why this headline should say “Uber Driver’s Family Gets $500k”

Posted on April 30, 2016 by tony

uber driver

Journalists aren’t the only ones who don’t know how to deal with Uber, cops need help too.

Over the past two years that Uber has been a household word, news stories about Uber Driver This and Uber Driver That get published breathlessly every week in coverage that no other transportation sector attracts.

No matter if the suspected criminal was actually ridesharing at the moment of the crime or not, the word Uber somehow gets popped in the headline.

Unless something good happens, and then it miraculously disappears from the headline and the fact that ridesharing Actually was the reason something happened is the also buried into the tale.

Look no further than this story. An Uber driver was involved in an accident in 2014 in Santa Clara. He had a dashcam. He had the damaged car towed to his cousin’s house and went home with the dashcam.

st. clara Turns out the Uber driver didn’t own the car. The owner of the car showed up to the cousin’s house to look at the car and get the dashcam. When he was told it wasn’t in the house, the owner called the cops, who a few days later searched the house and then much later took a battering ram to the house looking for the camera.

The cousin then sued the cops for super totally overreacting and said they did so because he was Muslim. This week the city settled with the cousin for a half million. $150k going to his lawyers and $350k going to him. Oh yeah, and he works for for the border control for Homeland Security.

So are we to believe that cops went aggro at the residence of, basically, one of their own, because he was Muslim? In Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley, which is home to many many peaceful and law-abiding Muslims?

No. The cops went aggro because in 2014 Uber was new and unproven. Cops are leery and would die to be one of the first to reveal OMG video of an Uber car getting into a crash. Imagine the potential handwringing!

So they huffed and they puffed and knocked down dude’s door. Who knows what other Uber-related incriminating evidence could be in there?

Tell me that’s not more believable than: OMG I CANT STAND THOSE MUSLINS LETS HARASS THEM IN BROAD DAYLIGHT SURROUNDED BY ALL THEIR MUSLIN FRIENDS

In Santa Clara? Named after a saint?

Santa Clara’s State Rep is a Democrat who has served since 2007, its State Senator is a Democrat who replaced a previous Democrat who was termed out. Santa Clara’s US Rep is a Democrat who has served for three years who replaced a long time Democrat who had just retired. I’m not saying a heavily Democratic area can’t have some bad cops…

But I am saying, what is far more likely is even though technically the gentleman had the type of job that would usually shield him from such police aggression, it was probably not because of his religion that the officers were so intensely motivated, it was the evidence they were seeking, namely that it would be negative towards Uber.

And that’s why we need Uber drivers in every newsroom.

Or better yet, journalists to admit that they too overreact when a negative so-called Uber story appears and clam up when a positive one pops up. Or so it seems in their papers and websites.

keira-anne is a beautiful spirit

Posted on April 29, 2016 by tony

miss 604, keira-anne, and their boyfriends hanson

pretty much the epitome of what youd imagine of a canadian young lady.

polite, healthy, creative, fun, and concerned with all the good things that you wish everyone else would be concerned aboot

i first met her at Blink 182 show. we were in the pit. moshing. i had been knocked to the ground.

kids were stomping on me but didnt know it was me, they thought it was a bag of Cubs hat.

out of the bloody darkness i saw a hand. it was hers, but i couldnt reach up.

then suddenly she grabbed my scruff and pulled me out from certain death.

she dragged me to the edge of the pit, borrowed a beer from a stunned gentleman who couldnt believe he was seeing The keira-anne in the flesh

she poured some down my throat and wiped the blood from my brow with the remains.

she kissed my forehead and pushed me back into the swirling mass of bodies.

little bluebirds fluttered around her and placed a wreath of wildflowers atop her blonde locks.

i mouthed thank you

she mouthed

eat timbits

which is now my gmail password.

today she posted an interview she conducted with me recently.

click if only to see a cute pic of she and i in canada in 2007.

sometimes i read her old emails

Posted on April 28, 2016 by tony

becky do people admit that?

do you think less of me for that?

you shouldnt.

some people obsess over bad things. they’ll replay fights theyve had or ways others have wronged them.

id rather focus on good stuff.

she wrote me emails like almost every day. sweet ones.

i wrote her too. but for different reasons.

for a while we were right there. but then no.

pink floyd once said

and if the band youre in starts playing different tunes,

i’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.

which is sad. and i didnt want this to be sad. i just wanted to admit something that if i get hit by a truck today everyone would know forever. which is, yeah sometimes i still read an email or two from the past.

to remember when someone thought i was cool.

theres things that make me sad, theres things that make me not sad

Posted on April 27, 2016 by tony

theres things that bring me joy,

theres things that bring me great joy

the other day i saw something stupid

the other day i saw true beauty

sometimes the weirdest wonderful things occur

sometimes i wonder why we bother

this pretty girl noticed me

this fucked up shit went down

often im inspired in the oddest way

and sometimes

even when the holy ghost himself

floats down from whereever he’s been watching

and whispers in my ear

tony

yo tony

dude bro!

i dont even hear

because im so obsessed with the noise of the mediocre

im so in tune with the fake

im keeping up with the wrong kardashians

im paying the wrong piper

as prince bowie and lemmy showed us there is an expiration date on our milk

we need to drink it all in, we need to begin the beguine, we need to follow the honey, we need to combat rock

we need to fish in the deep waters

we need to do what hasnt been done

we need to stop fighting the sun

we need to stop fighting

the son

we need to

once a year matt and emmauelle come to town for tacos

Posted on April 26, 2016 by tony

ben matt and busblog

and we eat them at Malo and drink the tasty margaritas and catch up and all is well

and in the morning i have a throbbing headache

and in the afternoon i want to die

but its worth it because all our friends are lovely like basart who took this pic

and ben who secretly paid the tab!

ben wondered if maybe this so called thing called Life could be a computer simulation

maybe we’re all droids

and as they were discussing the philosophy of Berkeley i said

i dont think this is a computer simulation. i dont think we are droids

because

when i first came to LA and first made out with this beautiful girl in the backseat of my grandmas cadillac

we were doing this and we were doing that

and i was thinking oh man im so lucky, look how beautiful this girl is, look how beautiful this view is, listen to how the radio station is stoking us with killer music

and then she said, tony, slap me, slap me right in the face

i said ?

she said, it’ll turn me so on

i said to the boys, aint no computer simulation i know of that would program a very sweet make out session that would climax, so to speak, in the pretty girl saying slap me and call me a ho

so screw you Bishop Berkeley

eight years ago today i saw prince at coachella

Posted on April 25, 2016 by tony

coachella i went with the wild and lovely suzie from canada. we had met once before in toronto and she said omg its tony pierce and promptly twisted both of my nipples through my cubs shirt.

i was press so i got vip and somehow we got another one for her. those were the days when wearing an indian headdress wasnt that big of a deal and before people could find Coachella sections at their local department store. you just wore fun things.

that year their two biggest headliners were Prince and Roger Waters. Waters did Dark Side all the way through and had an inflatable pig that accidentally flew away into the night and landed in some guy’s pool.

we partied with all these dudes from twitter and google and blogger and slept on the floor and drank and had a great time.

i even wrote a review about the sports car that Nissan lent us. and included pics of Suzie for scale.

suzie reminded me a lot of Linda from college: full of energy, definitely hippy sensibilities, and spent most of the time in her bikini.

she called me a carebear, but i later found out she didnt mean it as a compliment.

maybe the best moment was right after i took this picture we swung around behind us and noticed the singer of Aerosmith, Steven Tyler was sitting at a similar picnic table.

suzie let out a scream and ran over to him. his posse didnt know what to do, but bikini girls can pretty much do whatever they want. so he smiled as suzie told him how much she loved him and how her mom got her into them and la la la.

back then you didnt really take a lot of selfies with your phone. it wasnt a thing. you brought little “cameras” with you, or if you were fancy, big cameras.

i was not fancy so mine was little.

Joey Maloney was and still is very fancy so his was big, and not only that, but he had a photo pass so he took these pictures of many of the performers. i think he was doing it for LAist.

i remember saying to myself, this will probably be my last Coachella because seriously how could it get any better than this?

pretty sure i went about 4 more times since then.

what do you do when someone wont

Posted on April 25, 2016 by tony

hendrix i dont think i would have made a good parent because every now and then i end up making

agreements with people.

like i’ll say something like, fine you can do this, or i will give you that

but youve gotta do THIS ONE THING ONCE A WEEK

and after that doesnt come true i’ll say fine you’ve gotta do this one thing TWICE A WEEK

and that new negotiation is agreed to but then they dont do it and the first thing i do is get angry

because who am i to be fucking with? arent i a nice person? arent i being nice? am i just some asswipe? didnt you agree? if you didnt want to agree didnt you think you could say no, how about i do this other thing?

so when there is just ONE thing that i want, something i get zero benefit from, something that is beneficial pretty much only to that other person, and the agreement is not fulfilled, i get angry because i feel dumb i feel disrespected and i feel not useful in life.

i want to be an aid to mankind, someone who helped others, not someone who was insignificant that life woulda been exactly the same if i didnt exist. for sure i dont want to be dissed. but i feel dissed from time to time and maybe i shouldnt take these things personally but i do and everyone knows i do. if you see me get pissed off once that should clue you in. but how about you see me get pissed like five times. and then you still diss me? what is this a f u tony game? lets do the one thing we know will tick him off the most. something that will turn mr mellow into mr the opposite of mellow? simply because — who knows why?

i do not want to get to the point where i have to put my foot down in a dramatic way. i am the opposite of drama. i am mr chill. i am mr peace love rock n roll. i am mr jesus walked on the water. i am mr lets all try to do the right thing. which is why if i set up something im gonna set up something thats super easy to pull off. i want everyone to win. but most importantly i want you to win. then i win. but when ppl dont even fucking try and when they know what it does to my heart and when they know it turns me into the incredible hulk filled with rage thats when i say

if this agreement is not fulfilled one more time, i pity the fools.

prince doesnt have a star on the walk of fame

Posted on April 24, 2016 by tony

prince because life isnt fair and sometimes people make you pay for things that you really shouldnt have to pay for

and the hollywood walk of fame is one of those places where you have to pay

which is why people like donald trump have stars but perhaps the greatest guitarist of all doesnt

hung out with AJ yesterday hung out with Todd today watched hella tv

but still i tried to figure out Prince all weekend. was he insane? was he perfect? was he of this earth? could we actually do anything that he did?

i have no answers. im leaning towards he was a space alien. in the video of him jamming with tribe called quest he looks soooooo short. but his guitars never seem to be bigger than him like how they do with Angus. someone today said he may have had HIV for years and then stopped taking meds. but i dont know about that. he didnt do drugs and

then someone said he he may have killed himself. but i dont know about that neither because if he was gonna kill himself it would be the most beautiful and amazing suicide of all. it wouldnta happened in an elevator in the middle of the night, alone with no note.

same with the AIDS, wheres the note? wheres the doctors? wheres his church? yeah: WHERE IS HIS CHURCH? why havent we heard from them to talk about his life as a spiritual person?

whatever im sad. prince was amazing and now we dont have anyone even close like him around.

who can i complain to?

all i wanna talk about is prince all i think about is prince

Posted on April 22, 2016 by tony

city hall

yesterday at work i was a mess before i even got to work.

i was on the phone with my mom driving in to work when she learned about it and as i was driving i googled it and saw it was true,

i nearly stopped the car and turned around and went home but as prince embodied in his final performance at his home, the show must go on.

so i went in to work. it was super quiet. it’s been quiet but it was super quiet.

people would be nice and say hi how are you and i wanted to say Prince is dead how the f am i supposed to be?

but i smiled tried to tell jokes and i went on with my day which was pretty impossible

the only actual good i did there was we usually try to at least put a picture up if an Oscar winner or member dies and we try to say something nice but often it’s not as inspired as that one time.

so we all had a quickie little meeting and my boss decided to use prince’s Oscar win video as what we would put up and we did and near the end of the day i saw it had made it to Twitter Moments which is actually an accomplishment because EVERYTHING on twitter yesterday was about Prince

rightfully

so to make it through all of that was actually a little bit of a bright spot in an otherwise dark day

rosario dawson ubered a little. got home. couldnt sleep. tweeted. one of my tweets did super good. weird.

rosario dawson(!) retweeted it.

passed out.

today is friday and if i was a quitter or a call in sicker i would call in sick but im not sick im sad and gloomy and not at all sure why Prince died of the flu. and i hope he didnt have a drug issue no one knew about. because one reason out of millions that we loved Prince was because he was above all of those mortal things.

in many many ways he was holy.

still is.

still was.

now i really dont wanna go to work.

i nearly crashed the car when i was texted the news today

Posted on April 21, 2016 by tony

prince at the troubadour

then through most of the day i asked myself, what purpose is life>?

a guy cranks out so much music over the years. always on tour. always doing new things.

always wearing new clothes, new bands, new hairstyles, new passions

and then what: TMZ gets the scoop that youre dead?

thats why we do this? thats what happens to the best there was?

dude played like Hendrix, danced like James Brown, sang like… no one else

looked like no one else, acted like no one else, probably smelled like a freshly laundered unicorn

only guy in the world who could wear exactly the same clothes your girl was wearing

down to the shoes and the purse

and steal yr girl.

i saw him in san jose, staples, coachella, the forum and the troubadour

was better than even bruce because he never let ANYTHING tie him down to a structure.

only thing he HAD to do was play purple rain and guess what, at the Troub he didn’t play Purple Rain and people didnt give one f. except me because as ashley* said way back when im never satisfied and shes right.

for the exception of at the forum. he played for 55 hours. half of the audience left after the 18th encore. he had leased the building out for the entire month. he was on Prince Time, not our time. so he would play, make an exit and come back in 10 minutes and play more hits. it was a marvel. he was a marvel. he was the exception of all rules.

he was the maestro, the genius, the master and unlike many who are like that: he had soul for days.

soul is the reason for life.

how do we take care of our soul.

how do we tickle the souls of others.

and how do we stay sexy until our very last breath.

prince did it and i hope we never learn how he died because i wanna believe he just turned into a dove and flew away.

busblog

nothing in here is true

Monthly Archives: April 2016