Warning: these rants are entirely based off rampant speculation and knee-jerk reactionism. You have been warned.

OK, first off: one of the hot books with a lot of holds on it here at the library is The Great Depression Ahead: How to Prosper in the Crash Following the Greatest Boom in History. OK, I can dig why that book might be a high-demand item in this day and age. The author is Harry S. Dent, Jr., who the very cover of said book then points out is the "New York Times bestselling author of The Roaring 2000s and The Next Great Bubble Boom". So basically what we have here is one of the clueless boobs who, Jim Cramer-style, ra-ra-ra'd us right into the shithole we currently find ourselves sitting in, and now he's going to come down dispensing further "wisdom" from on high, still pedaling the same old self-centered greed-centric rhetoric that got us into this mess in the first place. How much you want to bet his methods are neither helpful nor constructive towards the greater good? In these uncertain times, I'm pretty sure that's a sure bet!

Secondly: I noticed on the news this morning a screen-shot of the top downloads on Walmart.com's MP3 listing (about as close to a vox populi of the current mainstream musical trends as I can figure). The top two spots were held by Lady Gaga and Flo-rida. OK, since when--WHEN--did it become acceptable for popular musical acts to have baby names? Next month's top musical act: Kaka-Doodoo-Bahbah. I mean, seriously.

::old geezer mode::
When I were a lad, and well before that even, musical acts had cool names. Evocative names. Names that made you go, "Wicked!" or "Boss!" or what have you. Guns N' Roses. Public Enemy. Nirvana. Black Sabbath. Even the silly ones, like Mötley Crüe or Run-D.M.C., still had a certain gravitas to them. Now, I say "Lady Gaga" or "Flo-rida" out loud and I can actually feel my brain cells dying. I don't even care what their music sounds like--I can't even get past the ridiculous names. Ah well, I am now officially old. Great.

This year was the year I officially decided to stop watching The Simpsons. I haven't watched more than maybe two or three new episodes per season for, oh, the last 5-7 years, but this year I formally quit. This is a moment of quiet sadness for me. I don't know what The Simpsons means to those of you who were too young to appreciate the earlier seasons, for whom the show has always existed, but I was right on the cusp of that generation that came of age with the show, where every Thursday night between September and May promised a new revelation, a new barrage of hitherto-undreamed-of hilarity. You could tell who the cool kids were at school by who was talking about last night's episode the next day.

I'm glad I quit while I was ahead. Apparently the show has a new opening now, made to coincide with the switch to high-definition TV:



That's two minutes and one second of pure affrontery. But in some ways, it's also a perfect encapsulation of what the show has become: far more concerned with prettifying the animation while simultaneously hurling a huge volume of lame jokes at us in the vain hope that a few will stick. Not to mention the continued grilling of sacred cows, or in this case crows. For the entire course of the show's run, we've never seen the "nuclear power plant crow" that caws every time a scene opens on the plant. Now you'll see it every week. I won't. For me, I'll just pretend The Simpsons went off the air ten years ago, when it should have, and continue to enjoy my DVD collections of the first ten seasons. I won't be buying any more.

If nothing else, I suppose the show can now serve as some sort of massive counter-example for the ages, a demonstration of the wisdom of the choice to quit while one is ahead (viz. the British Office...and hopefully the American one too). Of course, no one can say we didn't see this coming. Right, Troy McClure?

"Who knows what adventures they'll have between now and the time the show becomes unprofitable?" --"The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular" (Original airdate December 3rd, 1995.)

(Title of post to be sung to tune of Kiss' "Black Diamond.")

Another Black Friday come and gone. Thank god I'm not in retail anymore. ::shudder::

I'm not usually one to rant about this sort of thing, but this year we finally had some deaths. It's come close to this several times over in recent years, what with people being trampled and sent off to the hospital. Yet I'm pretty sure this won't make any difference, or serve as a wake-up call. So I feel I should add my voice to the dialogue, for the small difference it'll make.

Certain folks have expressed a certain skepticism of the efficacy of "Buy Nothing Day," the protest against the out of control consumerism of Black Friday. To whit, from a comment:

BND is pointless anyway; you're just going to spend that money the next day. What does it matter to retailers, especially when it's the biggest shopping day of the year? I guarantee no one notices.

Let's set aside the lameness of that argument for a second. Here's the thing, folks: we, as consumers, create demand. If we demanded that retailers offer low-priced incentives over the course of the shopping season, rather than just on one day, we wouldn't have scenes like this:



If I can do my part by not contributing to the demand for such insanity, I'm going to do it. There's nothing wrong with consumerism, per se. It is the inhuman consumerism encouraged by traditions like Black Friday (I'll take a Boxing Day any day, but Americans choose to have their two-day winter holiday at the beginning of the season rather than the end--don't get me started on that...) that is neither "normal" nor acceptable.

Over on Facebook I set my status to "David is inspired." There's a lot to be inspired about these days, it seems.

( I guess this is my 'What I'm Thankful for' post. )

You know, I loved Michael Cera in Arrested Development. And Napoleon Dynamite was a revelation to me when it came out. But those are two great flavors that do not go great together, and if Cera doesn't stop making these precious, aggressively "indie" movies I don't know what I'll do.

My feelings about these sorts of movies (Juno, Nick & Nora's Infinite Playlist (gag!), and even the inexplicably lauded Little Miss Sunshine) is best summed up with this brilliant little poster:

So you may recall my post about crazy Half.com buyers. Well, a new chapter was opened today.

( Read more... )

ETA: OK, things could be worse--just got an email from a friend with pictures of his Mustang that got busted up last night by some punk with a baseball bat. Nice. I think today is one of those "stay inside and keep your head down" sort of days.

I have just about had it up to here with dealing with idjits over on Half.com. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Half.com is a subsidiary of eBay that allows you to sell your CDs, DVDs, books, or electronic gadgets for a set price. It's a nice little set-up, pretty close to an automated store. You list an item, Half.com shows you what other sellers are asking, the average selling price, the highest and lowest selling prices, and you price accordingly. When someone buys your item, Half.com charges them the price of the item plus a standard amount for shipping (which is, by default, Media Mail for the most part). At the seller's end, you get three business days to ship your item.

I have now had to deal with two mouth breathers who seem incapable of appreciating that (a) Half.com is not Amazon, and that the people they buy from might have lives that would prevent them from instantly shipping their item out, (b) that the items are coming via Media Mail, and so might take a week or two to get to them, and (c) they are damn lucky to get their stuff at all.

I say this last bit because I myself have gotten screwed over on a couple occasions by sellers. One failed to send me the DVD I ordered and never responded to my emails; I just received my refund yesterday, over a month after placing the initial order. Then there was the guy who sent me the two-disc "Dial-a-Phone" They Might Be Giants comp, but, well, forgot to put the CDs in the case. When I notified him of his error he got right back to me, promising to send the discs out "tomorrow." That was almost two weeks ago.

So when I, you know, actually abide by the Half.com shipping standards and get the packages sent out within that three business day window, and STILL get guff for it? I really have to shake my head in disbelief.

( Details of the offenders follow. Plus more ranting. )

Time was, if there was a movement or belief that ran counter to "the establishment," it was simply repressed, usually with extreme brutality. The problem is that, over time, brutality has become increasingly passe. Nowadays it's positively condemned. It still goes on of course; it's just more, well, covert these days.

So now that you're no longer allowed to slowly unspool a dissident's intestines in front of cheering crowds, how do you go about undermining that which you find most threatening and abhorrent? By borrowing a page from the counterculture' own playbook, of course!

The counterculture and civil rights movements of the 1960s were the culmination of a long process that focused on subversion as a means to social change. This strategy paid off--a little too well, as it turned out. Starting with Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign, the subverted became the subverters, and it's only been gaining steam since then.

First we had Bush running on a ticket of "compassion" in 2000; now McCain has undermined Obama's message by flat-out stealing his "change" agenda. And the most visible manifestation of this has been, of course, Sarah Palin.

I think the reason Palin has got so many lefties up in arms is because her subversion moves beyond simple politics. She is subverting feminism, arguably the most important social movement of the last quarter-century.

Rebecca Traister over at Salon.com has summed things up in one of the most keenly-observed articles I've read in a long time. I'm hard-pressed to extract good quotes; I really would just end up quoting the whole article. So if you're wondering why you're feeling sort of uneasy about Palin, or if you're wondering why others are and whether you should be as well, go give it a read. You won't regret it.

While I'm on the topic of subversion and feminism, I see Keira Knightly is in another god-damn historical movie! What in holy hell is up with her being the go-to girl for historical pieces? Because, frankly, the way she's built, whether it's due to anorexia or not, would have rendered her about as attractive to the pre-20th century male as, say, a 400-lb. woman would be to today's average Joe. Skinny was most definitely not "in." Ads selling weight gain formulas for women continued to appear well into the 20th century, in fact.

(What's especially hilarious about her latest role is that it's set in the late 18th-century, i.e. the era of cleavage spilling out of corsets. Folks, I have more cleavage than this woman. Check it out: http://www.aolcdn.com/pmms/productpagemovies/0f/06/2612003.)

And that's the main concern I have with Knightly being the historical model for women. I'm sure she's being cast because, let's face it, we always project our current beauty standards onto historical dramas. But this is more than having perfectly blow-dried hair in a 70s-era Western, or 50s-style makeup and hair in Spartacus. This is telling the audience that skeletally thin women have always been found attractive and desirable. Subversion strikes again!

There's a music festival going on at Golden Gate Park this weekend. We live about two blocks from the Park, so we're going in to the weekend prepared to deal with the ensuing craziness. I thought I'd be able to sneak home after I got off work at 6:00 yesterday, before the madness really got in full swing. I was wrong.

See, I mistakenly thought the music festival was the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass fest, so I didn't think it would be a big deal. Turns out that festival is in October. This festival is the Outside Lands Music Festival, which is considerably a bigger deal. As in, the headliners for Friday night were Radiohead and Beck. Shit.

So needless to say, the two bus lines that I could take from downtown back to my house were PACKED. And that was even with the bus lines running every 2-4 minutes. I knew I had no chance at my regular stop, where only one line comes by, so I walked seven LONG blocks down to the Powell Street stop. There were about 80 people there. I am not even joking. It was like seeing the queue for the last chopper out of Saigon.

Fortune was on my side, as two #21 buses pulled up at the same time and the majority of the people at the station--being out of towners--were waiting for the #5, which is the more direct bus line, so I was able to shove my way onto the second bus and even got a seat! Hurray!

That's about where my luck ran out.

You see, the thing about Radiohead is that in the last few years they've started to attract of cadre of White People as fans. I hate White People. Now, don't confuse that with white people. White People are the Euro-Americans who can identify with the majority of stuff on this blog. And I was surrounded by them.

No problem, just bust out the iPod and crank it up, right? That was the plan--until my iPod immediately took a dump on me and claimed it was out of battery power, even though there had been a little bit of a bar on the battery indicator seconds before. WTF.

So I was trapped on this bus ride, which was about 10-15 minutes longer than usual (for a total of about 35 minutes), listening to inane White Person chatter. Like, as they popped open their Red Bulls, they compared energy drinks. Or how they reminisced in exacting detail about scenes from Growing Pains ("Yeah, Robin Thicke's dad was in that show!") and Family Ties. How "I have little faith in the franchise now that John Favreau is no longer writing the script." I think the best was when the Barbie doll in the seat in front of me proudly announced to her friend that she was getting a tattoo, "but a small one behind my ear, so no one can see it and only I know it's there."

When I at last stumbled off the bus, I had a raging headache. It was just so bad.

In some ways, though, it was illuminating. It coalesced my distaste for White People, which I'd never really been aware of before, not beyond a vague sense of discomfort whenever I was around them. I realized it's the reason I don't like certain people, the type of people who go out drinking on Friday night and then spend the rest of the week talking about how drunk they got; it's the people I found myself amongst at the Wolfmother and Faint shows (in addition to the freaks and weirdos I feel much more kindred with, of course). So I guess in the long run, it was a good thing, this bus ride. Still, it took me all night to recover. We watched Meet the Feebles and it barely fazed me.

Post-script: Like the aforementioned shows, it's not so much the bands playing at that festival as it is the people attending that bothered me. When I got home and checked out who was playing at the festival, there were actually a few acts I found myself thinking, "Shoot, I would've liked to have seen them!" The Black Keys, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, Black Mountain, Rodrigo y Gabriela, etc. Ah well.

Post-script the second: After getting home, I stumbled across this cartoon which kind of sums up how I feel about my place in the world:



Post-script the third: For no reason at all, a hedgehog:

We saw The Dark Knight today. And it was as good as I'd hoped.

But our journey, our odyssey, to see this film left us feeling still more alienated from the smug assholes that populate this otherwise wonderful city. We've often joked about running off to live in the hills (or Arcata), since there doesn't seem to be anywhere among humanity that we feel comfortable with.

After coming home from the movie, I ran across this infamous recording of Orson Welles flipping out over having to read stupid ad copy for frozen peas. I turned to Des and said, "This is us in 20 years."

( God help us! )

And now a bonus clip to lighten the mood:

( The Critic was a great show. )

On my local PBS station there's a show called Check Please Bay Area, in which three everyday folk are asked to come on and recommend a favorite restaurant. The other two guests then dine out at that person's restaurant, and vice versa and so on, then everyone presents their opinions on the recommendations, so you get three restaurant reviews.

At any rate, most of the time the guests are civil and well-behaved, even if they didn't like a particular dining experience. But occasionally you get someone who gets a little too smug for their own good. (Smug? In San Francisco? Surely you jest!) These smug displays are usually entertaining, but there's this one episode...

I'm using this guest's name, Jewel Wilk, so that this post will turn up if anyone Googles her name, because--really--this woman's statements were just so over-the-top ridiculous I can't let it slide.

Essentially what happened was that one of the other guests recommended an Asian restaurant. He gave his spiel about it, then the other guest raved about it, then the cameras turned to Ms. Welk.

Ms. Welk, who is Asian-American, announced with the most supremely smug look on her face that she was "savoring" the sight of watching "two non-Asians talking about Asian food in front of an Asian!" Like, by virtue of her ethnicity, only she could talk knowledgeably about food from "her" continent.

On top of that, I'm pretty sure Ms. Wilk was Japanese-American (she was credited as being a part-time taiko drummer) and this wasn't even a Japanese restaurant, it was Thai. That's like me saying I'm an expert on Hungarian food because I'm Scotch-Irish-German.

It gets better, since Ms. Wilk's restaurant recommendation was for a French restaurant. I really wish one of the other guests had thrown her bizarre culinary racism back in her face by saying something like, "Wow, it's so funny to see an Asian talking about European cuisine!"

/end public service announcement

ETA: Des found the actual episode up online (if you have RealPlayer...who the hell uses that anymore?) here.

It's forecast to be 90 degrees in our area today. Our apartment got up to 94 degrees last night before our thermometer broke.

Heat waves are bad enough in San Francisco since only about 10% of the buildings here have AC. Our lovely apartment makes things worse because (a) we have horrendous insulation that makes things hotter in the summer and colder in the winter, (b) we have NO cross-ventilation, so even our amazing Vornado fan can't get air moving through the apartment, and (c) the sun directly hits our windows for about 3 hours in the afternoon, turning the whole place into an oven. :/

Des is insisting on taking me to work with her today, so I can do my writing in the cool library. We're then going to eat out to avoid having to cook and we'll be going to a midnight movie tonight.

The apartment is going to be a kiln when we get home. :(

Meh.

My PC, which is about 3 years old, isn't booting up. Not good. I have most of my "irreplaceables" on a removable hard drive (THANK GOD), but this may be it for my trusty old compy. Good news: I have a laptop I can use. But if it's new computer time, I think it may be time to start saving up for a Mac. Even if I get my PC back up and running, I still might start socking the ducats away.

So--Mac aficionados, what's out there? The last time I used a Mac was about 10-12 years ago, so I'm kind of out of the loop.

EDIT: Well, I got the beast up and running again, but I've definitely got my eye on the iMac. Thanks so much for everyone's helpful suggestions!

So last autumn I ordered a bargain ukulele to see if I would have any luck with picking it up. I've always wanted to learn an instrument and, apart from screwing around on drums, this would be the first time I'd be really giving it a go.

Long story short, I love it.

( Oh if only the story ended there! )

This has been bothering me.

Watching some reality TV this week, I was saddened by the sudden appearance of high-waisted jeans.

No. Just...no. Now, I love the fashions of the 70s, for the most part, but some things are best left in the past. Nobody looks good in these. Maybe 1% of women. And if you're that 1%, it's not worth encouraging the other 99% of femaledom to don them as well.

Folks, we're just getting over the holocaust of low-rise jeans. I would ask all my female friends to please, PLEASE not buy into this latest fashion scam. I don't know if I can handle looking at hordes of women in these nightmares for the next two to five years.

( Do people think this actually looks good??? )