stagnation and boredom of your political "responsibilities"?
The answer to that question, for me, is "Yes, yes I have." How about you? Are you living up to your political ideals? Do you have suggestions for me? Or do you think all this rhetoric of mine is just more bullshit, pretending to matter--
Apparently this day is a big damn deal for some people, even though actually the titular missionary wasn't really from there. I guess it's like Gay Pride day being a big celebration of Liza Minelli? Anyhow, for those who are big time all about this day, here's a classic:
And for those of you who yearn for a more native, more modern, and more obscene mascot for your drunken revelry...
Have a spectacular time raising your blood alcohol level, kids!
How fucking inane do you have to be to choose Ratatouille over Persepolis?
I am hereby declaring Jihad on Pixar, Disney, all voting members of the Academy, and that foul mouthed doughy comedian who provided the voice for the rat.
Thank you for listening.
PS: If Viggo gets the award for best Actor in Eastern Promises, the Academy is off the hook.
Terrence McKenna foretold the collapse of our information heirarchy under its own weight. Anyone who has trawled through the echoing labyrinths of youtube response videos and livejournal clique wars has seen the brackish waters from whence our doom will rise, bubbling and swirling like the Asgardian Kraken from Cloverfield.*
In short, teh internets will obliterate our culture. To prove this, I offer you a set of videos. Alone, they are amusing and entertaining and a bit provocative. Together, they are eclectic and intriguing a bit more random. The context which brought this collection together is the damning evidence. Before I reveal it, let me remind you of the MTV commercial that aired a couple or 5 years ago chronicling the rise and fall of the term "bling." Don't remember? Well the internet does. Street slang enters rap songs, gets bandied about by the hip-hop hangers on, then Carson Daly farts it out of his mouth, and so it passes from him to suburban teenage girls and on to their desiccated aunties. RIP Bling-Bling, 1997-2004. The point: once a nugget of culture is spread to far from its origins, it dies. Stir this moral in with your memories of the Sars outbreak, and Outbreak the movie. Remember how airports and other conveniences of transportation make the spread of deadly viruses lots lots easier? Okay now you're ready.
The following videos were sent to my Mother by one of her professional colleagues. She's in her late 50's, listens to folk and classical music, and takes her dog to the doggy salon to get a haircut and shampoo every other month.
(Only 2 and 4 are SFW.)
Go look up the effect of ebola on the organs and veins and cell walls of the human body. That's what teh internets are gonna do to us.
There is no hope for our culture.
In the spirit of the holiday just past, I've got a medley of movie and TV conversation bait:
1. Josh, the previews for I am Legend are out; what do you think so far?
2. Thank you, Writer's strike. My childhood dream is within reach again.
3. Did you know that Wil Wheaton was on Numb3rs last Friday? I knew the show was going to feature comics, thanks to the howling curmudgeons blog, but I stopped reading Wil's blog when he went into exile. Not for a good reason; I just never updated my bookmark. Wil's flickr set is a good read, whether you care about the show or not.
4. Does anyone care about Cloverfield? Or the various associated mysteries?
5. Is anyone else planning to read the Southland Tales graphic novels before seeing the movie? Is anyone planning to see the movie at all? I'd link the sites but it's slow-loading animation and there's no "skip intro" button...
6. Not every list goes to 23, but this one goes well past that:
Full source list, and another couple of things in the responses...
If you haven't heard of Rule 34 by now, then you're using the wrong news aggregation service. Never fear, for I am here to reveal the glory of the aforementioned rule, and that self same rule's NSFW proof of concept... To say nothing of the glory holing of Rule Social B 99.1. If you can't risk clicking on that link, that's okay, here's a totally office-safe demonstration: a flickr group for public transit butt sex. Well sort of, if by "butt" you mean "bus," and by "sex" you mean "recovery vehicle." I feel like the guy on the other side of the goatse.cx lens; "when I took the photo I had no idea there was an audience for it..."
People say mixed-race babies are the most beautiful of all. I dunno; I find most babies ugly. Mixed race couples, though, are beautiful to my eye. The combinations of colors and tones, curves and contours, makes me happy at a deep level. I get a similar happy feeling from seeing butch and femme lesbians, and for some reason, people decked out in swingers outfits. The good news is that I live in Oakland, where there are a lot of couples that fall into each of these categories, especially the first one.
The bad news is, when I'm wandering around the city and see a happy, lovely couple, I get anxious about it. How would they know that I'm staring because they're so heart-warming, not because I've got a bigoted axe to grind. Most of the people I know who have been in a mixed race couple say they get hassled a little, and stared at rudely a lot.
How do you balance indulging your asthetic fascinations with the potential creep-out factor of your gaze?
What racial mixes do you like best? I'm currently digging a Tall dapper Persion and a short Jewess who wears 1980's dresses and belts. I know them, so it's a little easier to get away with drinking them in.
I'm going to be spending the next couple of hours taking two online courses about harassment and discrimination in the workplace. Do you have questions about such things? Would you like to know which states ban age discrimination for teenagers? Are you wondering how you can gracefully turn down an inappropriate invitation for drinks with the boss, without weakening your chances of getting a promotion?
I'll post the tidbits I find interesting or perplexing in the comments. Feel free to toss in your questions and I'll field them if I can.
November is almost up my ass again, and for the fourth year in a row, I'm telling myself that this is the year I'm gonna get me a novel written for National Novel Writing Month. Anybody else going for it this time around?
Some time in the next week I'll have to decide if I'm going to take up my idea for a distopian future high-school, or a municipal potboiler about a small claims court grifter, or a sequel to Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy, or something else entirely...
I'm also planning to cobble some kind of a submission (or more than one) for DC Comics' web-comic competition, Zuda Comics. I've emailed the link to Ben once or twice but he seems uninterested. Or maybe he doesn't want to tip his hand.
Anybody interested in cobbling some kind of killoggs driven web-comic monstrosity?
At least according to his wikipedia article, which had the following screed added last week.
Mr. C******* is also known for his hatred of women, portraying them in his comic strips in a demeaning way. Most notable was his October of 2007 comic, "Girl Fads," published in the Washington CityPaper. The comic featured 17 cells depicting women as wide-eyed airheads whose actions were dictated by some trendy fad. A woman doing yoga was smilingly farting her impurities and in another scene two women look dumbly at their naked breasts commenting on them. He even implies that women think voting is just as important as candles of binge diets with bulimia. When Mr. C******* is deameaning he tends to lose any wit or ironic humor that characterizes some of his better work and only illuminates his poor personal relationships with women.
In other creative writing news, DC has a webcomic/American-Idol-type project coming in October called Zuda Comics. Anybody trying out?
And back to the yearly event business... Somebody sometime suggested a Killoggs gift exchange that wasn't around the holidays. Like around Halloween instead? Anyone? Is this microphone on?
Finally, I went to small claims court last week, to defend myself against the guy in the truck who was hit by a guy in a van who I then hit when I came up the on ramp behind them... two and a half years ago. Before my case got called, I got to hear an amazing tale of a fish-pond installlation gone horribly, horribly leaky. The plaintiff's opener was "I didn't know much about Coy at the time." His final remark?
"It's one piece of polly urea flippy flopping off another, because he couldn't get his gun to shoot off enough heat!"
My landlord wants to raise my rent and have me start paying for the gas and electric. I haven't decided how much I want to negotiate--any advice from you all would be, by me, appreciated... even if it's just at the level of pro/anti/renter/landlord vitriol. It's a 7% increase, which is double the legal limit for one year, but I've had the same rent for 4 years now so that's legal. But the gas and electric is weird... and there's more than a few repairs that are way overdue. More details in the responses...
Five thousand, seven hundred and sixty eight years ago, give or take a week,* the divine will spun this earth into being. Tiamat the ocean was broken into a hundred seas, spread all around Gaia the land, while Quetzalcoatl the feathered serpent roared across Uranus the sky and poked thousands of star shaped holes in his skin. At some point, Slartibartfast and the other Magratheans pounded the enormous island Marduk into shape as a landing strip for the Douglas DC-8 Airplanes of Xenu, and that's how a pink unicorn was able to come to Midgard and teach Vishnu how to plant apple seeds all across the country while riding his big blue ox named Babe.
Maybe that's not the story according to reputable scientific sources like Stephen Hawking and Wikipedia. I'm not sure why you'd believe that kind of drooling, incomprehensible, robotic babble... Or listen to anything Stephen Hawking says either.
I believe this world came from somewhere, and that there were mighty and incomprehensible forces involved, and that at some ineffable and fundamentally unknowable point there was intention behind those forces, and maybe there still is. So me and my family and my family's family and a lot of other people going back at least five thousand years have got this tradition, where once a year we invoke the intentional force and ask for more time, more health, to do a better job this year of following that mighty and incomprehensible (let's just call it divine...) intent. We eat apple slices dipped in honey, for a sweet year filled with new fruits. We walk down to the running waters and pull breadcrumbs out of our pockets, and throw them in, to give up the sins we have indulged in from the last year. The actions we regret, if you'd rather not think about what "sin" entails.
We listen to ritual notes blown from a ram's horn instrument called a Shofar. These notes call us to go to temple, join the ritual, and heed the divine intent.
So eat something sweet today, killoggs, and empty your pockets of crumbs. Hope for more of the rare pleasures and happy days and healthy friends, and ask for strenth to have fewer things to regret, and fewer things to need forgiving, next year. L'shanah tovah tikatevi v'taihatemi! May you be inscribed for a good year in the book of life!
Is anybody else reading this? If you are, for the love of all that is holy, please stop.
If you're not, just fucking don't.
30 issues and $90 dollars ago it was an innovative bit of speculative fiction, with wild pulp-adventure twists and lots of interesting takes on the gender wars.
Then the intrepid heroes got to San Francisco and lost the plot, lost the fun, lost the narrative cohesion, and started figuring out how to take every interesting bit of character business up until then and turn it around into a series of "oh you liked that? fuck off then!" splash pages, one after another.
Yes, I'm going to spend 6 more dollars to complete this series. And then I'm going to set fire to it. Or put it on eBay. Whichever will reduce my bile quicker.
Carrots in rice makes more sense than peas; Priya is a common Indian name; Calcutta is in the east; going to the hospital with a camper at night sucks.
Also, K is fantastic, P needs more guidance, M needs more testosterone and training, L and E got no flies on them at all, and B is probably the only one that will read this.
Finally, Team Leaf from Korea liked the Iron Giant pretty well but they like searching for code online even better. Crazy smart foreign kids signal the fall of our own babylon, oh yes. The only question now is how fast the decline will be.
I've been having weird, revelatory dreams lately. At the start of the week there was the one where I was dating a woman with an intense violence fetish, and though she was beautiful and the sex was fantastic, I realized it was drawing me further into a pattern of valuing hurtful behavior. I awoke with the realization that I am ready to let go of pursuing relationships with people that enable my own flaws.
Mid-week I dreamt about an award ceremony filled with pomp and hyperbole, honoring some old guard of the Black political cadre in Oakland. My father was given a token award of some kind, or I found out he was later, after I had made a token appearance and left. I didn't have a good place to stand and couldn't see much point in being there except to "show the flag" so I left, and felt a mix of regret at missing my dad and embarrassment that he would be dragged into such an event. This had a lot to do with my role at my job, as the only white guy in an organization with a lot of history of good work and also hyperbole.
Then last night or the night before, I dreamt I was at a park, with an old friend, and we were talking about the importance of pursuing what is wanted and being sincere. Then she kissed me and told me I was what she wanted. I was instantly in love. I sort of know what this is about but I'm not sure why I picked that old friend (who's happy in Guatemala and nearly about to be engaged) as the proxy for the person I attach those feelings to right now.
I tell myself things, through dreams, and I believe that God speaks to me there too, though maybe just through murmurs and sighs. That's the god of my own conception, either a coyote, or a wizened mischievous harlot with piercing eyes, or an irascible misanthrope with a penchant for whimsy and a soft spot for cruelty.
How do you send messages to yourself? And what else speaks to you in those ways?
1. There have been baby pictures on the front page.
2. There are drawn heads that no one remembers.
3. There are question mark heads that post more than original members.
4. Brandon missed Hitler's birthday.
5. All of our arguments are the same.
6. Nobody really has the hate anymore.
7. All the cockteasing is done.
8. People post just to sell things.
9. We haven't had a new record-setting post in months. Years even.
10. Vista is out, Killoggs v3.0 still hasn't shipped.
11. When there's a flurry of interest, we shutter the doors.
12. We don't feed the trolls anymore so they all left.
13. We don't really have any beefs.
14. Voicemails and cell phone pics are still broken.
15. The journals bar is full of Brandon with a sprinkle of me.
16. The member to poster ratio is way high. Or low. I mean, there's a lot of us and not much on the page.
17. All the active blogs on the the interweb have been infected with the lolcat meme. We have no lolcats, therefore we are dead.
18. Ed and Sonny don't post.
19. We're more and more degrees away from boiling crack in a pipe squished between a meth-whore's tits everyday.
20. There was no Secret Santas last year.
21. Ben agrees.
22. Everybody's so fucking supportive.
23. Nobody's even stabbed anyone in the head in awhile.
My friends, Sweet Crude Bill & the Lighthouse Nautical Society are playing the Velvet Lounge in DC this week. They're a lovely ballad-rock band, like maybe Kurt Cobain as Rock-a-billy... Or Elvis Presley backed by Blues Traveler... Anyway they're great people and if you go, you'll get to meet my friend Munish, who lives in DC and has a head but has yet to be given a membership.
Here's lyrics to one of my favorite songs:
You're gonna get yours
You say you fight your war
For freedom and democracy
Well I don't pretend to understand
The complex bureaucracy
But I got two healthy boys and I intend to raise 'em
And if you try
To take em away...
I finally saw Children of Men on July 4th. With two of my friends who thought the Oakland Mimosas were great, thank you very much. Anyway, the movie exceeded my expectations, which were already pretty high. Then I went back and read what Josh and other people said back here, expecting a lot of comments about the bleak marxist message of the film. Not quite what I found.
So, if you saw it, what did you think the message was? And do you agree? I'm putting my own opinion in the comments.
