31 August 2010

I am the poor man's J.K. Simmons



















I mean, look at these photos. The resemblance is uncanny! Of course, that could mean I'm actually the poor man's Vern Schillinger, but it makes me shudder just to think that, so let's think about something else now. Chocolate cake! Ferris wheels! Prison rape!

Thinking about something else didn't work. Sorry.

14 July 2010

Cat Foes! The kung fu cat movie

I had this idea for a kung fu cat movie, but it was like, all that writing and training rats and putting pants on cats and general doing stuff would be so exhausting, am I right?, so I just made a poster for it.

14 June 2010

That's a Lot of Weed, S Robertson Blvd!

Los Angeles has a lot of medical marijuana dispensaries. There must be a lot of sick people in town.

Recently the City Attorney's office released a list of hundreds of pot stores that have to shut down. California voters approved medical marijuana sales a few years ago, the dispensaries grew like weeds (hydroponic weeds, even), and then the City Council freaked out a little. (The Councilors may have a panic or anxiety disorder; perhaps a cannibis sativa Rx might help?)

I took some pics of green cross stores near my house. I wanted to catch them before they disappear; also, there are a lot of them.


Kind for Cures is on Expedition Blvd. Guess which fast food joint this building used to house? The new K.F.C. is now closed, though apparently they are challenging their close order. No chicken AND no medical marijuana? No fair!

Let's head over to S Robertson Blvd just north of the on-ramp to the 10 freeway, shall we?


This place is on South Robertson Blvd, a very pot-friendly stretch of road. This one was on the close list. It's about 2 blocks from a high school. That nail store next door doesn't exist (yet?) -- it was a flooring store for many years, now it's empty. So an empty store on one side and a Domino's Pizza on the other. A Domino's, really? Is this a real thing or some kind of post-mod sidewalk art installation?

This one's a few blocks north of B.H.H.R. I didn't see this one on the close list. Pick up your pot, then get some empanadas. An empty storefront on one side and a munchies place on the other. I'm sensing a pattern.


Keep going 1-1/2 blocks north and you can catch a sermon at Temple 420. I suppose you could make a spiritual day of it and also attend the synagogue to the right. (According to the internet, there have been some legal issues with these guys, so the Temple may be empty.) Tara's Tease t-shirt place and Knesset Isreal Congregation on one side, PT Cruiser on the other. Again, are we being punk'd?

Okay, Robertson, we get it: you like pot.

Of course, you can always try to dull your pain the old fashioned and unquestionably legal way. This store shares a block with B.H.H.R. Note that Dave's Liquor wants to be very clear in their signage about what they sell. If you for one second think there's no liquor in this place, you are dead wrong. No prescription necessary.

Thank goodness the kids at Alexander Hamilton Senior High at the foot of South Robertson have plenty of fast food, medical marijuana, tattoo and liquor outlets to choose from on the way to and from school! We wouldn't want them to be all about book learning.

29 May 2010

Clerihew for Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry
Makes buildings kind of scary.
He draws walls that curve;
That takes a lot of nerve.

24 April 2010

It is not possible to put one's hands any further into one's pockets


Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim first base coach Alfredo Griffin demonstrates the limits of man's back pocket hand-stuffing powers.

14 April 2010

A dactyl followed by a spondee = Instant Fame!

Check out the Aleister Crowley entry at Wikipedia -- don't check it out if you're from a small Southern town that already ostracizes you for wearing black and being "weird" and might convict you of child murders "Paradise Lost"-style by using your reading choices as proof of your degeneracy -- but the rest of you, check it out and find out the secret to Fame!

I had read in some book or other that the most favourable name for becoming famous was one consisting of a dactyl followed by a spondee, as at the end of a hexameter: like Jeremy Taylor. Aleister Crowley fulfilled these conditions and Aleister is the Gaelic form of Alexander. To adopt it would satisfy my romantic ideals. The atrocious spelling A-L-E-I-S-T-E-R was suggested as the correct form by Cousin Gregor, who ought to have known better. In any case, A-L-A-I-S-D-A-I-R makes a very bad dactyl. For these reasons I saddled myself with my present nom-de-guerre—I can't say that I feel sure that I facilitated the process of becoming famous. I should doubtless have done so, whatever name I had chosen.
So that's what I've been doing wrong -- no dactyl + nada spondee = total obscurity.

From now on, call me Court-e-nay Lam-bo.

22 March 2010

The Glamorous "Life" on the Discovery Channel

There was a Fergie song a few years back called "Glamorous" in which she spells the word glamorous and the refers to it as "the flossy". Perhaps this is her Gramma's friend Flossy, a hip elderly lady who wears bangles and bedazzled pants suits? Alas, no; flossy means "flashy, showy", as the Urban Dictionary will tell anyone who asks.

So Fergie tells us that her life appears flossy, but that she still eats at Taco Bell. She's a regular person with a seemingly glamorous job.

I watched two hours of the "Life" series on the Discovery Channel last night, and it made life in the wild seem extremely flossy. It was one stunning beauty shot after another of reptiles with Stretch Armstrong tongues, a female ostrich running (unsuccessfully) for her life, tiny frogs hurtling down cliffs, and fish, basilisks and Western Grebes dancing on water (not together, though they'd make a great inter-species dance company; probably get a lot of grants with that angle).

Anyone who's ever gone camping or walked within two hundred feet of a standing body of water swarming with mosquitoes can tell you that life is not flossy. "Life" is, but life isn't. It smells. It's dirty. It eats at Taco Bell. Anywhere there have been people -- and if you are there and if camera crews are there, then there have been other people there -- there are people-remnants, plastic wrappers or bits of toilet paper or initials inked on rocks or rock cairns or (and especially) footprints. To take pictures of the wild, you might have to frame out your Aunt Flossy (she booked the Alaska trip with you, of course; she collects pictures of wildlife and flirts with the young guides).

"Life" makes everything clean and precise. It's fascinating and informative and I very much enjoyed it, but it's also a Glamour Shots version of these creatures. They're wearing too much lipstick and posing with tilted heads in front of a pastel background, which is to say that the lighting is always very bright, the shots are very sharp, and the narrative is very clear. Nothing is chaotic or frightening or dull or matter-of-fact. Animals running for their lives look picturesque. You cannot feel the terror and the bursts of cortisone and smell the dust and sense the hot breath. The animals are presented in extreme closeups and in slow-mo. Slow-mo makes everyone look cool. It's the cheapest shortcut to glamour; it makes Steve Buscemi look like Steve McQueen. The whole thing is like the Wild West as interpreted by Sergio Leone: beautiful, visually and aurally precise and striking, and utterly untrue to life.

Amidst all the Oprah-narrated HD beauty, the most striking bits of the show are the few minutes at the end of the program when you see the crew on site shooting these incredible images. This is one scene: a cluster of cameramen perched for weeks next to a dusty, muddy waterhole where a poisoned water buffalo is mercilessly harassed by a pack of taunting Komodo Dragons. The cameramen stalk both the buffalo and the dragons; they stand and move the camera when the dragons run off. They watch the water buffalo get bitten by a Komodo Dragon, and they know what the buffalo does not; that he's been fatally poisoned and will linger for weeks. They settle down next to the Komodo dragons to watch him weaken and die.

22 February 2010

Someone egged our house. Maybe a bird? Or a Bird?

 

I was sitting on the couch watching television while a rainstorm was doing its business outside when suddenly I heard a scratching/sqooshing sound on the bay window. It sounded like a cat trying to get in out of the rain, or maybe like one of those leafless trees with finger-like branches that comes alive and doesn't like the rain and wants you to let it in so it can shuffle around your house all creepy-like, crying about photosynthesis or something equally boring to the non-foliagic.

But when I checked, all I saw was slime. Yellowish slime. About three or four streaky blobs that landed on the top slanted panes of our bay window.

Someone egged our house! At 9pm at night! What's that all about?

I tried to think of which of my enemies would take out his aggression in an ovoid manner. 

But I also had to consider that the eggs landed on the top of the window, which is behind a tree, which is higher than the sidewalk by about two feet. So in order to land such accurate egg bombs, my enemy would need a wicked good sky hook.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar egged my house!

Was he wearing goggles when he did it?

That's what I thought for a day or two. I was preparing my KAJ revenge (very complicated: involved two ladders and Larry Bird) when I realized that there was another explanation, and from a far more likely and insidious enemy.

Birds (not Larry Bird) sometimes put nests in our gutters. Any unhatched eggs would still be lying there, and the unusually long and fierce rainstorms we had could very well have flung them out of the gutter and straight down onto our window.

Especially if a bird carefully balanced them there, practical joke-style, and waited until I went out to clean the windows to dump them right on my noggin.

But the joke's on you, birds, because I NEVER clean the windows!

And I know birds hate me because they think that just because I live with cats I must take their side on every issue (which is totally not true; e.g. the cats are all wrong on health care). And just because I eat birds and eggs must mean I have some crazy animosity toward the feathered world. I don't.

So...well played, birds. You forced me to clean the window.