Tonight We're Gonna Party Like It's 1789

Best of 2006? Norse saga regarding the expedition to Oregon for Christmas? A detailed account of what I've eaten today? No, just bullet points.

• Highway 101 obviates the need to deal with putting on chains since the highest pass isn't much over 2000 feet. It's also a lot more scenic than I-5, so I recommend it (although you do have to put up with driving through Eureka...god there are some ugly kids in Eureka.) It's about 10.5 hours from Novato to Eugene, as opposed to 9 hours on I-5.
• The xmas loot was excellent this year. Becky got me an American Apparel hoodie, the in-laws got me some sweet Pumas, and my mom got me an unsolicited and unexpected iPod. Oh, and my homie Crystal got me a t-shirt with a ninja jump-kicking with a guitar. I'll be styling like an undergrad in 2007.
• I was unable to see most of my Eugene homies, although we did score a precious hour or so with E. Our one-night-and-a-lunch trip to Portland was great; we saw an elite cadre of good-looking people.
• Did you realize that Mt. Everest is over 29,000 feet tall? It's about as high as commercial jets fly. That's crazy.
• We played 20 questions in the car. Me: "Uh...does it live on the east coast or something?" Becky: "oh! Wait, I lied on question number 1. The answer was yes."
• Pesto hates driving. In fairness, she's new to driving stick.
• A whole lot of eating went down. This morning, Elizabeth was kind enough to have me and the missus over for a delicious breakfast. More eating went down.
• Our new year's plans consist of (wait for it...) not leaving the apartment! What a shocker!

And, as ever, let's all hope next year sucks less than this one did. Huzzah to the Democratic takeover of congress, to the brilliance of my new colleagues, and to my ongoing success in avoiding having to have a real job.

Come With Me, Big-Haired Kim Basinger

We're back in effect in the SC after executing our holiday visitations with military precision. Scratch that: with academic precision. I'll compose an epic poem describing our adventures shortly, but in the interim, I will point out that there are numerous spots along Highway 101 in northern Cali that look a lot like the scene in Batman (the 1989 version) wherein Batman is blasting toward his Batcave in the Batmobile with his big-haired BatKimBasinger. That was one of the things that kept us going on the 10+ hour hauls up to Eugene and back.

On to the Beaver State

We're heading out this evening, carting two kids (us) and a bunny (our manager.) The bunny's staying with the in-laws in Novato, then we're on to pastoral Eugene the next day.

Nathan, Toki, Swiskgar, Pickles and William wish you all a merry xmas and a very metal 2007.

Nadir

Sure, normally a nadir is a bad thing, but I don't see why we can't have positive nadirs too. Today's a rainy Thursday in Santa Cruz, the most productive thing I've done so far is write an e-mail to family members I won't see over xmas, and I'm declaring today to be the nadir...of fun. To help celebrate, I'm calling on the powers of The Nuge. Rock it, Nuge! Take your reactionary politics and your teetotaling lifestyle and rock it!

Here comes a little bit of stream of consciousness.

1. I think the perfect band for me would be halfway between Weezer and Slayer.
2. I'm willing to drive up 101 just to skip the Shasta curves in the rain on I-5.
3. If we weren't all disatisfied all the time, do you think we'd just lay down and starve?
4. Why do I love to wear these hats so much?
5. Was Hitler right when he said that one's basic personality is established by 22? It reminds me of that Modest Mouse song ("I'm the same as I was when I was 6 years old...")
6. While I was falling asleep last night it occurred to me that religion is like a virus. When people find it, it's like they've caught something and thought and willpower are powerless against it.
7. It would only take 40 minutes or so to get some work done. Think it'll happen today?

I just talked to my friend Erin on the phone. It doesn't look like I'll get to see her while we're up in Eugene. Moving away from your friends never stops sucking, does it?

(At least there are so many good-looking people studying history here; I find comfort in that.)

P.S. Here's a link to a story about a study about the fact that NINETY FUCKING FIVE percent of Americans, men and women, had premarital sex. That INCLUDES the bloody right-wing abstinence-only Christian fuckwits. You'd like to think this would put another nail in abstinence-only sex education, but I doubt it.

I can now say this literally: fucking morons...

Mechanical Turk

The ever-watchful Ransom brought my attention to the Amazon Mechanical Turk program, in which (apparently) you can choose tasks submitted by software engineers and random businesses and complete them for money. The idea, as far as I can tell, is to substitute human intellectual piece-work in lieu of artificial intelligence.

The tip-off arises from a conversation Ransom and I had a while back about using spare brain cycles in the same way the SETI at home project uses spare CPU cycles to look for extraterrestrial intelligence.

This makes me think of two things. First, I'm reminded of my friend Kate's piece-work editing. I'm not sure if she still does it, but when I met her she had a backpack full of rough-drafts from various corporate entities and would rip through them correcting spelling and grammar. As memory serves, when she had work, she could pay her way. When the work would dry up, she ate a lot of ramen.

Second, it reminds me of Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash, in which people upload all manners of data (pictures, videos, print-outs they find in the trash) to a massive media network in hopes that someone will want to access it and they'll be paid a royalty.

The idea of using spare brain cycles to make a living is appealing because it seems like the kind of thing you could do when you'd otherwise be sitting around wasting time (something at which I'm a 5th Dan Black Belt.) On the other hand, it's also a bit ominous since there would be zero accountability on the part of the employer; globally, piece-work is one of the most pernicious ways to insure maximum efficiency from workers while paying out a bare minimum in compensation. I'll probably still look into the amazon thing; I'm sick to death of my one video game and without a grad lab to keep me honest, I get next to nothing done for school while I'm on break.

On an unrelated note, as far as I can tell, it's impossible to significantly modify the layout on this stupid system. I wasted a good 25 minutes trying to talk the XML template into letting me have some borders around the text of my blog, but the best I could do was force it to accept one on the left (which just looked all wrong without an equivalent on the right.) I guess I'll have to wait until they start allowing more customization options, not just trying to keep it from breaking every week.

Holiday task for everyone: go burn a sweet mix CD and play it while you're hanging out with your homies.

Moving Karma

Don't fuck around with moving karma. When you have the chance to help your homies load up boxes and heft furniture, get on it. I don't believe that there's a shred of justice or reciprocity in the universe, but I do believe that moving karma is real. So I built some up today helping Elizabeth and Nick move. It was highly succesful.

Also:

My Insanely Awesome Trucker Name is Coach Flaps.
Take The Trucker Name Generator today!

In other news, the weather is currently holding for our drive up on Saturday. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. When we were in New Zealand, one of the things we delighted in was the fact that they don't bother with extended forecasts. In fact, they only do a forecast for one day out (i.e. "tomorrow will be such-and-such. After that, who the hell knows.") I often feel that American weathermen should just admit that they don't know a sirrus cloud from a waterspout and give us tomorrow-only predictions as well.

Holy...Crap...I'm...Out...Of...Shape

Ok: My homie Elizabeth and her husband, Nick, hooked me up with a bike a while back. It was Nick's trusty ride for many years and has all the character that a slightly beat-up bright red 21-speed mountain bike could possibly have. I recently removed the toe clips (they scare me), lowered the seat (I've never liked sitting as high up as you're supposed to on bikes), removed the water bottle thing, and figured out how to inflate the presta-intake tires. You can see where this anecdote is going, n'est ce pas?

So: today I vowed to take it for its inaugural spin, having wimped out all last term (despite UCSC's award-winning bike shuttle, which whisks you up the hill to campus). Here's how it went down:

1. Number of times chain fell off derailer: 2.
2. Number of times I struggled to shift gears: 8 - 12.
3. Number of times I felt extremely self-conscious wearing a bike helmet (as Becky pointed out, we've spent enough time and money trying to increase the size of my brain. One must protect one's investment): 40+.
4. Number of minutes spent riding to spot where bike shuttle leaves and back home: 20-25.
   
5. How many minutes of hard panting it took to regain equilibrium upon returning home: 5-10.

There are muscles and varieties of cardiovascular exertion that I have not used for many, many months. In the long term, me-on-a-trusty-mountain-bike will prove to be an excellent way to stay in shape and to skip having to wait around for the bus to get home. In the short term, however, I'm going to have to seriously de-wimpify.

Xmas Break

I officially gave up on doing anything productive today. It's the weekend, and my working girl wife and I are eating very rich foods and drinking cheap vino. On the agenda:

• Watching Goonies.
• Watching best-drinking-movie-ever Van Helsing.
• Not reading a word of French, not reading a single bloody article about intellectual history, not waiting for the bus.

You know what I wish I could do? The following dance moves:

• Jumping straight up and landing the splits. Good for celebrations and gang fights.
• The Robot. Like a total stud.
• The lindy hop thing where you run up a wall and do a flip.

Here are some facts:

• When there are more than about 20 surfers in a given spot, they look like bugs from the shore.
• House rabbits are easy to litter box train.
  
• If you're reading this, your ass is of note. I say that as a friend.

In solidarity,
-KFR

Rock Your Nostalgia

I went up to campus earlier and soaked up the no-students ambience while picking up some books from the library. I called my homie Cori while waiting for the bus and we shot the shit for a while. A few months ago Cori joined the ranks of the beautiful people I know living in Portland and now she, too, gets to enjoy the reasonable cost of living, the many scenic bridges, the many fun bars. I've been warming up to SC, but I will never stop missing Portland.

Fortified by the conversation, I decided that the best thing to do was to sit around and listen to the Murder City Devils and drink coffee and think deep thoughts about getting older and missing all of my old friends. Naturally, I haven't reached any useful conclusions, but I'm still having fun (in a perverse, half-assed self-pitying way, obviously.)

Becky and I aren't sure what we're going to do in a few years. If she gets a career going here and we're happy, I'll finish the PHD and break dance on street corners for money (or, you know, teach at a community college.) If we're both at a loose end and I can't get a tenure-track position somewhere (likely not), we may well head back north. In the meantime I'll hang out with my new homies here and read more books, drink more coffee, and get even balder.

Good Luck, Soggy Homies

We move away and the rain comes to the NW something fierce. But I'm not complaining; we've had some bitchin' rains so far here in the scenic central coast, and we're well into the big wave season. Becky said she saw some surfers getting pummeled the other day while the otters were just slipping under the waves (and making fun of the surfers in otter-speak.)

Hmm. Sometimes blogger's blogs of note are actually of note. That one is pretty of note. Oo! Good new phrase. "Hey man, that's of note." "Your ass is totally of note, baby." "The second-to-last Queens of the Stone Age album was definitely of note."

Coffee, Capitalism, Pad Khee Maow

This will be a three-parter. Hope you're good and excited, because you're going to end up good and bored by the end...

1. I had a fierce craving for coffee last night while at dinner (see below for details on dinner.) After dinner, watching Mythbusters, then trying to fall asleep, I was stoked to wake up this morning and get to drink more coffee. And here I am, living the dream.

On an unrelated note, for the last few days I've been off the sauce. I realized that I've been tipsy every night since moving to Santa Cruz, which clocks in at, oh, just about three months. I felt fine and I felt functional, but in a perfect world, I would only drink on weekends. I'll probably treat myself to some more delicious cheap wine tomorrow, but I'll be trying to dry out a bit otherwise.


2. I'm linked to three brilliant anti-capitalists whom I know from UO:

1. My beloved friend and ally Ms. Rossi.
2. My esteemed Americanist francophile V.
3. My favorite decorative and erudite Spartacist.

I'm also participating in the capitalism/anti-capitalism reading group at UCSC. In the midst of this swirl of influences, I've been thinking quite a bit about the problems with talking about capitalism as such, the most serious of which seems to me to be the fact that the destructive things capitalism does (make some people rich and most people poor, advantage nations that are already wealthy over ones that aren't, gut safety nets in favor of false meritocracies) are not obvious in the lived experience of most Americans, and furthermore "capitalism" is such a tiny signifier in relation to that which it signifies that it becomes almost useless as a descriptive term. To really get a handle on how capitalism works seems to take the thorough and thoughtful reading of a great number of very, very dense books (starting with Marx and going through present-day critical theory like the stuff we're reading for the study group: David Harvey, Mike Davis, Hardt + Negri, etc.)

Meanwhile, most "capitalists, " among whom I'd include 99% of Americans who are just interested in living a decent life and owning some nice things, don't have to read a lick of theory or analysis. They just try to get a job and then try to get a raise. I don't even think it's particularly helpful to use concepts like "hegemony" or "reification" in trying to explain it because doing so implies a kind of "true" outside-of-capitalism consciousness that has been buried or subverted, but I don't think there's anything "false" about the way most Americans look at their own vocations, nor do I think the pursuit of comfort and advantage has been limited to modern capitalist societies.

That all said, I've never been more interested in and concerned about the (political and economic) state of the world. As a grad student, I will continue reading and talking about it. And as a watered-down political pragmatist, I'll vote for the Democratic candidate every single election.

3. We went out to Thai food last night. Ana + Colin ended up paying for it, because they threw money down on the check and refused to take it back. In the same sense that certain albums are just perfect all the way through (The Hives' Veni Vidi Vicious, Turbonegro's Apocalypse Dudes, Nick Cave + The Bad Seeds' Let Love In), certain meals just nail it every time. I will thus take this opportunity to salute Chicken Pad Khee Maow + Thai Iced Tea. You can't go wrong.

Twisty

Ah, getting your vehicle's oil changed: it always takes longer and costs more than one thinks it ought to. But at least one has the opportunity to catch up on back issues of Time magazine while earnest men inform one that one's air filter needs to be replaced.

Santa Cruz's streets are not like American streets. American cities usually live on a grid, which is one of the constituent elements of American naivete. Brought up to be friendly and honest, living in towns with easy-to-navigate streets, we travel only to find that the rest of the world is cautious and cold and that their streets were established by decree of the Bishop some 1100 years earlier and have not changed since then. Like those of European cities, Santa Cruz's streets loop randomly, radiating out from the old mission that stands at the center of town. Highway 1, which becomes Mission St. while in town, goes west when it says it's going north and goes east when it says it's going south. Streets change names mid-street and, since the planning board was always stoned, the streets constantly recycle names (W. Cliff Drive, E. Cliff Drive, Cliff St., Cliff Ave., Cliff Ct. [I'm not making this up]). In short, being able to navigate Santa Cruz proves that one has put down roots.

Santa Cruz: come for the otters, stay because you can't figure out how to get back on the highway.

An Evening Chez Brooks

During Pat + Lowry's visit to Santa Cruz, we did the following:

1. The walk down W. Cliff Drive. Giant waves: sighted. Big fuzzy otter: sighted.
   
2. The dinner at Saturn. Vegan diner food: munched.
   
3. The drinking-a-lot at our apartment. Fat Tire and 2-buck Chuck: gone.
   
4. The watching of American Astronaut. The bathroom dance scene: appreciated.
   
5. The picnic at Natural Bridges. The monarch butterflies: sighted.
   

Now it's pouring again and I have the best of intentions about getting some work done today. Bonne chance, me. Merci bien, me.

Santa Cruz :: Eugene

Two moderately-sized towns / small cities, two subjects, one blog post:

1. Downtowns. Eugene's downtown is a bad joke that never gets any funnier. For decades, the "once-thriving" (when? When it was a mud-streeted cow town? When men with beards declared that there's gold in them thar hills?) downtown of Eugene has been a commercial graveyard, full of an ugly gang of mall rats and lots of empty storefronts. Every year the city council tries to revive downtown with various zoning schemes, but it never works.

Santa Cruz's downtown is thriving. This is deeply confusing to me, used to decrepit downtowns as I am. Walking the ten blocks down Pacific from Laurel to Mission is overwhelming; hundreds of people milling around, street performers, theaters, restaurants, colorful shop windows, more-or-less-good-natured hobos. Christmas shopping for Becky this year will be easy. Semplice

2. Hippies. Eugene has an undeserved reputation as a hippy town. It used to be an authentic hippy town, probably as late as the early 90s. There are still hippy hot spots in town as well; we lived less than a block from Sundance Natural Foods, which was as hippy as Jerry Garcia eating pot brownies. Most of the town, however, is not hippy at all: the university and the surrounds are just frat houses and jocks and as soon as you get outside of the city center it's just rednecks as far as the eye can see (to the north: rednecks. To the west: rednecks. To the Springfield: rednecks.)

Santa Cruz is a lot of things, among them hippy. Real, authentic aging-60s-radicals hippy and real, authentic present-day-leftist-activists hippy. The surfer reputation and the university reputation precede the hippy reputation, but I feel like there's more of a true hippy core to this place than there is to Eugene.

On unrelated notes, I'd like to send a shout-out to R! for his tip about the best of Craigslist. That is some funny shit.

Also, it's been raining like nuts since yesterday. As we drove up to Kelly's last night to eat cookies and drink I thought we might get washed away. This morning it's been coming down steady. Our beloved homie Pat is visiting from Oregon and we sincerely hope he and his lady-friend Lowry make it over the 17 without being run over by a Californian confused by falling water.

Salvation: Protein!

In celebration of Becky's employment status, and armed with a gift certificate we received as a graduation present from a family friend back in June, we went out to the Crow's Nest last night and had (motherfuckin') BURGERS for dinner. And clam chowder and beer. It was raining over the harbor, there were xmas lights up all over the place, and a wee otter wriggled past in plain view of our harbor-view table at the bar. Then we came home and watched the original Batman with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson. Becky fell asleep halfway through, as she is wont to do.

It was this weird, giddy feeling of elation going out to eat. We haven't done that under our own power (i.e. we paid for it) in months and months. We've been so broke for so long that it's just confusing when we get to go out (you mean, you don't want me to do the dishes? I mean, I'm a former professional dishwasher. I can take care of it.)

Becky addendum: She saw a bobcat in Natural Bridges park yesterday. Happily, it didn't try to claw her face off. Also, she saw five dolphins the day before that. Monterey Bay is cool.

Inversions

So far, Becky's new job consists of sitting in a cube, reading pamphlets and the company website. The word around her office is that things will pick up significantly after the new year, but in the meantime she's way bored. Way bored and making more as a temp than I made as a salaried IT guy. Which got me to thinking:

One of the idiotic aspects of corporate capitalism is the inverse relationship between the pain associated with a given job and its corresponding salary or wage. Example: it's much harder and more painful to be a fry cook than to sit in a cube and answer e-mail, but your average fry cook is going to make half or a third as much as an executive assistant. The most egregious case I can think of is that of consultants; men (maybe there are female consultants, too, but I never saw one) with MBAs and a few executive jobs on their resumes who tool around the country charging 100 bucks an hour to "streamline" and "restructure" other people's businesses. Think of the Bobs in Office Space: they show up, they fuck around, they fire a bunch of people.

For a great insider perspective on what utter horseshit consulting in the IT industry is, see this post from Joel on Software.

Becky, being, uh, given to tension, has found the situation at the new job really confusing. "But I'm not doing anything! Aren't they going to get mad, or send me home early or something?" But that, I point out, is not how corporate America works. As a call center customer service rep, every second you're on the phone over the target time counts against you. As a grocery store shelf-stocker, you'd better be stocking shelves the whole time you're on the clock. But as you move up the food chain, less and less in terms of concrete work is expected of you. At my last corporate job we had a guy whose job was, officially, to sit around and think about the company and how it fit into the industry. And he made six figures.

The point is: here in the heart of the neo-liberal economic order (and neo-conservative political order), it's possible for educated kids from a middle-class upbringing to make a lot of money doing next to nothing. And when things are going badly at school, sometimes I think I should. All I've got to counter-balance that notion is a great love of essays and continental philosophy and a few remaining shreds of self-respect and optimism about the role of education.

Freak of the Industry

Browsing through the posts of various members of my cohort, I note that there are a few shared themes:

1. The term, she is over.
2. The free time, we do not know what to do with her.
3. The grad lab, we want it back (we've been moved to a new one, in a basement, but it's still under construction.)

Years ago, my homie "infrequent updates" Kenna warned me that I was not the type who could deal with free time. I was working in IT at the time and I thought she was nuts, but graduate school has realigned my perceptions and I am ready to admit that, yes, I loves me the structure. I conclude that we are all the freaks of the industry, giving up the possibility of real income in favor of hoarding library books and re-writing research proposals ad nauseum.

On an unrelated note, Becky has prompted me to report two things about her new job:

1. She has a hydraulic desk. It's for the ergonomicals. It goes up and down to ease typing.
2. She was there for 7.5 hours yesterday and still has no idea what her job actually is.
   

Jeff, this one's for you:

"Awright stop what you're doin', because I'm about to ruin, the image and the style that you're used to. I look funny, but yo I'm making money, see, so yo world I hope you're ready for me, so gather round. I'm the new fool in town and my sound's laid down by the Underground. I'll drink the bottle of Hennessy you got on your shelf, so just let me introduce myself..."

(Early 90s hip hop left its mark. I still know all the words to The Humpty Dance and I could probably keep up with most of the stuff from two or three Public Enemy albums. If I had to.)

My Abusive Relationship with Simone

Simone de Beauvoir knows how to bring the pain. I've taken a breather from my work on Deuxieme Sexe, but it was time to get back to it today. Everything about her intellect is overwhelming; she cites examples from psychoanalysis, Marxism, developmental biology, the literatures of several national traditions and, of course, philosophy. She writes in long, winding paragraphs and backs up every assertion with a dozen examples. It seems like she had spent about sixty years in the library of the Sorbonne before starting work on DS, but she was only in her late 30s (I think) when she wrote it.

I had lunch with my advisor yesterday and we were talking about various items of interest to European intellectual historians and he mentioned how all of the normaliens were like Beauvoir. It's the kind of education reserved for an entire prosperous nation's most elite students, something that has only happened haphazardly in the US. It's both a testament to the capacity of the human mind and a humiliating reminder of the fact that I chose to study the smartest people in history and, thus, to feel very, very dull by comparison.

My point is that Simone is very mean to me, but I know that she loves me deep down.

Thanks for all of the nice comments about Becky's newfound El Dorado of temping. She's there right now. She called at lunch and said that it was ok so far.

And with that, I'm off to listen to Turbonegro and clean the bathroom. Basically, I just pour pure bleach on everything and scrub until I'm about to be overwhelmed by the fumes.

Edit: 100th post on blogger. I hereby dedicate this post to the now-clean bathroom.

Landlord like a Sub-Woofer

Our landlord, Ron, has a voice like a slammed cadi with a thumpin' sound system. He's in the apartment below us fixing something and talking to someone and it's like a stereo with the treble all the way down and the bass all the way up, or perhaps like a movie about Santa Claus at high volumes through a thick wall. WUB WUB WUB WUB WUBWUB. That kind of thing.

Becky got a temp job. It pays well and it starts tomorrow.

Having spent the last few months worrying about Becky much more than she worried about herself, I find myself in a familiar position. It seems like most of the bad, hard things I've had to deal with in the last few years leave me so enervated that when they're over I barely have the energy to feel relieved. Still, here's me hoping that it turns out to be a good gig for her.

To our friends in Oregon: our trip up for xmas is going to be fast and short. We'll be in touch, as we'd like to see everyone who'll be around the week of xmas if we can. We're making a trip up to Portland for a night and a day if at all possible.

School (of fishes) Parliament (of owls)

Murder (of crows)...so many good group-names in biology. I bring this up because an elite cadre of history grad students are starting a semi-formal Foucault reading group next term and while outlining the readings and getting our ducks in a row earlier we realized that, with a little luck, we'll someday be referred to as the "Santa Cruz school" (of thought, of theory, of nap-taking, whatever.) Whether or not that happens, we now have a Foucault website to which we shall post when we get rolling next term.

On an unrelated note, my homie Elizabeth has a husband, and her husband does remarkable artwork. Go check it out; his comics are really neat.

Here are two unsolicited haiku:

Dearest Santa Cruz:
Please offer my wife a job
Or I'll beat your ass.

Happy holidays
I got you several hugs
Oh wait, I need those

No More Moustaches

When Becky would leave town for a few days to visit friends or family, I would traditionally shave a moustache into existence long enough to take a picture of it and put said picture on the internet (in this case, "traditional" means "I did this twice.") Becky's been up in Novato since Thursday but before she left this time she told me in no uncertain terms that I was not to fuck around with moustaches.

Becky has preternatural senses; I think it's part of being a wife. You know how moms can just find things when you're a kid? You leave your ninja turtle lunchbox up someone's butt and you can't find it and your mom is like "it's up that neighbor kid's butt! Go get it out of there!" Well, wife-powers consist of the ability to sense all and know all, even if there is no discernible way to find anything out. My point is that if I had crossed her and grown a moustache, she would have known. So I didn't.

On an unrelated note, Stephen Merritt's (of the Magnetic Fields, The 6ths, The Future Bible Heroes) bubblegum goth band The Gothic Archies have a newish album based on the Lemony Snicket series of children's books. It's fantastic. The best song on the album is "We Are The Gothic Archies," which features this priceless stanza:

"Though gothic we are archie
Though archie we are goth
No satan worshippers we
We worship Yog Sothoth."

(I also like "We are the Gothic Archies, with whom you should not mess, the apogee and zenith, of Gothic Archieness.")

And to everyone who was there last night, you know how I know you're gay? You macramed yourself a pair of jean shorts.

Fat Tire

I just returned home from a Graduate Student Association™ end-of-term fiesta on campus. My homie Kelly was the bartender. Let's just say the 2-drink limit was, uh, loosely enforced.

And now! Fun pictures!


(This is the best picture I have ever taken.)


(Pesto, IT analyst)


(An older picture of me trying to keep up with Becky's extreme cute.)

Appropriate Situationist Project

Let's keep the Situationists in mind (yes, that's a Wikipedia link. It's ok to do that on a blog, just not in an essay.) It occured to me this morning that I should put on one of my snappy sharkskin suits and go downtown, either here or in Berkeley, and panhandle for thesis topics in European intellectual history. Think I'd have any luck?

La reform, non, la chienlit, OUI!