james bondage

Its fast approaching 3pm and I am overcome with a strange desire to jump through the window (second floor), roll on the ground like a parkour, hop into my car, drive home, jump in bed and giggle maniacally.

Strange desires indeed...

planet zipedeedoodah and yorkshire pudding

My friend Tess, or as I fondly used to call her, "Heart" posted a tiny blurb on my blog comparing me to Planet Zipeedeedoodah and herself to Yorkshire Pudding.

She is thoroughly English. I know this because that comparison made absolutely no sense to me. Its like comparing apples to the the fork stuck in your eye. Or comparing zucchini to encyclopedias. Or comparing a circus clown to having watch South Park non stop.

Despite that, I still hold a fond place for little Heart because she's such a darling in high school.

But this is not about her. Sod her. This is about me. And Yorkshire Pudding.

For the longest time I've been curious about other culture's cuisine. And by other culture I mean other sane culture. Like the English but not the French and their snails. Like the Russians and their borsh but not the Mongolians and their boiled testicles that they gave Ewan McGregor. So I have always wanted to experiment with English food beyond Fish and Chips. And I was finally given the chance a month ago during the World Cup.

As luck would have it, there's an english pub about 2 miles from my workplace. Whenever there was a game I'd go there and try out their food. I've had fish and chips, chicken pot pie, fish and chips, prime ribs, fish and chips and bbq riblets. Hey, sometimes you got to eat the fish and chips.

Anyway, the best I've had was the prime ribs. It was the most expensive ass lunch I've ever had but it came with its own good ol' english Yorkshire Pudding. Now, I've heard of the good ol' pudding. I've even had chocolate pudding myself.

And let me tell you this, Yorkshire Pudding is not a pudding. Fucking Yorshireans are just naming it a pudding to piss you off. Yorkshire Pudding is a goddamn pastry. At least its an eggy croisant. But I must say this, that thing is tasty. TASTY! Probably because of the gratuitous amount of butter and egg they put into it. And its great for sopping up the gravy of the prime ribs. And its a bit like a cross between boring bread and tasty tasty butter bread.

I knew it had egg in it because I Wikipediaed the thing.

So dear Heart, this post is for you. And yes you are a bit like a Yorkshire Pudding. In the sense that you're pretty damn confusing for people that are not English (or don't have access to Wikipedia).



Good ol' Heart. Good ol' Yorkshire Pudding.

doctor, i have a burning sensation everywhere

Apocalypse is here! It is burning up in California. Someone call the firefighters and have them drop tons of water over here. Hot hot hot!

Now resorting to water evaporation to keep cool via splashing lots of water on self and waiting for it to evaporate.

Also have drenched two paper towels and draped them over my arms. Lookit me! I am water cooled!

missing pile of stylus

I have a pocket pda phone, the XV6700 from Verizon. Its my first PDA and I am having great fun with it. When I first got it I was worried that I'd lose the stylus -- since everyone constantly moans about that. So I took great care to always replace it. And for the first 6 months I had no problems.

Now, in the span of 2 weeks I have lost 2 stylus. I imagine there is a stylus monster somewhere eating up my stylus and waiting for more. Incorrigable brat.

holey scottevest!

I was browsing the web last week trying to find myself some nifty new pants ever since the cargo pants I've bought from Abercrombie started ripping from overuse. I've been using these babies for 6+ years and I haven't bought any significantly new pants since I went on a huge spree 8 years ago at Abercrombie, buying out nearly every cargo design they had then.

So I went to A&F to check out the new, evolved cargo pants that they had the last 7 years to perfect. And guess what? A&F must be goddamn intelligent design believers because their goddamn pants regressed in coolness. Where there used to be super nifty designs with like hundreds of pockets there's now like straightassed pants with one pocket for your right hand. If you wanted to put your left hand in a pocket, too bad, shove it down your pants.

Now, I'm a huge fan of pockets. I like pants with like 8+ pockets. I want to put my iPod here, my PDA there, my Jack Daniels in that pocket and so forth. So, disappointed, I looked around for a substitute, and that's when I found Ultimate Cargo Pants at ScottEVest. Now, when a man like me, sees the words "ultimate" with "cargo pants" it bears a second look. The only thing better than Ultimate is clearly "Penultimate" or "Fucking Ultimate" and they didn't have those in stock. So I checked out these Ultimate Cargo Pants and these pants have like 192837912 pockets. I mean wow! That's a lot of pockets! So I decided to order one.

Yesterday these pants arrived and I looked at them and thought "well these looks like some shitty pair of cargo pants" until I put it on. Let me tell ya, if you're the kind of lucky bloke that has a kinky girlfriend that likes to put her hands down your trousers pocket you'll be ecstatic. Because the only girlfriend that will be able to put all her hands down your pants is the Septulimbed Triple Breasted Whore of Nebulon V. If you don't have that kind of kinky girlfriend, at least you will be happy to know it will take your wife a while to find out which pocket you put your wallet in.

So, anyway, this pants are amazing right? Right?

Almost.

Today I wore them to work and found two serious flaws with them. One of them involves a seam on the right side that's not sewn properly. I thought it was another pocket at first so I stuck my fingers in it and let me tell ya folks, its apparently unacceptable to be groping yourself at work.

I did not know this.

Also the shin pocket on the right side (that's right they have a hidden SHIN POCKET) was not sewn properly. I put some coins into it and it fell through my pants, down my socks and into my shoe. So unless the plan is to use my shoe as another pocket, this isn't cool.

Of course at this point I'm slightly miffed because these babies cost me like a hefty quid. So I call them up intending to return it or yell at them or something. I get this lady on the line and I unleash unholy hell on her for shoddy workmanship.

Me: "Hi there I have a hole in the side of the pants that arrived yesterday"
Her: "Oh no problem, we'll send you a new pair, we'll pay for shipping"
Me: "OH YEAH WAIT UNTIL MY LAWYERS HEA... wha?"
Her: "FedEx already picked up today but it will go out first thing tomorrow. Is that ok?"
Me: "uh.. yeah I guess so. thanks"
Her: "No problem. Sorry for the inconvenience"
Me: "*mumbles* no problem issa not a big deal"

So, here I am, sitting in my holey pants which I was going to bring with me to Vegas tomorrow recording this magnificent moment of my glorious triumph over corporate America for posterity.
I hope those pants show up soon.

Goddamn Abercrombie.

o frabjous day! callooh! callay

You know how sometimes when you wake up and you just know how your day is going to turn out? Like that one time you were out drinking till 3am at your friend's place during a worknight because you were so sick of it all and wasn't sure if going to work next day was worth it because your girlfriend left you and before she did she threw all your shit out and burnt it? Or that one time when you had to wake up 78 times during the night because you ate one of those fancy ethic food thing for dinner because you wanted to be "cultured"?

No? Neither do I.

But today was special. I wake up at 8am to my stupid alarm clock blaring obnoxiously. If I was a fucking alarm clock I would be so obnoxious too. Its impossible to fuck up. You tell time and once a day you make a loud noise. Its like a baby, who can't tell time, but makes a loud noise all the time. So baby is like a broken clock. That poops. And eats. And one day will grow up to elope with the wierd punk next door with a lipring and eyeliner. Okay so a clock isn't much like a baby at all.

After I woke up I crawled to my home office chair like I always do and promptly fall asleep, like I always do (try to follow here, none of this is unusual yet), and then (here it comes!), I hear a bird cawing (yes assholes, that was The Big Twist In The Story).

This bird didn't go "caw caw" or "chirp chirp". It went "chuck chuck". I opened a bleary eye and tried to find out if I was slowly growing insane or if the fucking bird was trying to tell a Chuck Norris joke. At this point I wasn't sure if I was awake or asleep but prayed hard that I was asleep because birds should not be telling Chuck Norris jokes. No one should.

So for a brief moment, I panicked because the world was topsy turvy and I thought I was in some fantastic world where animals talked. So I tried to listen closely to the bird. And after 5 seconds, I fell asleep again. Because birds are that goddamn boring.

i have a dream

Not the kind where it would inspire people to stand up and fight for their freedom. Nor the kind that would make a man aspire to push himself to his limits. The regular kind. The one which most people don't remember in the morning.

My dream was that I was I met Mariah and Jaana. From Ultima 5. In my dream. Mariah was a cute lady with red hair and freckles on her shoulder. Jaana had platinum blonde hair and was a looker.

I hugged them both and thanked them. Then I told them to give my best wishes to Julia and I woke up.

I am not sure what happened. There should have been some shagging in there!

one twenty one eh am

Its 1.21am and I'm surfing amazon.com for Mediaval Baebes's Mirabilis CD while drinking a Corona. I heard good things, they better not suck.

Then I went to ebay and searched around for a new game to play, Age of Empires III or Civilization IV. Then I decided that even if I got it, I probably won't have the time to play it.

Then it struck me. I had grown up. Well, one part of me anyway. When I was 13 I asked my uncle (who was 27) why he doesn't play more games? Did he not enjoy them? Was it not fun? I had never seen him play one at all. His reply was, "I don't have the time to play them". And I said, "How could you not find the time? They are such fun!". Then I would go back to Tapper, Burger Time, Karateka or DigDug.

Well, its now 15 years later. And I think I understand. I have the time, if I stopped playing World of Warcraft. But why buy a new game? I will play it for a while, and then go back to WoW anyway.

So I pondered this as I drank the last 1/8th of my beer. Then I looked at the empty bottle and thought, "This was supposed to help put me to sleep. Its not working". Then my face hit the keyboard and the world went dark.

I got jipped!

I went to the 7-11 today as I usually do to pick up my morning coffee. As usual, I reach for the cup slot that holds the 24 oz coffee. As usual, I pour myself a coffee, pay for it and leave.

Now I am drinking said coffee and I realized I have been jipped! That new cashier at 7-11 replaced the 24 oz cups with 20 oz cups. So now I am drinking 4 oz less coffee than usual! (I only noticed as I put the cup down next to all my other empty cups of coffee and found that it is shorter than the rest )

Why do 7-11 jerks torment half asleep customers? Jerks!

purple car

I saw a purple car while driving to work today. Now there's a car that screams, "service me in the exhaust pipes".

world cup mania

I have the world cup fever.

Ok. That's a lie. I have at best, the world cup cough. Or maybe the world cup mildly irritating itch. But not a fever.

I tell people I like soccer but I'm really not a huge sports fan of any kind. However if it did come down to one sport I like over all else, it would be soccer. And not by a huge margin over my second favorite sport - basketball.

The last time I really cared about football at all was in 1994 when my classmates made me bet 50 cents on one team or another. I can't remember who played and I can't remember who won the bet. I do remember people getting excited about it and I was excited too.

Then there was the other time in 1998 when I was in university. My friends insisted on watching football and I went along. This time there was no betting, no crap talk and not much excitement.

So I gave 2002 a miss.

This year, I decided that I should check out the world cup. Not just at home on cable but also at the english pubs or irish pubs where hordes of football thugs are bound to gather and get all sorts of rowdy over which team is better. Then I would be all, "hellz ya, england is the shiznit" and they would look at me with their good eye and be like "you're a downright chum ol mate" and buy me a drink. Not one of those pansy ass Bud, but a real man's drink, like Guiness. And I'd be chilling with notorious thugs with tons of tattoos.

That's what I wanted to do anyway, but didn't. Because there's no goddamn football gangstas in the Bay Area. I'm not sure there's even gangstas of any kind around here. What there is are some goddamn middle aged foreigners sitting at english pubs cheering on some random team that's playing. Which is a lot like what I'm doing. Fucking copycats.

So anyway, I've caught a good one third of the games I can watch without having to wake up at some ungodly hour. And you know what? Football rocks!

Football rocks in the way that American Football or basketball does not. 90 minutes of intense action. Not like American Football where you get like 1 minute of play, then some goddamn stupid tackle and then 2 minutes of getting their ass back into position. And you can score like 5-6 times in a game. And there's huge numbers, like 1 touchdown = mondo points. And not like basketball where its just shoot shoot shoot, run back shoot, run forward shoot, dunk dunk dunk.. Blah.

Football rocks like a highwire act without a safety net. Its 90 minutes of guys that are not wearing protection run back and forth on some hugeass field and not messing up. That's some tough endurance shit.

And football's heroes are very different from basketball heroes. Zidane is a star. He knows he's a star. Yet he plays with his team. He passes the ball, moves it forward, passes it again. Not like goddamn Shaq and the Heats where their basic strategy can be summed up as "give shaq ball. shaq will play solo".

And the players are not assholes. Well they are assholes. But not like basketball. They are assholes when it comes down to playing but by and large they don't argue with the ref, because in football, the ref is always right. Arguing = yellow card. Hahaaa.. They need to do that crap in basketball.

And in the end, football matters because you only get one chance every 4 years. Once you're past the qualifiers -- Every. Fucking. Game. Is. Your. Last. Chance.

Not like basketball where you play best of 7, on an annual basis. Yippee kaye. Big deal. You'll just sign with another team next year (thanks Chris Webber! jackass). In football you play for your country, and you play once every 4 years. At most you'll play 3, maybe 4 games in your lifetime. And each game matters.

When you see the losers in basketball they are all "we'll do better in game 5, 6 or 7". In football, there is no game 5, 6 or 7. You lose, that's it. It was heart wrenching to see that English player break down and cry when they lost the game. Its heart wrenching because he cares. And when the players care, you better damn well care as well. Because that's just how it is.

Today's game was between France and Portugal. At the end of it, both teams hugged, cried and exchanged jerseys. In basketball they barely talk. Where is the honor? Where is the noble sport?

So, this year, something's changed. I'm into football like I never was before. Pretty amazing stuff. I wish it'd happen every year, but then it'd lose its gravitas. So it can't. But I don't have the World Cup fever. Because I don't have tattoos.