Ryan's Journal

Posted today on craigslist:

Old Tuxedo Needed for Photoshoot w/ Penguins (Culver City)

Date: 2005-12-20, 2:03PM PST

I need an old tuxedo, black and white, preferably very, very cheap, either to buy or to rent/borrow for the month of January. I don’t care if it has rips or a few stains, as long as it will look decent in a black and white photo. What I need it for is a trip I’m taking to the South Atlantic and Antarctica where I’d like to grab a few photos of myself and possibly other passengers from the trip standing in the midst of thousands of penguins wearing a tuxedo. I’m 5′ 11″ tall, 33″ waist, although the tux definitely doesn’t have to fit perfectly.

I’m a decent photographer (see http://www.mountaininterval.org/photos/south_georgia/highlights/ for some past photos from the Antarctic) and have had stuff used in advertising before, so if you own a tuxedo place and would be willing to loan me a tux in exchange for photos to use in advertising then I’d be fine with that. I’ll do my best to take good care of it, but the conditions will likely be muddy and possibly rainy, so please don’t loan anything that can’t get a few mud spots on it — it’s Antarctica after all, and a colony of thousands of penguins isn’t exactly the cleanest of environments!

My internet access is gonna be sporadic for the next few days, but please email with your location, cost of tuxedo, whether you prefer to sell or rent, and a description or (preferably) photo of the tuxedo. I live in Culver City, so it would be easiest if you were nearby, and I can come by to take a look. Thanks!

Results of this (possibly foolish) endeavour should be available in about six weeks.

Slightly subtle…

I got up at 4:45 AM on Thursday in order to miss rush hour and drive home for the Chiropracter Nish graduation extravaganza, and managed to escape the Los Angeles traffic nightmare before I started falling asleep at the wheel and had to stop for a nap. The Goob properly chastised me for being a Meatball (my gym membership expired back in October) before we grabbed Kenny, cajoled a few “Hot Plate!”‘s out of the waiter at Guadalajara, and headed to San Jose. $16 for a double crown, a few nametags, and a speech from Chef Boyardee (“Work hard, and maybe your life will be as fulfilling as mine”) and then the graduation was over and we were ready to be foiled in our attempts to get free drinks from both the UMC Convention and the eBay gathering at Paragon (note to self: when someone asks “Do you need a nametag?” you say YES).

The Nish graduation dinner featured an unfortunate propane incident, some creative photography by the Tall Guy, and a somewhat inebriated Nish crowd diving. Even Nish’s mom got in on the act, giggling so much that she couldn’t hold a camera still. Last night was thankfully uneventful, and today’s excitement has thus far been a quick lunch at PF Chang’s, preceded by a testy exchange on the top of an overly full parking structure. And that’s all I have to say about that.

Felicia scored two preview tickets to King Kong, so at 9:15 this morning I lined up at the Arclight, grabbed a free popcorn and soda (thanks Universal) and spent a little over three hours watching a giant monkey go bezerk. Retirement is fun.

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.

A 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.

Aaron 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.

I’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.

There is a line in the movie Garden State where Natalie Portman, after being taken on a series of outings that get progressively stranger, says “Ah, I must say, I’m continually impressed with how each place you bring us… continues to be weirder and weirder.” I had that same moment today with Audrey when we went to the home of the proprietors of the Museum of Death to pick up a coffin for tomorrow’s Scare the Children party. Entering the house, the living room was filled with skulls, stuffed birds, and other odd bits. Cathee then pulled out the (mummified) guillotined head of a French serial killer before taking us to look at her collection of two-headed turtles (“the largest in the world”) and albino animals. Keeping things slightly more normal, she also pointed out the giraffe skeleton that they had recently acquired, as well as a rocking horse made from an actual miniature horse (“we were the only bidders on eBay!”).

The coffin was in the back yard, next to their pet pig, another two-headed turtle, and an albino turtle. The coffin was of course filled with black-widow spiders which had to be chased out, but the highlight of the trip occurred when I made the comment that she would never have to worry about anyone breaking into her house (imagine breaking into a house and finding it full of body parts…) and she replied “Actually, I’m not sure about our neighbor in the rear, that guy is pretty weird”. Yeah. Anyhow, we drove home with a coffin hanging out of the tailgate of Audrey’s truck, and I can only imagine what further madness awaits for Halloween tomorrow.

My brain decided to swell up to twice its normal size during the past two days, and sadly my skull stayed the same size, so the headache has been tremendous. My money says it’s brain cancer, and if it doesn’t go away tomorrow I’m gonna operate. On the plus side, the roommate went to Jerry’s Deli and brought me soup; life is better when you get sick and people bring you soup.

Unrelated (as most pictures I post are), but this image from the South Georgia trip didn’t seem particularly noteworthy until tonight. Now, for whatever reason, I’m really liking it a lot.