Celebrity in the Crowd

At last night's Knicks game, we saw this:

21st Century Sport

A brief history of polar fleece

1979: One of the first forms of polar fleece is created by Malden Mills.

1997: I think it's cool to wear polar fleece everywhere. Especially if it's from Lands End.

2002: Track jackets take over. Polar fleece is worn by engineering students and overly enthusiastic residential college supporters.

2009: The mere mention of polar fleece brings to mind cheap corporate giveaways, magazine subscription enticements, and late-30s soccer moms hiding their good and bad curves. I fall in love all over again.

21st Century Therapy

This One's For Manifest Density

Took just 1 game to see that we could compete
Some irritable bowlers nearly got beat
But then we're 2 and 2, mediocrity loomed
Our pinfall low was the season doomed?
Not by a long shot
Cause this long shot
Got hot, struck a lot
And connected the dots
With the pieces in place, our average kept climbing
Hit our peak late season, talk about timing
Now the playoffs are beckoning
Other teams face a reckoning
This is judgment day on the lanes
Let's terminate them slowly, so they don't feel the pain

21st Century Sex Diary of the Narrator of Notes From Underground

Day One:
6:09 a.m. Think about how sick I am.
6:10 a.m. Think about how wicked I am.
6:11 a.m. Think about calling CoCo.
9:00 a.m. Start work for the day with my miserable co-workers. I bet they're all having office romances. Meanwhile, my dick is bigger than all of their dicks combined, but they walk around the office like they're fucking John Holmes.
12:15 p.m. Eat lunch alone at my desk. Occasionally sneak a peek at the knees of the secretaries who sit near me. The knee is the most sexual part of the leg.
5:00 p.m. Watch Jim (with his pockmarked face) and Martin (with his hideous teeth) walk out to happy hour with Katherine, who has the best knees in the office. Consider masturbating at work.
11:30 p.m. Consider masturbating at home.

Day Two
5:46 a.m. Think about calling CoCo. Wonder if she'll stop by my apartment instead.
12:30 p.m. Go to Brooks Brothers and buy the second-cheapest suit.
6:37 p.m. Put on my new suit and pick up the phone to call CoCo. Dial 3 digits. Hang up.

Day Three
5:21 a.m. Wake up from dream about CoCo. Realize that I don't have her phone number. Too many girls named CoCo on Facebook. Spend 90 minutes looking at 200x200 profile photos.
11:57 a.m. Consider "accidentally" bumping into Katherine in the office. Figure out the perfect plan.
2:59 p.m. Katherine is walking past my desk. Time to act. I look away and pretend to type in an Excel formula.
5:18 p.m. Walk by CoCo's place. Stand outside for 15 minutes pretending to do something useful on my phone. Walk around the block while thinking about going inside. Walk home.
11:12 p.m. Read reviews of Fleshlight for an hour. Decide that it's probably not worth it.

Day Four
4:49 a.m. Think about friending every CoCo in New York on Facebook. Realize that Korean handjob masseuses probably aren't on Facebook.
4:50 a.m. Consider masturbating. Start typing in videob...delete that and go to Google Image search. Switch from strict to moderate filtering. Search for Sasha Grey. Get lots of photos from The Girlfriend Experience movie premiere.
4:54 a.m. Go back to sleep.
1:12 p.m. See old college classmate at local deli. Look down and try to walk away. Hear him say my name. Keep walking. Feel him put his hand on my shoulder. Agree to meet him and 3 other cretins for drinks the next day at 6.
10:25 p.m. Think about inviting CoCo out with my college classmates. Hang out in front of her massage parlor.

Day Five
4:21 a.m. Get home.
8:16 a.m. Practice in the bathroom mirror asking Katherine what she's doing this weekend.
2:44 p.m. Accidentally reply-all to company-wide email.
2:51 p.m. Overhear Katherine asking Martin, "Who's the guy that just sent that weird email? Does he work here?"
4:57 p.m. Watch Katherine walk right by me and leave for the weekend.
6:00 p.m. Arrive for drinks. Wait at the bar alone and make furtive eye contact with at least 3 women. Order no drinks.
7:00 p.m. Pretend to care about what my classmates have done since college. Actually care even more than I am pretending. Every one of them is both more successful and less intelligent than I am.
11:23 p.m. Suggest to everyone that we get massages.

Day Six
12:37 p.m. Wake up on CoCo's massage table. Tell her that she's a lousy masseuse who should have stayed in Korea and that New York will bring nothing but suffering to her and her family. Ask for her email address.
4:00 p.m. Call my only acquaintance, who is also my boss, and ask him to lend me money. Tell him it's to help me set up a home office. It's really to buy CoCo flowers and champagne.

Day Seven
3:35 a.m. Create a flirty someecard for CoCo. Send her a generic ecard from a mainstream site.
2:25 p.m. Visit massage parlor rating site and type up a bad review for CoCo. Delete it.
10:04 p.m. Regret not getting at least a handjob from CoCo.

Totals: Two aborted handjob massages; three aborted attempts at masturbation; five days of staring at knees; zero ejaculations

Going Down

The 2009 Inaugural Address of @GeorgeWallace

If George Wallace were still around during the Twitter age, I think that he might given a speech something like this:

People of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, distinguished guests, Google Reader users:

Before I begin my talk with you, I want to ask you for a few minutes patience while I say something that is on my heart: I want to thank those intrepid folks on the internet who first gave an anxious country boy his opportunity to discuss the negroes he despised in a more public way. I shall always owe a lot to those who gave me that first opportunity to tweet.

I will never forget the warm support and close loyalty from my followers, 304 of whom made #PappysMoonshine a trending topic for a full 4 hours last Christmas and the 1 little old lady who accidentally wrote @PappysMoonshine, by mistake, because she doesn't understand Twitter. Bless her heart.

I hope you'll forgive me these few moments of remembering...but I wanted them...and you...to know, that I shall never forget.

And I wish I could shake hands and thank all of you in the Twitterverse who have tweeted @ me, and those of you who have not, for I know you tweeted your honest convictions. And now, we must stand together and move the great world of Twitter forward.

This is the day of my confirmation as a Verified Account on Twitter. And on this day I feel a deep obligation to renew my pledges, my covenants with you, the people of the Twitterverse.

General Robert E. Lee said that "duty" is the sublimest word on the English language and I have come, increasingly, to realize what he meant. I SHALL do my duty to you, God helping, to every man, to every woman, yes, to every child who tweets. I shall fulfill my duty toward improving search and making sure you never see the fail whale so that no man shall ever have to refresh the page and no child shall even consider switching micro-blogging platforms.

Today I have stood, where once @aplusk stood, and taken an oath to my tweeters. It is very appropriate then that from this Home of the Hipsterocracy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Twitterverse, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us done, time and time again through history. Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon Twitter. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny...and I say...segregation today...segregation tomorrow...segregation forever.

The way that negroes use Twitter is disgusting and revealing. We will not sacrifice our children to any such type of hashtags--and you can write that down. The FCC could be better used guarding the safety of Foursquare, where it is even unsafe to check in without fear of being immediately surrounded by blipsters. I was safer on MySpace during the mid-2000s, than the people of the Twitterverse are when they tweet about Michael Jackson!

Let us send this message back to @ev by our representatives who are with us today...that from this day we are standing up, and the heel of tyranny does not fit the neck of an upright man...that we intend to take the offensive and carry our fight for freedom across the Twitterverse, wielding the balance of power we know we possess in the Twitterverse...that WE, not the insipid bloc of tweeters of some sections...will determine in the next list of recommended users, who shall have the most followers...That from this day, from this hour...from this minute...we give the word of a race of honor that we will tolerate their bad grammar and oversharing in our face no longer...and let those certain judges put that in their opium pipes of power and smoke it for what it is worth.

In united effort we were meant to live under the Twitter terms of service...and each race, within its own framework has the freedom to @reply, to hashtag, to post twitpics...to ask for and receive deserved help from others of separate racial stations. This is the great freedom of Twitter's founding fathers...but if we amalgamate into the one unit as advocated by the social media blogs, then the enrichment of our lives, the freedom for our development, is gone forever. We become, therefore, a mongrel unit of one under a single all powerful trending topic, and we stand for everything...and for nothing.

The true brotherhood of America, of respecting the separateness of others, and uniting in effort, has been so twisted and distorted from its original concept that there is a small wonder that hashtags like #bitchplease are winning the world.

We invite the negro citizens of the Twitterverse to work with us from their separate racial station, as we will work with them, to develop, to grow in individual freedom and enrichment. We want jobs and a good future for BOTH races, the functionally illiterate and the overly witty. There must be a place for both professional athletes and social media professionals...for we all have too much time on our hands.

I promise you that I will try to make you proud of my Verified Account status. I promise you that, as Twitter gives me certain special features, I will make sure that whites never have to see negro trending topics or @replies. A steady diet of tweets about bacon, technology, and self-referential humor will rule the day.

And my prayer is that the Father (@ev) who reigns above us will bless all the people of this great Twitterverse, both white and black.

I thank you.

Beneficent Bowllah

(Guest Blogger: The BENEFICENT Allah)

Berkeley, CA

Sometimes I feel like God is using his mouse to drag the arrow over my baldspot in a fictitious Youtube video of me in a convertible whilst he murmurs: "Aging, man, aging..."

This past week has not been one of those times. Katie lives in an idyllic Berkeley apartment surrounded by three seminaries ("to keep the Jews away!") with an office and a walk-in closet. Surrounded by feminine splendour, I have sprouted a perfect, mid-sized clitoris in hushed olive...when I was little, I thought that women don't have anything there, just missing-a-penis. Now I know...

To make me feel more manly, Katie (or somebody) left the kitchen stove's gas on. I entered the apartment - sniff sniff - "I smell gas!" which is silly since gas has no smell except the smell we give it. I opened the windows (which could have caused an explosion) and then I heroically strutted around shirtless all day long until I Googled the situation in the evening and realized my error: I should've ran out screaming "Gas, Gas!" and called P,G & E from across the street like a pussy.

No fire though. Today I went to Berkeley Bowl to fetch some discount Komboocha (for the missus! I don't drink that gayjuice...) Walking back I passed a hospice. I peeked inside: a man-nurse was sitting at the piano, playing a rink-a-dink rendition of Take me out to the Baall Game while a bald white guy drooled like he was meant to enjoy it. Next to him, a fat black woman in a wheelchair dismissively regarded the drooler's obligeance, which was nice.

Bootlegs turning out to be the originals

After reading a certain online profile last week and doing some research about Heathcliff the cat, I was surprised to discover that he actually predated Garfield! My world was flipped upside down. Growing up, I had always considered Heathcliff to be the bootleg, grungy version of Garfield, a low-end knockoff (with an amazing intro). Then today, while typing one of my favorite exclamations, "Heavens to Murgatroyd!", I looked up the spelling of it and found out that Snagglepuss predated the Pink Panther! What is going on here? I guess it never made total sense that the most popular necessarily had to be the original, but still...Are there other characters like this that y'all can think of?

The Masses (are they really thirsty and rejoicing due to this post?)

As a self-styled urban elite who surrounds himself with a similar crowd, the subjects of what "the masses" really like and what they really think about various issues are always coming up. In light of that, I would love to be in the mind of one of these "folks" from Oklahoma and know what it's really like, just for one second. Anything longer might make me nauseous.

Rain Myths

Since I will be in Seattle soon and I've heard it rains a lot there, I decided to do a little investigation. Turns out that I've been lied to. It only rains a lot in the late Fall and Winter!

Oh, and that April showers bring May flowers thing sure doesn't hold water in New York, where April showers just bring even MORE May showers.

Update (7/14/09):

Of course after I wrote this, the only overcast/rainy day we had in 10 Pacific Northwest days was in Seattle.

Total Meme

How many times have you heard about the big-shot Jewish [insert finance guy, lawyer, movie executive, etc...] who spends $10 million dollars on renting private jets to fly around until they run out of fuel, but who also earnestly fishes golf balls out of lakes? I mean enough already. We get the point, [insert long magazine article writer]. Jews are cheap. Always have been, always will be.

BeRiched Keyboard Cat

This was inevitable:

Koi Pond in Baltimore