Around town today

The joe in the workout shorts and shiny running shoes walking out of Costco with his brand new Wii Fit set under his arm and a look of accomplishment on his face.

The guy sitting on the steps at SF City College about two pages into "Math does NOT suck", all in bright pink lettering and in the same fonts used for the intro to Saved by the Bell.

The loser at the gym on the stationary bike. Sipping his latte while "reading" his novel. Ass.

The blind guy who was crossing Taylor this morning and couldn't tell I was half-way into the crosswalk until his walking stick slapped my bumper and confusion reigned for about 4 seconds until he found his revised path to the sidewalk. I tried to back up but the clown behind me wouldn't move! Sorry, if you're reading this. Oh, right..

The River Fun

As Meryl Streep is to:










,

So we were to:




































Thanks to an awesome birthday trip from Jean

Progressively worse

Anyone else genuinely despise these commercials for progressive insurance?



I mean, like really, really angrily dislike it. A write-a-sternly-worded-letter-to-progressive hate that almost ruins whatever faux reality show it is that I'm investing my time in. Whenever I see god-awful commercials like this crap, I immediately imagine myself sitting in the board room meeting where some blowhard executive is signing off on this script: the quirky, relatable hipster "gal" that makes car insurance FUN weee hehe! I'm of course powerless to stop this decision from being made, let alone the follow up board meeting where the same executive feels his new quirky, hipster campaign is being received so well by the voiceless viewing audience that he signs off on enough variations on the same retarded theme to fill 10 months of Seinfeld reruns and in between Billy Mays pitches (rip).

I don't like corporations trying to be too assuming of me as a consumer, too hip (close second) and likable. It's what advertising is in essence and part of a free market society, but these are the best ideas they have? These are what millions of dollars are being spent on? This is what we respond to??

Also, an interesting read today.

Happy something or other

I really enjoy that my nephs are old/young enough to be coerced/coached by my sisters into wishing me salutations. Whether it's Sam meticulously repeating his birthday wishes for me, Joe blurting whatever monosyllabic adulations come to mind, or Pax descending into the most thoroughly orchestrated balderdash between "happy birthday" and "berries", it's good to be an uncle these days.

holy mamas!

for the first time in 5 years, my Giants are competitive. for the first time i can remember, they're competitive because of young, enthusiastic, unpretentious players. they're competitive because of phenoms like tim lincecum, matt cain and pablo sandoval - some of the best in the league. not because of guys like jonathan sanchez.

jonathan sanchez was one of the Giants' five starting pitchers but was so terribly inconsistent that he was banished to the bullpen (baseball's version of sitting one out) and it was assumed the team was trying to trade him to any team willing to offer any value in return. he was unwanted. last week one of the giants other starters (who happens to be the ugliest man in professional sports), hurt his shoulder. the team needed sanchez to fill in for one slot while the other pitcher healed.

with his dad watching from the stands for the first time in his major league career. sanchez ended up throwing the first no-hitter for the giants in 33 years this weekend. i appreciate that it means little to a non baseball fan, but a no-hitter happens maybe once a year in the sport (with over 2,400 games played each year). its one of the more rare feats in baseball, especially considering that the giants have generally sucked and been one of the less-than-victorious/lucky teams over the past 50 years.

few things make me blurt obscenities at my television in excitement while im standing in my apartment alone in my skivvies. this did. (link is snapshot of his game in 3 min. jump to 2:50 on the link for the last couple outs, complete with padre sanchez balling his eyes out).

the rear window, sans christopher reeves

On nights like tonight I feel like Jimmy Stewart in the Rear Window, without the murderer (presumably), gimp leg and absurd speech impediment that 1950s America apparently thought was endearing.

It's one of the things I like most about my spot, especially on a warm night when the fog miraculously never bothers to form and is replaced by a still haze over the water, a long-lasting sunset and a peculiarly early summer night that even the Indians couldn't see coming.

Situated on the top floor in the tallest of two buildings in my complex, I have the benefit of casually peering into pockets of my neighbors' lives with them being none the wiser.

I attempt a light through several matches and kick back on the grated porch, four flights up, hoping for some sort of entertainment from dozens of apartment buildings stacked out in front of me like an absurd Lego set, but mostly the 5 doors wide open in the building across the way.

An old woman shuffles out of #12 and clutches against the railing to strike up a conversation with the landlord watering the bushes in the patio below. I can't hear what she's saying, but she looks like a long-removed fixture of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, repeating the same jaunting head cocking and mechanical arm raising, most likely warning about some some suspicious activity she's seen lately around the building. Her moo moo snags on her motorized undercarriage. The landlord seems disinterested in her warnings.

Two flights up and over in #36, Darryl is making his moves in on some most likely unattractive broad. I can only see her legs, and his XXXL basketball shorts, as he begins to mac on the couch. I don't know his name, but Darryl seems fitting after how many of his obnoxious house parties have made me wonder if I had the aim to launch my bar-b-que across the patio into his living room - lit.

They'd be prime candidates for me to witness some horrific attempted crime, if not for the French couple frolicking around in the pool between the two buildings. They moved in next door six months ago, and seem way too nice and carefree to not be the target of some twisted plot. Just minutes earlier they had told me how "pleasant warm" the water was - "30 degrees Celsius!" I didn't know those would be their last words. If I were Jimmy, I'd guffaw and bang on my cast, trying to alert them that something was awry.

Instead, I get distracted by the landlord, now up on the third floor, cleaning out #32 for a new tenant. Though a seemingly hip young landlord (he has a beard and wears v-necks), I think he's sort of had it out for me. Weeks after a bar-b-que I hosted, he posted flyers on every door in the building prohibiting bar-b-ques or any lit object near the building, and "thanking us for our cooperation". Only I haven't cooperated. I shuffle my chair between his line of site and my "Smokey Joe" mini bar-b-que on my porch, in the process drawing his attention to my lit pipe.

He feigns interest in moo moo pirate, who's shuffled back to her perch to haggle about something, but gives me an admonishing stare. I'm committed to a summer grill-off without the Man getting me down, and decide I've had enough of the rear window for the night. The Frenchies will have to fend for themselves.

nerd alert

i'll be the first to accept my descent into startling nerdiness lately with my utter fascination about space. hell, i'll embrace it. nerdiness is the confident clothed man's nudity. so there.

ive always liked this picture, once i really looked at it, because once you get past all the cliches, it is the closest thing we have to understanding the incomprehensible vastness of the universe while seeing the only thing we really know as it really is: floating in an infinite sea of dark matter.

one leading theory among astronomers that i recently read about is the infiniteness of the universe. this is generally an idea that is supposed to be too grandiose for humans to fully conceptualize. ive tried, but usually end up getting sidetracked by something more one time i threw a snowball at a car and the guy got out and chased me and my friend through the forest oh man it was crazy. wait, what?

oh, right. when i stop to think about it, the numbers and ideas are incredible: the edge of our solar system is 5 trillion miles away. it takes light one full year to travel 6 trillion miles. the nearest star to us outside of our sun is over 4 light years away. there are millions and millions of stars in our galaxy. and there are millions of galaxies with millions more stars in each. emitting out from earth at the speed of light is every radio broadcast and every image of every event that ever occurred on earth - floating out there at the speed of light waiting for some sort of eye to receive it as if earth's history is happening for the first time.

there is some evidence that suggests the universe as a whole is expanding at an exponential rate - that the universe is, in essence, infinite in size. the implication being that there are infinite versions of "earth" and infinite versions of each of us somewhere in the universe. somewhere, 3 million lights years away, there could be an exact replica of me and the entire world around me, with the only exception being that in this alternate world my alternate self is 4'6 instead of 6'4 and suffers from acute Napoleonic Syndrome, leading me to become a wealthy - albeit pint-sized - industrialist bent on space exploration.



all that to say, i signed up for SETI@home - software i read about that incorporates the processing power of personal computers around the world to mine through massive amounts of white noise recorded from deep space to search for any kind of pattern or radio signal. the idea, of course, is to search for any signs of intelligent life, which is incredibly nerdy, unlikely and fascinating all at once. i downloaded the software, considering it at least a somewhat passively remarkable contribution to the relentless search for the inevitable life of some level that exists somewhere, some how. Millions, billions, trillions of miles away and suddenly closer than ever.

Crazy Pills

I'm not on them. But somebody's running a racket around here, and being sober from crazy is isolating me from the general public more and more.

Take today's trip to the market. Pulling into the parking lot, I slowed to a stop at a crosswalk in order to let a round hispanic girl in her 20s cross. she didnt cross at first. she stood there and furled her stenciled eyebrows - i'm such an ass for having stopped to let her cross. i think they call that look the stink-stencil. all put out that she had the right of way, she huffed and began clomping across the street and directly down the middle of the parking lane. her painted-on jeans miraculously held her corpulent ass in place as it clogged any passage like newton's cradle. Somehow slipping past, i pulled into a parking spot down the way and idled while checking email. Hearing what at first sounded like a seagull in heat, I checked my side view mirror to see many poor eating decisions pouring over the front of a pair of pants and a button holding on for life.

"Kan choo move yore kar?! i cant open my dore!" came the angry squawking through my rolled down window.

"Sure. We don't need to be mean about it, though." Forget the fact that a fully stocked wheelbarrow could've rolled between our cars. My willingness to make room for her width brought more huffing before she wedged behind the wheel and re-stenciled while mouthing profanities at me.

Inside the store, I decided some chips would hit the spot. A man wearing a backpack and reading a magazine by the chip rack slowly looked up at me and stared as i walked up. he didnt look like a crazy. he looked like a nothing-special average joe, except that if you changed the chip rack to an 1850's saloon and transplanted his face onto Mad Dog Tannen's and called him "yella", nothing would be different.

I pretended to ignore his glare. He eventually looked back to his Us Weekly but as I reached for some Sun Chips, Mad Dog realized I was McFly and started staring at me again.

we finally exchanged "hello's", even though his was more of a "Hello, im incredibly crazy and i'm going to keep staring at you." and he did, all the way through checkout.

poop goes in the potty, people

my almost 3-year-old nephew could do wonders as an honorary hygienic ambassador to san francisco. if he could just walk the streets singing his "poop in the potty" song, the educational value for so many citizens would be ground-breaking. i know i appreciated being reminded.










pics courtesy holly