| For those of you who may have wondered what I've been up to for the past 14 months, the story can be told today:
Welcome...to Forbidden Island
www.forbiddenislandalameda.com
Yes, I am opening my own tiki bar. See everyone in April!
Surprise! | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment   |
| Here's my question. If you like it, repost it to your own live journals that have a larger readership.
I'm starting a list, and I want to see yours as well:
Whose grave would you like to piss on?
You may make two lists, current graves and graves you are anxiously waiting for.
I'll start-
Current graves:
1. Strom Thurmond
Future Graves:
1. Karl Rove
Get creative! | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| Mark Morford's SFGate Column for 7/22.
Thank God. I mean, thank God there was a screechy and pointless uproar over the fact that violence-addled teenagers can, via a free downloadable patch, watch badly animated semi-explicit soft-core sex scenes interspersed throughout the No. 1 best-selling video game, "Grand Theft Auto, San Andreas."
'Cuz you know, there you are, eyes bloodshot and fingers sore and synapses raw and butt prematurely widening, cranking along on your 117th hour of the insanely popular GTASA, and you're bustin' heads and makin' drug deals and swipin' cars and gang-bangin' and stuff is blowin' up all around.
And there's tons of guns and bazookas and knives and disposable slutty chicks and viciously corrupt cops and piles of blatant racism and drive-by shootings and pipe beatings and low-rider cars with massive silly chrome rims, and you can veritably feel the imminent heroin overdoses and taste the toxic prison food these thug characters will soon enjoy, and it's just all manner of bitchin' badass video-game glory of sufficient quality to numb your teenage soul to the point where you become so callous and lost and malicious you're ready to join the Young Republicans when WHOA, what the hell is this?
Suddenly that downloadable patch you installed last night kicks in and there's, like, a lame and badly animated sex scene, right there, right between the graphic bloody part where you bazooka'd the police helicopter and the part where the gang-banger gets his lame ass beaten with a large handgun, and suddenly you're like, what the hell? Who stuck this lame badly animated sex in here? Where'd my soul-numbing ultraviolent racism go? I am outraged.
You are outraged. You are livid. You immediately show this lame and badly animated sex scene to your slightly catatonic mom who takes one look and nothing registers for a minute and she just sort of stares at you as if to say, yes, what? At which point you point out that it's, like, badly animated soft-core porn! In your favoritest violent video game, fer chrissakes! And she says oh. Oh!
And now she is also outraged, I mean how dare they show this stuff to you, you precious innocent thing and what the heck is the world coming to when you can't leave your jaded sexually misinformed American teenager alone for half an hour with his wholesome ultraviolent video game without some naughty geek programmer slithering in and showing him badly animated characters screwing in a van?
And so your mom takes the game and shows it to your alcoholic overworked stepdad and he looks at the sex scenes for a minute and sorta shrugs, right before your mom shoots him a look and he's like, oh right! Yeah! Sex is bad! And now he's outraged and so too is your older half-sister but you're not really sure about her because she's always a little baked on your mom's stash, but at this moment that's really neither here nor there.
So then. With everyone's outrage intact, you spend the next four days carefully typing out a short letter (it's been a while since you had to write actual words) to the game's publisher and to the parent company and to some senators and maybe to the Family Council for Icky Media Ickiness (or whatever it's called), and you say HEY, goddammit, what the hell is this lame badly animated SEX doing interspersed in between my ULTRAVIOLENCE?!! Where is the JUSTICE, DUDE??!! (You like to use lots of ALL CAPS and superfluous punctuation to emphasize the fact that your high school English classes were, like, a total waste of taxpayer money.)
After all, up to this point, you've only seen about 17 thousand porn ads on the Internet and spent 167 hours riffing through your stepdad's stash of Hustlers and watched your friend's DVD copy of "Weapons of Ass Destruction IV" like, 20 times. You're still a baby! Why, you still don't even get most of the jokes in "Wedding Crashers"! You're not even old enough to be sent off to die for no reason in Iraq!
Shouldn't someone be outraged over the fact that 17-year-old virgin geeks who play endless hours of ultraviolent video games might somehow be tainted to their very cores by two minutes of badly animated sex, despite how you are, as a typical American teen, so regularly co-opted, so viciously pummeled by crass product placement and violence on the news and wicked misinformation about everything from marijuana to abstinence to cafeteria food, well, it pretty much makes the tepid and completely unarousing sex on GTASA look like outtakes from "Shrek III: Now We're Just Whoring It"? You're darned right there should!
And sure enough, the Powers That Be hear your pleas and respond in force -- because what reactionary family watchdog group or PR-hungry politician doesn't love a good who-will-save-the-children plea? -- and it goes so far that the noxious Parents Television Council actually hooks up with none other than eye-on-the-prize Sen. Hillary Clinton to combat this new and vile force of video-game corruption, which is just depressing on a whole 'nuther level.
Success! Your team of sanctimonious deluded firebrands have caused the game's parent company, Take-Two Interactive, to lose millions in sales at gun-happy sexually frigid Wal-Mart by forcing them to relabel their cash cow as "adults only," and you have also forced Rockstar Games, who developed GTASA, to recode their pride and joy sans any hidden badly animated sex whatsoever (but still packed to the Monte Carlo's roof with all the sexist violent juicy thug-life goodness you can swallow). Yay!
Meanwhile, just down America's street, countless thousands of young U.S. soldiers are hobbling home from Iraq and Afghanistan, wounded and disabled and limbless and traumatized to the bone, eyes deadened to the world and permanently scarred to their cores and in interviews and documentaries and various news stories you often hear many of them say this one weirdly similar thing.
They say, wow man, yeah, it sure was amazing over there, totally surreal, killin' all those people with rapid-fire machine guns and firing rounds of mortar shells into buildings that might've been, for all we knew, hospitals or schools, and using night-vision goggles to invade decimated towns to hunt down crazed guerrillas and riding in those tanks and blowing the crap out of those Iraqi villages and hearing those women scream and watching those bodies burn.
This is what they say: Oh man, you know what it reminded me of? You know what it was like over there, what with all the killing and the violence and the guns? It was just like, well, it was just like a video game.
To which you may now reply, huh. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| I love this. What are the two biggest events in the Bay Area this weekend?
SF Pride and NASCAR at Sears Point.
What's so great is that tons of Nascar fans are going to come out (NO pun intended) for this and probably think to themselves, "Well, since we're coming to California, Lurline, why don't we stay in San Francisco and make a nice time of it, instead of booking a motel in Vallejo? We'll stay near Union Square and we can shop and see Cats and whatever else." And they'll be right next to the parade route and have no idea what's about to happen. It's so great. Because when they see the rainbows everywhere, and then the SPI, and then the chaps, and then hundreds of topless lesbians on motorcycles, they will freak their shit out. And the best part is that they'll think it happens every weekend in SF and it will confirm every image they've ever had of The City.
Har! | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| I saw him on this AFI tribute thing to George Lucas, and I swore it was not really him. Has anyone seen him lately? The weight loss is shocking. I think there's a second Peter Jackson out there somewhere- they divided like cells.
On the other end of the spectrum, tikimama was right- Lucas' daughter is out of control. She was HUGE on this show. | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| I hope I got this right!
Looking forward to pix and takes of the PNW Crawl!
You're older than me! Neener neener! (er, by one month...)
But NO ONE is as old as Craig! Ha!
;) | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| I want to create the definitive list of songs that include the lyric:
"Put your hands in the air, and wave them like you just don't care."
or something close to that.
I'll start:
1. Cameo - Word Up
(The inspiration for this will be in another post...) | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| I really want to go to the Northwest Tiki Crawl, but I won't use PayPal. What should I do?
*grin* | | comments: 8 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Who's been to Volpe's in Petaluma? I had no idea that there was a speakeasy in the back. It looks boring in the front, but there's a funky old bar hiding in the back. Why was this not on the Petaluma Crawl people? I want answers! | | comments: 7 comments or Leave a comment |
| I was going to post daily about this, but since there hasn't been much to say, welcome to Day Three of the Great and Glorious Detox.
We'd been meaning to do this for a long time, but it's hard to find a time when our schedules don't demand liquor. I've been interested in seeing if this would help, and, while the jury is still out, it's going OK.
Basically, we're on a 72 hour juice fast. Just fruit and vegetablee juices for three days - no solid food. I'm cheating a little and including soymilk, but otherwise that's it: no booze, caffeine, dairy, or actual food. So, lots of fresh orange and grapefruit, carrot juice, odwalla, etc. We're also clearing out the innerds: We take psyllium husks for that "Colon Blow" effect. Plus, all kinds of enzyme and bacteria supplements and milk thistle & dandelion root pills for liver purification. Also took a long soak in a hot bath with a cup of baking soda in the water. Then scrubbed with a natural sponge and hippie oatmeal soap. The water looked nasty as hell, so something came out of me. (mercury and aluminum according to one website)
Progress so far: no too bad. Sometimes at night I get incredible gas, and an off and on headache, but other wise, a little weaker than normal, but not much. Anytime there's cooking on TV or a commercial for food, it's tough. I even had a friend who I haven't talked to in months invite me out for steak on day two! Argh! I actually had a dream about quesadillas last night. It's getting to me, I suppose. But, it looks like I've lost eight pounds (probably not just in the last three days- I suspect Crawl Stress had something to do with that- but I forgot to get my weight at the start of the fast)
So, it looks like we've made it- we can eat again tonight. We dont want to run for Taco Bell straight away, because that would seem to defeat the purpose. So I think I'll make a grilled chicken caesar- seems like a decent compromise. And I might just cook the chicken in delicious Omega-3 rich Flax seed oil. (Does anyone know if you can cook with that?)
One more thing: There is the distinct possibility that all the hippie supplements are complete nonsense, but I'm being open minded about it. However, this little project was brutally expensive, so I'm glad they only recommend doing it once a year. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| I have recently been notified that I am a pathetic loser for not updating this more often. To assuage some of my critics, here it is:
Last weekend was crawl madness, and by all accounts, seems to have gone well. I know that I had a good time, which is more than I can say about last year, as H&C will attest. I'm not sure why the stars were in more alignment this year, except for the Tonga Room, which bailed on us. People on the bus were better behaved, which is all you can hope for when you're playing nanny to 53 rotten drunks. Although, the people at Bauer's Limo have just told me that someone indeed tossed their cookies on one of the seats and tried to hide it. Seems unlikely, as that's ususally pretty easy to smell. So I might get nailed with a cleaning cost. But we're in the black so far, which is a miracle. This thing is getting really big, and I'm not sure I can keep doing it- it's just a huge investment of time and money, and it really wears me out.
But all in all, a good time was had- it was nice to see H&C, Caoilin (did I just fuck that spelling up?), and Blair (briefly- damn army). Now it's on to my next project.... | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| ...with his piercing laser vision of death!
I watched the whole thing on sexy closed circuit TV. Blair's eyes were 19" across, and it was terrifying!
It looked like this!
It only took a second, he got a rad fanny pack, and some hip shades. I was hoping they'd give him those "Terminator" specs that old people wear, but no dice.
I tried to encourage him to take the free valium that was offered but he wussed out.
When he walked out of the surgery, I asked him if he'd been cured of his cravings for the ultraviolence. (see picture!) He responded that we should go to a milk bar. Everyone else just stared at us like we were from Mars. People in Santa Rosa are lame.
(People IN Santa Rosa, not people FROM Santa Rosa, Sara) | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| | So I got a job! (yay!) But the pay is shit! (boo!) But...It's at Beverages & More! (yay!) But there's no benefits. (boo!) But there's an employee discount! (yay!!!!!!!!!) But it's not very big. (boo!) The job is pretty fun! (yay!) But on the fourth day, I dislocated my knee! (boo!) So now I'm laid up at home, my knee is as big as a watermelon, and I just sit in my wheelchair and spy on the neighbors out back. I could swear I saw a man kill someone over there, but it's probably just my imagination. I also see giant rabbits. | | comments: 11 comments or Leave a comment |
| Posted here for the interest of my Portland readers:
So the other night, I decided to do a blind tasting of the white rums in the bar. So yes, this scientific panel consisted of me. It was totally blind- I had Rebecca pour out the rums in random order in another room and just identify them by letters. The tasting consisted of seven rums. I did not include Bacardi White, because, well, you know, it's crap. The palete was cleaned between each tasting with purified water and Carr's palin crackers. (oh, how posh!) The results were a little surprising to me in some cases. Most were more than acceptable, and often great. So here are the reulsts in no particular order, with my notes followed by the rum.
A. Rough start, but lots of character. Not very dry, a sweet start and a warm finish: Ron Flor De Cana 4 year
B. Smooth start, very light sweetness, a hint of spice and a light lime finish: Pyrat White
C. Ultra smooth on the palate, with a sharp, vegetal, almost single malt finish: Havana Club White
D. Semi-smooth, with a light hint of caramel: Myers's White
E. Rough start, dry, with a slight melon finish: Rogue White Rum (note: made in small batches by Rogue Brewing in Portland. Check it out!)
F. Very Smooth, with butter up front and a very clean finish: Appleton White
G. Very rough, terribly harsh rubbing alcohol smell, awful taste, no redeeming qualities: Rhum Barbancourt White
Well, I was certainly surprised by G. It probably mixes well in a pinch, but I'll be wary from now on. I'm sure lots of you will disagree on this, but what other whites do people reccomend? | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| I thought I would break my monastic levels of LJ silence to wish everyone a Happy Boxing Day.
Xmas was great this year: We got a lemon tree and a lime tree! Woo hoo! That's about it. Oh, and two wedges of Point Reyes blue cheese. mmmmmm. blue. If B/S like blue, you should come down for some, cause Rebecca won't eat it.
There is very little else to report:
May 2004-July 2004: Moved. Three times. Still tired.
August 2004-November 2004: Built The Novato Grotto
November 2004-December 2004: Looked for work without success
New Years Eve: One helluva good deal at Caliente Tropics ($65 a night!) is beckoning us to Palm Springs! There is now way in hell I can afford it, but with a cheap diet and carpooling, we'll keep the costs down.
What are other people doing for New Year's Eve? (or, as my father-in-law memorably calls it: "Amateur Night") | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| So, it's been a while since the last update. And what a while it has been. I've confirmed a lot of my suspicions about how evil, self-centered, and banal people can be. New job (started Feb.1) seemed OK for a while. (Much like Jeff Goldblum seemed OK for a while after fusing with the fly). Then the reality hit very quickly. The two partners who left the company did not go on to bigger and better things. They went on to the same thing. In very short order, the employees resigned to join the new company and took customers with them. All efforts to stop the flow were ultimately unsuccessful, and to make a long story short, we went out of business on May 5th. If you ever have the opportunity to tell 19 people that they are out of work, I advise you to pass. It's not much fun telling a guy who's 64 years old and five months shy of retirement that the company stock is worth zero and his retirement fund is shot. Oh, well- back to the coal mines with you! You'll have to take it up with the greedy motherfuckers who drove this company into the toilet. So fuck them and fuck this shit forsaken business.
On a lighter note, I have just started to enjoy some time off, and so will be spending the next month moving to our new digs in Novato. Yay: closer to Blair & Sara! Nay: it's Novato!
Blair: you were supposed to be at Tiki Oasis, you SOB.
The only break we will have in June is to journey north for the Portland Tiki Crawl! Yay! Plans are being made now, and we still hope to take advantage of the generous hospitality/lodging offered by Heather & Craig. (still on offer? hope so!)
So that's enough for now. More dreariness to follow. Bet you can't wait! | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
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