| links, we collect links. |
[Apr. 19th, 2006|10:06 am] |
Like this one, about how people are stupid. (Although it's not as dumb as the great story the other year about the guy who tried to crucify himself but could only get one hand nailed down, so he called 911 to get them to do the other.)
And then there's this puerile bit of racism, which is just jawdropping. Make sure you read the footnotes, which aren't really formatted as footnotes but random numbers that pop in; the opening only makes sense with it.
In other news, I've become suddenly busy making pudding.
Also, has anyone read any Christopher Alexander books? He looks pretty interesting to me.
Time to pick up my old stolen car. Yep, it was recovered. By me. Long story. |
|
|
| ah, pudding. |
[Apr. 11th, 2006|10:18 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | bemused | ] |
| [ | music |
| | something off the disappointing new Yeah Yeah Yeah's album | ] |
So I was all excited because I was supposed to work six (!) days this week. Got one down, and then something got fucked up with a computer and so those other five days ain't happening.
Fuck.
In other news, I'm seriously considering trying eggs as a side-product of reading Jeffrey Steingarten's THE MAN WHO ATE EVERYTHING, where he talks about how he overcame his food biases. Any suggestions for easy ways into the scary, scary world of eggs are appreciated. |
|
|
| why bother? |
[Apr. 5th, 2006|11:44 am] |
Not just because I'm depressed and self-loathing and have a headache and writer's block today, but because this guy is fifteen million times the blogger I'll ever be.
I am agog. |
|
|
| "You dumb motherfucker! You're supposed to be the good cop!" |
[Apr. 4th, 2006|09:48 am] |
In lieu of hostility, which is slightly minor right now in that I had a good weekend with my visiting friends Robbie and Rita G'Nouj, I offer everybody a friendly suggestion:
watch THE WIRE.
This thing is fucking fantastic. I don't even like cop shows particularly and I absolutely love it. Novelistic in complexity, insanely well acted by faces you've never seen before, intensely character-driven, intermittently hilarious, casually taboo-breaking without ever feeling unnecessarily provocative, and never not fully engaging. We've watched the first five episodes of season 1 here at the Ultra homestead and it's taking immense amounts of discipline not to just barricade the doors and watch the next eight in one gulp (only prevented by a. the fact that we're renting them and b. each episode is so immense and satisfying you'd feel guilty not taking the time to digest it).
Highlight so far: probably episode 4's old crime-scene investigation, where McNulty and his partner (whose group dynamic is amazingly awesome) spend three minutes reconstructing a shooting, using only isotopes of the word "fuck". Ballsy and brilliant.
Best TV. Ever. (And yes, that includes THE SOPRANOS, ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT, THE SIMPSONS, etc.) |
|
|
| meet the ox |
[Mar. 27th, 2006|11:29 pm] |
So I bought a car today. It's called the ox, for reasons that will be apparent if you ever see it.
It has an immobilizer alarm, which seems to be silent but keeps the car from starting. it also, as I inadvertently discovered today, has a setting that causes the car not to start and the button on the alarm not to work. That was an entertaining hour, sitting there two hours after buying a new car, and not being able to start it. Thankfully, I figured that out.
Anyway. It's okay. It has some weird charming features (like you can take the key out in any position, and the back is attached to the trunk by tape), but it was cheap.
I am stewing in anger about something that I am loath to write about even pseudonymously. Suffice it to say that I have some serious issues in the pudding industry about how people decide they should be credited for their work making the pudding, and even bigger issues with how they neglect to inform people that their credits have been altered. There's a reason that "passive/aggressive" contains the word "aggressive".
Also, on topic to the very existence of this journal, this. |
|
|
| hating libraries? |
[Mar. 22nd, 2006|11:15 pm] |
|
It never occured to me to hate them - okay, I'm lying, I'm sure it has at some point, probably involving overdue fees, or even just the other day when I realized they charge $2 to check out a CD and don't have any signage indicating such - but anyway, I'm a piker compared to Nicholson Baker. I just read DOUBLE FOLD over the course of two days, largely because I was taking the bus home from downtown and dropped into the library to grab something to read, and had just read a bit from Rick Moody praising Baker - an author I've never read and sorta dismissed as a perv with literary ambitions on the basis of VOX and THE FERMATA. Anyway, DOUBLE FOLD is a long way from phone sex or stopping time to undress women - it's a full-on jeremiad against American libraries that have destroyed the original copies of much of their collection in the name of microfilm, which has proven at least in its early days to be less enduring than the paper it's meant to replace. It's full of wit and anger and some crazy jawdropping shit, from the crazy pyrophoric chemicals used in some book-restoring test projects to the bit from the early days of rag-based paper making where they literally stripped the rags off mummies to make paper (just one of many uses; apparently mummies were also burned to fuel trains). There is SO a horror movie in there some place. |
|
|
| and for the punchline, we kick you in the nuts. |
[Mar. 21st, 2006|03:03 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | shitty | ] |
| [ | music |
| | the soothing lull of the jackhammer down the street | ] |
Came home today off the bus (still no car) while having a depressing discussion that made me realized I had in fact burned the bridge I thought I had that made me shut down my blog in the first place. Was downtown in the first place to help somebody with a job proposal, but it looks like the job will not entail very much pudding preparation, certainly not enough to pay rent. Got home to find in my letterbox a note from New Zealand police, with an $80 fine for going too fast through a speed camera. Also, it was sent to my old address, so it was just forwarded on, well past the 28-day window in which I had to pay for it.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
It's time for me to investigate temping. Don't know why I never thought of it before. I can type reasonably fast. (There's gotta be someplace online where you can test your typing speed.) |
|
|
| skydiving |
[Mar. 18th, 2006|10:37 am] |
so imagine pulling the ripcord, and the chute doesn't go. "Oh, but that's okay, I have an EMERGENCY chute!" Which you then pull.
And it rips out of the vest without opening.
No word from the Bloatus Motes job. At all. Not sure if being in the wrong city, being off of the Moats for two years, being American, or something else meant that a *staffing company* didn't even bother to get back to me.
I did get a call (the rough equivalent of being handed a cocktail umbrella in this situation) from a guy who wants me to help with a bit of pudding he's making. I have a meeting on Tuesday. It will undoubtedly be a pretty small chunk of pudding, and definitely mass-market, but it's likely to be more pudding than I've gotten paid to make in the last two months.
Twenty more calls like that, and everything will be fine. |
|
|
| hate is everywhere! |
[Mar. 14th, 2006|04:37 pm] |
Annie Proulx sure has some.
(She always seemed like a writer I would like, but I couldn't make it all the way through ACCORDION CRIMES' ultra-purple-prosey construction, and haven't bothered with everything else.)
I just applied for a job doing Blotus Moats and Romino Spadministration, says the Google-sensitive blogger. I thought it would make me want to walk into traffic, but I feel too numb to do anything that drastically active. Now, if I don't GET the job that I don't really want but is my Least Worst Alternative right now ... |
|
|
| one big problem |
[Mar. 11th, 2006|03:09 pm] |
there are so many things to be angry about, and so little time.
For instance, who should I focus my ire on at the moment? The folks at the pudding shops who haven't acknowledged my desire to make pudding* for them, despite sending in a CV (as they pronounce "resume" in Noisyland)? This asshat Anton Corbjin, who ruined the up-til-now flawless DIRECTOR'S LABEL series (see: the collections of Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, Michel Gondry, Mark Romanek, and Jonathan Glazer) with his jawdroppingly pretentious crap? I can't help but think that a non-negligible component of Kurt Cobain's decision to end his life was based around his embarrassment at the "Heart-Shaped Box" video. Or how about the creative team behind AEON FLUX, which I also watched last night? Look, I don't want a good movie: I just want an entertainingly bad one. Is that so much to ask for? Apparently so, when you have every actor delivering their lines on Prozac and totally banal cinematography and edit the fuck out of every action scene so it looks like the most complicated thing Charlize Theron did in the whole movie was get into her pseudo-bondage outfits.
But no: in the last dying gasp of meta-referentiality, I save my ire for this LiveJournal itself. Not the content, but the inscrutable fucking technology that seems to have prevented almost everybody from commenting. I don't want this to just be a collection for one man's hate; I would love to be building global communities of ire and scorn. But apparently LJ commenting just isn't working for some people, despite the fact that I have comments enabled for "anyone". One would think this was good. But apparently, not good enough for this fucking clunky piece of crap. I miss blogspot's endearing profusion of random consonants already when compared to this Kafkaesque technical nightmare.
Any suggestions on any asshattery I may have caused that's responsible for this: please pass it on. In the comments. Except you probably can't. HA-HA!
*Note: if you don't already know, my profession - or putative profession, I should say, given my lack of employment of late - is not actually making pudding. But I figure if I piss people off who make pudding, the worst thing that happens is that I don't get any pudding. And I fucking hate pudding. |
|
|
| a brief note about the motherfucking Oscars. |
[Mar. 10th, 2006|01:29 pm] |
Okay, look, we all know that CRASH is one of the mostly completely inept screenplays ever written, an excuse to get actors yelling at each other with such passion that we forget that nothing that's going on makes Any Fucking Sense. If anything, the people who are getting ornery about CRASH winning Best Picture should have a greater coronary about its Best Original Screenplay, but then again the fact that there weren't any Deeply Important Movies About Gay Shepherds in that category seems to have given it a pass. (Not to mention that these days, the chance of finding five Hollywood films in a year that aren't remakes or adaptations are basically nil.)
So do I wish that CRASH lost for Best Picture? Yeah, sort of, but I'm about as broke up about it as I am about The Mountain Goats not sweeping the Grammys. Anyone who looks to the Oscars for any sort of validation has absolutely no sense of historical perspective. Jon Stewart put it best and most tersely: "Three 6 Mafia, one Oscar; Martin Scorsese, zero."
Anyway, I'm all for bilious rage (that's why I'm here!), but all these people getting pissed off about CRASH beating BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN and coming up with grand conspiracy theories about Hollywood's homophobia are fucking irritating me more than the Academy Awards did in the first place. Look, did any of you consider the possibility that MOST PEOPLE HAVE SHITTY TASTE? Even your fucking precious Academy of the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, comprised of the same asshats that spend 80% of the year feeding us pap like MONSTER-IN-LAW and 20% of the year falling over themselves to try to put out "good" pictures, half of which are turgid crap that nobody really wants to sit through but that somebody in the development chain thought might be able to milk some Oscars. And then the ones that reach the finish line are 99% about studio politics, advertising, campaigning, and electability, and 1% about being anything more than a seemingly "important" movie that sounds slightly more plausible than HERBIE: FULLY LOADED as an Oscar candidate.
If you want to get upset about something, get upset about something important. Like the renewal of the Patriot Act. Or my fucking car being stolen. |
|
|
| My fucking car was fucking stolen! |
[Mar. 10th, 2006|01:04 pm] |
My car is what most people would call a piece of shit. Most people would be being kind. I bought it for $2200 (that's New Zealand dollars, for you Americans; they're like Canadian but worth even less and are kind of plastic-y) two years ago, and it's fucked up left and right ever since.
An incomplete list of problems with my car:
* went through five tires in two years
* destroyed power steering belt after air conditioner seized up
* blew out clutch, had to get new one
* antenna broken
* display on radio doesn't work (of course, with a broken antenna, doesn't really matter)
* passenger's side door fails to open intermittently
* lots of other little shit I can't be bothered to recount
An exhaustive list of advantages to my car:
* of late, it runs.
Now, while these lists aren't equal in number, that advantage is not to be downplayed, as I discovered this morning when I went to go some place in my car and discovered that it was not. fucking. there.
I just want to pause at this moment. I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit. (Okay, reasonably nice suburbs, but still.) I lived on the outskirts of downtown Houston for seven years, often leaving my car in the seediest of neighborhoods at 11 PM at night to go see some punk rock band. I lived in Portland for five years, often in what real estate agents would euphemistically call "up-and-coming" neighborhoods (which is code for, boy, it sure would be nice to get all the petty criminals out of this neighborhood so we can get some white collar criminals in and make assloads of money on their ill-gotten gains).
The first time I have ever had a car stolen is in New. Fucking. Zealand.
RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY MOTHERFUCKING HOUSE.
Suck on that the next time you think that this is some kind of paradise. Or maybe this: police are routinely telling people here that they aren't investigating "petty" crimes (meaning anything like burglary) because they don't have the staffing. That's not what they told me, of course. They just told me that my number plate is on a list and they'll let me know if someone calls them and says, hey, I've got a stolen car, would you like to return it to its owner?
And, of course, I went for the minimum insurance, so I have absolutely no recompense if the car isn't found. OTOH, if the car *is* found, the police will tow it ($200 right there), and then I'll have to get whatever they've fucked up with it fixed. Which may wind up costing as much as the car did.
Did I mention I'm still unemployed? Fuck. |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| |
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
derekultra's journal