being sick is funny. I spent the whole day sick. I slept most of the day. Why, i therefore wonder, am I TIRED NOW?

it is much more fun being bored when you get to complain about being bored with a lot of other people

as of a little after nine thirty today, I am officially unemployed. The temporary job did as temp jobs often do and ended. Lame lame lame, though much more of it would have totally melted my brain.
At least I can write more here.

Dean is pretty damn cool. I wonder what he would be like as president.

Well, this weekend, Dianna and I are taking care of Nicholas, the 9 month old son of Dianna's sister. This is no small task.
Further, monday is going to be my last day of work at NCS Pearson, so I am going to publish a zine to give to the coworkers who I want to impress and who I want to remember me, possibly be friends with me even in the real world.
Maybe I will put up a version of it on my internet, but it will take some help from friends.

So this may be a wait before you get any real (though not very specific, I did sign a confidentiality agreement) information on the kind of job I performed for the coolest company in the world! (sike!)

Sun Sep 23, 2001 10:26 am
Subject: When do Haloween tickets go on sale?

Note question.

I think that I can happily say that as the Devils leave us with very few
regrets.

What do I mean? When Frank Sinatra died I regretted having never seen him in
concert.
When the RCKNDY was shut down, I regretted missing whatever the last show was.
When the mother fucker cobain killed himself, I didn't walk down Queen Anne
Hill to the memorial thing at the Seattle Center, a 15 minute
walk. I watched it on TV news, ON TV!

But with the devils disbanding I am glad that I can say that so few regrets
remain.
I missed the Bumbershoot Makeup and Sword show. I never quite got around to
joining the fan club (I have a check written to the Murder City
Devils Fan Club from several years ago in an envelope with a 32 cent stamp
somewhere, but it was never sent.) I wasn't there for the first
show. I never got the Christmas single, and finally, I never found a way to
sneak in to the EMP show, (the untorn tickets are still in my
wallet.)

But on the whole, when I am old and I look back on my youth, and the devils
have a Velvet Underground, Germs or Stooges - esque postmortem
following many times the size of what they had in their time, and there is a
Rhino compilation album with a bunch of photographs I can look at
them and say, "I was at that show, I was at that show, I was at that show, I
knew her, I used to see that guy all the time..."

I've been to more devils shows than I can recall, some with crowds who
worshiped the band, some who were just discovering the band, and one
crowd that seemed totally uninterested and just wanted Shane McGowan to get his
drunk ass on the stage. I have seen them in tiny bars with
stages raised only a few inches, and at full scale festival scaffolding stages.
I have seen them while I was in states from stone cold
sobriety to really pretty damn drunk.

So while it is sad to see them go, the Murder City Devils will be just below
Christmas when I am old and when I am thinking of happy memories.

I mean, I like the strokes, but I have never FOLLOWED a band to canada...

I have never stood my underage ass outside of bars listening to a band...

I have never screamed along with every song while jumping around the stupid fucking pit for a band

and I have never seen a band so many times that I could never remember how many times I saw them

except the devils.

that's not to say that there is anything wrong with the strokes.

I miss the Murder City Devils. Though I am kind of glad they quit because had they stuck around for another six months they would have become the strokes.

More funny?

andrew found this.
it is the dullest blog in the world.


It would be friends with this

funny

I will tell you all about it soon, but tomorow marks the release of the final Murder City Devils album, the only major live album that I know of, for which I was in the audience, no less in the audience drunk and loud.

Happy Easter! Happy Passover!
these nice people have put a picture of frank sinatra on me which will be there when I die.

Matt has updated Antimuzak.com and it is really cool.

Dianna and I have This American Life Tour tickets for Portland! I am excited about that. I know I already wrote about it, but here is a photograph.

I have an appointment with some nice people who will permanently attach a picture of frank sinatra to my chest on Sunday, which is Easter.

"It seems that we are being boarded." Dianna said. I was assuming that the bus had stopped because the electrical wires and the big arms that reach up from the top of the bus had lost their connection to each other.
But two uniformed Seattle Police Department* officers boarded the bus, just as Dianna had warned.
"Yeah, there are two," the driver told the cops in a low, but-not-so-low-that-the-whole-bus-didn't-hear-him voice, and walked them to one young black man and one asian kid, maybe, though I seriously doubt it, maybe 18 years old.
"Can I see your transfer?" one of the Men In Blue asked. The first man took out his transfer instantly, with a bit of a smirk.
He asked the same question of the asian kid. He looked through his bag unable to find it.
"I can't find it."
"Either pay or get off!" one of the cops demanded.
So kid asked around, "Can I borrow 50 cents?"
A guy behind him, as baffled at the absurdity of what was going on as anyone else on the bus, offered him a dollar.
"No, I only need 50 cents."
The guy behind the kid offered the dollar again, and again the kid refused. He wasn't going to give the city a penny more than it deserved.
Someone else dug the half-dollar youth-fair out of his pocket and handed it to the kid.

The first man, the one who was quick to offer his transfer seemed amused.
"That shit was fucking racial profiling!" which it clearly was. Though he and the people around him were laughing. There was a certain smugness at being able to instantly proove the bus driver and his henchmen to be the assholes in the situation.

The kid was much less happy about it all. He resented paying twice for the bus, and further resented the idea that two fucking cops were needed to get 50 cents from him because the bus driver wouldn't say, "I'm sorry, sir, I didn't see your transfer."

Dianna and I got off at the same stop as the kid and his friends. As they left one of them said to the driver, "thanks a lot Big Brother," making an apt, if uncomfortably obvious comment on the state of a world and a city in which a seventeen year old who has lost his transfer, or worse may not have the 50 cents to cover the ride from downtown to capital hill is seen as a threat requiring two large police officers.

*I think that it was SPD, though logic would sugest that it may have been the Metro Transit Police.

These are my new glasses which I wear when I want to look like Hyde from the seventies show, Bill Gates of Richest Human ever fame, Hunter S. Thompson, or an old guy.

I understand no more than anyone, no more than this: at some level I believe this administration does not even know why it chose Iraq. I believe it cannot even remember the reasons. The reasons have changed so many times - at least in public - and make so little palpable sense that it is, of course, tempting to believe, as conspiracy theorists will always believe, that there is some hidden reason which is being kept from us. But to me, the more frightening possibility is this: what if no such reason exists? If there is indeed, no casus belli?

here is the page about the tour.

Dianna and I got tickets to the This American Life tour! We are going to greyhound down to Portland to see it! Yeay!

The other day, Dianna and I saw a man on the street yelling. He looked like Santa, but he was angry, we imagined drunk, and he had a copy of the bible wrapped in clear plastic.

I am sorry for the huge delay from one entry to the next these days. In the past I had endless siting around time to waste writing. Now I have work to attend, silver to polish, dirt to move... I no longer have the energy to do too very much interneting writing.

Nonetheless, I am on my way to opening up a Some Interesting Things Shoppe. I am begining my Anti-slogan program, whereby I will make buttons, possibly even t-shirts with non-slogans. In the past few months so many catchy slogans have been tossed around, "Bomb Sadam," "No War," "Shock and Awe," "Weapon's of Mass Destruction," "Iraqui Liberation," "Mad Cowboy Disease" et cetera, that real political debate and social commentary have become virtually non-existant, and possibly even irrelevant in the eyes of many people. So I am going to provide for you, the loyal Some Interesting Things reader, with the opportunity to express yourself through clothing and accessories that are not pre-literate, (well barely literate) in message. But don't think that my Anti-slogan program will be reserved to politics. I will have anti-slogan merchandise to respond to other obnoxios catch phrases like "show me your tits" and "mean people suck!"

More later.

I have turned off the war. I know that it seems like a stupid thing to do.
"But Joe, you need to be informed."
"Just because you oppose the war as one of the greatest acts of injustice and immorality to occur during your lifetime, it doesn't mean that by just not watching it anymore it will go away."
I know, I know. Still, I have my reasons.
Fox is notable for only a few things. It is owned by Rupert Merdoch, it brought us Married with Children, and it currently brings us Malcom in the Middle and THe Simpsons, it owns a right wing entertainment station / propoganda machine masquerading pathetically as a news station, and it is the home of the most morally reprehensable reality shows of all time.

Not long ago they produced something called "Who wants to Marry a Millionaire. It was a gross little pagent of women whoring themselves off to an unseen man who they had been promised was wealty. I watched the first five minutes in a daze as the sanctity of the institution of marrige and the three decade battle of feminism were bluntly urinated on. After that, I had to leave the room.




In the time that has followed they have given us Joe Millionaire, an even grosser little pagent of women whoreing themselves to a man with promised, though non-existant millions. Feminism was no longer being pissed on, a giant stream of bowel movements had replaced the now seemingly tame "Who wants to marry" tinkle.

These are only two of the shows that Fox has put out, seemingly because they are morally dispicable. I have to admit, I have almost always watched at least part of every one, from the exploitation of dwarves and animals to the deliberate destruction of happy couples.

But as I was turning "Married by America" off the other night for the first and last time, I realized something. This war is little, maybe even nothing more than the MOST revolting, cruel, morally unjustifyable Fox reality show ever presented.

The same sort of regressive, prepubecent thought that went in to "Man Versus Beast" and "Wife for Sale" has gone in to this war.

For a couple of years now, I have been saying that reality shows will become fights to the death within a short time, now I have been proven correct. That is where I have to draw the line. I have seen my episode. I have come to realize that I am only supporting advertising by watching this bullshit.

I asked Andrew if I should buy the great big green Atom and his Package backpatch, he said yes, I did. It is really cool, in fact here is a photo of it.
The problem with the purchase was the fact that I needed to further purchase a jacket on which to pin / sew it. So I went to Value Village today and found the perfect levi's vest. I also found a levi's jacket with a giant Metalica back patch, a giant Anthrax patch, a patch with the cover of master of puppets and a velvet slayer patch all sewn carefully on to it. I NEEDED to buy it right away.

Sorry for the total lapse in websiteupdates. It's the weekend though, so I should be able to think of some interesting things to post. If anyone has a scanner, there are some stupid little cartoons about my job that drew and that no one who doesn't work in my 1/4th of the office with me.
Most of those people would take offense at them anyway.
I'm looking forward to showing them off to a bunch of people (okay, one person) who won't have the first idea of what to make of them.
Talk to you soon.