Sartres says “others”.
I say: “others, checking out sales at a major Parisian department stores on a hot Summer day”.
On the other hand, that satin-lined tux is so gonna get me envious looks from every last pimp in the neighbourhood.
Yes folks, satin-lined.
Watching a small online condensate of worldwide TV programs, I stumbled upon a bit of French national news wherein a journalist comments, in French, over footage of flooded NOLA streets.
At one point, the camera stops on a man laying on the ground, zooms in, and we can hear the following voice-over:
Voiceover: “… Un homme a terre, qui dans un souffle parvient à peine à dire à une équipe de reporters…” ["... a man on the ground, barely manages to tell a team of reporters..."]
Offscreen (in English): “Are you alright?”
Man on the ground (in English): “I got a kidney stone…”
Voiceover (allegedly translating from English): “… qu’il est affamé.” ["... that he is starving."]
Yea… Next time I see somebody with a kidney stone, I’ll just cook them some food, ’cause they must be hungry…
Could they actually hand their reporters a dictionary before they send them abroad?
You are stuck in Japan, it’s oppressively hot and you don’t have a yen to your name. You decide to do the obvious and rob a cab.
Sure why not: the rich bastards must be carrying like a million yen on them at all times. Sounds like an easy one, right? Right?
Well, no.
You see, the incidence rate of mad bank robbing ending in wild taxicab chase and hostage situations through the streets of Tokyo is so high (Bogota of the East, that we call it) that officials have had to come up with a solution. Unbeknownst to you, from the moment you hopped on the cab with your gun, the taxi driver has been pressing a secret button on his dashboard that turns on an emergency distress signal light on top of the car, thus warning any law enforcement agent in the vicinity that something fishy is afloat.
In your face, evil taxicab robbers!
Well, that is, unless you actually take the time to poke your head out the window, spot the blinking red light, shoot the driver and escape.
But taxis are not the only ones that have received special care regarding the endemic hijacking problem in Japan: all public buses are also equipped with such a special emergency light that can be turned on in case a crazy lunatic would suddenly decide to re-enact the best moments of Su-ppee-do, the movie. I feel so much safer already.
Why do I have the feeling some lawmakers in Japan watch too much TV?
My friend and former neighbour/roommate Tracey forwarded me this:
Widow, 84, a prisoner in her own apartment Police allege 6 gang members dealt drugs from her S.F. home, even ate her senior meals.
SF Chronicle, May 24, 2005
We used to live in that building, two floors above (it was only four stories high). Yep, neighbours were always a bit weird…
Ah, joys of Mission street…
Don’t mind the noise in the background: still a few Apple fanboys around the world finishing themselves with WWDC keynote reruns. Man, what a mess the conference hall floor must have been.
A few thoughts to dump on top of the 20 millions (conservative estimate) blatantly unqualified comments on Apple’s recent decision to stick it to IBM and go with Intel:
Nevermind that he wrote the all-american novel and was the icon of a generation…
One, and only one thing makes F. Scott Fitzgerald the coolest writer there ever was:
He married a girl named Zelda.
If anybody reading this was legally given the name Zelda at birth, please contact me: I think I may have to marry you right now.
Gen, who works for Technorati Japan just kindly informed me that this blog sits at #37 on the Japan Top 100… Wow…
(it might not last, as understandably, there seems to be some discussion as to whether this blog really belongs in the Japanese billboard)
Just a quick word to thank all my friends, fans, ennemies and indifferent readers, for their warm support and inform everybody that I did survive.
Everything went mostly as expected. I’m covered head to toe in gauze and been told everything underneath works as well, if not better, than before. Yes, everything: You haven’t enjoyed life to the fullest until you experience the ability to throw peanuts in your mouth without using your hands.
Nevertheless, there are still a couple old entries pre-logged for the next few days, and I plan on letting them be, the way they would have, had I been strong enough to stay away from the net one more week (but I felt like I had to post a little update anyway). While you enjoy all the canned wisdom I was able to pack in one go at the end of last week, I’ll be enjoying a peaceful recovery, speeding away on my magic morphine-propelled cotton cloud.
I’ll be back for real, soon.
Hug’n'kisses everybody…
Yesterday, a session of the French senate was interrupted when a young man suddenly jumped from the public balconies, onto the actual senate floor, wearing but a thong, adorned with the colors of the French flag.
This [somewhat prudish] streaker managed to briefly voice his position on an upcoming national referendum, before being manhandled to the door. For added visibility, said position (a very unequivocal “NON” to the adoption of a European-wide constitution) was written all over his body, including his bare buttocks.
The man got out with only a few bruises (it’s a good 10 feet drop), a stern warning from the authorities and a newfound popularity on the evening-show circuit. Quite a good deal, if you consider how many bullets the coroner would currently be extracting from his corpse, had he tried a similar trick in the US.
The definition of cruel is when your friends, over at your house for some lo-key, yet highly inebriated, bbq dinner, drunkenly (and unwittingly) opened that one very special bottle of Piper Heidsieck Special Millesime.
No. Hold on. Cruel is when it turns out they drank but a glass and left a full uncorked bottle sitting there for you to mourn in the morning.
Inhumanly cruel, is when all this takes place in the middle of your shot at reaching ascetic enlightenment, and subsequent self-imposed ban on all forms of alcohol consumption.
If I end up not drinking off that bottle today, I will personally write in a demand for a medal from the British National Temperance League.
I bet none of you did notice that smooth server migration (unless, that is, you were one of the poor fool who tried using either unknowngenius.com or wp-plugins.net during the past 5 hours). Everything should be back to normal now, please contact me if you notice anything broken…
Why’d I change?
While not exceedingly bad (compared to the worse I had), my former host, HostForWeb, really had sub-par uptime (2 or 3 failures a month on average), rather sluggish performances and downright asinine handling of the last DDoS attack on my server (upon seeing one single IP pulling my index page 50 times a second, they simply disabled my account in the middle of a week-end: that is just retarded)…
Renewing my contract for a year with HFW being out of the question, I went with Site 5 instead: they came heartily recommended and their rates for the amount of disk space (one of my biggest priority) is damn near incredible (I’m getting three times what I was getting on HFW, for the same price, and wasn’t getting such a crappy deal either). We’ll see if the rest is on par (so far, so good).
This is quite possibly the most pointless item posted to this blog to date (all right, competition is tough there), but I’m so ecstatic I can’t contain it (yea, I have no life):
Safari apparently received a minor update in the last OS X package (the ones that gets downloaded and installed quasi-silently through the Update manager), and they have finally fixed the “Undo bug”!
Something for your ears at the bottom »
Good evening.
Do not attempt to adjust your radio, there is nothing wrong.
We have taken control as to bring you this special show.
We will return it to you as soon as you are grooving.Welcome to station W. E. F. U. N. K., better known as We-Funk,
Or deeper still, the Mothership Connection.
Home of the extraterrestrial brothers,
Dealers of funky music.
P-Funk, uncut funk, The Bomb.Parliament Funkadelic - P-Funk
Welcome to Station K.D.R.D… better known as…
Well, at the moment, it’s not known as anything. for a reason: I just made it up.
The concept is quite simple, really.
I have tons of these small tracks, pseudo-remixes, work-in-progress and all around occasional hour spent screwing around on decks with good ole music on wax. Every once in a while, I go through the length of packaging one hour of these into a nice and somewhat clean format for the enjoyment of the masses. Sometimes I even go one step shorter and only release a half-assed half-hour long mix with aforementioned musical goofing around.
All these mixes are available for your aural pleasure on the Dr Dave’s Insanely Cool Mixes Collection Page.
But this somewhat formal release scheme was still not cutting it. Three main reasons:
Which means that, to an overwhelming majority, times where I get on the decks and toy around with either records or computers, yield sub-par results in terms of overall mixing quality. What with the constant drinking and abusing substance while playing (OK, not this month, but I have still many ways to take my attention off whatever I’m supposed to mix). Even the Mini Mix collection requires a bit of effort, and I am a lazy person.
Hence the need for an even cheaper/easier way to share some cool tunes without inflicting unfair damages to your eardrums nor spend every waking minutes doing so.
Let me explain… These mixes I upload most definitely have an audience. They are downloaded, and listened to, by cool people, the world over. some of these people even send me nice notes or thank you gifts, which is really a testament to how awesome this Intarweb thingie is. But a live audience, it ain’t.
If you’ve ever done any sort of art or music live, then you know, otherwise, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine: with the right mindset, there is a sort of pressure that drives you to expand on your usual practices and break the mold. Play/act/do whatever you would be doing in a studio, in a way that you would never have thought of doing before. The live audience is a major catalyst there.
I hardly ever play clubs these days, and for the most part, I’m quite fine with this. But I do miss the crazy-spur-of-the-moment wild experimentations with vinyl, keyboards, sequencer, chopsticks (yea, I really did it once) and anything an adrenalin-fueled brain can summon.
The semi-answer to all these problems being…
KDRD: Dr Dave’s Very Own MP3 Radio Station
I cannot possibly be the only one to have noticed that the girl basically has one. single. pose.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure she has potential to make it into every college fratboy top ten shaggable. when she gets the coke-induced twitching under control.
But the fact this ridiculously cheap 20 degrees left, 30 degrees down, naughty-girl-with-malicious-eye-and-mischievous-smile is what nowadays passes for a paragon of charm, or even plain basic sex-appeal, is a sad testament to that pathetic MTV culture we live in.
And the fact I just took the time to write this, an even sadder testament to the very low level of productivity of my afternoon.
Solving math equations might not be the best thing for my manic-depressive tendencies.
Don’t know what’s more pathetic: that I will lose sleep over an unsolved problem, or that, each time I finally solve one, I start jumping around the room like a maniac for the next 20 minutes (Eriko still refuses to let me carve victory marks on the table).
