Hey, it's also been a while since I flooded your Friends page with a bunch of YouTube videos that you probably won't watch. I will not only be embedding videos, but linking to yet more! Here we go!

I posted this vid over on my Facebook too. Halloween is a great time to invoke Lightning Bolt--



--no! Not that kind of Lightning Bolt! This kind:



I love that pan at the end where you suddenly see somebody literally swinging from the rafters. Looks like quite the show.

###

From the life imitating art files, here are a couple videos of bands playing their effing hearts out despite what I think few would argue are less than rockin' surroundings.

First, we have seminal 80s doom pioneers Saint Vitus kicking ass at...the Palm Desert Community Center.



I love how the lead singer has this standoff about shilling for Cokes before grudgingly acquiescing.

It's all strangely reminiscent of when Spinal Tap winds up playing at an Air Force base.

Second, legendary Swedish hardcore punk band Refused playing...an Irish pub??? WTF!?



Playing their hearts out, tight as all hell, trying SO hard. And you've got these typical Saturday night bar-goers just...sitting there. Christ. I immediately thought of Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

Much like Hedwig, Refused wasn't long for the world thanks to bookings like that one. Just too damn depressing, I guess.

It's reassuring to know that in this day and age, what with all our modern ideas--and products--that good old American nativist paranoia is still alive and well:

One thing [G20 protesters] won't likely encounter are citizens. Fear of protesters is the talk of grocery and bank lines. At one point, local media was filled with reports of surreptitious foreigners training in a vacant building (they turned out to be a Swedish punk band on tour).

Sauce.

I've outed myself in the past as a pigeon watcher. No, I am not 82 years old. But what can I say, I like watching pigeons while I'm waiting for a bus or walking from Point A to Point B.

I like to watch their lives play out amid the hustle and bustle of the city. Nobody pays them any attention, yet even just a couple minutes' casual observation reveals personalities and drama and (in the springtime) romance. I wonder about pigeons living in different neighborhoods--do the filthy gutter pigeons that hang out at Hayes and Divis realize they could just fly a few blocks west and hang out at Golden Gate Park? What keeps them living amongst the grease and squalor outside Popeye's?

I'm also attracted to the fact that pigeons get no respect. Like a typical American, I'm prone to rooting for the underdog, I guess. It was while reflecting on the ubiquity of pigeons, and the ubiquitous lack of respect they get, that I started wondering where they came from. I mean, pigeons had to have an "origin story" of some kind, right?

Turns out, it's a rather interesting one.

Pigeons, it would seem, originally hail from Egypt. Their ancestors were cliff-dwelling doves. How differently would we regard pigeons if they were called Egyptian cliff doves instead? Sounds much more exotic.

So how did pigeons find their way into cities around the world? It's a bit of a convoluted story. The original wild cliff doves were domesticated by the Egyptians to use as food and pets. Domesticated pigeons spread throughout the Mediterranean world. Over the course of centuries, as the fortunes of Mediterranean civilizations rose and fell, certain pigeon populations reverted to a feral state. Being located in population centers, far from their native Nile Valley cliffsides, they made do with the sides of buildings and other such mandmade "cliffs". It's sort of the equivalent of a future society being infested with wild chickens or parakeets.

I still have yet to find details on when the first pigeons came over the Atlantic to the Americas, but I love the mental image of pigeons stowing away on a ship, perhaps quite by accident (I imagine a pigeon innocently building a nest in a nook aboard a ship sitting at a European dock, then the next thing it knows it's off to the New World!). At any rate, needless to say, pigeons have proven remarkably adaptable to the urban environment precisely because our buildings mirror their native cliffs so well.

So there you have it. Next time you see pigeons going about their daily business, take a moment to reflect on their rather bizarre journey from the cliffs of Egypt to a gutter outside Popeye's.

So this teenager apparently got up to some pipe bomb-related mischief at a Bay Area high school yesterday, so the local news this morning is all over the story. Other than the fact that the lad seems to have shown up at his former high school armed with a chainsaw and sword (this kid's been playing too many video games!), the only thing that really lept out at me from the news reports was what this one woman said when she was interviewed by the news crew out at the apartment complex where the teenager lived (with or without his parents, I'm not sure).

At any rate, she basically said that, on finding out that the kid had been making highly unstable explosives in his room for the past year, she felt a great sense of relief that nothing had gone wrong. Her reasoning? "Because everyone around here has kids, and if there had been an explosion it could have been really bad for all the children."

So...if it was a complex full of childless adults, that would have been OK? Or if there had been an explosion, only the children would have been hurt, but the adults would have been fine?

Bah, I say!

Thursday really threw me off. I've been trying to tap back into the groove I was in before all that rigamarole. How could I forget about this gem?



Sufficiently cranked up, The Barbarians make everything A-OK.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Reform Madness - White Minority
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Spinal Tap Performance

Actually, Black Flag called it 30 years ago:

Gonna be a white minority
Dont believe theres a possibility?
Well, just wait and see
We're gonna be white minority

--why is everyone acting all surprised? ;)

So 5-6 years ago, we had liberal protesters disrupting town hall meetings...over war.

"Boo! War is unbelievably costly in money, misery, and human lives! Boo!"

This year, we have conservative protesters disrupting town hall meetings...over providing health care to all Americans.

"Boo! Giving everyone access to basic medical care is...somehow...wrong...and stuff. BOO!"

::sigh::

Reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words (more or less) that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you.

These are the words delicata77 gave me...a couple weeks ago...heh...

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David Bowie on Saturday Night Live with back-up singers Klaus Nomi and Joey Arias. Back when, you know, crazy shit like this was allowed to air on broadcast television.



"OK," you're saying, "a little weird maybe, but so what?" Ah, let's check out the second performance from that evening, shall we?



I know the Internet has largely supplanted TV as a format for weirdness and creativity, but it's so much more fragmented an experience I think something's really been lost.

Spotted on a church marquee while driving through Millbrae today:

"Give God a Tweet--Pray!"

From Wikipedia:

Dave Allen Mather (August 10, 1851, date of death unknown, most probably May 1886, but nothing confirmed), known as Mysterious Dave, or sometimes as New York Dave, was an American lawman and gunfighter in the American Old West.

I wouldn't have been able to choose between "Mysterious Dave" and "New York Dave" either.

Having been recently reminded of the song, I've once again stumbled over a lyric in Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day" that's always troubled me. To whit:

No barking from the dog, no smog
And momma cooked a breakfast with no hog

No barking, check. No smog, amazing! But cooking the breakfast with no hog? C'mon Cube, you can't be serious! That would straight up ruin my day, starting it out without some wholesome bacon or perhaps sizzling ham shanks. I don't know about you.

Is there something I'm not aware of at work here? Is Ice Cube a member of the Nation of Islam? Is he trying to watch his cholesterol? Some bit of arcane slang from "teh ghettoe" that I don't know about? Fifteen years later, I still can't figure that line out.

001: Anyone who looks at this entry has to post this meme and their current wallpaper at their LiveJournal.
002: Explain in five sentences why you're using that wallpaper.
003: Don't change your wallpaper before doing this. The point is to see what you had on.

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I found this on film_stills. It's from a collection of 70s grindhouse movie trailers. Do I have to explain why this is totally awesome? As my AP English teacher would say, "Juxtaposition!" Plus the look on the dude's face.

Most hardcore high school ever:

"I furthermore promise and declare that I will, when opportunity present, make and wage relentless war, secretly or openly, against all heretics, Protestants and Liberals, as I am directed to do, to extirpate and exterminate them from the face of the whole earth; and that I will spare neither age, sex or condition; and that I will hang, waste, boil, flay, strangle and bury alive these infamous heretics, rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women and crush their infants' heads against the walls, in order to annihilate forever their execrable race. That when the same cannot be done openly, I will secretly use the poisoned cup, the strangulating cord, the steel of the poniard or the leaden bullet, regardless of the honor, rank, dignity, or authority of the person or persons, whatever may be their condition in life, either public or private, as I at any time may be directed so to do by any agent of the Pope or Superior of the Brotherhood of the Holy Faith, of the Society of Jesus."



How anyone could intone this passage and end with the word "Jesus" and not die from hypocrisy, I have no idea.

Also, read Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation.

I just got up, and I'm sitting at my computer blearily reading Wikipedia and eating cereal. The TV's on in the background, but the volume is low and the voices of the morning news casters has blended into a general murmur.

So I find myself reading about the 23 Enigma, the belief that the number 23 can be connected to almost every event, when suddenly I hear very clearly the traffic reporter's voice intone: "There are no accidents." The weird part is that he put the emphasis on the word "are". Anyone have an anti-paranoia serum they can inject me with?