On the "1 California" MUNI Bus, Thursday, 8 p.m.

Two Chinese (-American) teenagers are sitting in the back row blasting hiphop with their boombox.

Chinese teenager 1: Yo yo, muthafucka, dis shit is dope. [Raps along with boombox.]

Chinese teenager 2: Yo, it says ‘No Radios,’ nigga.

Chinese teenager 1: Shit, nigga, this ain’t no muthafuckin’ radio!

Chinese teenager 2: Yo dog, you see that shit go down in Chinatown last night? There was guns ‘n’ shit, farreals, nigga.

Chinese teenager 1: Mad guns, yo. All them niggaz gots guns, and the po-lice too, nigga.

Chinese teenager 2: Shit was wack, dog.

Chinese teenager 1: [Looks around.] Where all da bitches at, yo?

The bus stops and a middle-aged black couple take the seats directly in front of the two teenagers.

Chinese teenagers: [Speaking Chinese.]

More fun with MUNI here, here, here, here, and here.

Drunk Guys in Clogs



They were in front of SFMOMA, laughing and jumping around and shouting in Dutch or something.

Hell Comes to Oaktown
So we moved. It was nuts. I'll put a slideshow up eventually or something. The moment that encapsulated it all for me, I think, was when WULAD Wregular and moving-assistant extraordinaire Michael stepped back for a moment from the aged behemoth of a fold-out couch-bed we were attempting to somehow get up a set of brick stairs, over an iron railing and into the apartment, took a deep breath, and said, "Man, fuck this couch."

Expect a gradual trickling increase in posting with a return to full speed by the end of the month as my life is slowly removed from cardboard and duct-tape and reassembled. I know most of you people are only here for naked Jeanne Zelasko pictures anyway.

P.S. Pray to the Cat Gods for my main man, who had three teeth pulled this weekend and is now coming home to a different zip code.

I Love American Cheese



... but it creeps me out when it melts at room temperature.

Cinema WULADiso
C-Baby and I watched The Lovers on the Bridge this weekend, which was recommended to her by someone who should be stripped of all rights and deported. It's a Frenchity-Frenchish film about a couple of mentally ill losers who do all sorts of unbelievable things while beating the crap out of each other, and feels as if it were written and directed by a 13-year old Goth girl during detention. It features such realistic scenes as a woman leaving her eye-surgeon husband for a violently insane homeless person, and an admirably staged close-up of a finger being blown off. Let's just say that the scene where an innocent man is burned to death is one of the more uplifting moments of the film.

Ebert said of Lovers, "It has grand gestures and touching moments of truth, perched precariously on a foundation of horsefeathers." I would adjust that slightly to say, "It has shit gestures and shitty moments of shit, perched precariously on a foundation of suckassness."

I defy anyone to tell me why all copies of this movie should not be destroyed.

I know, what have I done for you lately? Well, as evidenced by the previous entry, it's in no-one's best interest that I put something up here just to put something up here. So in the tradition of great blog titans stretching back into the mists of time, I ask that you sit patiently while I replenish my creative juices. Perhaps a game of "UNO" is in order.

However, it isn't my style to leave you with nothing, so here, for your infotainification, are

Top Excuses for Not Updating Blog
... from Ye Olde Time-Traveler's Intercerebral Data Stream Gazette-Weekly, August 12, 6,000,000 B.C.—3456 A.D.—B4/X Timesphere

• Was out late gathering sticks, rocks, animal hides, and disco clothing for clan's participation in tomorrow's Holo-Laser Orbital Battle and Old-Tyme Ice Cream Social
  
  
• Helen of Troy may be good in the sack, but she burned down my damn teepee trying to make French toast, and she can't drive a hoverbike to save her life
  
  
• Let's just say that those people who warn you about hanging around with your hormone-crazed teenaged grandmother are right
  
  
• Still cleaning up the mess that Cornelius, Zira, and Karl Marx made at my cubewarming party last night
  
  
• You'd never believe what a pain in the ass it is to create a stable timesphere matrix using only substances available in 12th-century Utah
  
  
• I don't care how damn busy he is; if I link to freakin' Fredrick the Great, he should link to me, end of story
  
  
• Mammoth tusk stuck in my drivetrain, again
  
  
• Summoned to late 20th-century California to help some losers with their history report
  
  
• You know how we were wondering what it would be like if the Mongol horde had conquered Europe? Well, before I left for my last trip, you weren't eating yak butter and your middle name wasn't Genghis
  
  
• Busy downloading that video of Pamela Anderson doin' it with Shakespeare
  
  
• Just because Proust posts twenty damn times a day doesn't mean everybody should do it

News Flashes
Young people are disrespectful!

Christians occasionally do something useful!

Osama Bin Laden has not been leaving his mail on buses in Orlando!

The prevailing theory that short gamma ray bursts arise from collisions involving neutron stars has been bolstered! (Well, duh.)

God is an asshole! But on the other hand, peanut surplus!

And Another Thing
I remember thinking Dov Hikind, a city councilman from Brooklyn, was a pretty much a jerk back when I lived in New York, and I must say I thought he was even more of a jerk when I read about his suggestion yesterday that the NYPD start using racial profiling in their subway searches.

"They all look a certain way," said Hikind... "It's all very nice to be politically correct here, but we're talking about terrorism."

Now, all unsavory racial overtones aside, the last time I checked, the main visual element which differentiates Jews (although perhaps not the paler Eastern Europeans in his district) from Arabs is their clothes. (That is, without giving every Joe Transit Cop an advanced course in ethnic physiognomy.)

So in a mostly secular city like New York, following his suggestion would cause officers to go after anyone from Greeks to Italians to Gypsies to Sephardic Jews, with most likely another unfortunate emphasis on the oft-misidentified Sikhs who commit the supreme offense of wearing turbans. Most relevantly, is Dov not familiar with the suicide bombers in Israel who've slapped on a black suit and some tefillin and managed to avoid detection?

Therefore, to help New York's finest sort it all out, we present the following handy guide, suitable for printing and laminating:

Steroid Central (Last Day, I Promise)
This is just a minor follow-up to yesterday's discussion of Raffy Palmeiro, who was criminally deprived, by Major League Baseball and the Player's Association, of the necessary education that could have prevented him from unknowingly, unintentionally injecting himself with a potent anabolic steroid, which was apparently masquerading as heroin or any of the myriad substances honest athletes shoot into their bloodstreams all the time.

The other players, thankfully, are keeping things in perspective: no less an authority on illegal steroids than Jason Giambi offered his thoughts when asked if his opinion of Palmeiro had changed since hearing of his positive test.

"No, not at all," said Giambi, whose own steroid use was made public through leaked grand jury testimony in the BALCO case. "He's a phenomenal player. His accomplishments are an unbelievable thing."

That's right, folks—Giambi, an admitted steroid user, doesn't think Palmeiro's accomplishments should be tainted by his steroid use. (Palmeiro's steroid use, I mean, not Giambi's.) However, I believe the reporter in this case could be taken to task for his framing of the question—because, for all we know, Giambi formerly thought of Palmeiro as "that guy I did steroids with," and no, his opinion on that subject hasn't changed.

Meanwhile, Slate has a dizzying compendium of excuses offered by red-handed cheaters, all of which their fans and Harold Reynolds apparently have no difficulty accepting.

And the American Mastodon, who I admit has been looking like he has a little extra junk in his wooly trunk lately, pleads Not Guilty.

Take Me Out to the WULAD
Wregular WULAD Wreaders know I am a fan of the baseball. As such, I occasionally watch ESPN's Baseball Tonight program, which is, as you might guess, a nightly omnibus of that day’s baseball activity, accompanied by blaring guitar rock.

(Incidentally, I believe this music to be antithetical to the actual pace of the game, and that a hapless extraterrestrial viewer whose entire knowledge of baseball was deduced from this show might get a misguided sense that it is a nonstop, lightning-fast, sexciting sextravaganza, when it is in fact mostly, and intentionally, boring. So by stripping a game down to its action-packed highlights, you defeat its original purpose, which some guy once said was to make summer days seem as long as possible.)

But that is not my reason for speaking to you today.

My reason is this: I used to like Harold Reynolds—which is to say that I liked him on the commercial where they recreate that scene from Bull Durham where the manager says, "eight and sixteen... how the hell did we ever win eight?" and you see Peter Gammons standing there shamefacedly in his towel. It must have been the commercial, because I couldn't possibly have been listening to what he was saying on the show and still viewed him sympathetically.

What he was saying last night, along with the other brainless sycophants on the show, was that in the case of Orioles first baseman Rafael Palmeiro—who you may know from his two notable pharmaceutical proclamations: "I have never used steroids," and "I take Viagra," and who was suspended yesterday for violating the league’s steroids policy after a positive drug test—the blame lay squarely at the feet of Major League Baseball and the Player's Association, for failing to educate the players well enough to avoid accidentally ingesting steroids.

I'm going to run that by you again.

The blame lay squarely at the feet of Major League Baseball and the Player's Association, for failing to educate the players well enough to avoid accidentally ingesting steroids. That's what the lovable Harold "8 and 16" Reynolds was saying. Because, you know, Rafy is a stand-up guy who would never "intentionally" take steroids. (Just like a certain White House official would never "knowingly" disclose the identity of a covert agent.)

Which is funny, because I was thinking that the reaction of most rational people would be that Rafael Palmeiro is a dirty cheating hypocrite who deserves to be kicked out of the game. Am I losing my mind, I thought? Are these mealy-mouthed apologists right, and am I the one who's hopelessly confused on this issue? Could my seemingly logical but obviously insane reaction just be the initial symptom of some Mad Cow-related dementia?

Thankfully, it's not just me.