Annual Reminder: I Hate the Fourth of July

A cold fog settled over SC all day yesterday, reducing the number of people who came over from San Jose with their cars packed with explosives. Word in the local rag is that the cops had a relatively sane time of things for once.

Regardless, the usual mouth-breathing asshats went to work at 2:30am. For about 45 minutes every minute or so was punctuated with another huge explosion (the so-called "mortar" style fireworks), waking up Plan C with every blast. I can see them in my mind's eye, looking like former members of Limp Bizkit, chortling to themselves as they hit the street in the middle of the night, acting like screaming two year-olds looking for attention.

I hate that people who would fail the food handler's permit test get to buy explosives with impunity. I hate the Fourth of July.

Things Verily Shall I Miss About Santa Cruz

I've seldom failed to complain about SC over the last few years, but now that the end is nigh I find myself making a few spaces of anticipated nostalgia for this dirty little dump. Here are things I like about it and will presumably miss once we're back in PDX:

1. The otters. It's amazing to be able to walk ten minutes and see real otters doing their otterish things.
2. The surfers. They're remarkably good at not hitting each other, somehow, and they're fun to watch.
3. The weather in summertime. Because of the marine layer (that would be the morning fog), it rarely gets much above 75 all summer. Ironically, it's often ridiculously hot and uncomfortable in PDX, in contrast.
4. UCSC campus. The ewok village of academic radicalism.
5. The smart and nice locals. They're outnumbered by the menacing dumbasses, but I still appreciate their efforts.
6. The bus. It's been a while for me (with Plan C here, we drive more), but the SC Metro is really quite a solid bus system.
7. My homies. Needless to say, I'm going to miss the history kids. Ever since that one guy finished his MA and moved on two years ago, literally none of the history grads are jerks, and I'll miss hanging out with them.
   

11 Minutes Will Definitively Make You Smarter

I'm dead serious. Watch this presentation / animation by the Marxist economist and geographer David Harvey - which is very entertaining and very interesting, and you will be a lot smarter and better off for it. Seriously. You can spare 11 minutes.

There's No Accounting for Taste

I think I've arrived at a perfect dichotomous example of what it's like to live inside my brain. Please witness the two songs that I'm really into right now, based on recent discoveries of new music:




I think these tunes equal in every way.

P.S. The new Devo album? It's really good! The lyrics are pretty cheeseball, but the music is great. I think I'll devote a separate post to it sometime soon.

Media Frenzy

A few notes on sights and sounds today.

First, read this interview with Gerry Casale from Devo. For me, it's a great reminder of why Devo is and ever has been my favorite band. I haven't listened to the new album yet, but notes on that when I do.

Also, as you may know, I watch too much television. That will have to stop as Plan C gets older (fact: TV makes kids dumb), but just as B and I can still swear all the time right now, so we can watch stupid shows. Here are some ideas for new shows for the networks I watch, based on their existing repertoires:

DISCOVERY CHANNEL: "Rednecks at Work and Play!"
DISCOVERY CHANNEL: "Survival People Eating Gross Things in Nature!"

TRAVEL CHANNEL: "Eating Bugs With This Fat Guy!"
TRAVEL CHANNEL: "You Will Have a Fucking Heart Attack Eating this Awful Food!"
TRAVEL CHANNEL: "Things You Can Never Afford - So Fuck You!"

FOOD NETWORK: "A Show with a Creepy Republican Cooking Badly!"
FOOD NETWORK: "Bobby Flay: Serial Murderer!"
FOOD NETWORK: "Tyler Florence Wants to Beat You and Hear You Scream "Daddy!""
FOOD NETWORK: "Smarmy Horseshit with Butter!"

KQED (The PBS channel from San Francisco): "Only Antiques Roadshow Doesn't Suck!"

Ninja Assassin: Best Movie...EVER?!

Silent, deadly, and homoerotic. Just the way I like 'em.

Once in a great while a film comes along that earns both critical acclaim and massive box office receipts. As far as I know, Ninja Assassin did neither. BUT IT TOTALLY SHOULD HAVE, you guys! In the interest of my lifelong love of ninjas, I'm going to note the things that my nine year-old self LOVES about this movie, as well as his critical remarks. Please see below.

Nine year-old KFR loves the following about Ninja Assassin:

1. The ninjas are silent but deadly!
2. They have a mountain fortress of training and discipline!
3. They wield the kusari-gama, the wakazashi, and the shuriken with consummate skill!
4. Through sheer force of will, they can melt into the shadows, teleport, and heal themselves!
5. Training sequences!
6. Classic ninja attire; none of this colors-other-than-black bull-honkey.
7. Mere special forces guys find themselves hard-pressed to do anything but die!

Nine year-old KFR isn't crazy about the following about Ninja Assassin:

1. The main character rarely wears his ninja gear, instead favoring no shirt, scars, and floppy hair.
2. The ninjas are the bad guys, so most of the time the main character is busy betraying / killing his fellow ninjas.
3. (Spoiler alert!) In the end, the special forces guys, along with the main character, pretty much gun down all the ninjas.
   

Despite those shortcomings, though, we at kungfuramone.blogspot.com heartily recommend Ninja Assassin, especially if you've been drinkin' all day.

Informational

I am back to teaching, repeating the same two classes I taught last summer. I have a batch of very sharp, likable kids in my first class. I've always found that lecturing is an out-of-body experience, and this time, compounded with the parental sleep deprivation, it's even more so; it really feels like I'm standing there listening to myself talk about the enlightenment and the romantic movement and Hegel and so on.

Speaking of Hegel, I completely lost track of what I was talking about in trying to explain the master / slave dialectic in class last night. I feel bad about that.

Plan C (new nickname: The Architect of Chaos) is two months old as of yesterday. She keeps getting bigger and, possibly, cuter. She also still sucks at falling asleep during the day. Most nights go okay, but last night she had B up from 2:00am - 5:00am, when my shift started and (of course), she finally fell asleep for an hour or so after I fed her. B's back at work, so I've got baby-minding four days a week; right now C is lightly snoozing on the bed next to her sleep sheep.*

I am still dithering around with applying to the lecturer pools of Portland-area community colleges, mostly because my transcript won't reflect the doctorate for another four weeks; I'm basically promising on my applications that I really really DID finish a PhD, I SWEAR.

Post-op recovery is fine, although I still don't get to exercise for another week. This is the longest I've gone without doing a push-up since I was 14.

That's it. That's all I got. I'm tapped out.

* It's a sheep that plays soothing noises. The waves noise actually works; we always joke about doing the whale songs one.

Meet the Neighbors!

Here are some of our neighbors:

1. Hooker. Hooker lives across the hall. We think she is a drug dealer. She leaves her door open a lot and screams at her two kids, both of whom behave as if they were about seven while actually being closer to ten. She has a gigantic plasma TV bolted to her wall, which we have both seen because of before-mentioned door-leaving-opening. Hooker is trashy. Our long-suffering apartment manager regrets letting her live here.
2. The Gypsy Vampire. The Gypsy Vampire lives in the apartment below us. For the first year or so she lived here, there was an incessant thumping sound coming from her apartment that drove me absolutely crazy. It would happen literally all night, almost every night. I confronted her about it on a couple of occasions but she pled ignorance. It eventually stopped, so now the only thing we deal with from her is the weird, moldly stench wafting up from below.
3. Ugly Harry Potter. Ugly Harry Potter is the Gypsy Vampire's son. He's about 13 or 14 now. The two of them share the small one-bedroom place, which must be even more difficult and awkard now that he's gone through puberty. He grew a foot in the last two years or so. B saw him at the library downtown designing a mystic sword on one of the computers.
4. Crazy Lady. Crazy Lady lives in the adjacent apartment building. She smokes a lot of weed and talks to her dog a lot. She used to be a lot noisier and more stoned, but seems to have settled down a bit. We actually really like Crazy Lady; she was especially excited to see us walking around once Plan C was born because her daughter was one month behind us, pregnant with a little boy.
5. Fucky. Fucky is the latest addition to the gang. She also lives in the adjacent apartment building. She is a very, very loud lovemaking machine. Starting at 7:00am and going until as late as the 10:00pm hour, Fucky and whoever her boyfriend is might be heard going at it, with Fucky providing verbal evidence at about 95 decibels. What was briefly awkward to overhear is now just plain hilarious. I'm convinced Fucky is an auditory exhibitionist; she must know how easy it is to hear everything when you live in this kind of tight proximity. Occasionally, other neighbors can be overheard making fun of Fucky, which is also funny.
6. D. D is one of our favorite neighbors. He is an African-American gentleman of imposing stature. A veteran of the Army Rangers, D lives downstairs and operates as something of the building's protector. We often bump into him in the parking lot, where he washes his vintage Benz at least once a week.
7. A. A lives across the hall from D. She's just a nice middle-aged lady who's lived here for a long time. She's good friends with Crazy Lady; they can be heard laughing and getting baked on a pretty regular basis. As far as we can determine, A, D, and us may be the tenants who have lived in this building the longest.