[ onwards... ]

...and really, more sideways than upwards.



We now join this new blog, already in progress.

[ a one-question IQ test for your cat or small dog! ]

1) Can you, in the event of a sock being placed about your head up to the neck, free yourself from the sock?

So far, the Coalition for Creative & Hilarious Animal Abuse (a member of the Global Defense Dynamics Corporation family) has administered the test to three participants:

• Alice B. "Tonks" Dillon: failed (undocumented)
• Skittles Major: passed (pictured below)
• The Great American Novel "Charity" Giuliani-Khan: failed (basically the funniest thing we've ever seen)

Fig A: Skittles' attempts have ceased, signifying temporary victory for the inanimate sock. Skittles' other bouts with socks resulted in sucess, however.

Please submit all results (and appropriate documentation) to your local Global Defense Dynamics Corporation representative.

[ another wasted opportunity to perform a good deed ]

Sit a spell, my friends, and let me tell you why I have failed you all:

For the summer fashion season, the Smith Bros. clothing store in Bryn Mawr Plaza featured the gaudy, tasteless, ad-exec-notion-of-hip window promo pictured below:

Everything down to the lower-case "i"s planted this monstrosity in the same aesthetic as the 13-year-old girls it sought to woo into the store's catacombs of sassed-up mediocrity. It looks like the first half of a terribly-token screen name (e.g. XxBLiNGiNCHiKxX), and would have looked terrific on my bare, bare walls.

I conceived of a plan to remove it from the premises in a go-for-broke snag-and-haul-ass caper involving Josh as some manner of suitable distraction, and giggled in glee every time I passed by the storefront on my way to caffeination.

...then, when winter fashions mandated a change in the store's presentation, away it went, my window of opportunity for tripling my net fabulousness (also: obtaining a really, really silly police record) with it.

My deepest apologies to one and all.

Music: The Cure - To Wish Impossible Things. When choosing an album to cap off a fantastic night, do NOT make it Wish. Wish is sad, sad, sad.

[ some might consider this pornographic... ]

...but those folks have a disorder named after them, I imagine.

As the summer months faded into early September and school started again, I struggled to situated myself relative to the uncomfortable reality that I no longer had much legitimate claim to being oncampus, aside from The Band. One amazing Friday, Lewis and I drove down to the guitar center, and picked up the absolute beauty pictured below:

The body and neck are actually part of a single piece of deep, cherry-ish wood. The pickups are a hungry pair of Humbucker coils, though the guitar's signal strength doesn't quite compare to the ever-reliable keyboard. (I think the keyboard has lentils in it, at the moment.) The tone varies from a reedy, thin twang to a low, rumbly purr. The action is fast and pliant, with more flexibility out of the high strings than I'd consider healthy, frankly. (The high strings are where the instrument sings, by the by, though that's more to do with my lack of skill than the instrument's own properties). She's an Ibanez whose design/soul strives towards a Gibson, her own model name an obscurity.

...her name is Elise, and she's far more than I deserve, though I certainly don't plan on things staying that way.

Flush with the success of picking out a guitar that seemed to accommodate both my heavy inclinations towards the stylings of both My Bloody Valentine-mastermind Kevin Shields and U2-backbone The Edge, Lewis and I returned to Haverford nothing short of ecstatic. As it were, I'd slept for two hours that day, and hadn't had much more than a slice of pizza to eat.

...one party, two bottles of Lionshead, three shots of 101-proof Whisky, a glass of red wine, a disowned gin & tonic, and perhaps a brief ninety minutes later, I found myself fetal on a bandstand that had been set up for the next day's Cubano-American Pride Event, talking to Josh about the differences between how Java and C compile.

...about two minutes thereafter, the remnants of a seven-year, four-month vomit streak (in the form of an undigested slice of pizza) showered the grass by the bandstand.

Fucking crazy night, that.

Music: Daniel Lanois - Sonho Durado. I will teach myself to play this song to a high degree of tonal accuracy, if nothing else.

[ i've been driving / a mid-sized car... ]

Note the low, low price of regular-grade gas of $2.839 a gallon. I have just finished filling up my FUCKING HONDA ACCORD. The gods-among-men who engineered the '94 wagon would be devastated to know that it had ever cost $40 to fill it up.

To be fair, they'd be pretty displeased about my letting it run so empty it needed all 15 gallons of gas its tank could hold, but that's far more preventable, and far less-widespread in its geopolitical ramifications. Note that I'm amply visible in the reflection of the gas meter, and probably earned myself a few snide stares from other Sunoco patrons in misinterpretation of my particular brand of tomfoolery.

While my recourse is limited, it's not without its satisfaction: The featured picture is from a post-it affixed to the gas-door of a Ford Excursion, the most obese of Ford's SUV line.

I've seen these fuckers get bigger and dumber since the whole SUV trend began in earnest around 1998 or so; I was fuming all the while, mentally preparing myself for the sort of doomsday economic conditions we face at present. If it didn't involve an oil baron or twelve getting rich as sin, a nation's population growing insular and jingoist, and kids my age fucking dying in a goddamned war, I'd find myself pretty vindicated at the sight of some asshole kid reeling from an $80 or $90 gas station purchase. As it is, I can do little more than walk everywhere I need to go, stick post-it notes on offensive cars, and yell at them from the sidewalk like a streetcorner schizophrenic.

Music: Explosions In The Sky - Have You Passed Through This Night? Arguably, the low point on the album comes during the extended, monologue dramatique at the start of this song, much like the terribly-overwrought voice-acting in M83's "Car Crash Terror!" Almost unlistenable.

[ an open letter to Christian Leue ]

Dear Christian,

If you're going to leave pictures of you as a charmingly-goofy kid wearing a cream-coloured suit at a size appropriate for playing dress-up lying around your house unattended, please do not be surprised if said pictures wind their way onto your refrigerator, as well as the internet.

With Love and Squalor,

-z-

p.s. Bonusland headphone rockout candidshot!

Music: William Basinski - DLP 6.

[ ...we now return to "Why Amanda Rocks & She Found In Japan," already in progress: ]

Now, I realize that it's probably not too hard to get ahold of this stuff at Japanese-themed ethnic grocery stores in pretty much any urban center, but it's still (totally) sweet to have a pack that came from its motherland not as a faceless member of a retail box destined for a dusty, unclean-feeling shelf under the lazily-contemptuous eye of a shopkeeper, but as an individual bundle, selected specifically by a considerate soul to cater to my undeserving face and overdeveloped oral fixation. Did I mention it was caffeinated?

Behold the wonder of the crazy symbols gracing the peculiarly-appealing packaging.

Note not only the odd number of sticks (nine?) but also the "Hi Technical Excellent Taste And Flavor." I mentioned it was caffeinated, right? I haven't looked, but I'd be willing to wager that ThinkGeek sells it for sharply-inflated prices (a la Suncoast's exploitative vending of Pocky).

Anyone know how caffeinated it actually is?

Music: Fountains Of Wayne's "Maureen," a simplistic little gem from their new B-Side compilation.