Livin' it up

Today, I ran out of Kleenex© and now have to blow my nose on toilet paper. I only mention this because the exact reverse occured about three weeks ago. If the reverse has never happened to you, then you are missing out on a damn good thing. Let me tell you; the rejuvenating power of aloe is a pleasure I will not soon forget. I imagine this is how King Tut must have lived...

Speaking of the past, The Clash of the Titans is officially over. The final results have Brian Matthew Kessler reigning victorious and capturing nearly half of the votes cast. With that poll passing on, I got to thinking about how many famous people are on the verge of death right now. Terri Schiavo is fending off deadly vampires at this very moment and Pope JP the Deuce has to check his back for armies of Freemasons ready to ambush him at every turn. My first thought was to create a poll guessing which imminent death would occur first, but this seemed a tad bit cruel. So, I leave you with the kinder, gentler poll on your right. Enjoy!

Austin 3:16

Easter is a time to gather 'round friends and family to give thanks for everything that happened over the past year. Maybe thats Thanksgiving, but whatever the case, I'm thankful that I saw a tiny asian woman riding a Segway© down a trail in Muir Woods earlier today. Man, I love the future!

Happy Easter everybody!

Aren't those things endangered?

Yesterday I was up in Napa valley and among other things, I ate one of these. And, no, it did not taste like chicken. It was really good though. In fact, it was basically a marinated steak. Yeah, who knew?

Almost exactly one year ago, I was in Sweetwater, TX and I ate this. It did taste like chicken. Greasy, greasy chicken with lots of tiny little ribs.

One year from now, I will be eating three of these.

Not the cool kind that attach your wallet to your jeans

California is a cheap state. Why? Instead of hiring people to drive snow plows, dump sand/salt and generally clear the roads, California has decided to make everyone buy tire chains and put them on whenever there is a little snow on the road. The main purpose of this restriction is to stop all the yokels who haven't ever seen snow from driving like its a sunny day in the Bahamas. This works because you can't drive over 30 mph with chains on without risking breaking them.

This is America, Bub! You can't make me spend $50 on chains and drive slow! If I want to fly along a slushy highway at 65 mph, that's my perogative! Before you think that I'm being a hubris-filled jerk, I'll have you know that this was just the Donner Pass. I mean, what's the worst that could happen?

The current poll has grown stale and will go the way of cream top milk this weekend. If anyone cares, Brian Matthew Kessler is narrowly ahead. Vote like the future depends on it!

Your money is in the back seat of my Delorean

I was standing in line at the post office today zoning out when I noticed that some guy was struggling to get the stamp machine to take his dollar. Finally, it takes his dollar and spits out some change. He turns and says to no one in particular, "It took my money, but didn't give me any stamps. It stole my $7.40!" He then went to the front of the line.

Man: "The machine just ate my money!"

Lady behind desk: "OK, fill out this form, send it in and you will get reimbursed."

Man: "This happened to me five years ago in San Francisco and I sent in the form and followed it up and I never got my money."

Lady: "I'm sorry, sir, but you have to fill out this form."

Man: "I don't want this form! I want my $7.40! Where is my money from five years ago?"

Lady: "Sir, I can't do anything except give you this form."

Man: "This form doesn't do me any good. I want my money from five years ago! I'm leaving my money here and I'll be back in ten minutes. I want my money and my stamps!"

Lady: "Sir, I can't be responsible for your money."

The man leaves with his change and the form sitting on the counter...

If this ever happens to you, don't get confused into thinking that the clerk can:

• change the policies of the federal government
• reverse time
• magically produce $7.40 + stamps
• make everyone feel comfortable after you've throughly soiled the mood

On an unrelated sidenote, if you like laughing your arse off but you didn't watch Arrested Development last night, then your arse must still be firmly attached to your body. The funniest show on network TV (admittedly, I only watch Sunday nights) is probably getting cancelled this season. If you aren't a Gen-X slacker, then you can sign a petition to try to keep it on the air. Also, don't bother sticking around for The Sketch Show afterwards. If you've seen the part of Whose Line is it Anyway where they go back and forth improvising with props, its basically that for thirty minutes instead of thirty seconds.

Coming home from dick surgery

My buddies Jake Livermore and Steve Heuertz were in town for the past week and we were livin' la vida loca. In the spirit of March Madness, I will now present you with the highlight reel. Roll 'em Chet!

Monday

This dude


rocked me harder than Michael Myers with serious 'roid rage. An especially memorable moment was during the second of five or so encores, when Guitar Wolf begged in broken English for "Beer! Beer Please!" Someone brought him up a fancy beer which he immediately dumped on his head and kicked into the next song. And oh, how he kicked it!

Wednesday

After partially regaining my hearing and sense of reality, we headed down to LA and joined up with a gaggle of cool people. My pal Paul Rust was performing with the rest of Fireball Deluxe at this show:



They made me giggle like a school girl. Te-he!

Thursday

We all decided to go for a power lunch at the Grove, when who should be dining behind us. None other than Mr. Oscar himself:



After that we went to a dress rehearsal for Real Time with Bill Maher which is filmed right after the Price is Right. Writers for the show "played" the various guests he would be having on the show the following day. This may have been the most disturbing thing I have ever seen, until...

Friday

We went to Universal Studios and we were hanging out after JP the ride when a dude who noticed our obvious coolness asked us if we wanted to test a new food product. The new product is best represented by the following picture:


Yep, look for potato-chips-made-of-meat in your local market this summer. And I used to think meat and potatoes was a good thing...

And thats it for sports. Now to Johnny with the weather.

Olivia Newton John's Grandfather won the Nobel Prize in Physics and other things that are vexing me

I have a couple of friends coming into town tommorrow evening. We're gonna chill for a whole and it should be good times. How can I just hang out for an entire week? When you're a good-for-nothing grad student, its easy. All you have to do is turn in that week's required assignments. Which leaves me with less than 24 hours to complete a supposedly two-week midterm and another assignment.

So, why am I posting right now? Because the Internet is a time burglar, thats why! I just wanted to check something simple in the lecture notes, but the professor had to go and put a footnote that announced Olivia Newton John is the Granddaughter of Nobel-Prize winning physicist Max Born. This information comes courtesy of a japanese man who frequently wears a shirt similar in style and content to the one below.



Needless to say, this sent me on a downward spiral of distractedness which I am now bringing to a close. So, wish me luck brave cybernauts and I'll catch you on the flipside.

I have girly hands and other revelations about my fate

I recently learned that I have girly hands. How can I tell if I have burly man paws or frisky female tentacles, you ask? Well, the test is so simple you can perform it in your very own home. All you need to do is look at your index and ring fingers. If they are the same length you have girly mitts and if your index finger is shorter then you have man hands. And, both of my fingers are the same length. So what, big deal, what sort of consequences could that ever have. Well, nosy Ned, let me enlighten you.

It turns out some dudes in lab coats have been looking at a bunch of people's fingers and figured out that the relative length corresponds to how much testosterone (man juice) you got when you were in your mama's tummy. Thus, having girl hands makes me less agressive and generally more of a wuss. Also, these sissy fingers of mine make me more likely to die young of a heart attack. So, Doc, tell me, is there any good news? Well, girly hands make you less likely to be gay. Apparently, the girl hands have the same anti-gayness effect on both sexes.

Speaking of gayness, I was reading an article in the New York Times on how nobody can remember phone numbers anymore when I read the line

Perhaps the most frustrating part was that Mr. Gillis had been dating someone in Manhattan and couldn't get in touch with him until he returned to the city.

I actually reread it at first, thinking I just misread her. But no, the Times just included a gay relationship in a regular news article without batting an eye. Not even a mention of the words gay, partner, marriage or civil union. Pretty progressive if you ask me.

Now, I don't know about the rest of you out in cyberspace, but its a beautiful day out where I live. So, I'm off to enjoy it!

Bil Keane: Social Commentator

I was reading a copy of the newspaper that someone had discarded and I thought, "Hey, I haven't read the comics in a while. I wonder what they've been up to." At the top of the page was the ubiquitous Family Circus. My main connection with the Family Circus comes from my grandparents sending us a copy of the family circus calendar with all of the relatives birthdays and anniversaries already marked as part of our christmas present (except this year for some reason, hmmm...) The calendar would immediately be hidden on the back of the pantry door to stop us from bursting out laughing every time we entered the kitchen.

I figured the comic would still contain some benign "observation" on "family" "life." Instead, Bil Keane has risen above his sophmoric tendencies to the level of social commentary. You'll have to make due with a description since King Features Syndicate has an iron grip on web publishing for 2 weeks. The comic has Billy telling his playmates that, "We'll be the good guys and you can be the insurgents." I wanted to follow Billy's dotted line around the neighborhood and instead I got a severely-ADHD boy commenting on international conflicts. This is the last time you let me down Bil Keane!

While vainly trying to find the above strip, I stumbled across Comics Curmudgeon who offers up much better commentary on the funny pages than I just did. And now I will leave you with a more enjoyable comic from Playboy's own Mr. Shel Silverstein. For context, its from an article he wrote when Playboy sent him to spring training.



Isn't that dude completely radical? He wrote the lyrics for both "A Boy Named Sue" made famous by Johnny Cash and "Cover of the Rolling Stone" by Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show. And since I haven't filled my reminiscing quota for this entry, my elementary school art teacher used to read us poems from "Where the Sidewalk Ends" and "A Light in the Attic" at the end of class. I liked 'em so much I had half the poems memorized.

Ahh, rememberies...

This weekend's archetypal blog entry

So the weekend is over, and this post could have been about any number of typical things. It could have been about how on two non-consecutive occasions last week people commented on how new my car smells. And how my car now smells like 50 In-N-Out burgers that may have been in my backseat. Or it could have been about how I fell only once while skiing today, but still managed to leave a stain of blood soaked snow on the mountain. But, NO! Something much more archetypical has intervened.

In case you are living in a cave or didn't get past the article on Gun's and Roses Chinese Democracy debacle, today's Arts section of the New York Times contains an article featuring the one, the only, Mr. Rick Herbst entitled: Is a Cinema Studies Degree the New M.B.A.? And if you are having trouble reading the article (you have to register and the Times site has been on the fritz the past week), here is a reprint. So, what does this mean to me? Well, for one thing, it means I'll definitely see a celebrity when I'm in LA next week.

In right-hand-side of the website news, the Tia-Tamera controversy has come to a heart wrenching conclusion. Though early exit polls showed Tia leading by a comfortable margin, Tamera made a late surge to bring the race to a dead heat. Then, disaster struck as the Diebold voting machines went down and after they came back on, my account and polls were lost... In light of recent events, I have no choice but to call the race in favor of Whoopi. Deal with it! After switching poll hosting sites, I have a new poll posted as suggested by Jake Douche Livermore.

You say Pop instead of Soda? How Wierd!

Yes, its that time of the year again. No, not the time when Basketball players court cases are quietly hush-hushed, nor when pop stars trials start to get a bit more vociferous. Its time for Girl Scout Cookies! Yay!



And yours truly has received his first batch courtesy of the world's coolest 7th grader. Being the king of moderation when it comes to food, especially deserts, I have definitely not eaten two and a half boxes in the first twenty-four hours.

With Girl Scout cookies being in bloom, I got into a discussion with some people about what their favorite kinds were and was flabbergasted when they started listing off flavors I had never heard before. Little did I know that I was in a regional soda-pop mixup.

In hopes of easing the Eastside-Westside tensions, I now present you with your very own Girl Scout translation guide:

1. Caramel de Lites are known as Samoas, west of the Rockies. This name comes from the astronomical obesity rate that these cookies have brought upon American Samoa.

2. In the southern United States, the Peanut Butter Sandwich is known as the Do-Si-Do for its use in a bizarre courtship ritual.

3. The good people of Vermont, call Peanut Butter Patties, Tagalongs, since everyone who picks them as their favorite is most definitely a poseur.

In closing, I'll leave you with a comment someone once made about Girl Scout Cookies, "It's so hard to get into their boxes."

Awww, Hell No!!!

Take a moment and think back to the last time you heard someone use this phrase. Where were you? What were you doing? Well, I know where I was and what I was doing. The time was earlier this evening and I was tutoring math at San Quentin State Penitentiary. A student was working his way through the chapter when he turned the page...

"Awww, Hell No!"

What a glorious phrase of exclamatory disbelief. It sealed the deal on me seeing this movie:



Two Times!!!

What else can you say when you are magically transported back in time, while still wearing a green future-jersey?

Go on, take the money and run!

So, I had some birthday cheques to cash today and sauntered down to the local Well's Fargo depot to TCB. Having done two loads of laundry the previous night, I was in dire need of quarters. I told the man behind the counter to give me two rolls as part of my payment. I grabbed the cash without much thought and went on my merry way to class. After class, I was going to grab a quick bite to eat when I reached into my wallet and pulled out the money. Counting through the bills I thought, hey wait, I'm two dollars short, no wait, I'm eighteen dollars too much. Counting and recounting, I come to the conclusion that the man behind the counter gave me two rolls of quarters in place of two dollars. Now, yours truly is in stickly pickle. What is the appropriate course of action? Well, I did what any red-blooded American would do: I marched right back down to the bank and returned the eighteen dollars to the teller. Phew, eternal damnation averted for one more day...

Even without the eighteen dollars, I have extra cash burning a hole in my pocket and what does one do with extra cash? Well, try to get a hold of "The Muppet Show" on DVD of course. Logging on to Amazon.com, I find that all of the "Best of" compilations are out of stock and are fetching absurd prices for used copies. Befuddled, I log on to henson.com only to learn the sad truth that the Muppets were bought by Disney a year ago. As Michelle Tanner would say, "How wude!" Looking into the situation further, I find out that Disney has been preparing to release entire seasons with extras this summer. In the meantime, Time-Life has their remaining 3-episode DVDs on clearance. With some quick thinking, I decided to engage in some capitalistic speculation figuring that I can watch the Time-Life DVDs now and sell them when the full seasons come out and make a gagillion dollars in the process. Pure Johnny Rockafella Genius!

In right-hand-side of the website news, I noticed that Tia has taken a commmanding lead in the poll. Voting will run until sometime next week, so P-Diddy urges you to skate or die! More importantly, the digital homesteader act has allowed me to lay claim to 20 acres and a mule for the purposes of hosting a guestbook. So, feel free to sign the new guestbook with any thoughts you may have.