June 2005 Archives

Maybe the rain will stop following me
With millions of colors reflected in daylight
Right on the kickdrum
Turning the sound up full

Don't look surprised
Erased
Our lives
Erased

I'm taking off til next Thursday, and hopefully I won't manage to touch a computer the whole time. Just me by the pool with Feynman and Mystic Pig. Polyphonic Spree on Friday. Red Sox-Rangers tickets on Tuesday (if it's on TV in your neighborhood, look for us sitting in the vicinity of the right field foul pole).

Thanks for the good thoughts after last night's rant. I love you guys. Really.

See you next week.

Update: More poolside reading. My brother Karl El Vez just sent me a copy of Tim Powers' Last Call. I love you man. Thanks.

All I need now is to get Gina to bring me lemonades in a bikini and I don't think I'll leave the pool all week.

The voices in your head are calling
Stop wasting your time, there's nothing coming
Only a fool would think someone could save you
The men at the factory are old and cunning
You don't owe nothing, so boy get runnin'
It's the best years of your life they want to steal

A couple of weeks back I took the kids out for ice cream at Amy's and chatted outside for a while with a lovely lady who was reading Po Bronson's What Should I Do With My Life? She was younger than me but her kids had already grown up and moved out ("I started really young", she said) and she was in the middle of quitting the career she had to have, in order to take up the career she'd always wanted. I told her I feel like doing that sometimes, and she told me I should definitely give it some thought, that it's more possible than I realize.

I've been either studying in or working in computer science for 23 years now. I've been addicted to tech startups for the last thirteen. I've designed products that were never released, products that never even ran, products that were beautiful but wouldn't sell, and one or two products that made tens of millions of dollars in revenue for somebody or other.

Since 1992 I've worked for, let's see...seven startups and one research consortium.

Five of those companies (including the consortium) have gone out of business.

A sixth had a spectacular IPO, and an equally spectacular flame out. They're living on their cash now, praying for a buyer. I rode the stock options all the way up and all the way down, but I finally got fed up and bailed out during the 14th round of layoffs.

Now I work at yet another startup, along with some colleagues from the IPO days. Enterprise applications. A brutal fucking business, hugely complex mixes of technologies, with sales cycles of six months to a year or longer, and giant mega-tech competitors waiting to crush you at any moment.

The hours are long. The expectations are high. The pressure to produce, to stay on top of new technologies, to not fuck up, is immense. And I've never been happy unless I'm surrounded by people who are as smart or smarter than me. Face it, a company where I'm always the smartest guy in the room is not a company that's gonna succeed. So the competition amongst coworkers, the intellectual pressure to not be a dope, to not admit that there is a problem that you can't overcome, is sometimes overwhelming.

Your work day never really ends. It gets in your brain and you can't drive it out for more than a couple of hours. I used to drink it out of my skull, but that's no longer an option.

And lately I'm starting to wonder if I can do this at all any more. If I can really do another ten years of software. Or five. Or one.

Every time I go to Whole Foods now, I chat with the guys at the fish counter. I want to know what it's like, cutting up fish all day, bagging oysters for people, talking with random customers about what's good for grilling, how to prep a soft-shell crab, which salmon looks best this week. And then when your shift is over, going home and not thinking about work at all for the rest of the day.

Sometimes I think about chucking it all. Go to work for Whole Foods. Or go work for the Red Cross. Just vaccinate kids in Africa all day long. Anything to get me away from the incessant march of product releases and crit-sits and showstopper bugs and broken builds and quarterly sales numbers.

But I'm addicted to the money. Face it, a guy slinging haddock at Whole Foods does not get to live in a big house in Hyde Park and send his kids to private school and spend $2000 on a fucking tattoo. Do I want out bad enough to move into a tiny house, or a house out in the suburbs where I can have Republican neighbors all around? Give up on being able to put Cassidy and Liam through the college of their choice and just let them tough it out at UT or ACC?

For a few years now, I've been wanting one more IPO score. Something that would set us up financially so that I could tell the software business to finally go fuck itself. I'm like those guys in Requiem For a Dream. I just need that one lucky break, that one big score, and I'll be set up for life. Only that break never comes and I keep needing a taste and I fritter away the whole stash, my whole life away, pour it into the keyboard a little at a time like junk going up my veins a little at a time until there is nothing left and no more opportunities to get any of it back.

The enterprise software economy is rough right now, the money is tight, the deals are few and far between, and when they start looking around for the fat to trim...well, like I said, I don't like to be the smartest guy in the room. But the smartest guy in the room is usually the one who still has a job at the butt end of a weak quarter.

I'm fucking tired. And I feel fucking trapped.

"Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the president to explain to us what the exit strategy is."

"I think it’s also important for the president to lay out a timetable as to how long they will be involved and when they will be withdrawn."

What kind of America-hating, freedom-loathing traitor could utter these words in a time of war?

George W. Bush, in 1999, criticizing Bill Clinton on Kosovo.

From Think Progress again.

"The administration should clarify its intent [...] People lack confidence in the credibility of our government. Even our allies are beginning to suspect what we say. It's a difficult thing today to be informed about our government even without all the secrecy. With the secrecy, it's impossible. The American people will do what's right when they have the information they need."

"I do, however, believe it is important to the future of our Nation to recognize that there is a problem of credibility today."

"I believe the following significant and timely editorial which appeared in today’s issue of the New York Times and which discusses our involvement [...] merits wide attention. I concur in the conclusion expressed therein that the people of the United States must know not only how their country became involved but where we are heading."

"Accurate judgment is predicated on accurate information. Government has an obligation to present information to the public promptly and accurately so that the public's evaluation of Government activities is not distorted. Political pundits speak of the 'credibility gap' in the present administration. Indeed, this appellation is so widespread that it has become a household word."

Any guesses?

Joe Biden? No.

Ted Kennedy? No.

Chuck Hagel? Closer, but no.

Those quotes are from 1965-67. The words of Illinois Congressman Donald Rumsfeld, criticizing the Johnson administration's Vietnam record.

Courtesy of Think Progress.

Political blog of the week: Take It To Karl.

Dedicated to postings and emails from American veterans who think Karl Rove is a cowardly hypocritical fat greedy fuck.

Best. Novel. All. Year.

From what I can tell, New Orleans author Poppy Z. Brite originally made a name for herself writing vampire/horror stuff. I haven't read those early books, so I can't really comment on them specifically, but then again I guess it's not a surprise I never read them...if I'd heard about them I would have turned up my nose. I've always resented the way that the Anne Rice books turned New Orleans into some kind of goth mecca, a cartoony fantasy place where the city is so thick with vampires and voodoo and cemeteries and Marie Laveaux it's a wonder anybody gets anything else done.

But Poppy, it seems, has grown up, abandoned the undead, and is now writing about what is truly important in New Orleans, which is food and booze and neighborhood bars and Yats. And she knows the city well. She knows the city like a native.

I don't think it's possible to write convincingly about New Orleans if you're not a native, and I'm still not entirely positive that an outsider could read an accurate book about New Orleans and truly "get it". Even something like A Confederacy of Dunces, which is a brilliant novel...I don't know how somebody who doesn't know New Orleans could really fully grok it. That book was such a huge deal when it came out, when I was in high school. Not only did it finally put New Orleans on the map in terms of 20th century American fiction, but it did it by portraying in beautiful, hilarious, painfully accurate detail the people of New Orleans. It captured a now-dead era in New Orleans...before the huge wave of tourism, before the Cajun food craze, when there were still department stores on Canal Street and the Riverwalk was still a rail yard and Mardi Gras was still a largely local phenomenon.

Well, Poppy writes about New Orleans and its people with the same true, deep, powerful understanding that John Kennedy Toole did.

Liquor follows the adventures of two guys from the Ninth Ward, two guys living the typical hard-drinking drug-abusing bohemian lives of line cook grunts in the upscale eateries of New Orleans. If you've read Kitchen Confidential, you know the guys I'm talking about. Anthony Bourdain's army. I remember late one night being in a dive bar in the French Quarter after restaurant closing time, and a crowd of these guys came in to drink and play pool after getting off work. Still in their grubby, stained chef whites with the Brennan's logo stitched on the breast, they were an imposing bunch of sweaty, loud, long-haired, hard-drinking tattooed badasses. Imagine Mudhoney after guesting on Iron Chef. They were fucking cool.

Anyway, these two guys in the book, Rickey and G-Man, get the idea to open a theme restaurant called "Liquor", where every item on the menu has booze in it. And they get help from an unlikely source in the form of Lenny Duveteaux, a New England-born television chef with black curly hair who owns a touristy chain of New Orleans-themed restaurants (yeah, yeah, so it's kind of obvious who he's supposed to be). Things go from funny to debauched to strange to violent. It's a glorious book.

What I like best about Liquor is how authentic the characters are. I know exactly what these people look like, what they sound like. Everything they do, everything they say is believable to a native. Poppy understands the sound of how people speak, the rhythm of their days, even how they get around town and why. I mean, little things, like in one chapter they're driving back uptown to their shotgun house at Marengo & Tchoupitoulas, and they take Magazine Street. Now, anybody who wasn't from New Orleans would have had them driving up St. Charles past the ancient oaks and stately mansions of the Garden District. Because that would have seemed so "New Orleans-y". And it would have been obvious bullshit to a local, because anybody who drives Uptown knows that you take Magazine Street because it's got fewer lights and less traffic. I love that she knows that.

And the way people talk:

"We're no yats," said Rickey. "You gotta be old to be a yat."

"Bullshit," Tanker told him. "Here, take my foolproof yat test." He scrawled five words on a paper napkin -- SURE, ALL RIGHT, ROOM, TULANE -- and pushed it across the table. "Read that out loud."

"Shore. Awright. Rum. TOO-lane," Rickey read.

"You're as yatty as they come."

"What's a yat anyway?" said Lenny. "I know it's somebody who talks like you guys, but I don't know why you call it that."

"Hey, Lenny, where y'at?"

So I've found a new favorite novelist to follow around for a while. There's a sequel to Liquor already out, called Prime. And there's a third one in the works.

And Poppy's blog is over here, in case you're interested. Those of you who keep dancing around the notion of becoming writers, do check it out, since she talks about writing an awful lot.

I hereby jump all over Poppy's 5 Right Now meme. Because it's Friday. Just because.

5 things you feel right now:

1. Sweaty palms.
2. I'm pissed off at JR*les.
3. Munchies.
4. Sleepy.
5. A strong yet unfulfilled desire to view content "not appropriate in the workplace".

Last 5 things you bought:

1. Milky Way bar from the machine at work.
2. 2 al pastor tacos from Chango's.
3. Small box at Office Depot.
4. Large coffee to go from JP's.
4. Dinner for me and Cass at Nuevo Leon.

5 objects of lust:

1. Gina
2. The chocolate fountain at Whole Foods
3. Hiromi
4. hippiegoddess.com
5. The soft-shell crab po-boys I want to make this weekend.

5 things in your pockets or purse:

The first thing I do when I sit down at the computer is empty my pockets, so:

1. Lint

5 things you collect:

1. Books
2. CDs
3. Resentments
4. Chronic ailments
5. Porn

5 true statements you can make that most people can't:

1. My copy of "Rocket to Russia" is autographed by Johnny, Joey, and Dee-Dee.
2. I yelled Freebird before you did.
3. I shook hands with an East German border guard through a hole in the Berlin Wall.
4. I got paid good money to write LISP.
5. Fast cars bore me.

Shit like this really pisses me off. But I guess it's understandable, since Republican lawmakers and their families don't like to enlist so they don't really have a lot of experience dealing with actual flesh-and-blood vets.

My brother and I are going through the process of getting my dad's will together. (If there's one good thing to come out of the Schiavo mess, it's that Dad finally gets what Billy and I have been telling him about writing it all down.)

And this has made me consider, real close up, what it means to be a veteran and what it means when VA funding gets cut by the GOP.

My dad is a retired Coast Guard vet. Remember them? The Coast Guard? The forgotten military? The ones whose asses are on the line always, not just every few years when the White House decides it'd be fun to have another war?

Aside: Sometimes it seems like the GOP and the media think that military == Army/Marine Corps. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that most Red Staters don't have much experience with a body of water larger than those little ponds that their cattle roll around in on hot days. (Except for the rich Red Staters, who of course vacation in Maine and Cancun. But I'm not talking about them, since as we know, rich Red Staters don't fucking enlist.) But us Blue Staters (I'm from Boston) tend to be sea-faring folk.

Well, I look at what dad has for retirement, for health care. And it's basically the VA hospital. He gets Coast Guard retirement, a little pension from his mariner days, and VA health care. So when the GOP bleats about "support the troops" and then cuts my father's medical benefits that he earned by chasing crippled freighters into hurricanes...it pisses me off.

One of the wishes going into Dad's will is that all of his furniture and any of his personal effects that aren't to be passed to his grandchildren should be donated to the local VA hospital. Why? "Because those guys deserve all the help they can get," he says, "and they sure as shit aren't gonna get it from the government."

From The DCeiver (via Wonkette), this bit on the DC smoking ban.

"First they came for the smokers, and sent them outside...and then they came for the burned out lightbulbs, to be replaced by new ones...and then they came for the trash, and disposed of it...and then they came--uhhh...and since I was not a lightbulb...hmmmm...well, I forget how much more of it there is, but I'm pretty sure that at the end, there are totally some death camps. So, ummm, look out for those."

Smoking bans everywhere generate the same kind of rhetoric, I guess.

My connection at the Yellow Rose (which is a hotbed of libertarian political activism, I tell you what) reports that legal challeges are forthcoming against the Austin ban. And if the legal stuff bores you, on the same site you can check out the speakers list from the International Smokers Rights Conference in Vegas this month:

Joe Bob Briggs will provide his "Profoundly Disturbing" views on the fight against "Smoking In The Movies"

Woohoo!

I never did the Father's Day cooking rundown, although some of you have probably seen the pictures over there in the Flickr menu on the left.

This was probably the most fully collaborative meal the kids and I have ever cooked.

Cassidy has been doing Kid Cooking Camp at Central Market this summer and so we chose her to do the salad she learned there. A basic green salad with a citrus vinaigrette. She did all the shopping herself (at Whole Foods...shhhhh, don't tell the Central Market folks, apparently they're real sensitive about that kind of talk). They're letting the kids use the chef knife at the school, so I figured that means she's old enough to use it at home too, as long as I'm around to apply first aid.

And the salad frickin' rocked. All kinds of weird non-kid-like food in there like belgian endive and dandelion greens.

Something I hadn't done in a while was charbroiled oysters. Just a little butter, garlic, parmeggiano and parsley. Cook 'em til they plump up. These things are like crack at a dinner party. You cook up a couple dozen of them and most of them are gone before the shells are even cool enough to touch with your bare fingers.

Earlier in the week Liam and I had both found "The Hulk" movie repellent enough that we turned it off just in time to catch the "Pouch Cooking" episode of "Good Eats". So of course, Liam decided the main course on Father's Day had to be something out of a pouch. ("As Seen On TV" is a whole way of life for him.) We did red snapper with lemon, onions, garlic, red bell peppers, squash, and herbs and salt & pepper. A little olive oil and white wine. Just seal 'em up and throw them right on the coals after they've calmed down a little bit from the oyster butter flareups.

We were so taken with the pouch idea we decided to eat right out of the foil, campground style:

Everybody was well stuffed after all that, and since the fire died fairly quickly, we abandoned the notion of trying to cook bananas foster kabobs outdoors. Maybe next time.

And for an added bonus tonight, Cassidy made us another cooking school dinner: tostadas with a vinaigrette crab salad, guacamole, and peach salsa. Here's what happens when I get waaaaaaay too close to my food:

Click through all the picture links. They're yummier close up.

Last year right around this time, I posted a picture of a sunflower that had decided to grow out of a crack in our driveway. No care. No feeding. No earthly explanation.

So what are the chances of this happening twice?

Last year Gina planted bluebonnet seed in the grass patch between our alley and our driveway. As luck would have it, though, a few days later we got a horrendous storm with flash flooding. Flooding so furious that it actually ripped a 30-foot section of pavement off the alley and pushed it out into the street. So there was clearly no hope for all those tiny seeds which hadn't had a chance yet to burrow underground where it was safe. They were obviously long gone, washed down the drain to Waller Creek.

Sure enough, wildflower season came and went, and that little patch of weeds didn't sprout a single one. At the end of April we went ahead and mowed it. And mowed it again two weeks ago.

So Gina gets out there on Father's Day to do my mowing for me (she was gonna do it topless to make it an extra special Father's Day, but chickened out at the last minute) and what does she run across but this little guy:

He's late. He's probably lost. Definitely lonely (wildflowers usually travel in packs). But he's survived two mowings -- three if you count this last one when Gina found him.

Cassidy and I have decided to name him Jeremy Boob.

A real nowhere flower.

Father's Day 2001 was one of those turning points in my drinking history. It wasn't the day I got sober. That would take a couple more years. But it was the beginning of the end of my thinking that I could live this way forever.

Morning was the usual ritual for Mother's/Father's day. Brunch at home, with mimosas. My family bought me a dart board. At the time I was a hardcore beer geek and amateur dart geek; my main hobby was putting away pints and shooting darts at the Gingerman or the Dog & Duck with my friends James and Mark and Mike and Mike and Bill.

I was still in that frame of mind where I knew I would have to quit some day, but I was still waiting for that big event that would make it plain as day. Sooner or later I'd get liver cancer, or wreck my car, or get a DUI, or something, and then I would know that it was time to quit. (Sounds goofy now, doesn't it? It made perfect sense back then, and lots of ex-drunks I talk to now remember thinking exactly the same thing.)

So after drinking mimosas all morning, we set the dart board up in the garage and played darts with the kids. And shit, you can't play darts without drinking beer, so over the course of the afternoon I put away a 6-pack of Fat Tire. Somewhere along the way I vaguely remember promising the kids that we'd go to the pool.

Around 7:00pm, my wife wakes me up from my nap to tell me that they're going to the pool, with or without me. I told them to go without me. I was way too drunk, and I was getting that awful "I drank too early in the day" kind of daylight hangover.

And the guilt just crushed me. What a dorky Afterschool Special kind of thing to do. I made promises on Father's Day that I couldn't keep because I was too drunk.

It was the last straw. I told Gina I was going to quit. Not just for a month this time, not just for Lent, but for good.

A week later we went to a party at James & Mark's house, where I had a perfectly awful time, white-knuckling through it and pounding down Cokes non-stop. I had already backed off the notion of giving it up forever and decided that I was just going to give it up for a whole year. You know, see all the seasons change, experience all the holidays sober, just to see what it's like. It sounded refreshing. It sounded cleansing.

I got through an entire week in Wyoming with the in-laws and didn't drink anything. But it was calling me. I still walked through the beer section at the grocery store just to gaze at all the local microbrews that I would never have a chance to taste.

By the end of July, I had found a reason to drink. Just one time. Cassidy had gotten lost in the woods in Tacoma, police had to be called to find her, and the stress was overwhelming. It was also the perfect excuse. I decided, and Gina agreed, that I could drink on vacation in Tacoma, this one time, and still stay on the wagon at home in Austin.

A month after getting home to Austin, I found another reason to drink. I don't even remember what it was, but it seemed important at the time. A few weeks later, 9/11 happened, which of course called for a couple of bottles of wine to numb the pain. A few weeks after that, my company had the first massive layoffs to signal the end of the tech boom. More wine.

By November I was pretty comfortable with the notion that I should be able to drink once a week. I don't even remember the reasoning behind it; it was just "oh well". It was the new standard. Once a week. Or twice, depending.

Within six months, I was back to drinking almost every night, hangovers a couple times a week, drunk behind the wheel, etc, etc, etc.

By summer of 2003, I was a physical wreck. I weighed almost 250 pounds, my face was broken out, my total cholesterol was 240, I won't even get into the gastrointestinal stuff. Many bottles of wine a week, plus a few six packs. On top of that a bottle of scotch would typically last me less than two weeks. And that was just what I drank at home. I also drank at every meal in restaurants, at work every Friday afternoon, at least one night a week out with the guys.

And this when I had sworn off it forever.

This is what you call "quitting on your own". This is what you call "exerting self-control".

I'm still planning to write a blog entry picking apart the Penn & Teller "Bullshit" episode where they try to debunk AA, but their main theme was that AA is bullshit, and everybody who quits drinking does it on their own.

I love Penn & Teller, but they're idiots on this one. And every Father's Day is like a little reminder to me of how wrong they are.

My family spoiled the fuck out of me today.

Breakfast in bed: Bagels with lox and cream cheese from the boy, cheese omelette and hash browns from the girl. Coffee and newspaper from the spouse.

And then, they showered me with so many gifts that I'm starting to wonder, what's up? Did somebody wreck my motorcycle? Do I have cancer? What's going on here?

I got one of those fish grilling basket thingies with the handle, so that the fish won't fall apart on the grill any more when I flip it.

I got wireless outdoor speakers for the stereo, so that while I am grilling I can listen to rockin' tunes.

I got a set of tupperware with a container-and-lid caddy that rotates. "As Seen on TV". And Liam really did see it on TV, and has been bugging Gina to get it for me for months.

And I got a book. A book that was truly chosen with Daddy in mind. A book from the heart.

The History of Farting, by Dr. Benjamin Bart.

It has history. It has physiology. It has anecdotes, glossary, taxonomy.

And it has lots and lots and lots of limericks. About farting.

A philosopher once, named Descartes,
Was explaining himself to a tart.
"Since I think -- I exist,"
He remarked as he pissed,
"But what does it mean when I fart?"

It gets better.

An unfortunate girl named Louise
Lets a vast ventral blast with each sneeze.
She attracts quite a crowd
When they rip out real loud
And she blushes right down to her knees.

And better still.

I sat by the Duchess at tea,
And she asked, "Do you fart when you pee?"
I said with some wit,
"Do you belch when you shit?"
And I felt it was one up to me.

In other news, we cooked quite a feast tonight on the grill. Father's Day means I can make as much mess as I want and not have to clean any of it. Pictures soon, but for now I want to bask in this whole farting limerick afterglow.

Life is good.

Karl sent this to me in IM, so he gets all the credit/blame.

Just click it.

Guaranteed to be completely free of badgers.

[Update: Further inquiry shows the original source of infection to be Naughty Merrick, who despite her cavalier attitude towards passing along earworms to her blogging partners has what looks to be a nice blog full of discussion of heavy metal and masturbation fodder. Don't everybody head over there at one time.]

A few months back I managed to get myself hooked on Starbucks Java Chip ice cream. Damn, but that stuff was good. Only problem was it was hard to find; really only Central Market and HEB have it near my house. Plus there was the whole "feeding the beast that is Starbucks" thing lingering in the background.

Well, Starbucks is dead to me now.

I have discovered bliss in the freezer at Whole Foods, in the form of Boulder Ice Cream.

No artificial flavoring. No rBGH milk. No preprocessed ingredients. ("We use real food!") And funky flavors: my espresso chip fix, green tea, cinnamon, egg nog.

They don't even buy chocolate chips. They import chocolate bricks from Germany and shave it themselves. Oh, baby. (I looked for the "Chocolate Shaver Intern" job posting on the web site, but no dice.)

I like that they're a small operation. The email address for customer service sends you not to a sales department, but directly to some kid named Adam (who I think is 12). Accounting is this geeber named Scott. They have a sales & marketing MILF named Glennise. These are real people, not corporate-owned marketing images like *cough* *cough* Messrs. B & J.

I try, I don't always succeed, but I at least try to buy local when I can, and when I can't do that to at least buy indie. I'm not giving up on the local ice cream queen at Amy's (the ice cream is too good, the scooper chicks are hot and the scooper guys are funny), but when I don't want to stand in line at Amy's or I need a storebought pint stashed away for when I get those late night blood sugar issues, I do Boulder now.

A couple of newsworthy items from the Kinky Friedman gubernatorial campaign.

Alison at the Austinist points us to the Kinky blog. I think it's mostly staffers writing it, not him, but it's a nice twisted addition to the Texas political blog scene. Yesterday's entry gives a great (but weird...it's Kinky, after all) summary of the man himself and why he needs to displace Gov. Goodhair:

The leadership in Austin is nil. The present governor, Perry, is a weak sister. He is a graduate of Texas A & M. But, the exes and supporters of Texas A & M are deserting him by droves. The legislature has failed the people of Texas and are only interested in being returned to their position. Two ladies, Strayhorn, the present Comptroller of the State of Texas, and U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson appear as the only viable candidates for Governor to oppose Perry on the Republican ticket.

...

In any event Strayhorn vs. Perry is going to cause a bloodletting in the Republican Party. Should Hutchinson enter the race it is my feeling that the Republican Party will really be seriously damaged. There is no Democratic in the picture that has the known skill and abilities to lead the State of Texas. We must be careful or we may have the lady State Senator from San Antonio, who lead the walkouts last session, in charge.

And Burnt Orange Report digs up the Kinky campaign job ads on Craigslist, further proof that the Kinkster groks the grass-roots-Internet thing:

The Kinky Friedman gubernatorial campaign is currently accepting interns and volunteers to work in our Austin, TX headquarters.

Interns will participate in a campaign academy, complete with guest speakers, issue research, policy discussion, bloggers' breakfasts, media monitoring, and, of course, event visibility, phone banking, block walking, and data inputing.
Participating in the documentary of the campaign is voluntary.
A 20 hour per week commitment, beginning June 13, 2005 for at least eight weeks, is minimum (30-40 hours per week preferred) for one of the internship positions.

Help make Kinky the first Independent Texas governor since Sam Houston. Apply today! Email resumes to volunteer@kinkyfriedman.com, or call to get involved at (512) 828-7579.

Not surprised I missed these. My craiglist reading is usually confined to my daily check of Missed Connections looking for that entry that says "You, beautiful blue eyes, Flogging Molly t-shirt, stunning tattoo, showing your kids how to pick out fish at Whole Foods. Wanna check out my snapper?"

But alas...

Got these links via Poppy Z. Brite's blog. The New Orleans Times-Picayune has a long article giving a history of the legendary chef Paul Prudhomme. I knew a little of his history, but this piece, written in the form of a series of interviews with people who were there, really opened my eyes to how influential he really was. Before Chef Paul, New Orleans was Creole food. Cajun food existed only in the country. And New Orleans food was cooked by chefs from France. And Chef Paul, with help from the Brennan family, was able to transform New Orleans cooking, to say "this Creole food, and this Cajun food, they are joined at the hip; this is our food, this is true indigenous American cuisine and we can define it ourselves outside the shadow of the French chef."

PRUDHOMME: "I was the first American they'd hired as an executive (chef at Commander's). It was always Europeans."

BRENNAN: "The French had intimidated America with their supposed better knowledge of cooking. But we eventually became less intimidated. We got over (to France) a lot of times. We got (Paul) over there. We started to realize that we had possibly the only indigenous cuisine in the United States."

BOURG: "I remember going to Commander's and seeing these bizarre menu descriptions. This is when Paul began using all of these little puns and wordplays in his menu items. He started using words like 'debris,' 'Cajun popcorn.' Nobody knew who he was, because in those days, chefs were very anonymous."

BRENNAN: "It became a totally different menu. There wasn't a thing on the menu that was there before."

PRUDHOMME: "The gumbo I did at Commander's was a roux gumbo. To my knowledge, it never had been before. . . . I put it in and it became a staple. It was chicken and andouille gumbo. It was down-and-dirty Cajun. It was what Mama used to do. I'd go into the country and buy the andouille from the guy I'd known since I was a kid. We didn't have andouille in New Orleans until later."

It's in three links (don't know why, it just is). In order, go here, then here, then here. Third link is where the beef's at, but you need the first two to understand the background.

"My own brother, a goddamn shit-sucking vampire! Oh, you wait 'til mom finds out, buddy!"

From the time Cassidy was four or five, we've always had this tradition where on Halloween night, we would watch an (age-appropriate) monster movie before bed. When she was five, we watched the Boris Karloff version of Frankenstein, which she liked...she cried at the end when the monster died (she thought all the angry villagers were very mean), but she enjoyed it. No emotional scars; nothing like the time I accidently left her alone for the wrong ten minutes while Bambi was on.

When she was seven and Liam was four, we watched the Bela Lugosi version of Dracula. Age-appropriate? "Hell," I thought, "it was made in 1936, how scary could it be?" Well, it scared the fuck out of them. Way way beyond what I expected. Liam had to have a crucifix and a braid of garlic hanging on his bed for almost a year after that. Cassidy swore off scary movies forever.

I didn't realize until much later that we were putting them through that movie just six weeks after 9/11, and I think the movie just gave them an outlet for the fears that they had naturally picked up from all the freaked out adults around them during those months.

But since that time, they've seen all the Harry Potter movies, all the Star Wars movies, all the Lord of the Rings movies. They can handle their weight in suspense and even violence and swordplay, so I've been thinking it was time to try to work the horror thing back in a little at a time. And since Cassidy was out of town this weekend, while Liam has been talking all macho about scary movies lately, this seemed like the perfect opportunity.

So I puzzled through a pile of movies at Blockbuster tonight. Almost all of them were either too gory, or rated R, or were black-and-white (I didn't want anything too similar to the Lugosi debacle), so after much hemming and hawing and talking it over with Gina and with the film geek at the Blockbuster store (who I incidentally turned on to The Warriors, which he's gonna watch tonight, heh heh), I finally settled on The Lost Boys and Killer Klowns from Outer Space. Lost Boys is rated R, and I knew there was one rather intense vampire feeding scene, but I was guessing the R must be just because of some bad words, so I figured "what the hell". We can always stop it in the middle. And both of these movies are horror-comedies, not straight scary.

Right up until the feeding scene, Liam kept going "This isn't scary. When is it gonna get scary?" And right after the feeding scene, half of which he didn't see because my hands were over his eyes, he got up off my lap and went to sit with his mother.

And now he's in my bed. Head of garlic on my nightstand. Celtic cross over my side of the bed, my grandmother's crucifix over the TV, a little cross medallion hanging on the bedpost. Watching "That's So Raven". With all the lights on. I don't think I'll have to whip up any holy water, at least, which is good since I don't really know how to bless anything that hasn't sneezed.

On the way upstairs he said, "I think PG-13 should be my limit for a few more years."

So, OK. Oops. My bad.

He actually liked it, he thought the Coreys were hilarious, he'll probably watch it again in the daylight and it will take all the fear out of it. But I hate thinking I'm accidently doing damage to the boy just because I'm anxious for him to be able to watch certain kinds of movies with me.

I remember when I was his age, we had the Sunday morning Creature Feature that I got to watch only on weeks where we went to Saturday evening Mass. Mostly harmless Japanese monster movies, but there was this one called The Flesh Eaters, about a bunch of people who crash land on this island surrounded by these little round silvery things in the water that burrow through flesh. At one point the evil scientist tricks the dumb beatnik into drinking a few of these things and he screams while blood pours out his abdomen into his hands. That shit messed me up good, at least temporarily.

I also recall that the vampire episode of The Night Stalker had me sleeping with my mom's crucifix for a few weeks.

I guess I turned out all right.

Didn't I?

I finished Friday Night Lights last week, a birthday gift from my friend Sarah. I wasn't really aware of the book until the recent movie version came out, since the book was originally published during my all-too-brief exile in California.

Now I've read a lot of books about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and there are a lot of non-touristy-type places I'd like to visit in Belfast, or in Derry. I'm a WWII history geek, and some day I want to visit Auschwitz. I want to visit Normandy. One of my favorite trips ever was going to Berlin right after the Wall came down, and getting to see it while no-mans-land still existed, and while nobody was really 100% sure yet if somebody wasn't going to change their mind and shoot you for climbing up on top of the Wall. Hell, after reading Guerevitch's book about Rwanda, I even checked out the web site for the Hotel Des Milles Collines to see how much it costs to stay there.

But I tell you...after reading Friday Night Lights, I don't ever ever want to go anywhere near Odessa, Texas. It sounds awful. It sounds dreary. And to me, who once got dragged into an interrogation room for (unfounded) suspicion of drug smuggling by East German border guards, Odessa actually sounds too scary and alien to contemplate.

If you're not familiar with the book, it is the non-fiction account of the 1988 season of the Permian Panthers football team, during the depths of the West Texas oil bust. It's roughly a football equivalent of Hoop Dreams...a high school, a whole town, where football is revered above all else (especially above academics), where players are treated like gods until injury or graduation transforms them back into the "dumb niggers and oil field workers" they were born to be.

I suppose some people can read this and see "traditional American values". All I see is everything that is wrong with America right now. Everything that the educated Urban Archipelago must continually fight against. Conservative America as a religion in its own right. Football as an obsession, as a fetish, raised almost to the status of a sacrament. Reading this book right on the heels of What's the Matter With Kansas made me more depressed than ever about the faux-Christian-values jock contingent, the people who Bruce Sterling once described as the "they don't know nothing about nothing and hate anyone who does" crowd.

It's a brilliant, fascinating read. It's a great book if you want to see right into the heart of where our President calls home. But you might prefer to avert your eyes.

Sexy geek Rachel turned up this gem from Jimmy Kimmel, presumably while preparing for her thesis defense.

One Year of Unnecessary Censorship.

Choicest bit:

"If finger-fucking or some other kind of fucking will do it for the elderly, then go to it, God bless you." --Pat Robertson

The past few weeks I've been undergoing training for a volunteer emergency response program with the city of Austin. It's been very fun; we've learned disaster psychology, weather spotting, fire suppression, but this past Monday was the best so far. We learned Medical Operations. First aid, triage, how to set up a treatment center, how to set up a morgue.

First we got to take turns playing the victim while our colleagues practiced first aid on us. Somebody would fake, say, a forearm fracture and we'd have to properly splint it using a box of random household items...scraps of cardboard, gauze, duct tape, feminine hygiene products...

Feminine hygiene products? Seriously. You really can't beat a stack of maxipads when somebody's arm is impaled with a tent spike and you have to splint it in place without removing the spike.

Our final practice run was a simulated disaster scene, a partial structural collapse in a building. I got to be one of the victims. The instructor gave us little cards with the symptoms we were supposed to fake. I had trouble breathing and severe abdominal pain. One guy couldn't feel his legs. One girl was unconscious. One girl was dead. One guy was thrown in as a ringer...he was supposed to be the uninjured angry troublemaker who kept disrupting the scene demanding that people help him find his sister, just to see if the volunteers could figure out how to defuse the situation.

While the "rescuers" were outside, we got to moderately demolish the room we were in to simulate a disaster...turn over chairs and tables, turn off the lights, etc. The rescuers had to find us, evaluate us, triage, and transport if necessary using whatever means available. (In this case, most of us got wheeled out in Aeron chairs. Heh.)

It was a blast. Educational too, obviously, but it was great fun.

Upcoming events include beginner search and rescue training this Saturday (woot!), and the EMS guy who was our instructor this week says we are allowed to schedule a "ride along" with him if we want. Eight hours in an ambulance. He says you never know what you're gonna get. Might be eight hours of checking on drunks. Might be eight hours of trauma.

I will say this, though. Those EMS guys have a really dark sense of humor. This guy was funny, he was really smart, and he was also pretty twisted, in the best kind of way. I guess he has to be.

Best quote: "Air goes in and out. Blood goes round and round. Any deviation from this is bad."

I won't name the program here, since volunteers are supposed to comport themselves with some measure of, uh, professionalism, and I don't want anyone Googling the program name to run across the occasional bits of filth and depravity that show up in my blog from time to time. If you're in the Austin area and want to find out more about how to volunteer, email me and I'll give you the URL.

And I could use a t-shirt from this site: Sweet Jesus I Hate Bill O'Reilly, Intl.

An Organization of Hope.

If y'all haven't got the point yet, after I've been hammering on it for so long, you need to make it part of your daily food porn ritual to check out Looka, Chuck's blog at the Gumbo Pages.

Today's entry (scroll down a bit) chronicles his recent visit to the ancient New Orleans lunch institution that is Galatoire's. Lots of food porn, lots of local color in the form of a crazy Cajun waiter from Chalmette named John (and if you know anything about Cajuns and anything about Chalmette, you know what I'm talking about):

John's as wacky as ever, too. At one point he came to the table and said, "I'm gonna ask de lady to pick a number between one and ten." "Seven," Louise replied immediately; she always answers with seven when asked to pick a number between one and ten. "That number," John continued, "will determine how dirty my joke is gonna be ... y'all can stop me if y'all want." Oh no, we weren't about to stop him. Unfortunately, I can't remember the joke (d'oh!), but it was a Boudreaux, Thibodeaux and Clothilde joke, and while it was a tad risqué it wasn't the least bit dirty (although some Catholic mammas and grammaws might've blushed), but it was funny.

The thing with waiters in the fine New Orleans restaurants is that they are not just elegant servers with impeccable manners. They're entertainers, usually of the "blue" variety...on TOP of being consumate professionals, they're fucking funny as hell. Go to Brennan's, to Galatoire's, to Commander's Palace, and you will not just eat well, eat elegantly, and be pampered like royalty...you will laugh, you will be flirted with, you will be kidded, you will be entertained, and you will have the time of your life.

And if you're not familiar with the Boudreaux & Thibodeaux genre of jokes, here's my favorite sample. I can do this better in person; I can't really spell the necessary Cajun accent very well, but just squint your ears and pretend:

Boudreaux was an oil rig worker, and so he worked the usual rig worker schedule, two weeks on and one week off. And when he got home to Lafayette after a couple of weeks on the rigs, his wife would always meet him at the door, dressed in a sexy negligee, holding a bottle of Dixie beer to welcome him home.

Well, one week ol' Boudreaux, he gets home from the rigs and his front door is wide open, but the house is dark. No wife. No sexy negligee. No Dixie beer. He waited and waited and waited, but his wife never came home.

So Boudreaux calls up Sheriff Thibodeaux, and he says "Sheriff, I just got back from the rigs and I haven't seen my wife all night an' it ain't like her to be gone like dis." And Sheriff Thibodeaux says, "Aw, now, Boudreaux, don't you worry, she probably just gon' to tha casinos with her girlfriends and she'll be back soon. But if you want, I'll put out an APB on her." Boudreaux said "Thanks, Sheriff, that'd be nice."

The next morning Boudreaux gets a call from Sheriff Thibodeaux, and the sheriff says, "Boudreaux, my friend, I've got some good news and some bad news. What you wanna hear first?" and Boudreaux says "Oh, Lord, I don't know. Gimme th' bad news, I guess" and Thibodeaux says "Well, we found your wife. She's been murdered. They foun' her in the bayou, still wearing the sexy negligee."

Boudreaux says "Lord, that's awful. What's the good news?"

And Thibodeaux says "Well the good news is when the boys drug her out de bayou, there was a couple blue crabs hanging off her so they gon' drug her a few more times."

Thank you. Thank you. I'm here all week.

I forgot to bring the camera to the first night of the Republic of Texas rally, so unfortunately no pictures of Cassidy.

These three are of Gina taking Liam for a spin around the neighborhood. He doesn't feel ready yet to go out on the busy streets so he didn't go to the rally.

This is Gina parked on 6th Street on Saturday night:

And this one is Gina's best friend, Gena. Yeah, it's confusing. They used to be roommates, and when people would call on the phone asking for one of them, they'd have to say "Black Gena or White Gina?" (Update: Since I'm getting so many Google hits on this picture, I'd like to point out that Gena is a fantastic person and is single! So, uh, email me for details.):

ROT was fun, but it's all Harley Harley Harley wherever you go. 50,000 bikes and all we saw was one other Triumph, three BMW's, a half dozen Japanese bikes, and that was it. The rest were Harleys with a smattering of Indians.

They did have the Captain America bike from Easy Rider on display at the Paramount, which was very cool, but I couldn't get close enough to see if there was still any cash in the gas tank.

The Republic of Texas Biker Rally is in town this weekend. I'm sitting in my office and I hear Harleys roaring past on Loop 360 every ten minutes or so. People who took a three-day weekend are out having fun on the Hill Country roads before the non-stop party starts tonight, while I'm stuck in the office hacking JR*les. Waaaah!

If you've never seen this spectacle, you need to head downtown tonight. Imagine all of Congress and much of 4th Street closed...just to provide bike parking! Tens of thousands of motorcycles, from the rattiest rat bikes to the most beautiful pimped-out custom classics.

Cassidy loves going to this thing, I think mostly 'cause she likes being seen in public wearing her mom's riding gear. The real kicker tonight is that she and I have to go to a middle school parent-kid meet-and-greet happy hour, so we're gonna show up to that on the Triumph and blow away all the other kids as far as coolness points go, then go downtown afterwards to check out the RoT sights.

This being a Harley-dominated event, we'll definitely stand out, because of (1) full-face helmets, (2) riding gear even though it's 90 and muggy out, and (3) on a Brit bike instead of a Harley.

So if you see us, say hi. We're friendly bikers.

Redux on the old Tegan and Sara trick in the car with Cass this week. Just happened to have something on the CD player.

The drug this time? Gun Club, Fire of Love. She says it rocks.

OK, so I fiddled with the volume at some choice lyrical spots:

"We can fuck forever,
But you will never get my soul."

and

"I will fuck you until you die,
Bury you and kiss this town goodbye".

She's 11. She doesn't need to be hearing that shit just yet. But she knows from good punk rock. She's my girl.

Liam, meanwhile, is wearing me out with wanting to hear "Constipation Blues" all the damn time. He's got good taste, but damn he obsesses.

All right.
'ere it is.
Again.
And it's called...
12XU!

Yes! (From the Stereo Society commentary on Pink Flag:

The well-meant addition of extra tracks (typically, and in the US, the B-side for a subsequent single Options R) destroys the coherence of the album we made. The structure of the music was embedded in the LP, and the extra track after 12XU confuses what was a clear 40-minute experience. Options R is external to the context in which we sequenced the songs. Stop the clock before it, then enjoy it separately.

I have always thought that way about bonus tracks on classic albums that I know well, and on this album especially, I have always done just what he recommends: stop the CD where the original LP ended. Gang of Four's Entertainment CD has the same problem; so does Eleventh Dream Day's Prarie School Freakout. I know in my bones exactly where the album should end, because I lived so many defining moments of my life with that music as the soundtrack.

There is, however, one CD where I wished they had actually modified the original and dropped the last song OFF: the Dead's American Beauty. Side 2 of that album is perfect, ascending to a glorious finale with "Attics of My Life". The song ends and leaves you sad and ecstatic and emotionally drained all at once, and you just want to bask in the memory of it for a bit...and then this cracker-ass "Truckin'" cliche comes clunking along and completely harshes what's left of your buzz.

The only saving grace of "Truckin'" is that without it, we would never have had Pop O'Pies. So for that I am, er, grateful.

I feel icy
I feel cold
I feel old
Is there something there behind me?
I'm sublime

I feel empty
I feel dark
I remark
I am mesmerized
By my own beat
Like a heartbeat

I just ran across this totally fascinating account of the recording of Wire's Chairs Missing, written by Mike Thorne, who was sort of a fifth member of the band, helping record and playing keyboards on the first three albums.

I had played keyboards on a few tracks on Pink Flag, but didn't think that my contribution warranted disturbing the rock-solid coherence of the group's sound. There is piano under Reuters as basic coloring, and more forward noises in Options R, although I listened to that track recently and couldn't hear anything I'd done (most of it was intended to color Bruce's or Colin's guitars anyway) except the harmony to the bass on the descending line at the very end. So what if I was playing a cranky old RMI Electrapiano whose pedal would fall off onstage and require a short, discreet technical session with sticky tape. Wire said I should play synthesizers on the next album. I said, 'I can't move my fingers fast enough.' They said, 'If you don't do it, we'll get that Brian Eno in.' I said, 'OK.'

Dig around on their site, The Stereo Society. There are similar accounts for Pink Flag and 154 and interviews with other Wire members and other artists past and present (Captain Sensible, Glen Matlock, Lene Lovich, Hilly Kristal...) loosely affiliated with this sort of manifesto thingy on the front page:

You might think we’re throwbacks.

We keep living in that era when you listened to music with open ears. When you looked for something different and stimulating. When labels and categories and marketing didn’t matter so much as if something unusual grabbed at your ears..

The world changes. Used to be, you could make new and different music and if it worked and did it for the big wide people you’d have a hit. It worked pretty well in the old big music business structure. No longer. Let’s see if we can get something going again.

We think that music shouldn’t have convenient categories and definitions. To get filed and neutralized in some harmless corner. All it should do is just move and rattle you a bit. That’s why the music we make and sell is all over the place. We just think it works, and that’s that.

It's like I've been telling you people, if you'd just listen to me.