Maybe Trent Lott (who’d always be good for a laugh if he weren’t so powerful) should choose his words more carefully. Quoted in an AP article today he states that the “American people, and the people of Vermont for that matter, did not vote to put the Democrats in control of the Senate.”
Interesting. Brings to mind the somehwat commonly-held opinion that the people of America may not necessarily have voted to put a Republican in the White House either…
Funny how these things work out…
I visited my ocean today.
A lot of people who live in San Francisco seem to forget that we pretty much live at the beach. It’s true, even though SF is not really a “beach town” and even though our beaches are very often cold and foggy. Neighborhoods near the beach are not among the most popular and “in demand” areas here, possibly because of that very fog as well as the distance from downtown.
San Francisco orients itself toward the bay, and people on the east side of Twin Peaks have this semi-irrational fear of anything to the west of it. It’s much the same fear that San Franciscans in the northeast quadrant seem to have of just about anyplace outside the quaint little 15 square miles or so of unchallenged assumptions and pretentious coffee joints they call home.
But all the same, the Pacific Ocean keeps right on being our western border, even though much (maybe most) of the city keeps right on ignoring it. But me, I like to go visit my ocean once in a while.
I’m not really a beach person, but at the same time, I am one too. The idea of lying on a hot beach, baking in the sun, is about the closest thing I can imagine to hell. I do not swim and I do not surf. But I do like being at the beach when it’s cold or foggy or stormy, and especially at night. It’s not a nature thing for me; I like shabby, run-down beachfront buildings and piers, and the sound of waves. And yes, I like watching surfers change into their wetsuits in the parking lot too.
On a few rare nights when my apartment six miles inland was like an oven, I’ve actually even had sex on the beach here, which is something most natives won’t admit to.
Today I visited my ocean down in Pacifica. I had to return to my car for a jacket. There were no sunbathers and no volleyball players. There were also no fashion victims nor speed freaks nor cell phones. There were just about fifty quite pleasant and unremarkable people watching their dogs and fishing and strolling by the pier trying not to get too cold.
My ocean and I had a nice visit. I sort of didn’t want to come back. And I was sort of glad that most of San Francisco was ignoring the seahore today, just as expected.
At this point I’ll just duck in and acknowlege that I am in fact alive. I just don’t have anything particularly interesting to say. Sorry…
There’s something sort of nice about wandering in to the front room to check email at 9:15 PM and realizing that you haven’t done so since 11:45 PM the previous day…
Not to mention the fun of realizing that, once you finally sat down in front of the computer, it was just in time (three minutes to spare) to win this auction that you’d almost forgotten to bid on…
I’m abandoning said computer again now to go read a book. Time spent online today: 26 minutes, including the time it took to type this…
It might make a good litmus test to see how compatible I am with someone else. There are certain movies I can watch over and over again without ever getting tired of them. Taken together, they probably say an awful lot about me, but I’m not really sure what it is.
Anyway, here’s a list of some of my favorites which stand up to repeated viewing:
And a second tier. Think of these as the ones I might watch once a year rather than twice:
Analysis? Think we’re meant to be together? Think Alfred Hitchcock or really desparate characters are over-represented? Think I need to contemporize? Wondering how “The Crow” made the list? Got a list of your own? Post it here or on your own site (and let me know for the obligatory free link)…
Some pictures my mom sent me recently. You can click on them to see bigger versions if you’re really bored. I drew these about a month before my sixth birthday. Hmmm. Old supermarkets and dumpy motels. Funny that my interests haven’t really changed all that much since 1970…
It’s weird the things you notice and remember as a kid. Like the Better Business Bureau sign and the way the letters in neon signs all connected together. And I apparenty had this real obsession with different kinds of doors…
Anyhow, I think I did a pretty good rendering of Belk’s “Big B” for a five-year-old and I like my A&P. Pity I couldn’t quite manage to spell “Woolworth”…
Yeah, the apostrophe thing (where people use apostrophes in inappropriate situations like “apple’s” and “video’s”) annoys me no end as well.
A related pet peeve of mine is signs in stores (and text on websites) which feature certain words enclosed within decorative quotation marks which have no grammatical reason for being there. Like, for example, when stores put quotation marks around the words “on sale”. Are they trying to be ironic?
I blame the fine folks at Ma Bell for this ugly trend. If you look back at old telephone directories, you’ll see that Yellow Pages ads offered certain boilerplate text options such as “for information call” or “your nearest location”. These were always printed in italics and quotation marks above the phone numbers. And there was never any reason for it to be so.
So next time you go to the corner store, and they have the word “apples” in quotation marks above a display, you might (just for fun) ask the clerk what they REALLY are.
While I’m at it, I may as well take on another one which has been nagging at me for years. This one is mostly a southern thing: people who think that, just because the word “license” ends in an “s” sound, it must therefore be a plural word.
I never really noticed this, until (surprise) I got my driver’s license at age 16. That day, one of my aunts called and asked “did you get ’em?”
Baffled, I asked “get what?”
She answered “your license.”
I choked back the urge to answer that, yes, I’d gotten several, all in different names and colors, and that this acquisition would prove very useful, what with my plan for a life of crime and all.
At the time, I looked on it as her own personal peculiarity. But as the years went on, I realized that about a third of all the people I met in North Carolina had somehow gone through life thinking a license was a “them” rather than an “it”.
Just had to get that off my chest and today seemed like the day.
Consider this your official reminder to call your dad today…
I seem to be having one of those really bad periods of email writer’s block again. Yeah, I know it’s a monthly occurrence, but it seems worse this time. So if you’re waiting and waiting for an answer, please don’t hate me. It’s coming. Really…
Coming tomorrow: why I didn’t eat hamburgers at the block party on my street this afternoon after also not eating crawdads at the Crawdad Festival…