i feel like such a loser.

yesterday sk smith wrote about the value of knocking out 500 words a day.

i could write 500 words standing on my head, i thought, but then she brought up the caveat that writers should actually try to peice together 500 words of quality each day.

ho.

karisa and i chatted on the phone last night, something we dont do nearly enough. we dont do anything nearly enough.

on saturday renee and i went to the redondo beach lobster farce, i mean fest. $10 to get in which includes zero lobster.

when you get in there was one sidewalk of street-fair foods (chicken on a stick, thai in a box, clam chowdah in bread bowls, etc). only one place to get lobster and that place had the longest line youve ever seen.

and it cost $17 for a lobster, a half ear of corn, and a styrofoam cup of cole slaw.

i was all, fuck this.

one guy with his hottie on his arm yelled out, I was Rooked!

never one to look a thick serving of chicken on a stick me and my bestest decided that although we too had been rooked we were going to eat our way out of this sticky situation and not only had the undercooked chicken

but shared a nicely hot fresh funnel cake, and took a pathetic lobster sandwhich roll for the ride home.

dick dale was scheduled to play but we couldnt stand hanging out there for very long as it was, indeed, a disaster.

making me realize once and for all that i need to be in charge of Everything.

heres what you do when you have a lobster fest.

fucking fest, people.

they had two of the hugest boiling pots of lobster youve ever seened. put one of those pots on one side of the fest and one on the other. that way the lines go twice as fast and they seem half as short.

call me einstein.

then set up a few more booths to sell the lobster. have one that sells spicy lobster. have one that sells lobster balls. have one that sells fried lobster. have one that sells lobster soup.

but whatever you do, dont just have one place to get lobster and run around calling it a fest.

we were so upset we could barely enjoy the fresh squeezed lemonade and shivver next to the sand.

as we left and people were lined up waiting to hand over their $10 i wanted to say,

it’s a rip,

you’re better off just going to the chart house,

but i didn’t because im… polite?

isnt it more polite to inform people that theres bullshit waiting for them around the corner?

later we went food shopping and i got everything that i normally dont get: cooked peeled shrimp, handfulls of beefaroni, french bread that’s doomed to stale in hours, flowers for the crib, C2 cuz now im addicted, mint milanos…

because we blow so much money on so many dumb things in life

no need to skimp at the grocery store where most things are relatively inexpensive in comparison.

when i got hom my 91 year old landlady called me to tell me that someone had been parking in my spot

and i thanked her

and brought her the roses.

574 + yesterday + was + basart’s + birthday!

To: You

Subj: Wild On… Taiwan

Actually I am in Hong Kong now. Just arrived today. It is also the Moon Festival, although I have not seen the moon, let alone the sun since I got here. Today may well in fact be Asia version of a sunny day, that is… not raining.

Taiwan was tres grisaille, however my first couple days were spent in jet-lagged wandering, street after street and stall after stall of clothes shoes monkey brains fishmongers butchers, the smell was intoxicating to say the least. The humidity left me soaked to the skin and the tremendous pollution left me wanting to sport one of those face masks all the locals wore, very Michael Jackson.

I stayed with distant relatives in Chungli, had a posse of 10 year-old girls following me everywhere. Only one spoke English, and they would all whisper questions to her to ask me. I managed to recollect my college Chinese enough to not make me feel like a complete mute, but the nonsensical chatter is soothing in a way, I don’t have to think, or converse, just smile.

I was going into social withdrawl, and made my cousin take us to a club. Just happened to be a BALLROOM DANCING club. Turns out it is very popular there. Unfortunately I don’t ChaCha and there was no bar there, I thought I was going to die of boredom. I thought I would freak if someone asked me to dance. Some middle-aged businessman asked me, I couldn’t even look at him, bu yao, bu yao, I said, my face so red, I imagine, my mom laughed her ass off.

So then she takes us to a real club, a disco. I was so ready for a coctail at that point, they pour a pretty shitty drink there, once I could actually communicate what it was I wanted. It was Ladies Night which meant some male dancers. First of all, I don’t find asian guys too attractive, but I can appreciate the male form, and I might have if every song they danced to wasn’t Michael Jackson, and they weren’t ALL a bunch of homos (no offense Adrian). And of course I am sitting in the front row. He takes my water bottle and gyated a bit then poured the water all over himself (Remember when you walked out of puppetry of the penis, simone, it was like that.)

After 2 days there, I was nearly eaten alive my mosquitos, my stomach was in knots, (from the milk maybe, I had a caramel macchiato at Starbucks, trying to relish the US, you’d think they would have soy milk, but nooo…Could have been the unsanitary conditions of the street food vendors, from which I ate from nearly every stall I passed, or simply from all the carbs, my first stop in the morning (at 6 in the morning, as if… I would ever get up that early, jet lag, right… The pastries and bread, cream puffs, onion rolls, sooo good, a shock to the Atkins system to say the least)

So anyway I had to make my escape to Taipei and the comforts of the Grand Hyatt, and was it ever grand, I felt bad leaving my relatives and mother there, but I couldn’t sleep on that hard matress, sweating all night, getting eaten alive… you get the picture.

I didn’t leave the hotel at all the first day, the gym was fab, the club was pretty cool, too, American band doing covers, had to explain the finer poins of the vodka martini to the bartenders (shaken, not stirred). But I managed to bridge my jet-lagged self and get my 2nd wind closing the place down.

Anyhow, in HK, net is costing a fortune be home soon, the 3rd, my b-day.

lovelovelove,

meesh

our first interview chat with meesh two years ago + meeting meesh + meesh and her pals

nbc

9/27/04

the peacock announced today that theres good news and bad news regarding the tonight show.

the good news is actually great news.

completely wonderful news, really

and that is that not only is jay leno going to stop doing the tonight show in five years, 2009, which really looks like forever on paper, but it’s not, thank the lord it’s not

but also that conan o’brien will replace him.

we had to suffer for so long, and for some reason all i see is the grateful dead skeleton guy tipping his red white and blue striped top hat.

lenos tonight show era has been almost unwatchable.

compounded by the sad fact that it should have been letterman’s natural victory lap.

but as we’ve said over and over in the busblog, life isnt fair.

and poor dave had to make tens of millions a year at cbs

heartbroken.

almost exactly a year ago i had a plan for cbs and dave that included conan, but nobody ever listens to me.

and now their only hope is bringing back the midnight special starring me and karisa live from the rainbow.

i watched a little of the tonight show’s 50th anniversary and heard jay announce this very good news and alluded to the fact that he and dave dont talk any more, etc

and i swear to you after the audience clapped he introduced gary shandling as someone else who got their start on the tonight show

and i was all you little prick, i dont remember johnny having you on 40 times when no one knew you.

but ultimately it’s on johnny, in the only unclassy thing he ever did.

something that not only did not secure him his rightful place atop the late night throne, but spoiled a lot of the magic around it.

so yes its great news for conan. pushing the limits and creativity should always be rewarded, and if it couldnt be dave, im glad that it’s conan. it sucks that it couldnt have been both though.

it’s hard not to keep mentioning that.

and yes sometimes i dream about having a cable access television show.

called bloggers.

with raymi as my ed mcmahon.

and after i do something great on the show, or say something funny, i would let the audience recover, stretch my arm out, and say and now, green day!

well last monday, a week ago, your next president was on the late show. and dave interviewed him and then had him read off the top ten list.

and when he was done, i swear to you, they went to commercial, came back, and dave asked

is the election going to be close

and kerry said

i hope not

and dave said,

do you have a prediction

and kerry said

i have a prediction that im going to win

the audience clapped

and dave said

senator john kerry ladies and gentlemen

we’ll be back with green day.

and i always wondered what happens when your dreams come true

i’ll have to ask dave how mine was.

annika’s journal + jp journal + wonkette + britney wedding pics

got off the phone with the second hottest girl in america, karisa j moonshine, who just accepted a job promotion and deserves a round of applause and congratulations, and we were discussing our two baseball organizations hers being the boston red sox and mine of course being your chicago cubs.

the sox have just clinched a playoff spot and i was telling her how bad pedros jerri curl was doing under the onslaught of cheap champagne, and she was saying how excited she was to be back in the playoffs and ready to take another shot at it.

and i was all, i’d rather the cubs didn’t even make it to the playoffs if they weren’t going to win it all. i take it so personally, i told her. she said, i do too, i was all i will seriously cry again.

and she just giggled explaining how they had been used to saying wait till next year in her home land of new england.

the cubs didn’t do so well this weekend in new york city. they lost two of their three games at shea and were far from impressive the week before that.

but nobody this year seems to want to win the wild card in the national league and the cubs are so quietly stacked, it’s nearly impossible for them to fuck this up.

so today thanks to three-hit games from former red sox infielders nomar garciapara and todd walker, the cubs routed the reds 12-5 at wrigley.

this gave the cubs a full game atop the national league wild card standings.

while kissing a new young woman all day yesterday she asked, you keep talking about this wild card in baseball, wtf is a wild card.

chick had just turned twenty one. held my stubbly head in her hands as we made out. kept jumping up to change the cd player back to her favorite song.

mandy moores, have a little faith in me.

not the prettiest girl in class, but lets face it im no catch, but whatever, shes moving back to milan in the morning.

what’s italian for please take me with you.

after a while i said, there are three divisions in each league in baseball. the winners of each division get to go to the playoffs. but you can’t have playoffs with just three teams, so to make it an even four teams, they need one more team. so of all the other teams they pick the one with the best record who didn’t win their division, and that team is the wild card.

the red sox today clinched at least the wild card slot in the american league.

the giants and cubs are vying for the national league wild card spot.

the giants actually have just as good a chance of winning the division if the dodgers keep spazzing out.

like the cubs have been doing.

until today

as they gave me hope

which we all know is brightest

before the storm.

505+ jules19 + sk smith did 539 + a frog king

the “honest blogger’s quiz”.

many bloggers took it, some did not. i’m not going to say that they were dishonest, but hopefully they thought to themselves “why am i being a chickenshit and not revealing who i really am?”

my advice to you, dear reader, don’t trust bloggers who condem others for not being truthful if they cannot be truthful themselves.

especially about simple things like this.

if you have a favorite blogger that you regularilly read, ask him or her to take this quiz so that you can discover where they stand on the issues.

you might be suprised who you are reading.

these are the questions, and what follows are my answers. if you want to add your answers in the comments, be my guest!

1. which political party do you typically agree with? green

2. which political party do you typically vote for? democrat

3. list the last five presidents that you voted for? nader, clinton, clinton, bush, reagan

4. which party do you think is smarter about the economy? democrat

5. which party do you think is smarter about domestic affairs? democrat

6. do you think we should keep our troops in Iraq or pull them out? pull them out now.

7. who, or what country, do you think is most responsible for 9/11? obl and the saudis.

8. do you think we will find weapons of mass destruction in iraq? yes, ours.

9. yes or no, should the u.s. legalize marijuana? hell yes.

10. do you think the republicans stole the last presidental election? yep.

11. do you think bill clinton should have been impeached because of what he did with monica lewinski? no.

12. do you think hillary clinton would make a good president? yes.

13. name a current democrat who would make a great president: hillary

14. name a current republican who would make a great president: mccain

15. do you think that women should have the right to have an abortion? yes.

16. what religion are you? Christian.

17. have you read the Bible all the way through? yes.

18. what’s your favorite book? Cruddy by Linda Barry.

19. who is your favorite band? tsar

20. who do you think you’ll vote for president in the next election? Kerry.

21. what website did you see this on first? tonypierce.com + busblog

kos + democratic underground + kerry & bush’s military records side-by-side

for some good reasons they are moving some people around. for some very bad reasons they are moving some other people around. at 110 years old i dont freak out about these things any more. annoying as they might be at 9:30am on monday morning when all you want to do is blog about the wild weekend that youve had, all the cheerleaders youve kissed and all the famous libras who were born on this day.

i would also like to write about how in the comments section of jeff jarvis’s buzzmachine (i know, i know) mr instapundit himself tried to defend his “moderate” facade, to which another commentor defended him,

to which i asked there and i will ask here:

if anyone can show me one day in the Instapundit’s illustrious career, where he spent one day spending more time criticising the Bush administration more than attacking the left

or if one can show me one time when the Instapundit criticized President Bush three posts in a row, then i will quit calling bullshit on his “but im a moderate” claims.

otherwise jarvis himself should call a little bullshhit on his buddy the blogfather.

of course glenn is a tool cheerleader for the right, who are we kidding?

maybe im just cranky this morning.

one of the people who got booted out of our department was my buddy travis k smiley who was banished to a new land that was integrated with two others.

i am not one to monday morning quarterback. i have said all along that the department that i still reside in and the one that travis k was once part of was a horribly intense place of incredibly busy and hard working people who are all too good of souls to be forced into the gunk they must wade through to collect a paycheck.

youd think that i would be happy to break up such a flawed system. problem is, this part of the system isnt flawed. the jobs suck, but we handle them. we handle them with so few errors that when we do make an error all hell breaks loose.

can you imagine what it must be like to know Every mistake you and your department has made in the last 3 months? it happens that rarely.

which is why it should stay as is.

just give us hella raises.

instead im sitting here with only part of my crew.

sending an s.o.s. to you.

jamie + the detox + steph + world’s shortest blog

is a nice enough fellow, and i dont know why im not a good person, but im not.

this week he asked simple questions that i didnt answer, and i’m a pudtz cuz i dont join in with the la blog o sphere the way i probably should.

we have a great bunch here in lalaland. ranging from matt and emmaunelle to ben and kate sullivan to mc brown and buzznet to sean bonner and blogging.la, to kitty bukkake, my wife moxie, lick covergirl tiffany,

to charles johnson and lgf to the volokhs and mickey kaus,

to the rabbit blog, the advice goddess, cathy seipp and luke ford,

to koganuts to franklin ave and laist and brian flemming and boing boing and jim gilliam,

from anti to vaine, from rupaul to treacher to xtracyx from steve smith to floorpie

to tonecluster and the mollusk and injection from negro please to dirty fez, from bunsen and the internet junkie to my hourly favorite flagrant, just to name a few off the top of my head

we should have another blogparty at linse‘s pad.

so anyway here’s the answers i shoulda given a week ago when he asked on lablogs.com like a nice guy.

Leaving LA

1. When you can only get out of LA for a weekend, where do you like to go? vegas. it used to be santa barbara but that place just makes me want to live there, and then sadness ensues. vegas however is perfect in every way.

2. Where do you stay when you go there? (lodging and/or region) when i worked for philips we stayed at the rio which has that all you can eat seafood buffet and suites in all of the rooms but it’s off the strip, when i worked for microsoft we stayed at caesars which is mighty classy, but it’s fun to bop around each time and try somewhere new. i have still yet to stay at the hard rock.

3. Where do you go on vacation to get as far out of the LA lifestyle? baja. there nobody cares what you are dressed like, nobody has fancy cars, and all the pricks get tossed into the jails immediately. there are also no valets.

4. For longer vacations, 1-2 weeks, where have you been that you would go back to? amsterdam. for the art, of course. they have just enough of it.

5. Where do you dream of going, but haven’t been? japan. i would like to see the toyko giants play, i would like to see a concert at budokan, and i would like to see how long it would take to kiss 100 japanese girls.

6. Where have you been on vacation where you thought “I could settle here”? everywhere.

7. What place in Los Angeles makes you feel like you’re already on vacation? the sands of venice beach are terribly relaxing to me.

8. Where in Los Angeles would you warn tourists to stay away from, even though a lot of them end up there? universal city walk. it’s just an outdoor mall people! one that charges you $10 to park at! it’s just a mall!

lablogs.com + blogging.la + la.buzznet

anywhere online for that matter. or even on a personal journal of mysterious things?

perhaps we should experiment.

emotions fade so quickly though so then who cares really. and wont the readers get confused? if a sweet young girl on friday comes home heartbroken because she realizes she has nothing to do and not even her favorite blogger will come over to pay attention to her.

and if she would write whoa is me on her blog on friday night

only to wake up on saturday refreshed refocused and ready to go, and doesnt update her page.

then her readers might fill up her comment box with words of encouragement all day saturday, even though she didnt write it to get sympathy she was just writing it cuz it was real for her at the time, and now she has all these bittersweet feelings about the outpouring of love because the problem was quicky solved with a xxx instant message therapy session followed by a good nights sleep.

my home stereo has a timer on it. on saturdays i set it to wake me up to the pixies. gigantic + caribu + debaser.

while some of you were being born, i was selling tvs in the eighties. tvs stereos car stereos. but first they put me in the computer department.

this was a store like circuit city or the good guys full of electronics. where the salesmen all wore suits, we worked on commission only (a percentage of the profit), and our clientelle were mostly wealthy clueless men on the westside.

they started me off in the computer department.

so in 1986 i was selling 286 zeniths, kaypros, and amigas.

at the time the amiga had 512k of memory. your cell phone has more than that. but somehow it was capable of color graphics that were mindboggling compared to the usually-monochrome ibm clones.

sadly our best sellers were not the pcs but the video games. the commodore 64 was a hot seller at $99, and the commodore 128 at $199 wasnt doing too poorly. but because neither of them had any profit on them ($1 for the C64, $10 for the 128), i learned everything i could about the $1,200 zenith and the $1,500 kaypro which looked like a small suitcase and actually did fold up and had a handle so it was probably the first laptop.

i was young back then. so idealistic. i figured that if they were making you wear a shirt and tie you may as well look good. problem was it was the 80s and looking good meant dressing gay.

i had black puffy slacks, pink shirts and teal ties. leather ties. skinny ones.

but i did know one thing. i knew that the other two salesmen in the computer deptartment were leading the 30 store chain in sales. and i realized they werent selling any commodore 128s or 64s because they werent profitable.

but i noticed that they werent getting any zenith system “lay downs”. a lay down is an easy sale. like a guy saying, you got any of those kaypros? i’ll take one.

most big sales you have to describe the thing, answer any questions, introduce the extended warranty, overcome any objections, ask for the sale, close the sale, sending a thank you card.

you get good by making it seem like a natural conversation. like no big deal. that and learning where there is a hole in the market.

90 percent of the people who came in were moms wanting to get their kid an educational tool. a computer. but many of them wisely didnt see any benefit of buying a $1500 x286. especially when their kid would walk in and go apeshit over the c64s that only cost $99.

i learned that if you said, the c128 plays a lot of commodore games, and it is a decent computer for a kid, but i do recommend the warranty because boys, im speaking from experience, are going to wear this thing out.

sold for $350 out the door in less than 15 minutes, $20 commission.

give the people what they want.

youd be shocked how many of those salesmen, and even the chain as a whole all had the attitude of no, give them what we want.

in three months of whipping everyones ass in computers they moved me to personal audio, which were boom boxes, walkmens, little tape recorders, toys, etc. but you were also allowed to walk clear across the building and sell car stereos if you wanted. the trade off was, no way could you get any boom box laydowns if you were on the other side of the store.

i took my chances in car audio where the commissions were up to 50% like on speakers and amps.

my secret weapon was brass monkey from the recently released beastie boys licensed to ill.

oh my, what is that sweet sound?

thats a cervin vega 12 inch subwoofer for $150 hooked up through a 10 watt alpine stereo for $250 and a $100 pioneer subwoofer and two $100 pioneer speakers.

but i will get you the whole thing for $500 plus tax.

thats pretty good, let me ask you a question…

questions are $5 each… just kidding.

which mysteriously kept the questions short. im getting a great deal, this guy is funny, i cant believe im going to get this sort of boom in my crx for five hundred bucks.

fifty bucks commission on something like that, and a percentage of the install in the back. five bucks more usually.

the idea was to make $100 a day. which in those days, where minimum wage was $4 an hour and you could easilly be making $40 a day, twice that was pretty good for a dumb ass in junior college who was driving his grandmas cadillac.

im happy right now. my best friend is coming over and we are going to the lobster fest in redondo beach. how can you pass up lobster on a perfect day at the beach with full sets of music from the Infidels, Carlos Guitarlos, Bonne Music Zydeco, Klymaxx, and the legendary surf guitar king Dick Dale who i once interviewed in college and he told me that he sometimes sleeps with his tigers at his ranch in palm springs.

not f sleep, sleep sleep.

he plays upsidedown lefthanded guitar that he said hendrix played.

i didnt understand any of it, and now i will shower in prepeparation for the crustations who were lucky enough to get eaten at a friggin festival held in their name by two people who really do love their species.

who dont look down at them for being bottom feeders, for arent we all bottom feeders in some way.

fucking survivor had those women hapilly eating maggots. looking at them as protein. dudes were eating worms.

get a man hungry enough for something and he will turn back into the animal that we all pretend we’re not.

at least the noble lobster is comfortable enough in his shell to own who he is

and the best of those

i will eat today.

as carlos guitarlos serenades us.

carlos of course being janine lindemuellers former husband. but now i fear ive said too much.

offline adventures + tiffany + anti

i lost whatever looks i had since joining the xbi. maybe it was a coincidence maybe not. somehow the ladies dont notice. people dont understand what this place does to you. and it happens so slowly. thats the scary thing.

since being here i wouldnt be ashleys bf and i wouldnt be annas and i wouldnt be clipper girls or her cousin and lately i wouldnt be cuban girls. its cuz you die in the xbi. first you harden then you age then you give up and then you die.

and people will say blah blah blah but everyone knows that somethings look great as they die.

take slowmotion fireworks on acid for example. you hear about it you see it boom and its gone. if its loud enough you might catch an echo for a second but then never again.

there wasnt anything wrong with any of those girls and even then i looked at myself in the pictures with them and said youre living the dream old man scratch that you are the dream.

people nearly filled up my gmail today asking to see scans of the letter and i have always looked at the bible for inspiration and ive noticed that satan is only mentioned three times. even homer simpson can count that on one hand. in the garden in job and tempting Jesus. you dont write about people who dont deserve your attention. for if you do you encourage them to continue to be written about.

create topics and subjects that are worthy of your attention.

which means we wont be talking about how the cubs had to go into ten innings Again tonight, this time to beat the lowly mets. and they had to get piazza out to lock it down. they made kris benson look like a twenty game winner.

my hat’s off to glendon rusch who kept the mets to one run in six innings and helped the cubs get their 12th win in 15 games. the most lukewarm hot team youve never seen.

but since the dodgers eeked out a win against the giants tonight in frisco depite bonds’ 702nd homer, the cubbies are a game and a half ahead of the gyros in the wild card and the dodgers are two and a half games ahead of sf in the west.

all due to shawn green’s dinger.

the giants however are breathing a sigh of relief that the dodger right fielder wont play tomorrow so he can celebrate yom kippur.

which is cooler than anything ive done lately.

although i did ask nicely for my super hot friend to write about being a prison officer and she just posted part three of her ongoing series. in todays chapter she interviews 18 inmates who give her advice as to how not to get raped in jail. apparently the advice begins with “dont talk to anyone.”

the next time i talk to her i will have to ask her if she’s noticed anyone following the ol’ dirty bastard technique of never showering and thus repelling anyone who even thinks about coming within 15 feet of you.

kenneth cowan needs to update + flagrant falls for kitty tricks + raymi wrote me an email