Diskage:
DVD • Brotherhood of the Wolf
CD-ROM • Empty
CD Player
• Bang Tango - Psycho Cafe
• Mindfunk -  Mindfunk
• Guns 'n Roses - Use Your Illusion I
• Faster Pussycat - Wake Me When It's Over
• Band Tango - Dancin' on Coals

Books Lying Open
• The Books of Blood, Volume Two, Clive Barker

Soul-Devouring Worry
• Overly-enthusiastic alarm clocks.

When I Grow Up:
• Carrots will be renamed in onomatopoeia fashion.

Curse of the Day:
• May you be studded with cloves, in a festive effort to improve your aroma.

Oh, and the movie doesn't totally suck either, according to critics.  That's somewhat of an irrelevant issue, with proper marketing, (Episode One, for instance) but it never hurts.

Here's some news.  I'll faff a bit below, though I know not about what.  Inspiration is a bit lacking this evening.

• European nations are taking steps to not just ban, but actually criminalize what they define as hate speech on the internet.  This includes hyperlinks to sites, not just what you put on your own site.

The amendment bans "any written material, any image or any other representation of ideas or theories, which advocates, promotes or incites hatred, discrimination or violence, against any individual or group of individuals, based on race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin, as well as religion if used as pretext for any of these factors."

It also obliquely refers to the Holocaust, outlawing sites that deny, minimize, approve or justify crimes against humanity, particularly those that occurred during World War II.

So what the hell can you hate people for?  Is it still legal to hate stupid legislators for their thought-crime laws, laws as misguided as they are well-intentioned?  Being as I'm not in Europe, I guess so.

• In other, far more ridiculous European news, a German zookeeper was fired after they caught him killing and eating zoo animals.  Really.  He took them to court and got six months severance pay, since he was not given the six months termination notice as stated in his contract. As the article says, in a masterpiece of understatement:

Germany's laws make it extremely difficult for employers to fire workers.

The inability of companies to easily rid themselves of even the biggest idiots has to hurt overall productivity.  How do you get people to work hard if they can screw around with no fear of the consequences?

• Huge bacon sale coming to Northern California.

Officials last month began stretching "pig proof" fencing across the 60,645-acre island, the largest of the eight Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California. Once the 4,000 pigs are trapped inside the fences, they will be shot by contract hunters.

You can always count on PETA to inject some levity into events.

The program has drawn the ire of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which has suggested shooting the pigs with contraceptive darts to eradicate them over time.

• News about the seemingly-ridiculous restraints applied to captured terrorism suspects has come again.  Pretty much everyone thought it absurd that John Walker was tied in about 12 places and all but nailed to a stretcher, naked, in the transport back from Afghanistan.  These new photos are pretty ridiculous also, in the almost Rube Goldberg'esque straps on top of straps, with bonus points for hoods.  The military is of course looking into where the photos were leaked from, and saying nothing about how silly and inhuman their method of restraint is.  It's probably a wise strategy; say nothing about the people roped up like an Xmas tree atop a minivan.  Ignore that issue entirely. Don't even defend yourselves, just ignore it until it goes away, and if you have to, mention how they blew up the World Trade Center in a choked up voice.

While it's easy to think the dog kennels Al Quida now live in in Guantanamo Bay are bad, and these guys on the plane are ridiculous, consider how US or other foreign forces would be held if they were the captives?  If they weren't just killed outright, they'd be tortured and then killed, or locked into some tiny box or dungeon, with no hope of humane treatment.  None of which makes pictures like these any less silly.

The event began inauspiciously, when it turned out that I was one of only two vendors in the entire stadium.  A Chargers game has 80+ vendors, and used to have 150+ when they could get that many people to work at them. While a good sign for the amount of competition I'd have, one is simultaneously left wondering if everyone else knows something you don't.

I've never bothered to work at this event in past years, since the crowd is very small, like 7000 (compared to about 20k for a normal college f'ball game, or 60k for a small football game) but any crowd under 10,000 looks tiny; a scattering of isolated people in the massive stadium.

But this year I need the money, and I'm trying to get enough events to qualify for vacation and medical, so off I went.  Game time was 3pm, check in was 1:30, and by 2:30 there were probably 50 fans in the entire stadium.  Being as I can't really count on everyone to buy 3 or 4 things from me each, we'd like to see a slightly larger crowd. The weather was not helping, ugly, drizzling all day, though it wasn't cold.  And still isn't; 74 in my living room at 2am, with two windows open wide about 4 feet from the thermometer, and 87% humidity, which makes it feel warmer.  So just enough rain and clouds to make it dark and gloomy, but not actually cold.

As expected, the crowd was almost entirely black.  Probably 98%, with a few scattered white people, interracial couples or friends.  I didn't see any white people who were there in a group other than a bunch of sailors, who were a mixed batch, race and gender.  Many free tickets were given out to the military, and very few of them were used.

So a football game with two small black colleges, and almost entirely black fans.  It must have been fights and riots galore, right?  You racist pig.  There were zero problems.  No heckling drunks, no angry rival fan taunting, no pushing or shoving, nothing.  Very calm crowd, at least partially since it was wet and there weren't any sections more than 50% full, so everyone had elbow room and wasn't crowded in together.  Probably the calmest crowd I've ever seen for a football game. Lots of families, lots of kids, and I sold quite a bit of cotton candy. I got almost zero tips, less than usual, but you can't have everything.

One thing I can now safely report is that black people wear a lot of leather.  At least when attending an evening football game in the light rain.  At least 2/3 of the adults were in black leather coats, and often pants as well.  Not any weird styles of leather, no red or white or fringes or tassels or designer name jackets with logos or anything like that.  Just plain black leather.

White people do wear leather somewhat, but if this had been a white college crowd there would have been mostly wind breakers, ski jackets, cloth overcoats, sweaters, parkas, etc.  At most 5 or 10% leather, while it was 70% or more yesterday.  I guess team jackets are out of style, since I saw a few Chargers jackets, but no others anywhere.  Every team sells various leather jackets in their team style, but no one in the crowd last night had one, at least that I saw.

One other thing on leather jackets.  I'm sure designers spend days slaving over exactly where the lines go and individual pieces are joined together, and if the side should be one piece or a ribbed sort of thing, but I doubt anyone else notices.  At one point late in the game I saw a guy in a big black leather trenchcoat that had a little ledge half way down the back, like below the shoulder blades, and then the piece below it had a seam in the middle, running down the spine, while the sides were one long piece from shoulder to legs.  As I noticed that, solely because I was right behind him as he walked up the steps and I was waiting for someone to dig out $2.75, I noticed that I hadn't noticed it on anyone else.  I'd seen 500 or more leather jackets at point blank range by then, and couldn't have told you one detail of any of them.  High collar or low, thick or thin lapels, etc.  You begin to understand how I wear the same t-shirts and jeans for 5 years and never give a thought to upgrading.

The game itself was pretty boring, and the players looked like participants in a high school all star game. Not as big or fast as major college players, and far smaller and slower than the pros; you can really tell the difference in size/speed when you see them all in person.  Not that San Diego's major college football team is really any better; they laid another egg against an inferior team, managing just 2 field goals and a safety and losing 15-8.  They aren't 3-7 by accident, I assure you.  Horrible coaching and play-calling, as always.  At least in the last minute I saw.  The other team blitzes up the middle on every single play, and SDSU does a long, slow, involved pass pattern on every single play, SDSU gets sacked or the quarterback killed every single play. They are like some sort of physical simulation of a computer football game.  One with bad AI.  You just have to find the one defensive play that works 99% of the time, and then ride that horse to market.

The really inexplicable thing is that early in the year, when they were losing every game, they had these huge offensive outbursts.  Their QB threw for over 500 years two games in a row, and they still have the #1 and #3 receivers in the country, based almost entirely on their obscenely-large stats from a few early games.  And those were against better teams than they've lost miserably to the last two games.

This sort of thing is why I don't gamble.

To change the subject, I'm eating a can of Campbell's Vegetarian Vegetable (which is a bit redundant, if you think about it), yes, despite my endless anti-salt rant of a couple weeks past.  Anyway, this can was purchased recently, and I note that there's a new ingredient.  Chunks of tomato.  Stewed tomato style, but smaller chunks than that, fortunately.

The other night at the restaurant where my dad burned his fingers off, they gave us salsa and chips for the pre-entree time-killer.  The salsa was good, but we kept hitting this huge lumpy thing in the bottom.  Hoping it was like a human head, or half a rat, we eventually excavated enough of the salsa off to determine that it was a tomato.  Like a whole tomato, peeled, then softened by prolonged exposure to liquid, but clearly a tomato still. Big as a child's fist. We wondered if the blender missed it or it was their specialty or what; there was no way to eat it with thin dipping chips; you couldn't carve into it like a chunk of brie or much less pick the whole thing up on a chip.

So fortunately the soup wasn't stewed tomato vegetable for vegetarian vegetarians, but it has salsa-like chunks of tomato, when it didn't used to.

I love tomato raw; if someone has some from their garden I can eat them pretty much indefinitely.  Long enough to guarantee that later that night I'll catch up on my magazine reading while on a rather hard seat, if you catch my drift. And I like them cooked, in pasta sauce or tomato soup or ketchup, but I do not like whole tomatoes, or big chunks of them, cooked.  They're huge and mushy and intimidating.  I don't even like pasta sauce that's chunky.  Thick yes, chunky like they ground up a wino in the Prego, no.

I just felt like sharing. 

If you check out the music list for the day, I can't offer any excuse for that flagrant outburst of little-known semi-hair bands from the early 90's.  I put on the Mindfunk CD a couple of days ago in a moment of sentimental weakness, and actually enjoyed it.  Then with the articles about Axl skipping out on the GnR concert, I had to throw on Illusion I.  I still had NIN and old Metallica on it though, preserving some illusion of manhood for myself.

However tonight I was reading some metal news and somewhere saw a mention of Bang Tango.  I have two of their CDs from the early 90's, and hadn't thought of or listened to either of them in years and years.  However I've now dug them out and put them on and they aren't bad, though I suspect they'll get about one listen each and then go back on the bottom of the stack.

I do remember writing endlessly with these and other CDs of that time playing, back when I was in college and writing about a short story a week and forever working on one novel (pun not applicable) idea or other.  Each time I'd write about 50 pages, work up an outline, be excited thinking this would be the one; before gradually realizing that it wouldn't hold up over 400 pages and abandoning it, or truncating it into a short story.

However that's really no excuse for putting on such moldy oldies.  I'm disgusted with myself.  I didn't even bother to do a Band Names page for Bang Tango or Mindfunk, since they're too unknown/never popular/undeserving.  I guess I'll have to now though, as penance, if nothing else.

I've been mostly listening to WinAmp for weeks anyway, Tool and Audioslave and a bunch of misc Smashing Pumpkins and NIN and MM and other oddity remixes.  Which is why the CDs listed didn't change for a while

It also just occurred to me that I should really have the bands in my CD player on the nav bar linked to the Band Names entry for them.  I don't know how I didn't think of that long ago; it's such an obvious thing.  Pity there aren't any boobies involved or I could blame my penis; the usual male excuse for misbehavior.

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