Found myself unexpectedly home all day friday, as there was no work to be had.

Which just shows how cuckoo bananas my life is, when I want to work but can’t.

And so, in lieu of crying myself to sleep and counting all my remaining pennies, I went and downloaded the worst big-budget movies I could find, and initiated the Day Off Movie Marathon.

First up: The Happening.

Oy vey, such a wonderful film. It has been an age since I saw a film that was, from start to finish, horrible in every single way. The acting…well, it’s not acting. It was people who had memorized lines. No, wait, it Was acting. It was robots acting like people, famous people who are actors. It was delicious, that’s the best way to describe it. It was like rolling around in $240 worth of pudding, watching the tone-deaf performances. They were only surpassed by the actual script, which has people attempting to outrun the film’s villain: The Wind. Yes, the wind. And they do! They beat the wind!! Yay!!!!!!! -40 out of 10.

Next: The Incredible Hulk.

I liked when the Hulk beat things up and yelled. And when the Hulk made a sad face. And when the Hulk used brazilian ju-jitsu breathing to defeat his enemy, The Abomination. The rest was a bit dull. But better than the clusterfuck that was Ang Lee’s HULK.

Next: Wanted.

Is Angelina Jolie still attractive? I think, being the Jewish mother I am, she should eat more. She looks too skinny. Oh, and the movie made very little sense. The action scenes were kind of interesting. But mainly I’m worried for Ms. Jolie’s health.

I capped the day off with Doomsday, which can be summed up thusly: Take two tablespoons of The Road Warrior, three tablespoons of Escape From New York, one teaspoon Robin Hood, a dash of Gladiator, sprinkle some Dawn of the Dead, and place on top actress Rhona Mitra, for garnish. Mix vigorously. Do not watch.

I kept watching bad movies over the weekend, made my way through the Bourne Ultimatum (better than the second, not as good as the first) and half way through Speed Racer, which, literally, is a film made for retarded people. It is dumb and shiny and if you say it’s for children I would ask that you show me these children, that I may kill them, thus ensuring our planet’s future is safe from the criminally stupid.

Celebrated my birthday last week.

Wait, that’s wrong. I’ve been celebrating my birthday since last week, with plans to continue celebrating for at least another six days or so.

For the past five years I’ve had a bbq, but this year, turning the ripe old age of 31, the thought of organizing and coordinating and mingling was just a bit too much.

For I am seriously old now. All the classics now refer to me. Don’t trust anyone older than me. In Logan’s Run, I’d be turned to ash. I should have, by all rights, sold out by now.

Back aches, food don’t digest as fast, can’t remember a damned thing.

Today is the first monday of being 31. Jesus was walking the earth, gathering knowledge.

But that’s because the poor bastard didn’t have the internet. So I’m just gonna chill here at the laptop for awhile.

Every once in awhile I come across something that reminds me that everything just might be okay someday. Today it was this:

The power of what we don’t know is infinite.

Yesterday I met my friend Andrew for lunch at the copious cafeteria at the svelte, newly constructed New York Times building. It’s a soaring obelisk of a building that possesses a green design that apparently begs for scaling. I had a mixed green salad with a side of cottage cheese and some tuna for lunch. It sustained me nicely…

Whenever I go there to meet him for lunch I always spend five minutes or so staring in to the Moveable Type art installation that lives in the lobby. I stand there, lost in its algorithmic chance, digesting the informational chaos, completely transfixed. It’s an amazing work—you should check it out…

Every once in awhile one of the screens extracts some random nugget of news that reminds me that everything just might be fucked. Yesterday it was this: “Natural stupidity will always trump artificial intelligence.” And this was selected by a computer…

The power of what we do know is frightening.

Fair or not, there are practically no avenues in life in which pure physical obesity may garnish someone clout, wealth, fame, or sexual opulence. Even football players and Sumo wrestlers must possess some degree of athleticism and strength to succeed. The lone exception to this rule is hip hop, where corpulence is not only embraced and celebrated, but can be used as a platform to catapult one’s self in to mega stardom. Personally, I think it’s awesome. Even awesomer is that you get to select a rap moniker that directly communicates your heft to the masses for maximum impact, making sure that everyone knows you’re large and in charge…

Portly pioneers of this phenomenon include none other than Heavy D (a.k.a. the Overweight Lover), Chubb Rock, and, of course, The Fat Boys. They ate up the competition, and the fitness of their fatness forged the way for future hip hop heavyweights. And, as hip hop grew, so did some of its “biggest” stars. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, you hip hop heads of the blogosphere, who have no doubt “poured a l’il out” for fallen flablayered rhymesayers such as Big Pun and the colossal talent that was The Notorious B.I.G…

The one drawback to exploiting one’s size for fame is that you’re forever beholden to your tubby persona, and probably must take great efforts to maintain your weight. When you sign your record deal, you are likewise signing a deal with the devil’s food cake. It’s shape out or ship out, folks. As they say in the industry—No pain, no gain…

I recently got a first hand look at this dietary regimen upon a visit to the famous Katz’s Deli in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. There I was, slurping down some matzo ball soup, plunging my latkes in to apple sauce, and excitedly awaiting the arrival of my mustardy delicious pastrami on rye. I probably waited so long because a certain someone was hungrily devouring the majority of their meat supply nearby, and that certain someone was none other than one Fat Joe, draped in velvety purple and shaped like a Velveeta Grimace. He was a manatee of a man, and the way he was cramming down that sandwich he must be a butcher’s wet dream. His sausage link fingers were slathered in greasy flotsam, and his heaving mouth hole was at maximum meat capacity. His blinged out Terror Squad entourage seemed Lilliputian by comparison, and even the table seemed toylike before his mowing magnitude…

I was awed by his appetite, and inspired by his gluttonous dedication to his craft. While I know he did not climb the pop charts on cellulite alone (being able to rap helps too), watching him wolf down deli delights like that made me realize that he truly embodied the title of his last album, The Elephant in the Room. It also made me wonder what his Katz’s Deli rap song would be like, and I wondered if it would be like this:

My name’s Fat Joe and I’m not a fat Jew,
But eatin’ some pastrami is what I’m gonna do.
Puttin’ deli in my belly, ain’t a damn thing soy based,
You dudes who is skinny make me wanna say “Oi vei”!

My size 86 waist has a taste for kosher dishes,
So don’t 86 my order, just make haste with them knishes!
I shoulda wore a fuckin bib cuz grease be makin’ me unkempt,
All this meat be a mitzvah and it’s makin’ me ferclempt!

My chubby chasin’ peeps out there—feel free to add your own verses…

First and foremost, let it be known I bailed out before all this happened. I’ve never much enjoyed strip clubs, and in this economy I just couldn’t afford the expense.

But my friends could, and unfortunately they found that, this particular night, the price was far higher than expected.

For our friend’s birthday, the plan was dinner and stripper. Easy enough.

The sushi was delicious, then I dropped the crew off at Crazy Girls, made my way home for an early night.

And here’s where it all went sideways. A man got too frisky during a lapdance, got ejected. Drunkenly threatens patrons with a bottle. Is ushered to the foyer, where he gets in an argument with his friends. And is promptly pepper-sprayed.

Said pepper spray is carried on the air and affecting everyone in the club and forcing an impromptu evacuation.

After everyone gets a good dose of fresh air, folks go back in. Not too long later, a dancer who is obviously drunk beyond comprehension, FALLS off the pole.

And is immediately followed, not by another dancer, but by the owner’s son, who decides to turn the place into a karaoke joint, he and his friends singing along to the music as off-key and unpleasantly as possible. Patrons leave in droves, and thus the night is at an end.

During all this, the manager yells at his bartender, gets himself drunk, runs around the club checking patrons for obvious signs of criminal narcotic activity. Dancers openly complain about the shenanigans.

Now my question is this: how does this not happen every night? For a strip club located right off the Sunset Strip, how is this place not the most torrid scenes from Carlito’s Way on a daily basis? Everyone was shocked at how hyphy it was, but this is exactly what I want from a strip club. I would’ve been in the front row of the stage if I’d known this was what was in store.

Women wearing pasties and dancing as if dosed with quaaludes doesn’t do it for me. When it comes to seeing women nude, if I hear the music, I wanna dance. I see nudity, I’d very much like to have sex. Not sit there getting drunker and poorer.

But coked-up dudes getting maced? Strippers having pole malfunctions? The staff having Boogie Nights-style meltdowns?

This is the Hollywood I love.

I had the distinct pleasure of going golfing for the first time in my life this past weekend. I think my pal Andrew summed it up best for me, “This is awesome, no wonder why douche bags do it!”

(Note: I know many non-douche bags who golf.)

For those who’ve never golfed, let me try to put it in simple terms. Imagine spending an entire day in the most manicured park you’ve ever set foot it; no dog poop, broken glass or hypodermic needles to be found. The park is so big you need a go-kart to drive through it, and it’s encouraged that you drink while driving this go-kart. If you run out of beer, an old man will come by and take beer orders. He’ll magically appear 20 minutes later with a sack of suds. When you’re not driving through the quiet scenery, you’re drilling golf balls wherever they may go, in the vain attempt to get them near a hole that is roughly 6 city blocks from where you are. When you finally get close, skills from mini-golf come into play. If you’re golfing with us, you’ve downloaded Journey’s “Any Way You Want It” to play out of your phone speaker while you re-enact Caddy Shack on that final put. Make no mistake, I will be golfing again.

When I was wee, say about nine years old, I’d take the bus from Redding to Sacramento to visit my pops. These trips happened over the summer, were always hot, and were always a bit disconcerting for a young man fresh out of 2nd grade traveling alone. I never took Greyhound, always Trailways. Remember Trailways? I barely do…given my family’s economic situation, I can only guess they were a budget version of Greyhound, which is like saying a cheaper version of Thunderbird.

Anyway, around half way through the four hour trip, we’d stop at Sambo’s. Someone would usually befriend me on the bus and we’d eat together. Otherwise, I’d make like a man and belly up to the counter all by my little self. Either way, Sambo’s was always a welcome site. It meant, “I’m almost to daddy!” Talk about powerful conditioning.

The chain itself has a somewhat interesting history, one that I’m sure can be analyzed through the lens of race relations in the United States. Rather than bore you with my analysis, I’ll simply provide the Wiki entry for Sambo’s Restaurant and let you do the heavy lifting: Sambo’s is a restaurant, formerly an American restaurant chain, started in 1957 by Sam Battistone and Newell Bohnett. Though the name was taken from portions of the names of its founders, the chain soon found itself associated with The Story of Little Black Sambo. Battistone and Bohnett capitalized on the coincidence by decorating the walls of the restaurants with scenes from the book, including a dark-skinned boy and tigers.

Pretty rich so far, right? This is some great icing:

A kids club, Sambo’s Tiger Tamers (later called the Tiger Club), promoted the chain’s family image.

Wow. I may be old, but I’m not that old. Sambo’s proliferated throughout the country concurrently with Max Headroom. In other words, not exactly ancient history. Still waiting for that “dawning of the Age of Aquarius” because I promise you it’s not here yet.

Laura, Larissa and myself were sitting at the harbor, getting to know each other while sitting on the grass, just easy “breaking the ice” talk before we got down to taking some pictures.

All of a sudden we started to hear music coming from one of the boats, too loud to ignore. And damned if it wasn’t a cover of Tom Petty’s Last Dance for Mary Jane, a song we all thought an incredibly strange choice to cover. For the life of me I couldn’t place the band.

And it was getting louder. We laughed at the redneck implications of a houseboat owner blasting cover songs on a Sunday morning.

Then this yacht appeared. The three of us exploded in laughter as it all became clear.

THERE WAS A LIVE BAND ON THAT BOAT. A good twenty people were rocking out to an awful Tom Petty cover, on a Sunday morning, in the Oceanside (near san diego) harbor.

Laura: I wanna be on that boat.

Me: I wanna live on that boat. Forever.

After that, there was no chance the day was going to go any way but awesome.

Some time in the late 1960s, before even I was born, my dad was living in Marysville, California. If you don’t know Marysville, you’re not missing too much. In the 1850s, due to a gold rush boom, it was one of the biggest cities in California. Now, it’s not much more than dust and walnut shells. My pop, he was a reporter for the local paper, the Appeal Democrat. At the time, he was a real big Cutty Sark man. Big enough that he passed out drunk in bed and burned his house down. Fortunately, his trusty beagle got him up and out of there…a dog he later gave to the pound. Not a bad guy, mind you–just not a real dog lover.

So one day he walks into a bar in Marysville for his early afternoon fill. Problem is, he’d already had his fill at the bar next door. Across the bar he spies his good friend and fellow drunk, Joe Fulcher. Joe was (he’s got to be dead by now, Joe) a good guy. Never sober, always black. Meaning, he was a black man. And still is, if he’s alive (which I doubt, like I said). My dad sees Joe and hollers across the bar, “HEY YOU BIG NIGGER!” in the friendliest possible fashion. You see, Joe and my pops were just tight like that. Joe turns at the boisterous entrance line…and it’s not Joe. No, it’s a different black man. A bigger black man. A man who is decidedly NOT my father’s friend and who very much did not appreciate the greeting. Long story short, my dad got his ass kicked that day and learned a big lesson about the appropriateness of the public utterance of racially insensitive descriptors.

During my morning run yesterday I heard, coming from about midway up a tree, the most frightening sounds I can ever remember hitting my ears.

I could clearly make out the wail of a bird as it fought…something. The other animal’s howls were, well, they were not of this world. They were deep growls, preternatural is the only word that comes to mind. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it was that was so obviously raping that poor bird.

I stopped dead in my tracks, a safe distance away, my eyes glued to that tree as its leaves shook, a hidden struggle deep inside. Louder, more furious, my ears were actually aching at my attempt to place the sounds of that beast.

And it dawned on me that I was incredibly excited. For a brief moment I entertained the possibility that some kind of nightmare creature was in that tree, that I was soon to see something that shouldn’t, that I never entertained the possibility could, exist. A small werewolf, or some bear/warthog chimera.

The damn thing sounded fierce enough to tear me limb from limb, but it was enthralling.

And then it was over, and out from the tree popped…A FUCKING RACCOON?!?!?

I will never taunt those pretty-tailed bastards again. Because I tell you, the war cry of a raccoon will make you swallow your tongue and pee yourself, while crying and begging for your mama.

Not that I did that in the middle of the street. YOU CAN’T PROVE ANYTHING.

Now this is change we can all believe in…

Well, turns out the paranoid lefties were right on when they predicted Sarah Palin would skip the debates. Technically, she showed up, but not five minutes in she tosses out the gem, “I may not answer the questions the way the moderator or you (Joe Biden) want me to, but I’m going to tell the American people what they need to hear.” Or some such bullshit. In other words she’s not gonna debate, but instead stick to the talking points of her choosing, which is exactly what she did.

Sure, she made some verbal gaffes. Yeah, she said “nuc-u-lar” nineteen times. To be expected from a prime-time rookie. Her biggest fuck up?

“It’s toxic what’s happening. It’s toxic on Main Street and it’s affecting Wall Street.”

Damn, Sarah, I live three blocks from Main Street and while sometimes the trash cans overflow (New Years, especially), I’m awfully sorry that we’re a burden to y’all on Wall Street. I feel awful terrible about how us Main Streeters got the country into this $700 billion fiasco. Next time you’re in town, accept my hospitality as penance. I’ll sleep on the couch. You sleep in our bed for a bit, okay?

What really got to me was her bizarro eye winks, shoulder shrugs and facial twitches. As for her rhetoric? Everything to be expected. The Republicans are masterful with rhetoric. Substance doesn’t matter at all in this type of debate. Palin’s handlers knew this and due to this, she kept from veering off the tracks.

Biden? Nothing special. Had his ups and downs. Never drove the dagger deep, never showed more than slight flashes of fire and had his share of flubs. He played it very close, hoping Palin would fall on her sword, which she didn’t. His closing statement? Flatter than a pizza box. After it’s been crushed by a parade of tanks.

Coolest thing about the debate? Both camps, Dems and Repubs refuse to support same sex marriage. AWESOME TOWN! If you’re a homophobe, both parties are a real good pic. Both refuse to recognize gays as deserving of equal human rights. The Dems? They’re all about a separate but equal policy. I ASK YOU GAY DEMOCRATS, how does that feel? Your own party hates you. Yet, you won’t go to a third party, one that embraces you and fights for your rights. That’s some serious self-loathing going on. That said, your only choice is to vote for Palin. She believes you can pray your gay away.

So, who won the debate? I’m thinkin’ middle ‘merkins think she done real good. Me, well all I can say is, regardless of Palin’s utter inanity, Biden didn’t do his camp any favors. He should have just called her a dumb cunt and be done with it.

My co-workers developed a handy drinking game to go along with the debates. I, for one, am seriously considering a 40 (what else is new). As the original author of this game put it: “add, subtract, modify as you choose, and drink away any anxieties you might have about the performance of your candidate of choice.”

Drink if there is any mention of
• Wasilla
• Scranton
• Earmark
• Ted Kennedy
• Shoring up the economy
• Pork barrel
• Joe Six Pack
• “Should I have the honor” or any variation thereof
• Bridge to Nowhere
• Main Street
• Small town
• Media elite

Finish your beer if there is any mention of
• Orgy
• eBay

Debate Scoring Rules

• Deduct one point from Joe Biden for every time he mentions getting America working again, but add three points for every reference to liberalised trade or immigration as a way of doing so.

• Deduct one point from Sarah Palin for every time she mentions shrinking the size of government, but add three points for every subsidy, programme or regulatory agency she names for cutting.

• Deduct .01 points for every time I smack my own forehead in disbelief, to a maximum of five points each.

• Add five points to either candidate for explaining the financial crisis without naming culprits.

• Subtract eleventy-seven points for listing culprits without naming ordinary Americans living above their means.

• Deduct one point from Joe Biden each time he says “laissez-faire”.

• Deduct one point from Sarah Palin each time she says “liberal media”.

• Add one point to Sarah Palin for saying “moose.”

• Subtract one point from Joe Biden for every answer that runs longer than my attention span. Triple penalty if my dog leaves the room.

• Subtract one point from Sarah Palin every time she starts a sentence with “Ya know” and ends it with something I doubt.

• Subtract fifty points from PBS if I hear Judy Garland singing Meet Me In Saint Louie and add a hundred for W.C. Handy’s St. Louis Blues.