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Straight-acting?

Seems I’m a “somewhat feminine” Level 5 on the straight-acting scale. Mind you I still have no earthly fucking idea just what “straight acting” means, but at least I know that — whatever it is — I don’t do it very well. This is a terrific comfort to me and is comparable to my happiness that I’m apparently not great at “gay acting” either, whatever THAT is….

What I can’t figure out is this: what effect did having a T-shirt with a cartoon character on it have on my score? Does it matter if it was, say, Quisp rather than Quake?

These results, along with yesterday’s indicating that I’m a brown have convinced me that (a) I’m right in the boring average middle of just about any scale, and (b) that I should stop taking quizzes I learn about from Jonno’s site.

In other news, I’ve been asked to pose naked, to move the fuck to Cuba, and to apply for three more credit cards today. Interesting Monday. Yours?

Shit. Literally.

Take the new and improved Planet SOMA Factory tour…

Crimes against nature:

  • Canned corn
  • Low-flow toilets
  • The upcoming “Gilligan’s Island” marathon on Nick-at-Nite

Of course, numbers one and three paint me as a snob and number two makes me look anti-environment. But canned corn is just plain nasty, on the same level as canned squash and canned rutabagas. “Gilligan’s Island” is pure crap, and while I love a lot of crap, I don’t love this particular crap. Number two on the list is, of course, related to crap as well and to the fact that I want said crap to disappear when I ask it to by flushing the crapper.

I guess number two could also be related to “number two”, for those of you who grew up using that particular term. I grew up in a “stinky” house myself. It seved as both noun and verb (“I have to stinky” or “there’s still stinky in the commode”). Most of my friends were from “doo doo” homes. I never met “poop” people until I moved to California, and even then, most of them were from Ohio.

Please don’t inundate me with email about the term you used to describe defecation unless it was really funny…

Scat

Only three scatalogical email messages so far, and one of them even gave me cool tips on how I could even make my shit FLOAT if I were so inclined. Thank God for this font of useless information we call “the internet”.

Some Idiot’s Foot

It started when I accidentally brushed against this guy’s foot with mine while standing in the back room of my friendly neighborhood sex bar. I realized I’d done it immediately and had already stepped away. I was about to utter “excuse me” when he whined in his annoying San Francisco perpetual faggot victim voice “you’re on my foot”.

Of course, I was already off his stinky little foot at this point anyway, but I finished my “excuse me” like a good, polite Southern boy. He just glared at me. I was thinking about how this happens to my poor, tortured foot about a dozen times every time I walk into a crowded bar without causing me a moment’s anguish. It sort of comes with the territory in bars, and especially in back rooms. You step on someone, you excuse yourself, they acknowledge, and you both get on with your lives.

Still, he kept glaring like I was some drunk (I wasn’t) sack of shit (I may have been). I looked at him and re-iterated “pardon the FUCK out of me, jackass” and walked away. I heard some whiny comment, and I turned around to tell him “welcome to the back room, where sensibilities occasionally get offended”. Then I wnet home.

Walking down Folsom Street, I started wondering why this had set me off so. Of course he was an idiot, but I’ve dealt with other idiots hundreds of time in the same bar. Why did I snap? And why do I seem to be doing it so often lately? I’ve done it at work, in the car, by email, or wherever I happen to be at the time.

I’m easily annoyed. This is not a major revelation. I’ve always been sort of an impatient grumpy kind of guy, but I usually manage to have a sense of humor about it. Why am I so damned irritable lately? Why am I overreacting to damn near everything?

From careful statistical analysis of my recent blow-ups, I’ve determined that what I’m doing is overreacting to other people who overreact to ME. I’m not sure what this might be a symptom of, but I know it could sure get me hurt if I don’t watch out…

Hot and Sticky

Hot, sticky, and miserable. The kind of weekend where you’re perpetually tired, both from the heat itself and from the fact that the heat kept you from sleeping the night before. In my case, I coped today by keeping all the blinds shut and not moving all day. Yesterday I just drove around all afternoon, enjoying the air-conditioned comfort my car provides but my apartment is lacking.

Some people really enjoy this kind of weather when it makes its brief appearances here. I understand how they feel and I respect their opinions. I feel so much love and understanding that I’ve even devised a pet name for them: “freaks”.

I’m going to go hang out in the frozen food department at Safeway until Growing Up Brady comes on…

Half a Million

In a few days, this front page will by accessed for the half-millionth time. I find this fact absolutely frightening, but I’ll think about that in a few days. It’s still hot and unpleasant inside my apartment (although the temperature outside has gotten a little more bearable), but I don’t want to think about that now either.

I’m also frightened by the fact that I’m starting to get email from the occasional headhunter. Must be a tight labor market indeed. But that, too, is a thought for another day…

No, today I’m frightened by McDonald’s. I switched on the VCR tonight to watch something I recorded last night. As the tape started, the McDonald’s commercial on the broadcast channel was replaced by yet ANOTHER McDonald’s commercial at the beginning of the tape. Jeez. It’s not like every breathing soul on the planet doesn’t already know about McDonald’s…

Corporate ethics and labor policies aside, wouldn’t it be nice if they invested some of that advertsing budget on making their food suck a little less? I’m not anything resembling a food snob. I eat a good bit of junk food. But McDonald’s is pretty much the bottom of the barrel. It’s the fast food I eat only when nothing else is an option.

Stupid AT&T

I stepped outside a few minutes ago, almost got knocked over by the breeze from the bay, and thought “it’s chilly tonight”. The weather is normal again. I am happy.

This afternoon, I was not happy. I finally told AT&T to fuck off after being a long-distance customer since 1986. I’d been thinking of it for quite a while, mainly because of their erratic billing (bi-monthly? quarterly? hell, who knows?) and all their miscellaneous semi-hidden charges.

Today’s bill, though, was the last straw: they charged me $16.00 for a 20-minute call from Fresno to Greensboro for using 102880 (the method they pushed for so many years) rather than dialing their fucking toll-free number. I could have gotten a better rate using a pay phone owned by the Mafia. And, of course, none of their phone people were particularly helpful (and none would connect me with a supervisor) so I ditched them for Working Assets. Simple. Took 15 minutes, and now I get free ice cream for a year too…

It’s been a bad month for me and phones (not to mention other customer support issues). I’m probably on some 1-800 blacklist now, too; I have a pretty short fuse when I’m getting fucked over. Especially when I’m getting fucked over by idiots at some call center who may well be convicts for all I know.

And your day?

Parking Crisis

Interesting feature in yesterday’s SF Weekly. Its suggestion, more or less, is that the best solution to San Francisco’s “parking crisis” is to do absolutely nothing about it.

I couldn’t agree more.

The last thing San Francisco needs is more parking. The very idea of making the city more comfortable for cars is ludicrous. San Francisco is an amazing, pedestrian-scaled place for one reason: the fact that it’s damned near impossible to drive or park in most of the city. This is what sets us apart from LA, Sacramento, or San Jose; San Francisco is a dense, urban area which more closely resemebles New York or Boston than other places in California.

And I say this as someone who lives in the city and owns a car. Early on, I realized that, in San Francisco, my car has two main purposes: to get me to the supermarket and to get me out of the city on a moment’s notice. I haven’t used it for commuting in years, and there are very few places I drive within the city anymore. Rather than bitching about the parking in, say, Chinatown or the Financial District, I make the bold step of NOT TRYING TO DRIVE THERE.

It’s amazing how simple this is. Strangely enough, most of the areas with the worst traffic problems also happen to be some of the best-served by transit.

Frankly, I think that anyone who voluntarily drives to a job in downtown San Francisco during rush hour is a flaming idiot who deserves whatever inconvenience he or she has to face in the process. And guess what? Building even more parking spaces (which will encourage even more cars) will make it even worse.

It’s amazing how quickly the “parking crisis” diappears when you finally realize that you can avoid it simply by, well, avoiding it…

Randomly Saturday

So maybe I’m the last person on the web to catch on to The Dreamweaver Depot and the Dreamweaver Supply Bin, but they’re still pretty cool. I like to fantasize about keeping Planet SOMA pretty low-tech, but not all my design clients are necessarily so inclined, and one can ever have too many navigation tools at one’s disposal, after all…

Maybe next week I’ll start having the Planet SOMA logo flying around the page. Maybe not. But I sure do like the idea of making collapsible outline menus, ,especilly when they’re also usable by that significant number of people who (wisely) browse with Javascript disabled.

But enough tech talk. Does anybody else remember this show? I watched it every week as 12-year-old, but all the other kids didn’t know about it even THEN. Probably because they all had actual friends thay played with on Saturday afternoons. I do remember it was little bit silly, but, since puberty was striking at the time, I remember even more clearly that Mike Darnell (who played the older brother) had a really great butt.

It’s Memorial Day weekend, of course. No telling what other best-forgotten memories will surface. I’ve already been digging through the “American Top 40” book. Stay tuned for more…

7 miles, 500000 hits, etc.


Photo by Sarah

The second annual Planet SOMA Memorial Day Walk Across San Francisco is now complete. Sarah came along this year, since it was also her birthday. It was fun. More pictures and exciting observations may follow. As may pictures of Sunday afternoon’s long drive, which ended up hitting Sacramento, Auburn, Isleton, and other stray spots.

I’m really beat, which is frightening because we did our seven-mile walk 30 hours ago…

More excitement: half a million hits on the old front page counter. Wow. What can I say but “thanks for coming by and keep hitting that “reload” button often!” And thanks also to Fitz for capturing the moment in a screen shot since I was still fast asleep at the time. I wasn’t really expecting to cross the mark until mid-morning.

There is very little further excitement, save for the fact that I’ll be making a quick trip to LA with Duncan in a few weeks. More details to come, but this probably won’t be the long road trip I’ve been promising for a couple of months. Should be fun anyhow, though…