Weblog

It’s March. When I was in elementary school, March always meant it was time to break out the green, pink and yellow construction paper and make happy spring junk. I usually would do a rabbit devouring a flower that was shrieking in pain, and eventually the teacher would refuse to give me more red construction paper. Today, March meant walking home in binary digits.

As I was pulling into my apartment’s parking lot my car went CHA-THUNK and a wheel fell off and went spinning into traffic. I turned around to gawk, and it turns out that a basketball-sized chunk of frozen street muck had fallen off. Not as exciting as a missing wheel, but a hell of a lot cheaper to replace.

In this year’s running for the coolest thing ever…

It’s called the SKIMBAT. It combines skiing and snowboarding with windsurfing and hanggliding. Yes Virginia, you can fly. Skip the words and go straight for the Quicktime videos.

Mount Hood beckons.

People keep telling me I was on the Duluth news. I went to that pro-war sign dispensary over the weekend, and apparently Channel 6 found my body so hot and irresistable that they used every excuse to run their footage of me … well, of me talking to one of the old sign dudes, but still… it’s probably a good thing they didn’t show me oggling the pro-war babes that kept fluttering in…

Unless they did. Note to self: destroy all VHS tapes.

The temperature in the library is currently set to steamed clam. If the University wants to make a serious effort to save money (besides emailing its faculty and students to turn off their computers at night, and besides building roadblocks across a service road with the philosophy IF STUDENTS CAN USE IT, NO ONE CAN USE IT) they’d set the thermostat under 90. I used to think that the reason I didn’t wear sweaters was because I wanted to disassociate myself from the “I’m an intellectual but I’m not intellectual enough to wear a black turtleneck” aesthetic. Nay. My decision was purely pragmatic, in that if I wore a long-sleeved shirt to school it would be like taking a sauna in a wetsuit.

Got my teeth examined and cleaned and fortified at the Lake Superior College dental school, today. It was every bit as thorough as a regular inspection, only it was free, took a bit longer and had me leave with that tingly feeling from doing some subtle social good. Hand my body over to the amateurs to facilitate their timely education and insertion into the work force? BRING IT ON! I don’t know how smoothly things would have gone had I needed a cavity filled, a tooth removed or dentures installed, but luckily I have indestructable choppers that never require the serious hardware.

In other news, I have recently discovered that Save Ferris is the coolest ska band ever. I mean, seriously. They have a female lead vocalist and a song about Spam. What more do you need? A legitimate inquiry and written analysis about the quality of their music? Ha. Music isn’t like leperosy. It`s actually much more fun to experience it than to write about it.

Hmm… what if everything was like leperosy?

My weblog worldview just exploded. Traipsing about in Xanga.com I found blogger webrings, and hoo-boy, there’s some stuff out there. Maybe not good stuff, but quite a lot of stuff. Just select your desired social acolyte.

Extreme Tobogganer?

last night i had a dream about the cottage… it was summer. I was on the boat, and i think I was going to attempt to knee board again. I hate that damn thing. It ruined my pretty bathing suit. Speaking of that I need a new one. The one for the hot tub has been stretched out abd ruined by the jets and chlorine.

Surfer in Hawaii?

i woke up dis mornin in decided for ste home my dad was snappin get ur ass in sku i was like fuk i ste sick n u like me go sku. so he claimin i grounded for 2 weeks but cancel dat. well i gonna rent videos so alojahs

I wonder how much faster I could type if I eliminated every other letter, too.

Raver?

Okie dokie! I F-I-N-A-L-L-Y got my car back!! Woohoo! I am so incredibly grateful to have it back – you have no idea! It’s funny…its so akward to drive after driving a different car – I have to get used to it all over again…but it’s sort of like getting a brand new car!

It’s still freezing! It’s still raining…I wanna go home and snuggle under blankets and watch tv – who wants to work in this weather? Even my boss isn’t here – he just went to Starbucks for coffee!

Self-Proclaimed Band Geek?

rawrwrawrrwarrrwarrrawrrwarr

Oregon Salmon Fisher?

Well, the sad news is, today was my last day monitoring the salmon harvest on the Nehalem and NF Nehalem Rivers.

The good is the results. Out of 3420 angler parties sampled: 765 Chinook, 326 Coho, and 136 Steelhead were harvested and recorded by Creel Surveyors. In all, 1227 fish. So at least a third of the boats and shore anglers did not go home empty handed this this year.

I mean, wow. There are people out there who have found uses for the Internet that don’t involve warmongering.

So I just picked up the program ZoneAlarm, which lets me choose when I want programs to connect to the Internet without my knowledge and upload all my personal information, and when I would rather they kept all my junk tethered to my desk where it belongs.

It’s amazing how many backwoods requests for Internet access I get. Occasionally, a little window creeps up in the corner, begging, “Could ccm.exe please, pretty please, connect to the Internet?” and I ponder the request, and depending on my mood will brutally swat it down. I get to be that king who sits in his really big chair at his big eating table and casts his goblet of wine into the fireplace for no good reason. I’ve ruined 53 goblets so far, and the day is still young.

Norton AntiVirus really, really wants to connect to the Internet really, really often, and that really bothers me. I thought the whole point of that program was to keep nasty things off my computer. While composing this entry I’ve denied its request three times. It’s like telling your dog he can’t go for a walk right now, and each time I’m finding it harder to say no.

SHOW ME, SHOW YOU, KIKKOMAN, KIKKOMAN.

It was quite a nice weekend down in the Cities. Had some beautiful experiences reconciling my internal metaphysics and epistemological frameworks. In English? A hard weekend of wine, dine and women.

I went to the pro-war rally/sign distribution out on Piedmont Avenue. Ends up it was just two guys passing out signs, but they had a fairly steady stream of sign-takers. As of Friday they had given away 6,000 signs total, and about 250 during their two hours in Duluth. I took pictures but they’re nothing special. Lots of American flags, lots of signs.

And say. Hot girls seem to be totally down with this pro-war thing. If you don’t make the switch for any other reason, at least spend some time blending in with us so you can sidle up to these ladies. They subscribe to a totally different aesthetic than the anti-war crowd. A lot less hair.

Went out to dinner with my folks at a leading Mexican restaurant. The waitress seemed to be digging on me pretty strong, so I dug back. Asked her out. Got her phone number. She got off work at 11:30 and we went to Perkins, as even down in the Cities there’s very little to do around midnight. I mean, you can try to get yourself kicked out of Wal-Mart, you can go to the laundromat, you can drive around aimlessly, or you can go to Perkins and wait for the drunks to stumble in.

Throughout our entire date it seemed she was convinced I was this high-rollin’ fothermucker in the lady business, a bold lad that plays the field and asks girls out on dates in front of his parents. History suggests otherwise, however, and even I was surprised at myself for my sudden uncharacteristic forwardness.

Saturday I met up with Dave and we hit the town, leaving McCoy’s, Micro Center, the King’s Wok and Cheapo in our wake. Dave got two Moog Cookbook CDs, and I got Save Ferris, Greazy Meal and the new Happy Apple. We eventually wrangled in my friend Dan and shot off to the Cabooze for some hot bluegrass action courtesy of Yonder Mountain String Band. The streets were packed, so we had to circle a few times to find a decent parking spot in a snowbank. We ran down the cold street, glancing in the windows of biker bars that were unsettlingly empty.

“Ya know, Dane,” said Dave, “I think all these people are here to see Yonder Mountain.”

“No, they can’t be,” I assured myself. “Don’t people know that bluegrass music sucks? I mean, seriously, it’s bluegrass. It’s folky. We listen to it. It’s not cool.”

The entrance was surrounded by people looking for extra tickets, as the show was SOLD OUT. Now, understand that we had the opportunity to get our tickets in advance; a mere $18 in advance. Why, with tickets at the door being $20, that would have been a $2 savings, right? Nay. Tacked onto that $18 was a $3 INCONVENIENCE CHARGE, so we actually would have paid more for advance tickets than door tickets. Of course, standing there in the cold, without coats, in front of a biker bar we couldn’t really spend $18 or $20 on anything but a kick to the throat…

But Goonies never say die, so we took our $60 in concert savings and invested in some stocks at the liquor store and went to Dave’s Japan House. We sat around and talked about nerdy things, and eventually the evening degenerated into the drunken-anime-watching of every single Golden Boy episode. Golden Boy is centered around this 25-year-old guy named Kintaro who rides his bicycle everywhere, working odd jobs part-time. The catch is that Kintaro is an artist, a misunderstood genius, a womanizer and a pr3v3rt. The catch is also that Golden Boy ended up with an obscenely large budget that allowed the producers to adequately animate the[ahem] objects central to the story.

What do I mean? Let’s just say that the animators watched a lot of videos on bounce algorithms to make the show accurate, and then twisted physics in a horribly alluring way. It was just about as gratuitous as fan-service can get.

It was great.