Antisocial Media

Two Battle Scarred Veterans... who do you want on *your* fantasy football team?

The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny looks to address the eternal issue of Mortal Kombat-style fights between ...well, whoever. In my experience, the question of who would win in a fight between... stayed in the realm of the animal world, ie: puma vs. cheetah, weight-lifting gorilla vs. black bear, grizzly bear vs. polar bear, great white shark vs. grizzly bear/puma tag team, etc. This Flash video is still pretty damn funny. Mom, you probably won't enjoy this one.

It's been a little more than a week since Sarah returned from Denver, and we are finally starting to settle back in. I picked her up at San Francisco Airport last Tuesday night, and whisked her off to Wilbur Hot Springs for a few R&R days. The waters were a little too stinky for our tastes (and very very salty--even the filtered water for showering and drinking left our pores filled with sulfur-y odors for days afterward, which was gross) and a little too hot for protracted bathing, but the lodgings were gorgeous--we stayed in the Loft Room, which you ascend spiral staircase to get to--and the communal kitchen was a great common space. The other highlight was tromping around the 1800 acres of private land around the springs. The whole area supported a pretty intense mining industry around the turn of the last century, and the land is dotted with collapsed mines and smeltery ruins, and zigzagged with old mining roads. Next time I bring a camera. The transition from such f...

Elizabeth took these great pictures and more at Joel and Stephanie's moustache party Saturday night! Total satisfaction. Oh yeah, the photos:

I feel kind of cheap biting this from the great Mark Evanier's News From ME , but it's just too much. This man, Julian Beever is a genius. Chalk and a sidewalk, and an incredible mind, hand and eye. Here's his website. It is incredibly beautiful here today--sunny, a little hazy, and such intensely refreshing cool breezes. Ahhhh. Lots of complaining on the internets about the officiating during the Super Bowl, and the usual blah blah blah about Oh, it's so boring. Whatever. It's football. In my opinion, the ratio of truly exciting, competitive Super Bowls to boring ones is about the same as for regular season games. Football games tend to have a pretty steady low state of action/interest, punctuated by moments of senses-shattering transcendence. Kind of like life. My Otis Redding Pandora station has gone all rock-and-or-roll on me: from North Mississippi AllStars to a great John Hiatt song I hadn't heard (Straight Outta Time) to John Mayer covering ...

Today has been a very good day. It still is a very good day, as I sit and reflect on it. I spent the morning and early afternoon cleaning up the house and my room and car a bit in preparation of Sarah's return, and the afternoon and evening enjoying the Super Bowl at the Parkway Theater and the company of my friend Josh. It's early enough in the semester that I don't feel guilty about skimping on the reading for my classes, or that I'm going to miss a bunch of classes this week taking Sarah to Wilbur Hot Springs as a wind down from nanny-ing for Becky and Andy Potter the last three-and-a-half weeks. Of course, Sarah doesn't know about this yet, so if you see her before Tuesday, please keep it under your hat. I'm listening to the Otis Redding station on Pandora.com as I write this, which plugs me into such a great variety of classic soul music and like great blues channels pain and loneliness into defiant joy and perseverance, steadfastness. Night Train ...

Hooray!!! James Is Cute dot Blogspot dot Com has finally arrived! I have been waiting many a long month to see my favorite canine get his internet-y due. Here's a taste of what awaits you at jamesiscute.blogspot.com: What an awesome James, and what an awesome Ali and Paul!!! A person is incredibly lucky to have such great friends.

Hooray!!! Triumph! The experience of watching the Super Bowl at The Parkway Theater was completely fantastic. I got to meet cool new folks, hang out with old friends, and be completely engaged in a pretty decent football game! Also, I knocked over Two , count 'em, Two completely full beers on consecutive exciting plays during the second half of the game, which was embarassing and cool. Long story short, a helluva game, and the viewing experience was entirely satisfactory. And good on the Steelers.

This comic runs in one of the local free tabloids. Kind of hit or miss, but this week's edition killed me: Well done, Robert T. Balder! I may finally be ready to, as it has been said, rock.

True, I didn't think California would be like this, but I don't know how it could be different, either. Sitting on the deck tonight, hearing the resonant tones of the metal wind chimes, and the sorrowful plunks of the bamboo ones, and smelling the jasmine on the breeze; hearing the constant low roar of the highway (even at three in the morning), but also the distant lament of the train horn; and seeing a few stars through the orange-purple night sky...I thought California would be different, but I didn't expect it to be this much the same. {EdNote: This image is of a print by Raymond Pettibon, one that I had the privelege to live with for a semester of college thanks to Oberlin's Art Rental program and my excellent housemate Josh Adler. I think about it every time the thought "Wow, California isn't how I thought it would be," crosses my mind. Kind of grim, no?}

Pleasing taste; some monster-ism.

Funny that I should have spent so much of yesterday writing about All the King's Men , and spent all of today being driven slowly nuts by a facial tic above the left side of my lip. Seriously, it's making me crazy. In the novel, The Great Twitch was Jack Burden's (ultimately failed) metaphor for the senselessness of life, that life is so random that all our behaviors and interactions might as well be random twitches of muscle fiber. I don't think that what I've got constitutes a Great Twitch, but it certainly is a persistent one.

So I had a great post written on questions of agency and identity as explored through Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men and High Fidelity (I focussed more on the film by Stephen Frears than on the original Nick Hornby book), and it mysteriously disappeared. I, of course, blame the government . The crux of my post was that letting outside events and relationships with other people shape your life is fundamentally selfish , and that each of us bears responsibility for claiming our own agency . One of my favorite lines from Richard Linklater's Waking Life is an offhanded remark by a passerby , late in the movie, who tells the nameless protagonist (played by Wiley Wiggins ) "As the pattern becomes more complex , it is no longer sufficient to be swept along," or something like the same. The patterns are becoming more complex, and we face peril if we are satisfied with passivity. But, like I said, that post got erased, so here's a BMW z3 Coupe, ...

What pleases God? What offends God? To what is God indifferent? Shaykh Yassir Chadly at Starr King told me at the start of the last semester that proper etiquette was important because it pleases God. I'm not a Muslim, nor do I believe in God in a firm, definite sense. Something about the idea of etiquette being important to God really stuck with me, though, and I'm still mulling it over. What are the rules that govern our relationships with one another? Where do ethics come from? Are they pragmatic constructs, or do they come from a deeper source? Just idle thoughts from an early morning walk home from a late-night beer and bs session with Garrick and Neal.

Pandora has just helped me create a Josh Ritter radio station. If you were curious, the music-genomic traits of Josh Ritter are mellow rock instrumentation, mild rhythmic syncopation, repetitive melodic phrasing, extensive vamping, and major key tonality. Must be why he's such a hit in Ireland--those leprechauns are suckers for vamping.

For what it's worth, I am resurrecting my blog! Cause everyone else is, that's why. I'm listening to the Flaming Lips Radio station from pandora.com which is playing a song called Magic Finger by James Kochalka Superstar. The chorus, and I'm not joking, is "It's my dick! It's my dick! It's a magic finger, pointing at all the pretty girls!" Actually, that's pretty much the whole song. Kochalka is a cartoonist of some repute, most recently for Super F*ckers. Get your mind out of the gutter, James! I figured out how to resurrect the posts from me and Sarah's bike trip, and I'm working on getting the photos back up, so hold yer horses, you bastids. I have been meaning to write more, and this is sort of a step up from journaling. I do, yes, need the practice. I haven't bicycled across the country since the last time, so no real significant two-wheeled news. I am relocated from Madison, WI, to Oakland, CA, to attend seminar...