We were making lunch for the office (it's Dave's birthday today) and Heather and I were in the kitchen when a small explosion sounded somewhere outside. We went to go see if Duff was okay (he was at the grill). DA started yelling "Where's Duff's head? Where'd his head go?!"

We got outside and Duff was a bit shook. Apparently he thought he was done for when he heard the blast. A power line fuse exploded.

Now his hearing's gone. Or he's trying to ignore me.

So we've got half power for the lights, but the computers are fine. The linotronic is down, AC is off, and it's starting to heat up. We're just hoping the $300 worth of meat in the freezer will stay frozen.

They replaced the fuse and it blew again. The second power surge has taken down some of our computers and phones. I have to shut down before mine goes.

Five computers so far. Freaky.

Task: Reorganizing bookmarks.

Ever wondered about Clarus the dogcow? You can learn all about Clarus in infamous Tech Note 31 on Apple's website.

Or see what your Oz prison name would be here. Mine's Nipple Nibbler.

My porn name is Ginger Lake. I always liked that one.

And my smog name is Elizabeth Lake. So there.

Or see what the White House lists as known names of stimulants. I swear some of them are completely made up.

DEA Type: "Excuse me, young man, could you tell me what the slang is for marijuana? You know, 'Mary Jane.'"

Young Man: "Sure can, Mister. Me and my friends call it... uh... Dinkie dow. Yep, that's the hip term. That's street."

Must pause to get Barenaked Ladies off radio. Ahem:

Why The Barenaked Ladies Suck
by Claire

I do not like the Barenaked Ladies. I never have. This fact amazes a friend, who loves them. His argument: they're really good. He thinks that proves his argument.

Here's my argument: The Barenaked Ladies are basic pop music. Nothing special instrumentally. They try and write these witty, funny, catchy songs that completely and totally fail to be any of those things. It's not wit. It's not a sharp sense of humor. It's annoying. It's even more annoying because these guys seem to believe their press releases and seem smug about how clever they are.

Take another band that tries to be clever and witty, the Old 97s. They generally succeed. Rhett Miller has a great turn-of-phrase. Take a look at lyrics from Barrier Reef:

The Empty Bottle was half empty, tide was low, and I was thirsty.
Saw her sitting at the bar, you know how some girls are,
Always making eyes, well she wasn't making eyes
So I sidled up beside her, settled down and shouted, "Hi there."
"My name's Stewart Ransom Miller, I'm a serial ladykiller."
She said, "I'm already dead," that's exactly what she said.

[words/chorus]

My heart wasn't in it, not for one single minute.
I went through the motions with her./
Her on top, and me on liquor.
Didn't do no good, well I didn't think it would.
[chorus]

That's clever. Compare:

Chickity China the Chinese chicken
You have a drumstick and your brain stops tickin'
Watchin X-Files with no lights on, we're dans la maison
I hope the Smoking Man's in this one
Like Harrison Ford I'm getting Frantic
Like Sting I'm Tantric
Like Snickers, guaranteed to satisfy
Like Kurasawa I make mad films
Okay I don't make films
But if I did they'd have a samurai
Gonna get a set of better clubs
Gonna find the kind with tiny nubs just so my
irons aren't always flying off the back-swing
Gotta get in tune with Sailor Moon
Cause that cartoon has got the boom anime babes
that make me think the wrong thing

It's rhyming with pop culture references thrown in. Not even obscure pop culture references. At the very least. And that is why I don't like Barenaked Ladies. I have no problem if you like them, just don't expect to convince me differently.

I have been noticing over the last ten years the decline of Saturday morning cartoons. As a kid, there was nothing better than trying (and failing) to sneak down my squeaky stairs without waking up Mom, and then turning on the TV and watching cartoons. I loved cartoons. I still love cartoons. But man have they gotten insipid. This guy agrees.

42 appears in so many television shows. I have to imagine that a lot of people love Douglas Adams (42 is the answer to life, the universe and everything). For instance, it's Fox Mulder's apartment number and the number of Buzz Lightyear's spaceship, offhand. It's either a) a random coincidence, b) really is the number of life, the universe and everything, or c) a geek's code for Douglas Adams fandom. I'm going with the inside joke reference.

St. Paul was a haven for gangsters in the 1920s. The town had a non-extradition policy, meaning that criminals wanted in other states/counties could hang out in St. Paul and were safe from warrants in other towns. A police officer would meet a wanted criminal at the train station and let them know that they were safe here but if they so much as picked a pocket they were screwed. If I recall one story, someone did grab a purse and the police tracked this individual down, made him give them the purse and its contents, and gave them back to the purse's owner with their sincere apologies.

The whole Turf Club corner at University and Snelling was the site of a huge shoot out back in the day. Dillinger would hang out in that town. The Commodore (around Selby and Western) was once a hotel and home to many well-known mobsters. It had a huge fire back in the seventies and they turned it into condos. Some people lived there that I knew and I loved going over there just for the history.

St. Paul was originally called Pig's Eye. There was this guy who lived in a cave that was one of the first settlers to the town and he had a patch over his eye because it was pig-esque. There was no name for the growing town, so mail was addressed to "Pigs Eye, Minnesota". When it was decided that the town would be the state capitol the people-that-be figured it needed a more respectable name, so henceforth: St. Paul.

On the way home down Franklin I was stopped at a light. Dumb story. The people turning left from the street on my right kept trying very hard not to hit me (it's a weird turn). Anyway, it started to become funny (to no one but me) and their light started turning red. I was paying attention to the last car trying to navigate around me and I realized it was Jim Boquist from Son Volt.

Weird. To me and no one else, but weird.

I think Jim has a new thing going with Kraig Johnston at present. I saw them open for Tim Easton and Mark Eitzel and they were quite good, although Kraig kept referring to Jim as Jacques and there was a lot of discussion about not getting the memo. It was fun in a slightly buzzed sort of way.

Apparently Shannon's date was such a non-talker that the poor girl had to start coming up with useless trivia to have something to talk about. Case in point:

"Did you know that aerodynamically speaking a bumblebee should not be able to fly???"

Which is generally true, but is also a sign your date is sucking.

11:42 am
So we're listening to U2's Rattle and Hum back in our little enclave. I mention to Heathrow that half the people screaming when Bono mentions apartheid in Silver and Gold most likely have no clue what apartheid is. And SHE didn't know what it is/was. So if you don't, you should learn about it here.

Southern Culture on the Skids at First Ave. tonight. I'm too damn boring to keep a web diary. Are all diaries this boring? No one cares what the hell my cat is doing. I don't care what the hell my cat is doing.

A few weeks ago my dad was telling me about a building designed for Paul Allen (of M*crosoft fame/infamy) by his company. Paul wanted a building whose exterior could change with his mood. So apparently the architect created a series of different panels and fabric that were able to be manually altered to created different styles and looks.

Now that's money for you. But this is coming from the guy who told Frank Gehry (in describing how he wanted his Experience Music Project building to look) that he wanted it to swoosh. I'm paraphrasing, but it was woosh or swoosh and that's what he wanted the building to do. Wow.

So some journalism students have been working on the Deep Throat mystery and have concluded, based on best possible evidence, that it was Pat
Buchanan. Now that's wacky.

Who the hell had a high school experience like American Pie? Seriously. SERIOUSLY. It's on FOX right now. What friggin senior has some sort of sense of larger world purpose or self-reflection? Or treats girls so respectfully? The boys I went to school with were horrible. I have to argue that the only things going for that movie would be Jason Biggs as a goofily lovable dork who wants to get laid, and Eugene Levy who is, in my humble opinion, a comedic genius.

A friend/co-worker of mine and his best friend love Douglas Adams perhaps more than I do and he's currently sitting in his office and this friend is on the phone pretty much reading the book verbatim to him and laughing uncontrollably. They're at the bit about time travel and the poet (humor me):

"There is, or was, a poet. His name was Lallafa, and he wrote what are widely regarded throughout the Galaxy as the finest poems in existence, the Songs of the Long Land.

They are/were unspeakably wonderful. That is to say, you couldn't speak very much of them at once without being so overcome with emotion, truth and a sense of wholeness and oneness of things that you wouldn't pretty soon need a brisk walk around the block, possibly pausing at a bar on the way back for a quick glass of perspective and soda. They were that good.

Lallafa had lived in the forests of the Long Lands of Effa. He lived there, and he wrote his poems there. He wrote them on pages made of dried habra leaves, without the benefit of education or correcting fluid. He wrote about the light in the forest, and what he thought about that. He wrote about the darkness in the forest and what he thought about that. He wrote about the girl who had left him and precisely what he thought about that.

Long after his death his poems were found and wondered over. News of them spread like morning sunlight. For centuries they illuminated and watered the lives of many people whose lives might otherwise have been darker and dryer.

Then, shortly after the invention of time travel, some major correcting fluid manufacturers wondered whether his poems might have been better still if he had access to some high-quality correcting fluid, and whether he might be persuaded to say a few words to that effect.

They traveled the time waves; they found him, and did indeed persuade him. In fact they persuaded him to such effect that he became extremely rich at their hands, and the girl about whom he was otherwise destined to write with such precision never got around to leaving him, and in fact they moved out of the forest to a rather nice pad in town and he frequently commuted to the future to do talk shows, on which he sparkled wittily.

He never got around to writing the poems, of course, which was a problem but an easily solved one. The manufacturers of correcting fluid simply packed him off for a week somewhere with a copy of a later edition of his book and stacks of dried habra leaves to copy them out onto, making the odd deliberate mistake and correction on the way.

Many people now say that the poems are suddenly worthless. Others argue that they are exactly the same as they always were, so what's changed? The first people say that that isn't the point. They aren't quite certain what the point is, but they are quite sure that that isn't it. They set up the Campaign for Real Time to try to stop this sort of thing going on. Their case was considerably strengthened by the fact that a week after they had set themselves up, news broke that not only had the great Cathedral of Chalesm been pulled down in order to build a new ion refinery, but that construction of the refinery had taken so long, and had had to extend so far back into the past in order to allow ion production to start on time, that the Cathedral of Chalesm had now never been built in the first place. Picture postcards of the cathedral suddenly became immensely valuable."

I can't help it. I'm a Douglas Adams geek. I think the man was brilliant. And he knew a good computer when he had one. And a good word processor.

So I hate Sundays. Always have. Since high school. But I thought Sundays were a good day to post my lame weekend. So there. Thoughts.

Favorite bumper sticker:
Those who laugh last are a little slow.

Creepiest church sign:
Who's your Daddy?

Fun fact: Apple Computer was sued over the use of its name by Apple Records (think Beatles). They lost (Apple Computers was not competition and therefore not infringing on their name). In retaliation Apple Computer named their startup sound "Sosumi". Here's the blurb from former Apple engineer Greg Marriot (from his resume):

"TMON Professional. I wrote the trap recording part of TMON. Check it out, it's kind of cool. And fast. Another hammer. I like making hammers. Oh, I said that already. So sue me. (That reminds me... I helped name the Sosumi sound in System 7. It was called Xylophone, but Apple's lawyers didn't like that name in light of the Apple Records lawsuit. Too music-y, they said, as they demanded the name be changed. I looked one of Apple's lawyers dead in the eye and explained that Sosumi was a Japanese word for beautiful flower.)"

When Apple began working with MIDI technology they were sued by McCartney et al again and LOST.

I got together with a long-time friend last night that I've known since fourth grade. We went thru photos and it's amazing how much time has passed. Amanda's a rock star (figuratively speaking). Anyway, I Wanna Be Your Dog, as covered by Uncle Tupelo just came on in my iTunes shuffle and I am reminded of the insane record collection she and her roommate* have. It's a rock snob's dream collection (they have The Stooges, which is why I thought of it). I have like 200 CDs and am dwarfed by so many people that know so much more than me.

*I clarify—Todd's the guy with the rock snob record collection. Although I think Amanda has pretty good taste in music herself.

Hometown, the same town blues
Same old walls closing in
Well what a life a mess can be
I'm sitting here thinking of you
Won't you give a few thoughts to me

Whenever I hear the opening lyrics of "Graveyard Shift" by Uncle Tupelo I get giddy. Isn't that dumb?

There's too much time spent looking for a reason
Seems the simple ones beat the most truth
Oh, what a life a mess can be
I'm sitting here thinking of you
Won't you give a few thoughts to me?

I have to design this butt ugly newsletter for a non-paying client (religious). I redesigned the thing so it looked decent and the original designer (some tightly wound Edina woman) got pissed and it has to be changed back. If she thinks 11 point type on 13 point leading with a horizontal scale of 80% and kerning of -8 looks legible she's HIGH.

HIGH, I tell you.

Best misheard overhead page request: "Can you take a look at my poodle."

Phillip Starck is Target's new it-boy—Michael Graves' heir-apparent. I like Graves' work, but it was more whimsical. Nothing all that evolutionary/revolutionary. Starck, in my humble opinion, does a much better job of creating pieces that blend form and function.

On a semi-related note, my dad returned from Alaska last week (he landed on a glacier and wandered around. too cool.). Whilst he was gone he received a package from Fallingwater. Turns out he was invited to the grand reopening but was unable to attend. Which begs the question: why in the world didn't he give ME the ticket? I would LOVE to have gone to that. Anyway, they sent him the packet he would have received had he attended. Very nice home. FLLW may be over-exposed, but I still think he had some beautiful designs.

So there's this billboard for a bank that I see when I'm coming home from my mom's house that says, and I quote: Unbought, uncompromised, unpretentious.

Or something like that. Now forgive me, but isn't that the height of pretension?

Main Entry: pre·ten·tious
Pronunciation: pri-'ten(t)-sh&s
Function: adjective
Date: 1837
1 : characterized by pretension : as a : making usually unjustified or excessive claims (as of value or standing) b : expressive of affected, unwarranted, or exaggerated importance, worth, or stature

Well okay, maybe it isn't pretentious. But still sorta snooty. I mean, what bank is pretentious? It's a friggin' bank.