January 2009
34 posts
Some Stuff I've Been Up To, Pt. 1: SWF at Trivia
A week ago I went back to Lawrence Unviersity in Appleton, WI, where I went to college, with the LOST band, aka Sonic Weapon Fence, and played a show. The show was part of the Great Midwest Trivia Contest, an anual event where teams of students, alumni, town-ys, and habitual triva players answers obscure triva questions over the phone for 50 hours.
Most of the questions are just very obscure and...
Brad DeLong - Some Perspective on Crisis →
All around smart man Brad DeLong explains why we should be upbeat and consider ourselves (Middle to Upper class Americans) incredibly well off, even when things seem to be going to shit, economically. Choice quote:
“Our goods are not only plentiful but cheap. I am a book addict. Yet even I am fighting hard to spend as great a share of my income on books as Adam Smith did in his day. Back...
Shock Doctrine, except it makes sense →
Its just like Naomi Klein predicted (governments waiting for economic crises so they can impose unpopular free market policies), except, you know, the exact opposite.
The Most Incredible Thing I'll See All Day →
Check out the TEDTalk, and get about half way through. This sort of thing is incredible and makes me want to get back to school and do something astounding like this. If I don’t go to Germany next year, this is my plan.
WatchMy honest train of thought when watching this video: Open Movie: Oh, its mislabeled, thats really Zach Galifianakis. Start playing: Oh, I can see how thats the Walk the Line guy. Hear him talking about making a hip hop album: No, this has to be a Zach Galifianakis prank.
America is a weird and great place
I’m at Chipotle, a chain resturant run by mcdonalds, one of the most successful international corporations I know of. And they’re playing Public Enemy’s “Dont believe the hype”, a song by “Public Enemy,” a radical hip hop group, againts, among other things, international corporations. Things are so weird it makes me grin sometimes
Auto-Tuned Baby →
I don’t know how to reblog posts from tumblr’s that were posted before I started following, so here is a link. Hillarious!
What was your first job?
annicka:
oliviaisferosch:
alohanico:
blocksonblox:
thephenthouse:
Working in a fish market off the docks of Long Beach Island, NJ. You?
Score keeper at little league baseball games
I worked as a cashier at an organic grocery store.
Me: I was a Spanish tutor (ha!) and quickly thereafter worked in a coffee shop (still one of my favourite jobs I had). I think I made a whopping...
Regulatory Capture In Action →
This seems so brazen, but its no different than when labor unions lobby congress to make sure that a certain portion of government contracts are given out to union firms, or when teachers unions campaign against voucher programs, or when green energy companies go to the government and ask congress to mandate a certian amout of electricty be made from their products, or when HI-NRG groups try to...
Something Fallout 3 has in common with Jr High
I really like the Fallout series of games. They’re sort of like Mad Max or The Road or any of those kinds of pop-post apolcalypitc fantasies. In Fallout you’re someone who survived a nuclear war by living in a Vault, which is basically what you’d get if the federal goverment privitized NORAD and condo develoeprs turned it into luxury suites. And at some point you leave the...
Looking for A New (New) Apartment
Yesterday I got an envelope in the mail from my rental company. It had a copy of my lease in there (good), some envelopes in there I could use to send my monthly rent check in (better) and a never-before-seen-by-me “Rider” addition to the contract (WTF!). The rider said that my rent would be going up anther $50 during the summer to pay for the cost of people using their air...
Lunch Today and Everyday I'm not Home
Today I had to visit a clients spot, so I couldn’t eat at home.
Biden, Alpha and Omega
This comic was, and is my final word on Biden. And thats all I have to say on that.
annicka:
so i have the CNN Live feed on in the background, and for the past 5 minutes they’ve literally been reading Facebook, with shots of a computer screen with a Facebook news feed open. Seriously? CNN must be desperate for filler. GOD. The only thing worse than obsessively watching people update their Facebook statuses all day is watching CNN obsessively watch people update their Facebook...
Sonic Weapon Fence (LOST) Show Coming Up!
Something few people know about me is that I am in a LOST themed rock band called Sonic Weapon Fence. The other members of the band are Patrick Ehlers and Pete Pfarr, and given the confines of the premiss, I think our music is top notch.
We have two performances coming up. First, we’re going to Appleton, WI, where I went to college, to play (fingers crossed) at the Firefly lounge. The...
Trip To Indiana
Today I visited a friend of mine from Lawrence in South Bend, IN. Its a fine place, but not anything more than that.
Some weird things happened to me there though. First, I couldn’t find $2 that I swore were in my wallet.
AND THEN, as if my day couldn’t get any weirder, on the train ride home, the 9:40 from South Bend, I was reading when I felt a huge thump. The train came to a...
Hot ChipTunes
Chiptunes on the internet are like books in the library: they’re free, as good as or better than the alternatives people usually take advantage of, and are generally under utilized. Here is some tip-top tunes that everyone has missed out on, all courtesy of 8bitpeoples.com:
Nullsleep - Unconditional Accelleration
Random - Bad Joke EP
Xinon VS Sabrepulse - Realization
Chilly Breakfast At Golden Cup
This morning I had breakfast at “The Golden Cup” on Clark by Fullerton. Yelp makes it sound like a fine, if unremarkable, dinner. Like what Cozy Corner is to Logan Square. One thing Yelp doesn’t mention about “The Golden Cup” is that it is cold. And this is a significant oversight on Yelp’s part, because this morning “The Golden Cup” is cold. ...
What about the voice of Geddy Lee...
Its important that everyone check out this video.
That drum kit (see 3:15) goes so far beyond anything that could be believable parody. Its like when some annoying guy at a party thinks they’re delivering biting satire when they say something like “I thought all Republicans liked killing the poor.” Except in this case, that guy actually might have a 100+ piece drum kit.
...
Pete 1, World 0
Sup Bitches. Check out that image. Thats an A grade, Pete-Made, horizontally laid, not-paid Egg McMuffin. It tastes awesome. I don’t have a oven or stove or kitchen sink, so I had to be crafty. I made the egg in the microwave, toasted the English Muffin in the George Foreman, and over all it works very well. However, I did learn some important lessons in the process:
When you buy...
Fitness
Today I decided to start the “one hundred push ups” challenege. Its a 6 week program where you increase the number of push ups you do three times a week, till you wind up at one hundred. Step one is the assessment. I was able to complete 11 pushups which isn’t alltogether terrible. Its not enough to join the army (would require me to complete 43 pushups) but is enough for me...
Another Reason Naomi Klein is a Chode
I was thinking about Naomi Klein today. That doesn’t happen often. Naomi Klein is not an honest person. Her interviews are always filled with the sorts of evasive retoric that high schoolers used to impress their peers and annoy their teachers. In a debate with Alan Greenspan, she responds to his charge that the types of protectionist measures she advocates lead to inflation and...
Lincoln Perk
Today I’m working out of a coffee shop called “Lincoln Perk.” Its a fine looking place, the coffee isn’t posion, they have wifi, and no one has beaten me with a chair. I’ll probably come back. But here are three noteable things about the place.
One is that they have only one celebrity named coffee drink. Its called “The Tony Montana,” its advertised...
I'm finally Post-Op
I wish I could say that this will be my last butt posting, but I can’t. Like all great writers, I can only write what I know, and right know I know butt pain. When that fades I’ll move on to writting about the other things in my life. The spiders that taunt me from the cieling in my room, the guy at 7-11 who talks so loudly about Buddhism on a Steven Seagal level without realizing that...
Finished Two Books
I still have the anal fissure I wrote about in the last post. Its still very painful (though actually a bit less so today) so I’ve scheduled the next batch of treatments for Thursday morning. At 7:00AM I’m going to the in-patient section of the hospital to have botox injected into my butt. The botox is a form of chemical sphincterotomy. The botox makes the muscle unable to contract...
A Painful Anal Week (Not Sex)
Intro Note I’m writing this post under the influence of prescription painkillers, a headache, nausea inducing cream that contains nitro glycerin, and a whole lot of pain. It will likely not be my most lucid post. However, for anyone thats ever held a secret grudge against me, it will likely be my most entertaining post. And, for my secretly sadomasochistic friends (yes, I noticed), this...
