California Dreaming Pt. 2

So I want to start out this second part first with an apology. It has recently come to my attention that every time I post you all receive a notification that I have done so. This is ridiculous and I hadn't posted the second part earlier because I was trying to figure out how to turn it off. Unfortunately what Friendster's tech people told me is that you dear reader have to turn off the receive notification option. So, if you're sick of hearing that I've patted myself on the back again with another self inflated ego stroking post, you'll have to go into "My Settings" in the upper right section of your account page and turn off the receive notifications. And now into the post.

As I was saying, plane rides make life so much easier. So after we unloaded Dan, Chris and I went back to the apartment, grabbed Chris' girlfriend Lisa and walked to a pancake house in Palo Alto's downtown shopping district. When Chris and I were in High school we had comparable appetites. It hurts me to say that Chris is no longer capable of keeping "it" real. He and Lisa shared three pancakes and couldn't finish them. I ate two by myself and could have easily eaten another. I won't eat someone else’s left overs because that's what poor people do and I was still feeling rocky from the night before so they got a to-go box. Afterwards we went back to the apartment and took Lisa's car to Half Moon Bay.

On the way there Chris told me the truth about California. I was shocked that one, Dan had never said anything about these facts and that two, I had never read this stuff anywhere. Someone high up has been keeping y'all ignorant and I'm about to set it straight.


1) California has the most Space lasers of any state in the Union.
2) Most of these Space lasers are located beneath fake lakes.
3) All lakes in California are fake, the California the Spanish encountered only had the ocean and some rivers.
4) California is on a fault line. Some day a giant Earthquake will happen and the rest of the country will fall into the ocean leaving only the Californians.
5) Californians are sure they're better than you.

Half Moon bay was pretty but I'm pretty sure Chris only made us go there because his last name is Moon.




(Chris and Lisa at Half Moon Bay)


After the bay we went back to Palo Alto, had some dinner at a nice pizza place called Patxi's. The waiter kept calling it "Patchi's" and I felt bad because he was clearly too stupid to pronounce it correctly as "Pattexis".
Sunday Lisa went back to school in San (some other southern part of California) and Chris and I went over to the physics lab. Chris is building, along with a few other people, a world-class electron microscope. It is capable of seeing an atom.

The lab is in a sub basement and nearly soundproof. I saw a picture of an Atom but it just looked like a weird hexagon. Science is kind of unimpressive actually.
Afterwards we played more GTA San Andreas and I went to sleep. The next morning I hopped on three planes to get back to NY and was in bed by 10pm EST.


The high points of the flight? Sleeping, sleeping through the in flight movie on the way to Atlanta (can anyone say Aeon Flux?) and the one hour between Atlanta and Cincinnati where I flew first class. I drank a lot of free coke and ate a lot of free pretzels. I also took the remote control from my personal entertainment console, the sleeping man next to me's laptop, the emergency oxygen mask in the panel above me (I jimmied the panel open with a pen) and I joined the mile high club by myself. All in all I give California a thumb up.

California Dreaming Pt. 1

Last Thursday at around 1:30 I got on a plane bound for San Jose, California. Don't worry reader: I had purchased tickets for this flight, this was no spur of the moment plane jacking. I had planned for some weeks to go out to Palo Alto and visit Dan and Chris at Stanford. I hope if nothing else this story proves that I'm smart, if only by association.
The first leg of the trip was a quick jaunt over to Minneapolis where I had a five hour layover. Mommy came to the airport to pick me up and we went back to the house of my birth (which is being sold) and I ate sandwiches and regailed my mother with off color stories from New York. I think it's the first time I told her a story ending with myself exclaiming (in the story and not to my mother) "Damn those some tig ol' bitties!!!".
Around 8pm I got back on a plane headed to San Jose and the greater West Coast (that's where the rappers what hated on the East coast are from). The second plane ride was equally uneventful. Perhaps the only good things to come from Aero-planes are thus: 1)They are much faster than cars and trains. 2) You can take neat pictures out their windows.


I touched down in San Jose at 10:50. Chris and Dan were there waiting for me along with Chris' girlfriend Lisa, who I hadn't met before. The four of us went to the grocery store and bought ice cream and then went back to their apartment. The weather was very nice, especially since MN had snow.
The next morning I awoke and Dan and I went over to Stanford's campus. Dan had to work on some school related computer things, so I thought I'd take advantage of the day by sitting around campus reading a book and ogling undergrads... which I did. Stanfords campus is very big and easily defendable, let that be a lesson to the Japanese if their expansionist eyes happen upon Stanford. It is a complex of giant courtyards, passageways and mamoth school buildings filled with classrooms to teach young minds.

That night Dan and I went to a grad students birthday party and I drank a wee bit too much. No pukey, but the next morning/mid-day/afternoon wasn't so much fun. Chris, Lisa and I went and ate giant pancakes and then played Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. I killed a lot of hookers, and I only wanted to find a knife so I could slit a cops throat...
The next morning Chris and I took Dan to the airport so's he could go to New York where his gal pal Jen is. It's kind of funny to me that in the olden days it took people nearly a year to get from the east coast to the west and usually involved canabalism, and now it's a six hour plane ride (assuming you don't have layovers).

Super intelligent hyper dog invasion!!!

Friends, I have never been more terrified in my life. I'm not talking about the war in Iraq, the rising ultra nationalism in Serbia, or tensions with Iran over their nuclear ambitions. I am talking specifically and in hushed tones about the new menace... Dogs who know how to use computers.
I was browsing my Friendster page and noticed that in the singles in my area section was a picture of "Muffin". I thought, "how odd. A girl with the screen name Muffin. She must be a freak in the bedroom." Indeed she is freaky, freaky terrifying.



(Muffin)

Muffin is a super smart computer savvy dog. And Muffin isn't the only canine using Friendster... Oh no, I found hundreds more! Average dogs with names like "Cookie", "Pixie" and "Bubba"...



(Cookie)

...are infiltrating Friendster.
Now, the question comes up... How are these dogs logging into Friendster and why? As far as I could tell most of these dogs got a great sense of satisfaction out of being pets to their "masters" but, right there in the terminology something was unsettling. To have a master implies a derogatory power structure with a "slave" to the "master". So, if the dogs here see themselves as "slaves" are they intending to overthrow this system? If so do they see their "masters" as their enemy or all humans? Further investigation into these doggy accounts revealed that these dogs were mostly interested in eating, pooping and meeting other dogs. I could tell below the surface that something sinister was happening but I couldn't put my finger on it. That's when I found the most frightening link...



(Peanut)

The dogs were Friendsters with cats. Anyone who knows anything about anything ever in the course of the world knows that dogs and cats hate each other. Sure liberal Hollywood wants you to believe they can get along but if you've ever seen the split nose of a puppy or the half eaten corpse of a kitten you know this is typical big screen bullsh*t. Yet on Friendster I was finding connections between hundreds of thousands of dogs and cats. Is there an alliance? Is the enemy of my enemy truly my friend?
I tried to dig deeper. I started contacting these dogs and cats, innocently prodding for information. It didn't take long before I was told to stay away.




(Shiro)

"Hey jerk off, I don't know who you think you're fooling with your little messages but let's get something straight. Whatever you think is going on is much much bigger, and unless you like the idea of ending up in an industrial meat grinder in Jersey you better keep your questions to yourself. You've been warned by the IPLF (International Pet Liberation Front)"
After wetting myself I became calm, almost serene. That's when I decided to tell all. Stay vigilant reader, the cats and dogs are everywhere. If you see them in packs, run for your life. Keep your fire arms locked away (they don't have opposable thumbs so they can't use keys). Be prepared because whether we like it or not... the war is coming.

My best Fiend

In a few short weeks (a week and a half) I'm moving out of 107 St. Marks place and making my way north through Bed-Stuy and into the venerable Willy-B (Williamsburg, hipster not historic). Before I do this I want to address a particular fixture of 107 St. Marks Place #1. No, I'm not talking about the fact that the hot and cold water handles are reversed in my bathroom, I'm talking about Nugget... my nemesis.



(This is an actual, undoctored photo)






Many of you have made fun of me for my deep distrust of Nugget. Some have commented that my fear of the cat somehow makes me less of a man. You who mock haven't been subjected to the terrors of living with him. Go to the survivor of the Texas Chainsaw Masacre and say "Leatherface isn't so bad, you're just a p*ssy".
In detail, living with Nugget is exactly the same as living with a roommate who has schizophrenia and a violent streak. For instance one time Nugget was sitting in the middle of the living room. I picked up my shoes off the floor and Nugget, in a fit of rage, ran and wrapped his front legs around my leg and repeatedly bit me. Another time he bit Dave's face because Dave was petting him, and he'd grown tired of it. He drew blood one morning when I was walking back from the kitchen to my room and hadn't paid him enough attention after feeding him. Come to think of it, one of our first altercations as roomies was when Dave was visiting his parents and I was feeding Nugget. I put his full bowl of food down and he bit my hand... hard. Quite literally Nugget bites the hand (mine) that feeds.
Now Nugget isn't all scratching, biting and drawing blood. Sometimes he's really sweet. When I watch that show... um, you know that 70's show. What's it called?
Get it?!? Like I couldn't remember the name... but that is the name!!!
Anyway, when I'm watching that he'll come over and lie next to me and put his front paw out. If I touch his paw he'll bite me, but if I leave well enough alone we're fine. He'll even let me pick him up now, something that Dave can't get away with. Sometimes I hear him purr. But all of these gestures of docility are merely weighed for their effect in getting my gaurd down. Whenever I think we've hit some point of understanding between us and that maybe, just maybe the violence will end... Nugget bites me.
So when I move next week and leave behind 107 St. Marks place, Dave and my landlords Joe and Lizzie, I'll also be leaving behind the worse pet I've ever co-habitated with. Nugget I hope you die at an early age in a painful way. You're a little bastard.