wednesday, february 28, 2001
t-minus one day! i'm off today, waiting for the cable guy to come pick up the box, then over to the new apartment to paint it "calypso berry" and "cranberry splash." i've pretty much mastered the sponging technique: these are two shades of a sort of watermelon red that are very close. i will first apply a solid wall of the darker color, then sponge over it with the lighter color, creating a subtle textured effect. my room is pretty much shoebox-shaped and -sized, an illegal 6 feet wide by about 17; i'm only slightly afraid the dark color will make it feel "closed in" as good ol' mom has pounded into me over the years, but then again it's fucking small and nothing's going to change that. ah, manhattan.

i pretty much cried all the way through last night's buffy. did any of you see it? absolutely brilliant.

fun email sign-offs to confuse your friends with, via john.

i limited myself in advance to one hour online this morning, and i'm about to pack up the 'puter, so no more updates till friday. as you were.

tuesday, february 27, 2001
crazy fact: after i leave on thursday, my apartment's rent is going up almost $200, to the same price i'll be paying in manhattan. my landlord's wife, a realtor, says she had lots of people "begging" her for the apartment. vacancy is low, and in 20 years she's never seen prices this high. astoria is hot hot hot, and i'm getting out out out!

fun for whirling around the city, literally: dizzy city. get the plug-in; it's worth it. [via golden boy]

too big for a cab, i guess.

[Ed note: a few images on this page are broken, lost to the internet. Sorry. 10/6/04 ]

bill werde bulletin: deep dish didn't win the grammy, but may have opened the door for underground dance acts of the future. and tons of young people are getting laid off and learning about the real (nonvirtual) world in the process.

some good blogs you should visit from real-life writers: andrew sullivan, who writes tons of smart stuff on politics, among other things, and michaelangelo matos, who is a music critic and made me two stellar mix cd's.

monday, february 26, 2001
more me:

friday, february 23, 2001
you don't...wanna fuck with shady...

thursday, february 22, 2001
inexplicably funny, this: all your base are belong to us. there may be an underlying inside joke (a little background from salon), but mainly it is just a meme. and i am spreading it.

for those of you wondering about the lack of logo and pictures, i just got the deal from andrew. it seems geocities stopped allowing their images to be pulled from anywhere (so, it's not just me) a day or two ago. he's been getting a lot of mail about it and is working on a solution. which i will love him if he can find one. otherwise i might have to (*gasp*) figure out how to get set up with my own domain.

wednesday, february 21, 2001
beck releases web-only grab-bag album. should i get it? what do you think? i am way more gleeful about the fact that les savy fav is playing again in march. are you?

this shouldn't be funny, but it is: the underpants archive, filled with quotes from the x-files with key words replaced by the word "underpants." [via quiddity]

well this is quite ridiculous: the government is arguing before the supreme court that people ought not to have a reasonable expectation that heat will stay inside their homes ("that's why there's an insulation industry"), so therefore we should not be surprised when police use high-tech thermal imaging equipment to find out what's going on in there.

tuesday, february 20, 2001
in a column for E, ben stein reveals that he is at work on a "comedy program" in which he "may" wear a black robe and yell at people from a bench. and that they've just signed to do 260 more episodes of win ben stein's money, which i find highly addictive and perfectly placed in terms of piggybacking (or whatever the industry term is) to get me to watch--11:30 weeknights, right after the daily show.

a lot of you know this already: i'm moving. after almost three years in the no-respect boro of queens, i'm bound for the grayer pastures of the lower east side. very, very excited. march 1! so i'm packing. which can be kind of sad, reducing your home to a pile of boxes. especially when you realize that you have a bunch of tape cases and jewelboxes that are missing their tapes and cd's. very sad indeed:

do you hope they'll turn up? replace them?

this is just what i had already set aside, too. i'm sure there are more.

something to look forward to: a new built to spill album.

i have gotten so much mail today, my officemate is sick with jealousy. first i got a huge package with tons of bubble wrap from tiffany's: two (kind of boring) champagne flutes, my first anniversary present from hearst. then i got a promo old 97s ep from scott midnight, a reader who picked it up in a record store. next, from reader and record-store employee john parker, another promo cd, this one featuring an interview with rhett miller with songs from "satellite rides" playing in the background. so most sincere thanks, guys. and *then* i got the hot snakes cd i ordered from saul goodman. ain't mail grand? now: who wants to send me weezer tickets? anyone?

saturday, february 17, 2001
must have been pretty shocking for the members of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists when the lieutenant governor of california used the n-word. even bush has never slipped up that bad. that one came from steve, whose nascent page is an entertaining mix of blog and fake corporate propaganda.

and this guy in australia married his TV. "I feel I'm better off marrying it rather than another damn woman," he said. via eileen.

friday, february 16, 2001
just one extra soda can increase a child's obesity risk by 60 percent. i stopped drinking soda a couple years ago and let me tell you, i felt so much better.

dave eggers dates, via betsy. i'm thinking of elaborately defacing my HWOSG in order to win the pristine copy of mcsweeneys #1.

rarely do i watch the grammys. but now that i know my honey jon stewart is hosting, i am so there. [via fresh hell]

thursday, february 15, 2001

gbv. rock. roll.

yeah, so, i had a *great* time at the show last night with jami (the secret's out). if you have somehow missed mention of them here in the past, GBV is guided by voices, and they rock. we love them, yes we do. alas, the evening was marred by an upsetting event: yes, i had seen the sign. but there *were* other people taking pictures. after snapping that crappy one above i received a tap on the shoulder from a big burly bouncer, who took me to the back of the club and demanded my memory card. uh, no fucking way? so i had to leave. which was fine, it was the encore, whatever. but the asshole bouncer would not let me get my coat from the coat check, told me i would have to "wait a while" for it, called me a bitch several times, and just generally did his best to make me feel powerless. *he* was in control, see. so i took his picture. ha! and chatted with shane from strong island, who had been ejected for "sleeping" and who was cuter than the picture below shows. and alas, i somehow missed jami, but i did see herb, who was with jack from the big takeover, and that was nice, and herb was allowed to go in and get my coat (thanks herb!). and so despite the sweet boys, i was a ball of anger and frustration and guilt, and i cried on the cab ride home, the kind where your eyes are squeezed tight but your cheeks are all wet and you're curling in on yourself and trying to hold it in because you want it to be quiet, like you do in the ladies room that is never quite satisfying. what a weird night.

pure male evil.

had been drinking since 2 o'clock.

wednesday, february 14, 2001

village voice pazz & jop is out. lots' o lists.

dog with afro, best in show. such a cutie!

tuesday, february 13, 2001
salon names their 10 most paranoid books, naming my favorite as #1. rock!

before midnight tomorrow, click the heart and $1.25 will be donated to united way to help abused women.

funny review of the new stephen malkmus record by nick monosyllabic, who continues his monstrous project of reviewing every album he bought in 2000. which is apparently a LOT.

fun with quizzes: the abductalizer rates your personal abduction analysis factor, weirdly rating me a high 7 despite telling me it suspected i was not taking the test seriously. i want to believe, really i do! [via jejune]

newyorker.com is up and running, which is a good thing for those of us with too many magazines and an addiction to the internet. it's good, and they're even smart enough to have an online-only feature.

via quiddity, a quality blog i'd never visited because of some vague suspicion about its url, comes this great story about how terry gilliam's don quixote movie collapsed.

weekend astoria pictures:

happy birthday to holly, first of all. holly, say cheese:

monday, february 12, 2001
doing a pop-up slide show takes a lot of goddamn work. i don't even know if it's going to work properly, but i've been working on it for half the day, it's late, and i'm going home. they're pictures of holly and amy's birthday bash at fez on saturday. i hope you appreciate them, because i did it all for YOU! sorry about the ads, but you can't have it all.

and now it is 12:55 a.m., and i just archived the first two weeks of february. and i just received some new information tonight about ways to save my pictures so they're not so big. AND i learned that those of you who have been complaining about slow loading times shouldn't, because you visit every day and the page might take a *little* longer to load, in the grand scheme of things, but nowhere near as long as somebody who's never visited the page before, because all that shit you've already seen is cached, right? at least that's my interpretation of what john (a.k.a. my computer-tech-guy-for-life) tells me. anyway i don't want potential new readers to give up and go somewhere else just because they're on a modem. so go, look at the last nine days, and weep for the nice clean monthly nature of my archives. i'll have some fun links tomorrow, i promise.

friday, february 9, 2001
funny onion-esque faux christian site. do i have to provide commentary? how about "god will strike you down if you don't go"?

also funny: they say 1.5 percent of home accidents are caused by large-penis related incidents.

thursday, february 8, 2001
the inimitable eileen wilde has entered the pita world with bipolar biweekly. back in the new woman days she used to write a number on a large piece of paper -- the bipolar meter -- and tack it up outside her cubicle to warn would-be visitors of her mood. it was quite humorous. check out her page: it's all black and white and crazy. actually it could use a little more craziness, but i'm sure she'll get there.

did you know beck and winona broke up? i didn't. (apparently she's dating ryan adams from whiskeytown now.) other beck tidbits a ways down the page (no news judgment, those daily news gossipmongers).

on the way to work this morning:

and also, another astoria series for you non-queens residents, which is to say everybody except for bill and heather. (unless there are others...are there?) anyway for some reason all the businesses -- the dollar stores, laundromats, pizza places, etc. -- all seem to have these mechanical toys for the kiddies. i can't imagine why, because i think i've seen a child on one of these exactly once in my 2.75 years here. and that one was crying.

wednesday, february 7, 2001
cheezball! hopefully this is simply her trying to cash in before she's, like, totally over.

betsy is on the ball with news that the new old 97s album is out march 20. simply cannot wait for the show. she and i (and anyone else?) are planning a major fan-offensive: getting there early, elbowing other girls out of the front row, etc.

tuesday, february 6, 2001
today the pita has more info than keith kelly, can you believe it? apparently rodale is starting another women's magazine, little more than a year after it gave up on new woman. how arrogant, to think they can make a go of another women's lifestyle magazine, called, get this, organic style! fools, i tell you.

monday, february 5, 2001
i decided to take some pictures out my office window. unfortunately i can't get the red neon 666 sign to show up, but it's there. did i mention it's snowing? look:

i was very pleased with my results on the spark's gender test. it proclaimed, "you are definitely a woman!" which was comforting, especially when i remembered that never-to-be-forgotten comment from a good friend (a boy, of course) that i was "on the girl side of woman." so true, even today, and yet so infuriating. thank you, spark.

the screenwriter of traffic talks about his dark days smoking crack on the fox lot, a rather brave thing of him to do.

did you know another r.e.m. album was so close? apparently it is going to be called reveal and it's going to come out in may. michael stipe says some stuff about it. oh and by the way, if you are the guilty party who has had my copy of up for a long, long time now, please give it up.

jeff tweedy is going to be previewing new wilco songs on his upcoming solo minitour. hopefully, if you are a fan, you have your tickets already. if you do not, or are not, shame on you.

i'm afraid i lack any other worthwhile pictures to post, so you're going to have to look at my cat:

her name is xena phoebe, space warrior. she is not named after the lesbian icon.

union square station, yesterday.

oh my!

sunday, february 4, 2001
happy birthday steve! steve is my weird-yet-supercool little brother, and he turns 24 today. i'm taking him out to brunch in a little while so i better get in the shower. that's all you get today; watch this space for pics of steve and the brunch. update: brunch was yummy.

friday, february 2, 2001
for our second restaurant week outing, my lovely boss took us out to latin restaurant chicama. and expensed it, planning to attribute the cost to "morale building." she rules. i had octupus for the appetizer, a chicken stew thing for the entree, and an absolutely delicious orange-infused bread pudding for dessert. yums. and of course, since i had the cam with me, there are pictures:

the service sucked, but the lamps rocked.

nobody really liked their ceviche; oh well.

incredibly funny and frighteningly copious: things my girlfriend and i have argued about. [via jejune]

i'm so glad kempa is back. i've missed him.

the following is kind of copy editor-ish of me, but i think that's okay. it's not mean is it, this Dumb Sign Series? i find most of these signs hilariously funny, anyway. all of them exist in astoria, which is probably like 90 percent immigrants, living the american dream and clearly still learning english:

thursday, february 1, 2001
this is a great story: you know the "shot heard 'round the world," immortalized so beautifully in don delillo's underworld? well the pitcher who threw the fastball that lost his brooklyn dodgers the pennant has known ever since that day, in 1951, that the new york giants were stealing signs using a high-powered telescope. and never said anything. now that's sportsmanship.

midtown isn't very fun, but here are some pictures anyway:

a view from central park south.

just inside the park.

sixth avenue, looking south.

53rd street, a block from my office.

everywhere you looked, clinton heads!

via the excellent nyc photoblog subinev comes this first-rate link: this day in music. #1 the day i was born: "bohemian rhapsody." very very frightening indeed! magnifico-oh-oh-oh.