Pancake City

On the way to San Francisco, I saw a sign that said, “Magic Mountain Parkway Congested.” Except it wasn’t an electronic sign, or a sign with hinges that could easily be changed. It was a permanent sign. And sure enough, at 7:30 in the morning, with light traffic on the highway, a line of brake lights led to the exit for Magic Mountain Parkway.

Everyone assumes magic is fantastical, but to me, the ability to stay congested 24 hours a day is at least as wondrous as anything Gandalf or Nostradamus ever did. Okay, maybe not Gandalf. But it definitely trumps Siegfried and Roy.

I met my first L.A. character five minutes after arriving at the airport. In the lavatory was an elderly gentleman who, from all appearances, was trying out for the TV show, “How Far Can You Pee Away From The Urinal!” To his credit, he got the vast majority of his urine on the rose-scented bull’s-eye. A younger man, possibly his son, commented on his peeing prowess. I went into a stall.

I’m off to L.A. for two weeks. Although the weather there will be sunny and in the 70s every day, I truly hope that the weather here, with a little luck, consists of snowstorms and locusts.

I’ll probably update the site 2-3 times in the next two weeks. The updates may even be more frequent than they have been recently as I’ll have more sensory input than my monitor and Chocho, the squirrel that makes crow noises and made me stuff the rest of my grilled cheese sandwich in my mouth when I was eating on my front step yesterday.

I hope the Democratic Presidential candidates, after a respectful amount of time following the end of the war, start referring to Dubya as “the little George Bush”.

I had an image of a kid and Saddam Hussein having an insult contest at a playground…

KID: “Your mother is so stupid that she went to the Gap to fix her teeth.”
HUSSEIN: “Your mother is so stupid that I will slaughter your entire family and gas your village.”
KID: “Uh…”
HUSSEIN: “Saddam wins again!”

It’s not looking good for Boat Trip, the new Cuba Gooding Jr. movie about a man who accidentally goes on a gay cruise. (Gay sailboat I can believe, but a whole cruise?) You know how most movie ads put the name of the reviewer by his or her blurb about the movie? Boat Trip uses footnotes. Among the tiny-type reviewers: “Hula” (KHTS-FM San Diego), “Jah-T” (WUSL Philadelphia), and “Earl Dittman” (Wireless Magazines). Earl, who always loves a good gay boat movie, was quoted twice.

This is still better than a practice I saw several months ago, where a marketer tried to make his own copy look like a rave from a movie review by putting it in quotes. “You’ve got to see this movie!” That was it. Did the technique propel “Battlefield Earth” to a #1 hit? Only time will tell. (TIME: “No!”)

If I were a movie marketer, I’d find someone in America with the name Roger Ebert and pay him to give a good review. “What a great movie! I have two thumbs!”

The feature story in The Washington Post’s Weekend section is about the weekend of an active Washingtonian named Chad. The headline: “Hanging With Chad.”

Bad Post! Bad Post! No three-year-old puns!

Have you ever winced because you heard someone’s name and known the person must have been teased mercilessly for it in school? I just read a story about World Figure Skating Champ Irina Slutskaya.

She’s Russian though, so maybe the only person who recognized the innuendo was the strange American foreign exchange student who had few friends because he always giggled during roll call.

A North Carolina tobacco farmer is in a stand-off with police after driving his tractor into a pond on the Mall. Maybe he’s just a really bad driver and thought, “Well, now that I’m here…”

Two great gems have come from the story so far:
1. Name of the U.S. Park Police spokesman: Scott Fear.
2. A comment from Watson’s neighbor: “She believes Watson is ‘trying to make a point’ about the government’s tobacco policy. She says she believes Watson isn’t a crazy person, adding that he’s ‘just been pushed to the edge.’ “

If this doesn’t count as crazy in North Carolina, then what does? Driving into a pond and smoking menthols? And this isn’t spur of the moment craziness. This guy was going 55 tops driving up here in a rundown jeep with a tractor attached. He has been crazy at Denny’s, crazy at the Motel 6, crazy buying Breakfast Bites at 7-11… He should have abducted a couple teenagers along the way and combined two stories into one.

Eventually, the police are going to get tired of the standoff, toss him a turban, and shoot him.
“Hey, Akmed. Catch.”
“Akmed? Why are you calling me–uh oh.”

I wonder if James Gandolfini put his pinky to his lip when he asked HBO to up his salary.

Every article I’ve read detailing the difficulty of the U.N. inspectors’ task has mentioned the phrase, “Iraq is as big as California.” This is a fine analogy for Californians and the gifted and talented, but what about the rest of us unfamiliar with the intricacies of geography?

That’s why I’m suggesting reporters change the analogy to “Iraq is a large country–about the size of Bigassylvania.” Reporters should also compare Saddam Hussein to “Count Bigassula” and run a side-by-side profile with Count Chocula so no one gets Hussein’s acts of torture and cruelty confused with the dehydration of marshmallows.

My phone and DSL are back up. The phone repair guy came this morning, right after our water stopped working. I was hoping he was a Renaissance man and could flip his hat inside-out to the plumbing side, but he was a specialist. Everybody is a specialist nowadays.

Compared to my roommates, I have been inversely affected by our house troubles. I’m at home most of the day, so I was going crazy without the phone or Internet. My roommates have cell phones and Internet connection at work and school. On the other hand, I don’t have to shower.

Perhaps I’ll call the maintenance office to get our water fixed. Or perhaps I’ll play computer games for the next few days. Who can tell what will happen in this crazy world?

My DSL connection is still down. My phone, thinking this was some sort of technology fiesta, fried itself last night. I might as well stop shaving and become a hermit. Coincidentally, our phone stopped working after I called Verizon to see why they haven’t fixed our Internet connection yet. I get the picture, Verizon. Take your time! Some problems take an hour to fix. Some take a month. To-ma-to, to-mat-o. Just leave the stereo alone.

If you need to contact me, shout loudly.

My internet connection has been down for the past few days. It’s still down–I’m at the library. The delete key is disabled, thus stopping one of the biggest security holes in existence from being exploited by nefarious hackers. Fortunately, I cracked the system and found a “back door”: the backspace key.

The man next to me is breathing very heavily.