So I’m now fully retired again; I think this is the fourth time. Sadly the landlord is selling my current home, so it’s been busy lately packing things up to move. Since my worldly possessions amount to little more than two shirts and a shoe moving isn’t much of a worry, but Audrey has stockpiled enough stuff to supply a relief mission to Uganda and is experiencing slightly more stress. A good portion of her stuff is going on craigslist.org, a site whose purpose is both to assist in getting rid of random junk and also to provide a forum for the world’s oddballs. In the past week craigslist has introduced us to a shopaholic woman who showed up in a tiny Porsche, took everything we had left, forced me to deliver, and then wrote back the next day to see if we had found anything else. There was also a person who wrote about our free CD-ROM drive, but insisted she only wanted something in a nice color. A third fellow showed up with a wolf in his van wearing a cowboy hat, a camouflage poncho, and riding gloves. Before anything else he handed me a copy of his latest film, and then shifted gears completely and did a little dance when I told him that we had two boxes of free stuff (he walked off with two bags full of odds and ends, including a coyote skull). There have also been about fifty bazillion folks who have written about items, set up pickup times, and then flaked completely. Never a dull moment.
Month: November 2005
The Arctic
Posted from Studio City, California at 9:39 am, November 11th, 2005A quick political posting. Yesterday the House of Representatives actually voted to remove drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from the budget, which is awesome news. The main argument cited for drilling has been to decrease dependency on foreign oil, which seems suspect given that the same politicans are unwilling to support raising fuel economy standards, an action that would save vastly more oil than ANWR will ever produce. Spoiling one of the most amazing places I’ve ever seen for what appears to be simply a quick financial windfall doesn’t seem justified to me when better options are available.
In a similar vein, Exxon-Mobil is now the only major oil company still pushing for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Sierra Club is calling for a boycott of Exxon, something I think is worth supporting. While companies like BP are heavily investing in alternative energy sources, Exxon seems to be taking a different approach. For my part I’d rather see my $3.00 per gallon go elsewhere.
The comments link is available for anyone wanting to argue these points, but please do so with reasonable facts — the best argument I could find online about why drilling was better than raising the CAFE standards was “…raising CAFE standards would not increase America’s energy supply by a single barrel…” Drill = (maybe) find 3.2 billion barrels. CAFE = save a minimum of one million barrels each day. Anyone who can explain why drilling is the better option gets a cookie.
U2 Treasure Hunt
Posted from Studio City, California at 9:55 pm, November 10th, 2005Aaron called me last week and told me I had to fly home to see U2. The conversation basically went:
“Hey, you wanna see U2?”
“Uh, yeah, of course I want to see U2.”
And thus the evening was launched into action. The concert started at 7:30 Thursday night. As of 4:00, we still had no tickets. The following ad was thus posted on craigslist:
Two tickets needed for U2
We’re heading down to the arena soon to see what’s still available, but figured we’d try craigslist first. You have tickets. We need tickets. Ergo, we need your tickets. Sell them to us. We need two. Not one, or three, just two. Two lovely tickets. And we’ll pay cash and pick them up. Email immediately with your offer.
And yeah, we’ve seen the $168 tickets that are still on Ticketmaster. We like U2, but we like them a little less than $168.
Shortly thereafter two responses arrived, one mocking us for being cheapskates, and the other offering two tickets for $40 each. The catch was that we would have to meet the guy in the South Bay, leaving us barely enough time to make the concert in time; the brothers Holliday were up to the challenge. Decked out in a Museum of Death t-shirt and a Michael Seaver shirt we set out on BART, arriving in Balboa Park an hour and a half later, and an hour after that our treasure hunt ended at the Oakland Arena. Damien Marley rocked for an hour, and U2 put on a hell of a show after that. My enjoyment of the second encore was only mildly affected by complications due to the several beers I had consumed throughout the evening, but thoughts of things like the desert and saltines allowed all embarrassment to be avoided. Waking up at 5:30 this morning to make it to the airport wasn’t the most enjoyable of tasks, but it was a small price to pay.
You Too
Posted from Burbank, California at 1:10 pm, November 8th, 2005I’m at the Burbank airport getting ready to fly home for a couple of days to see U2 with younger Holliday. Not wanting to go to the concert without sufficiently dorky t-shirts, I went to nearly every t-shirt shop on Hollywood Boulevard yesterday (for those not familiar with LA, there are about six million t-shirt shops on Hollywood) and had a conversation with the <insert foreign nationality here> owner of each place that went something like this:
Me: “Do you have any U2 t-shirts?”
Them: “Sorry, don’t understand. Me?”
Me: “No, it’s the name of a band. U2. Do you have any t-shirts for them?”
Them: “You? Who?”
Me: “U2”
blank stare
Me: “I think I’ll just look around on my own…”
We’re not gonna be wearing band shirts to this one.
Scared the Children
Posted from Studio City, California at 3:35 pm, November 7th, 2005Crazy busy lately. Anyhow, Halloween’s Scare the Children party started slow but was off the charts fun by the time it ended. I’d guess that about one in twelve kids were too scared to come up the driveway, and most of those that did make it up the driveway were totally freaked out. Pete, who is 6′ 7″, was our star, standing behind the driveway gate wearing a Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde mask. We put a strobe on him so that it made it really tough to tell what was coming out of the dark, and he carried chains that he slammed into the gate with such force that it scared everyone, including those of us who already knew he was there. Shelley was harnassed onto the roof dressed as a gargoyle and spent the night running around shrieking at people. Gina’s costume was creepy but not particularly scary, and she just stood by the door with a lantern scaring kids more because of what they imagined she might do rather than anything she actually was doing. For comedic relief Paul roamed the yard in a zombie outfit talking to kids in a cookie monster voice, while I simply crouched behind the coffin with an ax and jumped out at people from time to time.
There were a lot of highlights to the evening, but two stood out. The first was when a car drove up to our driveway, dropped a kid off, and then waited five minutes while he built up enough courage to walk up the driveway. Just as he got to the top of the driveway Pete ran at the gate with the chains, and the kid’s feet barely touched the ground as he took off down the driveway and did a flying leap back into the car. The second was when I took a turn at the door giving out candy. A kid dressed as Darth Vader ran the gauntlet and made it to the door, but he was a bit slow going back down the walk so I snuck up behind him and screeched. He literally shot about a foot and a half into the air, executed a mid-air 180 spin, and then brought his toy lightsaber down full force on my head before running away. Totally classic.
Scare the Children 2005.
Work mostly finished up for me on Friday, and Sunday we went to the house of one of Audrey’s recording studio customers to drop off a ton of equipment. It would probably be rude to mention names, but I was a fan prior to meeting the guy and was a much bigger one after meeting him. The house was way cooler than I expected, the guy was super-nice, but he also surprised me by being almost as much of a dork as I am. Nearly immediately after we arrived he told us “we’re demolishing the pool, but you need to see this first”. He then ran like a kid behind the current pool, flipped a few dials, and came out to laugh with us at the attrociously tacky pool statues that were gushing water. This was followed by him retrieving a two-foot tall garden gnome from his car which shortly thereafter became the first decoration in his multi-million dollar Spanish home. While moving equipment in he insisted on helping out, and I don’t think I’ve ever been so nervous about someone hurting themselves as I was while carrying a giant keyboard up a flight of stairs – it’s not everyday where a slight slip could cause twenty-thousand angry ticketholders to hunt you down for being the cause of their idol having to miss a show. The whole visit probably only lasted a bit more than an hour, but it was a really good time.