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Disks in Rotation:
Books Lying
Open Soul-Devouring
Worry When I Grow Up:
Curse of the Day:
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Monday August 26, 2002 | ||
| Quote
of the Day A medium whose impact is so profound and so resolutely banal that is has almost single-handedly removed vulgarity from modern culture by making it the norm. -- James Twitchell, on TV |
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Daily
Update Sunday wasn't real eventful. Worked, it was hot, got 4 fish tacos on the way home, bonded with one of the Rubio's employees, went over to dad's later and ate a huge salad and watched the 25,000th edition of SportsCenter. Which was pretty lame. ESPN has been plugging it for months, making you think it would be the Eleventh Coming, or something along those lines. Was it? No. It was a normal one hour Sportscenter, with about 20 minutes of extra crap, and 10 minutes of extra commercials. The extra crap wasn't even very entertaining. Top five Sportscenter commercials ever, which would be great if they weren't still showing 2/3 of them every day. The presentation was annoying since they got Carson Daly to do them from the Mtv TRL studio, which I am proud to say I'd never seen before. And never will again, if this is anything to judge it by. The only thing happening is him standing and talking into a mike, with about 150 shrieking 15 y/o girls in bench seating on all sides. It was as annoying as the horny little banshees in the old Beatles @ Ed Sullivan show clips. What the hell goes in in the head (or wherever) of girls that age that motivates that insane screaming over whatever flavor of the month they are all charged up for? Yes, it's rhetorical. Other than the top 5 Sportscenter commercials ever, they had various minor celebrity actors, mostly TV show guys, talking about their favorite sports moment of all time. That was sort of cool, as it was from their personal lives, and most were therefore something their favorite team had done. I could have done without yet another embarrassing shot of Spike Lee wrapped around one of the Knicks like a wiener dog on a hot shin, but I suppose that's just inevitable with any East Coast-based sports program. That was basically it. No top 20 or 25 baseball or football or basketball or whatever plays of the last 20 years, no greatest sports moments of the last ______ years, no greatest Sportscenter moments, no best bloopers, etc. They should have cut down the normal day's highlights a lot more, like compressed them to about 30 minutes, and then done some damn best of stuff. Maybe even talked about who thinks up the SC commercials that they gave so much play to, or shown how a show is produced and edited, or other behind the scenes info. Instead they had a never-ending highlight package of three American League games, cutting needlessly back and forth between them to stretch it out even longer. Bleh. At least the few highlights they did show weren't ruined by excessive camera angle chopping, blaring inappropriate music, etc. Half the time their top plays of the day are unwatchable due to that sort of thing. The best thing on the whole show was the top 10 plays of the NFL Exhibition season, and only about 6 of those were actually any good, FFS. People love the show though, look at their junk selling on eBay.
Since there must be a rat update, here it is. They're furrier, and all crawling around, when given a chance. They aren't quite sentient yet; when I put my hand in they just crawl into or over it, rather than realizing it's something new, and stopping to sniff, as they'll be doing in a day or two. They are eating a little; I put some corn into their bed area and they made it go away, despite individual kernels being about the size of their heads. By
tomorrow, if not later today, they'll be really mobile and start
exploring their area of the cage, and from them on it's pretty much
spider monkey phase. Getting
good at crawling. I didn't
surf at all Sunday, so not all that much news. •
Here's the
top picture on Yahoo right now. I have no idea why, and I
can't quite get my head around it. A five year old got pregnant
and had a baby? That doesn't seem possible. Which I suppose
is why it's the top photo on Yahoo... •
More Britons than
ever want
to leave their country. The weather is a top reason, but the
food isn't cited, which just goes to show you can get used to eating
anything, if you're raised with it in your mouth?
Fifty-four percent of
Britons surveyed by pollsters YouGov for the Daily Telegraph newspaper
said they would like to settle abroad if they were free to do so. Similar
polls found just 42 percent wanted to emigrate in 1948 shortly after
World War II, and only 40 percent in 1975.
Of those wanting to
leave Britain behind, the United States was the most popular
destination followed by Australia. • A
truly
horrible article about AIDS devastating poor Chinese villages.
And they didn't even have any fun getting it.
Nearly
the entire adult population of some villages was infected almost
simultaneously in the 1990's as poor farmers flocked en masse to blood
collection stations whose unsterile practices introduced hefty doses
of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, directly into their veins. Now,
the victims including many married couples are falling ill and dying
almost in unison.
Some Chinese experts
estimate that selling blood was common in dozens of Henan Province's
counties before it was banned in the mid-90's, leaving at least a
million people infected with H.I.V. In some places, selling blood
served as a source of emergency income fast cash to fix a roof or pay
off a debt but in others, like Donghu, most adults sold blood at least
occasionally, and many sold it every week. Like many of the most
severely affected villages, Donghu was near a blood collection
station, one with government ties. Commercials on local television
assured villagers that selling their blood was safe. The
government is doing nothing to help them now, not surprisingly.
• News reports go in
cycles. One station runs something to death, and others pick up on
it, and pretty soon every channel and newspaper in the country is
beating the topic to death. This goes internationally also; for a
couple of months every time someone stubbed their toe in Israel it was
world news, then the moment passed and there hasn't been a story about
any bombings or tanks from there in weeks. The current frantic
media story in the US is missing kids. Several children have
vanished in recent months, missing white children = media attention, and the
media is going
berserk about it since that's what gets the ratings. Once
people get sick of it we'll suddenly hear nothing about any child
abductions. Crime statistics
advise there is no sharp increase in the numbers of children kidnapped
and killed; it's been 200 to 300 a year for the last decade or so. What's changed is
that there's a new electronic monster in our living rooms: 24-hour
television news, a phenomenon that succeeded in making the
disappearance and murder of a formerly anonymous congressional intern
into the biggest missing-persons case since Amelia Earhart. Reporters
and analysts made paydays, and for a time it seemed as if much of the
American conversation was all-Chandra-all-the-time. In fact, the Levy
case was such a going concern that it took acts of war against New
York and Washington to change the topic on much of talk radio and TV. The media to a large
extent creates their own news. A little more than 40
years ago, Walter Cronkite anchored a 15-minute national newscast;
unspectacular, regional crime rarely made the rundown. In 2002, news
and magazine programs are packed with sob-sister pulp. It is there
because suckers watch it. And the suckers are us. Meanwhile
politicians and bureaucrats are given free passes to hoodwink and
connive. Notebooks and cameras are busy elsewhere. The Van Dam family
connected with a publicist to manage coverage.
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One thing that's not exactly exciting to me at this point, but may be of interest to others are the Marines at the stadium. Most every Sunday, big groups of recruits, just out of boot camp, come to the Padre game. They are in a huge group, all in their camouflage uniforms, all sitting together. They have Drill Instructors with them, for the requisite shouting and keeping them in line, and they buy absolutely everything in sight. The guys (always male) are all the typical young recruits; 18 or 19 generally, and from all over the country. They've just finished basic training at Camp Pendleton, which is about 60 miles north of here, in Oceanside, and the game is the first chance they've had for non-military rations in 8 or 10 weeks, and the first chance they've had to spend money on anything in just as long. Predictably, they go nuts. Anything sweet, pizza, hot dogs, CrackerJack, ice cream, soda, nachos, etc. The guys probably go through $40 or more a piece on every sort of stadium food. Of course they have to run about 30 miles in full gear the next day, so they do pay for it, but at least for one day they have some fun. I was selling Frozen Lemonade yesterday, which comes in cups for $3.25, and is sort of a harder slurpee. You eat it with a spoon. The Marines didn't buy that much of it, they were mostly hitting the frozen Snickers and Big Kahunas (ice cream cookie sammich things), but there were still plenty of them who wanted my crap. And the other 7 guys selling frozen lemonade were all crowded into the same area also. Of the 17 loads I sold, probably 15.5 were to the Marines. They were three sections out of the entire stadium, and probably 600 out of 15,000 people. Yet they accounted for 90% of my sales, and it was probably much the same for the other guys. So aside from their ravenous eating habits, how are they? Well, I don't exactly get to know them in my five second interaction per sale, but they are as they've always been. Young, polite (they all say "yes sir"), quick with the money (all have their cash ready at hand, and often have exact change once they've burned up their initial $20s), and they don't bitch if you're blocking their view for a minute. Years ago I would get uptight about them, like it was this symbol of the evil military complex, what if they could smell my dissent! I don't give that a thought anymore; they're just a bunch of kids who signed up after high school, they're thrown together from all over the country, and are young and not too sure what they're going to do in life. Sorry, no profound philosophical insights there.
The funnier human interaction was after work Sunday, at Rubio's. It's a fast food place with Mexican food, mostly seafood. Their big item is the fish taco, which is a soft flour tortilla with two or three long fish sticks in it (batter deep fried strips of cod, I suspect), covered in shredded cabbage with some salsa and tarter sauce. They come wrapped up with a slice of lime, and I have those with the lime squeezed on top, and some hot salsa. If I bring them home I'll usually add some sour cream and maybe black lives. They are damn tasty. Rubio's also has tons of other stuff, shrimp burritos, quesadillas, carne asada burritos, combo platters, etc. It's quite tasty, much above the usual fast food. Right now they're having their semi-regular $.99 fish tacos, which is why I stopped by. I got four. The funny part was that while I was waiting (it's usually slow, the penalty for better quality food) I sat down and talked to one of the employees who was on his break. I'd seen him before working there, and he recognized me and asked me to sit. He was demolishing a huge platter, free food of course, and was startlingly-frank. I was eating a jalapeno, as I usually do while waiting for my food (they have a self-serve salsa bar, with hot and mild salsa, sliced limes, and a tub of jalapenos) and perhaps that impressed him. Most Mexican guys love that; they grow up eating really hot food and it's a matter of pride that they can do so, and most white people are wimpy about anything hot, so if you are white and can handle the hot stuff, they seem to feel a camaraderie. Also he was right in front and I was standing by him while I waited. He was really talkative and friendly, but in an odd way. First thing after I sit down; he's looking past me at the line by the door, and starts going off, "Damn, look at the titties on her!" I look and there's a woman, and she did indeed have breasts, but I wouldn't have given her a second look. Late 30's, bit plump, blonde, jeans, black t-shirt. I mean not ugly, but not on my radar. Not so with my new friend, who continued, "Man, she's a little bit old, but damn those titties! I'd just suck that one... mmm!" Keep in mind that we've known each other for upwards of 15 seconds at this point. He eventually got off of that topic, and talked about surfing, how sick he was of Rubio's food after eating it every single day forever, how he was going to head down to the beach and surf until dark as soon as he got off work in 15 minutes, and of course more about girls. "I met this girl at a party last week, and then she came in here the next day, in these tight little shorts. Goddamn I wanted to just stick my tongue up that pussy! You know, man? "Hey, you can put that jalapeno right on my tray here, I'm done. "Damn, look at those two! That's the best thing about working here, so many hot women come in." This time it was a pair of semi-cute girls, maybe 14 or 15. He wasn't exactly whispering this either, mind you. I guess if you're horny enough, every female is hot. Sort of like permanent beer goggles. I guess it's nice to see a guy with such enthusiasm for things, and I'm glad he's fixated on sex rather than, say... armed robbery, but I was left to wonder what he talked about with his friends? More of the same I guess, and he's just willing to share with almost total strangers. Or perhaps I look like a horny guy myself, so he felt he could open up. My fish tacos were at last ready, and he went back and got them and bagged them for me, when the cashier was busy with an order. We shook hands once again, I wished him happy surfing, and I was off. I wouldn't mind turning this into free food, since Rubio's is good, but sort of pricey, when they aren't having their 99 cent fish taco sales. Well, pricey for me, what with my Marine recruit-derived income. He would probably throw in something extra next time I come in, if he's on the register. I could eat more right now, honestly. Them fish tacos is damn tasty, 9am Monday morning or not. |
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