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.