Oddities

Bill Hicks asked that anybody in his audience who was in marketing to please kill themselves. I have friends who work in marketing and quasi-marketing jobs, so I'd reserve this particular piece of advice to the assholes who came up with this bit of viral marketing from Starbucks.

I can't tell what's most depressing about this whole scenario. The fact that most people who commented on the Flickr post and at the San Francisco Chronicle's Culture Blog, including some people who were actually had by the stunt, seemed to find it "clever," and to blame themselves for being tricked into an extremely modest bit of concern for one's fellow human? The fact that the "punchline" to the stunt is an ur-cynical "Happy Holidays from Starbucks," the form, but not the content of basic, non-cynical well wishing (like they really just wanted to get people's attention to wish them well during the holiday season)? That the whole irony-steeped mess is causing complicated internal feelings of both complete cynicism and self-righteous anger wholly out of proportion to what is, at its core, a stunt likely to be discarded to the dust bin of history in short order?

I don't like to put myself in the same camp as the cultural conservatives, but I also can't help but mourn an age when interactions between random people on the street weren't informed by poisonous corporate marketing bullshit. It's not news to me that businesses have been captializing on both the holidays and our non-commercial goodwill for a long time. But still.

I don't find it funny. I don't find it clever. If there were any justice in the world, every time someone holds back from helping another person to avoid being a chump, the marketing department at Starbucks who approved this campaign would get sucker punched.

At Bay to Breakers, Claudia and I dressed up as little kids, with huge lollypops and a big wheel. I also wore a propeller-head beanie. Claudia had a wig and a little girl dress. We met up with some kickball friends dressed as the runaway bride's maids and their groomsmen. The big wheel was a big hit on the second half of the race (after the Hayes hill).

Veronica's birthday was over memorial day, which we mostly spent on the beach at Tahoe. Only Jay and Chuck actually braved the water, which was, uh, refreshing.

From the L.A. Times:

"My concept of death for a long time," he told McKeen, "was to come down that mountain road [in Kentucky] at a hundred and twenty and just keep going straight right there, burst out through the barrier and hang out above all that � and there I'd be sitting in the front seat, stark naked, with a case of whiskey next to me, and a case of dynamite in the trunk � honking the horn, and the lights on, and just sit there in space for an instant, a human bomb, and fall down into that mess of steel mills. It'd be a tremendous goddamn explosion. No pain. No one would get hurt."

I suppose it's instructive that this bit of morbid theater didn't happen, and instead Hunter S. Thompson's self-inflicted end was a gunshot wound to the head, indoors, inside a Colorado cabin in late winter, with his son in the next room. That he was a great writer is undeniable, but I think the fact that his writing was so incisive and exceptional and even coherent depite the mayhem of his personality (and the mayhem fueled it all) demonstrates his true genius.

Yesterday I stepped outside to golden sunshine here in San Francisco, and the quality of light and the angle of the shadows, were striking: it's autumn. Not technically, not for another three weeks, but still. Every year I notice this, and it's always something of a revelation. The transition from winter to spring is similar in its suddennes, a time in late February where a switch is thrown and winter's over.

Autumn-to-winter and spring-to-summer are more feathered; the seasons gracefully merge, over a month or so.

Well, I guess it is true that The Simpsons is the summation of western civilization. Thomas Pynchon's voice appeared in an episode last Sunday, although yours truly missed it, as I was unawares and flipping between the last thirty minutes of Casino and Goldfinger elsewhere on the idiot box. Given Mr. P's love of pop culture, it's not that surprising that he'd appear on The Simpsons.

The above clip also shows that I've been mispronouncing his name all along: Pinch-on rather than Pinch-un. As befitting a Long Island boy from a time before mass media whittled down the edges of everyone's regional accents, he's got a fairly thick New York accent.

This proposal is so rational, it'll never get anywhere. Check it out anyway.

This morning was our day in court for the "Bonny Doon Four," intransigent trespassers & moonwatchers that we are. After an hour and a half of cases that included DUIs, theft, reckless driving, public drunkenness, and a slew of failures to appear, Chuck, Sarah, and I appeared in front of the honorable Stephen Siegel (Jay was assigned to a different courtroom) for our arraignment. When the charges of trespassing on an ecological preserve were read, people in the gallery snickered, apparently.

Our misdemeanors were ammended to infractions, and a $10 fine was assessed.

Salon published a letter to the editor I wrote in response to a somewhat narcissistic piece by a writer who feels ostracized by his peers for liking cockrock and slasher flicks.

Basically, he details how his friends and acquaintances don't have much respect for his taste in music and movies, and then proceeds to insult the music and movies his peers like. The phrase involving pots and teakettles comes to mind. His problems largely stem from an inflexibility when it comes to movies and music, and it's no wonder he feels isolated when he tries to take first dates to splatter films without first finding out if maybe she's ok with such movies.

I guess it's a happy ending for him, though, as he falls for a girl who likes Def Leppard as much as he does.

Words of wisdom from my friend Erik, fellow philosophy major (but from Yale, the punk) and Pynchon fan, regarding his work improving the writing of his students. Ironically, the article about him is very poorly written. He was blessed with a front page photo in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, which unfortunately isn't available online.

While I can't speak as to his glue sniffing habits or lack thereof, and I'm certain he does good work, I'm fairly certain that he's not following his own advice about going to bed early, unless that's a body double at the Redroom downtown at midnight on a school night.

I'm an unrepentant law breaker. Specifically, I've been cited for misdemeanor trespassing for enjoying the moonrise over Monterey Bay and the coast north of Santa Cruz, in the Bonny Doon ecological preserve. There's an area of sandstone formations colloquially known as the "moon rocks" that has impressive near-360 degree views of the Santa Cruz mountains, the bay, and the coast.

Because many people go up there and drink beer, litter, carve their names in the sandstone, and carouse, the California Department of Fish & Game have been writing tickets for people still in the preserve after sunset.

Jay, Sarah, Chuck, Elisha, and I were stopped at around midnight as we were walking back to our car, and proceeded to spend the next hour and a half getting our licenses run and tickets run up. Officer Steve Schindler was kind enough to let Elisha off with a warning, seeing as how we have a court date in late September, and she'll be in Corvalis, OR going to grad school. The rest of us, though, were cited, and must appear before a judge. The maximum fine is apparently $1350.

You read that correctly--$1350 for misdemeanor trespassing. If I don't fight it and pay whatever fine the judge levies against me, I'll have a criminal record. Meanwhile, my neighbor Claire just had her mountain bike ripped off the locked roof rack of her car, a bike easily worth $2000. Any guess on how diligently the police will work to catch this bit of grand theft?

An amusing article about Pat Burns, coach of the New Jersey Devils, and Pascal Rheume, a Devils forward, and their adventures with the Stanley Cup.

One of the many traditions surrounding the Stanley Cup, the NHL's championship trophy, is that each member of the team that wins the cup gets to spend a day with it. You can pretty much do anything with it that won't damage it permanently. Some past celebrations with the cup have sent it to the bottom of a pool, on stage at a strip club, as a basin to catch the water from a baptism, and countless episodes of drinking champagne or beer from the bowl.

Rheume, however, wins my vote for the best use of the cup involving food, having poutine served in the Stanley Cup. Poutine is a Quebecois heart-stopper: french fries with crumbled farmers cheese and slathered in gravy.

The only worthwhile thing I learned in this horrifically bad interview with Erica Jong, author of "Fear of Flying," is that Jong's daughter Molly suffers from aviatophobia. Many of the questions don't make sense unless you were actually at the interview (stuff like, "[Name withheld] supposedly did [libelous allegation]"), and Bowman's obvious sexual anxiety about meeting Jong reads comes accross as completely pathetic. Worse still, at one point Jong points out that, although she's written about many things, everyone zeros-in on the sex in her books, and nobody wants to talk about anything else. Bowman underscores this point by doing exactly that, even admitting that he just thinks of her as "the Sex woman." Way to go, sport. I like Salon, but lately they've been publishing a few too many articles that appear to be more about the author than the subject, full of meaningless confessions and uninteresting autobiographical information.

I filled up my Jetta today with a tank of B100 biodiesel, a diesel fuel made without petroleum. It's made from vegetable oils, usually soybean. A commercial fueling station in San Jose started selling B100 a couple months ago, and I wanted to give it a shot.

The drive home was uneventful, and I couldn't tell the difference. The exhaust supposedly smells like french fries. I'll have to check next time. It was pricey compared to regular diesel (around $2.70 a gallon), but it's not as polluting, and nobody's fought a war over soybean farmland yet.

It appears that Nullsoft, the company that brought you WinAmp, has released a free encrypted communications suite called WASTE. Someone over there knows their Thomas Pynchon (my favorite author), specifically The Crying of Lot 49, the novella that features an underground mail system called W.A.S.T.E. (We Await Silent Trystero's Empire). The plot of Lot 49 involves a possibly imaginary conspiracy against the official postal channels, that may or may not have existed for centuries. W.A.S.T.E. is a mail system used by people on the margins of society--the homeless, drunks, criminals, the urban poor--that the main character, Oedipa Maas, encounters while executing the estate of an ex-lover. A friend of my neighbor works at Nullsoft, so I'll have to ask him about it.

Update: I talked with Tom, the guy that works at Nullsoft, and he said it was indeed a nod to Lot 49. Oh, and AJ, you flatter me.

UpdateUpdate: The Hollywood suits at AOL/Time Warner appear to have pulled the plug on WASTE. It was released as a GPLed project, so the it will now probably live in the software demi-monde of off-shore source repositories inhabited by DeCSS and the like.

From the Daily Show:

Stewart: I'm confused. We think he has weapons, but if he doesn't ...

Colbert: Jon, don't confuse him actually having them with the threat posed by our thinking he has them. Just imagine what Saddam could do if he did what we're imagining he'll do. It's almost unimaginable.