Welcome to Flavor Country

MOVING ON UP/OUT

2010-02-04T20:20:00.000-08:00

A couple of technical causes have conspired to make me get off my ass and move all future blogging operations to flavorcountry.tumblr.com; you can find me there from here on out. Don't worry: all of this old stuff will still live here forever, but you might find the comments have vanished. I'll see you over at the new digs, people. All eight of you!

HOW ABOUT SOME NON-POLITICAL OPINIONS

2010-01-27T23:11:00.000-08:00

I have those, too!

- Let me get this straight. The iPad doesn't multitask, I can't use it as a netbook (no Flash isn't just a dealbreaker -- there's literally no deal even on the table without Flash if you want to use it as a web device), and it costs five hundred dollars? I almost want to say "fuck you" instead of just "no." Sorry, Apple: your thing is not for me. Who's it really for, though? People who want to say "Yeah, this economy's a rough one, but I had half a grand to blow on a broken tablet computer" without printing up stickers? Their choice, I guess.

-- I will admit that if it had been called the iPADD and run something that looked like LCARS, I'd've given it serious consideration.

- Having now seen a bunch of posters for it, I'm prepared to call it: the new Alice in Wonderland movie looks like a paint factory tried to make a drunk baby with a Mark Ryden painting, except one or both were high on unpleasant hallucinogens and kept barfing throughout the process. This is one in the column for the director-as-auteur theory, though, because my best guess is that a box office spreadsheet somewhere told Tim Burton to hike up the quirkskirt like nobody's business. I'm, uh, not gonna see this one, in case you were wondering.

FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS

2010-01-26T16:23:00.000-08:00

Mass Effect 2 came out. I could buy it today, but I know I won't have the time to play it until at least next week. Possibly longer. I need there to be about six extra hours in the day, or else eliminate my need for sleep entirely.

A BASIC UNDERSTANDING OF FLUID DYNAMICS

2010-01-22T09:50:00.000-08:00

You know those umbrellas that are deeper than regular umbrellas? The ones that are shaped in a way that gives better personal coverage than your standard shallow umbrella? Did you know it was possible for someone to use them wrong? I didn't, until I saw this walk past me this morning:

I got nothin', people. I'm not sure if this man understood how water flows in physical space.

TYRANT KING OF AMERICA

2010-01-21T00:14:00.000-08:00

All right, fuck it, let's do this. If you're reading this blog, you should do one of these, too. Let's armchair-quarterback the shit out of this country!

- I, (YOUR NAME HERE), TYRANT KING/QUEEN OF AMERICA
- No more than ten bullet points. Just give the highlights.

I, JON SUNG, TYRANT KING OF AMERICA

- We get us a health care system that's actually on par with any fucking first-world European nation.

- Some of the CEO-type motherfuckers who got us in this economic mess are going the fuck to jail.

- Abortion's legal. Period. Deal with it or move out, I don't give a fuck anymore.

- Gay marriage is legal, too. That's right.

- Stem cell research is on. Cry about it on your own time, we won't stop you.

- Intelligent design gets taught in fucking Sunday school, if anywhere. In real school, kids learn real science, for fucksake. Fuck! Also, real teachers get paid more.

- If you're convicted of a hate crime, you get a limb hacked off and no prosthetic (it's harder to lynch people one-handed); if you're convicted repeatedly, we're just going to keep sawing limbs the fuck off until you're a torso on a skateboard -- you could find a useful profession as a football, maybe.

- News media are now constrained to report just the facts, and tell us what's important first. Just the facts! Shit like calling a senatorial election in Massachusetts "a stinging referendum on Obama's health care initiative" gets you fined. Opinion assholes can still be on the air, but the start of every show and end of every commercial break must contain the announcement "And now some opinions from an asshole" -- there's no more dressing this shit up as fact.

- Turbo election rules from here on out, until the end of time.

- You want kids? You need to pass a basic exam that proves you're a competent fucking human being with some ethics.

And because I am TYRANT KING OF AMERICA, I get a bonus one:

- The following movies are to be stricken from the record and remade under my personal watchful eye:
-- Transformers 1 and 2
-- All three Star Wars prequels
-- Star Trek: Nemesis
-- The ending to Battlestar Galactica

History will vindicate me!

PROFANE OPINIONPOST

2010-01-20T18:05:00.000-08:00

I'm going to limit my political opinions to just this one post and see how that works out for everyone involved.

God fucking dammit, Democrats, you can't get your shit together just this once for long enough to elect one fucking senator? One fucking senator who is somehow the single One True Keystone to getting health care reform passed? On your home fucking turf?

And what is this with health care reform thing anyway, that you can't lose a single fucking senator without it all falling the fuck apart? Don't you motherfuckers run Congress now? Isn't one of your own in the fucking White House? It's like we handed you idiots a lightsaber to fight a street gang, but instead of turning it on, you pulled your own pants down and jammed it up your collective ass with your own two hands and just laid down on the fucking sidewalk to be kicked to death.

Even with the Democrats in power, the Republican assholes still win? What kind of fucking logic is that? What the fuck world is this?

This is your fucking job, you miserable fuckstains. You're supposed to blaze a path toward a better fucking world for all of us. Enough of us believe in that better world to have voted your incompetent asses into power; would you get your fucking shit together and fucking do something with it? For fucksake.

DAYS OF RAIN

2010-01-19T10:29:00.000-08:00

Holy crap do we ever need this rain. I'm ready for it. So ready. Except that I don't have boots. I think I just figured out the purpose of high rain boots: they keep the bottoms of your pants dry, don't they? If I'm walking around with an umbrella, the bottoms of my pants tend to get rained on; I bet if I tucked them into a pair of boots, they'd stay dry. I don't know why it took me this long to make that connection.

Unrelatedly, I updated the Dogblog yesterday and forgot to say anything here.

I HAVE A CONCERN

2010-01-13T12:54:00.000-08:00

Anyone who's eaten a single-serving bag of Kettle Chips knows that those bags only open one way: they provide a little tear in the top of the bag that allows you to rip it open down the side. Or more like forces you to open it that way. You can't do it the normal damn way!

What was wrong with the normal way, Kettle Chips people? You grab it at the top and use the flap to pull the top apart. This method is not possible with Kettle Chips. You just can't do it; something about the adhesive they use or the manufacturing process for the bags makes it god damn near impossible.

Why do this. It's not just that this feels like an inferior way to open a bag of chips. It's taking choice away! This chip company is taking away my freedom! What the fuck country am I in, if not America?! SHALL NOT THE FLAG OF FREEDOM FLY FREE?!?! ?!?!?!

THE STRENGTH OF FRUIT KNOWLEDGE

2010-01-11T17:14:00.000-08:00

I'm about to fill this knowledge hole by looking it up on the internet, but I'm wondering if I'm not the only one who has it. Behold:

- Apples. "An apple a day keeps the doctor away"
- Oranges. Vitamin C
- Bananas. Potassium
- Cranberries. Vitamin C?
- Pineapples. ??????

What are pineapples good for, aside from being fruit? Does anyone else not know this off the top of their head? And come to think of it, I'm not exactly sure how apples promote health. This just occurred to me because I love pineapples to the point where I suspect they're actually not good for you, based on how awesome they taste.

JUST STOP ALREADY

2010-01-08T13:22:00.000-08:00

As most of us probably do, I keep a Yahoo mail account around for all of the bullshit corporate signup email I need to have an address handy for. When I open it, it always gives me the top five headlines off Yahoo news, and for the past I-don't-know-how-long, I've been seeing a story pop up that takes the form of

Job Losses (Dip/Rise)* Unexpectedly This Week/Month; Employers/Job Seekers (Optimistic/Discouraged)*

* One of these two words will be used. How do you know which one? What month is it? What's the phase of the moon? Flip a coin.

Is shit getting better or not? Who the fuck knows? Not these people, from what it sounds like. Can we relax with this bullshit and get a report on some other metric that's actually fucking useful, from professionals who know what they're talking about? I'd be interested in that. This is just an idea I'm having. Don't give me any bullshit about whether that type of news is actually available in the Wall Street Journal or some other specialty magazine or paper or some crap -- this is news everybody should be getting with their Yahoo mail like me.

Actually, as long as I'm bitching about something vaguely related to Yahoo, what's the deal with their ad campaign about "making the web personal"? Was my web browsing not ... personal before? Was there someone else standing next to my computer this whole time making my decisions for me on what I wanted to see? Who was that asshole?

I HAVE GREAT IDEAS ALL THE TIME

2010-01-07T10:08:00.001-08:00

I can see them in my mind's eye and I don't even have to squint: poster ads for the interiors of buses that say things like "You know we can hear you, right?" and "Everybody's listening to your conversation," with photos depicting someone talking on their cellphone while everyone else around them just stares. We need these. Someone get on this.

IDIOTECHNOLOGY

2009-12-29T10:19:00.000-08:00

Here's that story I referred to yesterday about my visit to the ancestral homelands:

Prior to my arrival, my parents had bought a Blu-Ray player, so when I got home, my brother and I went out and got them some Blu-Ray movies. Nice, right? We decided to watch Batman Begins. We put the disc in.

Fucker didn't work.

The machine kept getting about six seconds into the factory-new disc, past the copyright warning and MPAA rating, and just stopped. Gave us a little "spinny disc" icon and the message "Could not perform action" or something. It took us about ten minutes of putting the disc in and out (including a roughly eight-minute interlude where the machine simply refused to eject the disc at all, leading us to power-cycle the motherfucker by unplugging and replugging it) to conclude that it couldn't be a hardware problem. We solved it, though. How?

We had to run a firmware update on the fucking Blu-Ray player.

This happened. We actually did this. We checked the player's firmware version against the manufacturer's website, downloaded a zip file, unzipped it, put the package on a thumb drive, plugged the thumb drive into the Blu-Ray player, selected an update option from the setup menu, and sat there until the progress bar crawled to completion and we could unplug the thumb drive after the automatic restart. Unbefuckinglievable.

Answer me this: what in the good god damned fuck would my parents have done had my brother and I not been around? How did this technology make its way into the hands of civilians? In the garage I saw the box the Blu-Ray player came in, and it had the "Java-powered" symbol on it. Why the fuck does a Blu-Ray player need to run Java?!

After we did all this bullshit, btw, we got to watch Batman Begins, but that was the most ridiculous thing I have ever done with a piece of consumer technology. Someone needs to get punched, but I don't know who that would be.

I HEREBY COPYRIGHT THIS IDEA IN PERPETUITY

2009-12-27T21:03:00.000-08:00

I've returned to the Bay Area from a too-brief trip back to the ancestral homelands of Syracuse, NY. It was nice, but that's not what I'm here to talk about, although I do have a story about it that I need to relate here in due time.

Waiting at JetBlue's excellent JFK terminal for my connecting flight back home, I went into Borders to check out their comics selection. The comics are next to the young adult books, and the stereotype is true, at least on the mass-market paperback level: YA is almost all vampire books. It's all either vampire books or angel books. But here's the weird thing: no books that have angels that have been transformed into vampires. Wouldn't you think that'd be a no-brainer? I mean, maybe someone already did it and my eyes skipped over it because the cover art just wasn't indicative of the book's contents, but sheeeeeeeeeeeeeit /claydavis

This is all to say that you should watch in 2010 for my upcoming series of novels titled VAMPANGEL: The Blood Seraphim Chronicles. Or maybe BLOODWINGS: Tales of the Vampire Host. Listen, the title's not important. It's all about content, okay? This shit is gonna be packed with vampires biting angels and angels biting humans and, like, halos made of blood and tears and crap like that. Nobody else can do it now, because I said it on my blog. That's how it works, right?

THERE IT GOES AGAIN

2009-12-22T07:48:00.000-08:00

Twitter's "Trending Topics" list is always a good way to be reminded that most people just can't spell. Do you guys remember when #Micheal Jackson died? Or #Britney Murphy? #youknowyourfat when you can distinguish between monounsaturated and polyunsaturated. Where is my rimshot

In other news, your Dogblog update for the month went up last night and I forgot to tell you!

RAP METATAGS?

2009-12-15T16:36:00.000-08:00

So there was a brief moment where, listening to the Blakroc album's opening track, I found myself wondering whether ODB has been alive all this time and his death was an elaborate hoax, or whether the art of necromancy had been perfected and nobody told anyone. It turns out his appearance was just an unused vocal track, which leads me to wonder: if there's a pile of these unused vocal tracks just sitting around (my impression is that every (ex)member of the Wu Tang Clan has a vast stockpile of these somewhere), how does someone putting a new song together know which ones will be good for that particular song? Is there a system somewhere to keep all of this shit straight? Is there a vast library of unused ODB tracks that are tagged with metadata?

- 2:31
-- 4/4
-- 3 verses
-- 98bpm
-- weed, guns

- 3:12
-- 4/4
-- 3 verses, chorus
-- 102bpm
-- weed, partying

- 2:40
-- 4/4
-- 2 verses
-- 100bpm
-- weed, fucking

- etc

How else are they gonna know? I can't imagine any other way to get this shit done, but I'm not a producer. Who knows what they actually do.

IMSDB

2009-12-08T14:30:00.000-08:00

Talking with a friend of mine who occasionally works as a medic on movie sets, it occurred to me that my default reaction whenever I find out a Hollywood movie star is a decent person is to be mildly surprised. It's like I expect them to be douchebags, and when they violate that expectation, it's vaguely astonishing.

We need a website for this. Internet Movie Star Database. You can only register to post on it if you're confirmed as a worker in the service industry -- waiter, stagehand, grip, whatever. If enough of these people post their own personal experiences with stars, what sort of picture would then emerge of each actor or actress, I wonder?

"Bruce Willis: freaks out if you bring him food that contains the color orange. Seemed apologetic about it later, though. Good tipper."
"Halle Berry: was very nice to my visiting 8-yr-old."
"Scarlett Johansson: slaps people all the time like it ain't no thang."
"Alton Brown: lets the crew take the leftovers home."
ETC

Wouldn't it be nice to have a more-or-less irrefutable* source for this kind of data, a place that makes bigtime celebrities accountable for their behavior to everyone around them? I think it would be amazing if it could be executed correctly.

* The truth content of the site is only as good as the people who post to it, of course, so there'd have to be some kind of system in place to verify each registrant. I don't know what that would be.

HOW YOU KNOW IT WAS A GOOD BIRTHDAY

2009-12-07T13:37:00.000-08:00

I had a get-together at a bar on Saturday for the birthday, and it was awesome. And drunk. So drunk, in fact, that when I got home and fell asleep, I dreamed that I continued partying, albeit at a house somewhere in some suburbs I'd never seen before in my life. But some of the people who'd been at the real party were in the dream party, and I'm honestly not sure which of the things I remember talking about were with actual humans or their oneiric counterparts. That's a good birthday.

BEFORE IT'S OVER

2009-12-03T23:11:00.000-08:00

If you heard a rumor that today was my birthday, you were not misled: it was! It happened. It still is, I suppose, for another 45 minutes or so on this coast. Originally I wasn't going to do anything, because I have a party planned on Saturday, but other friends of mine informed me that this was a stupid idea -- that to do nothing today would be essentially unamerican. And they were right! We went out to dinner and I got my hands on a dessert I haven't been able to eat in months, and it was fantastic.

Also, we made up a new word whose meaning you can probably infer. It's a verb: to vulve.

Usage:

"Did she vulve him?"
"She totally vulved him."
"Dang."

NEW SOLUTIONS TO OLD PROBLEMS

2009-12-01T12:48:00.000-08:00

This morning on the bus I had this happen again, except I didn't have my Emergency Bus Notepad on me. Which is a shame, because I really had some good advice for the girl sitting next to me, who chose to initiate a phone conversation that lasted the entire duration of the bus ride about her mom and the issues her mom has.* I contemplated briefly simply telling her my ideas the next time I see her, but that might get really awkward. To say the least.** This is what happens when you want to convey two pieces of information simultaneously that are at cross-purposes:

- I have some useful advice for you on your mom situation
- Did you really have to have that conversation on the bus, next to me, where I had no choice but to hear it?

A new and innovative deterrence solution has been suggested:

The next time this happens, I pull my own phone out and have a conversation of my own, at slightly higher-than-normal volume, about something intensely personal, but also completely ridiculous. "Yeah. Yeah, the doctor says the worms are all in my left kidney. I don't know either, man, but shit, that's why evolution gave us two, right? Yeah. Naw, he said their reproduction cycle is basically diurnal, so I'm just going to gain that weight right back, and -- yeah. Yeah, weird, huh?" At significant points in the "conversation," I look her way and make deliberate eye contact.

It's funnier, but I don't know. Too subtle? Also, there's a nonzero risk of people actually thinking I have worms in my kidneys. I'm'a think about it some more. I really should've had my Emergency Bus Notepad on me.

* Her mom's an asshole, basically.
** "You're gonna get slapped" was what my friend Jess had to say about it.

MILSPEC INNOVATION

2009-11-28T09:38:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure in which conversation this week it came up, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that I am an inventor and I have inventions for you.

- M83A Decoration Grenade -- Made with a paper shell, this device is capable of throwing glitter out to a radius of 14m. M83A series decoration devices contain one color of glitter, and come in all standard colors of the rainbow plus pink, silver, and gold. Can be used in concert with the M83B series for maximal effect.

- M83B Celebration Grenade -- Also made with a paper shell, this device has a 4oz core of Composition B high explosive inside a tightly-packed cylinder of star-shaped confetti. Standard models are equipped with all colors of the rainbow plus pink, silver, and gold, but the M83B2 celebration device contains red, white, and blue confetti only.

UH WHAT

2009-11-25T10:02:00.000-08:00

Have I been seeing commercials for Google Chrome that show how pretty the browser looks? What universe is this coming from, where the fact that the browser looks fancy matters even a little? It's a fucking web browser. The content is what matters, right? The browser itself is, like, a 30px tall strip of buttons, tabs, and menu options above the content. I don't give even half a shit what that looks like. Does anybody?

IT IS HAPPENING AGAIN

2009-11-22T22:38:00.001-08:00

My birthday's coming up next month, and while I am planning to celebrate in not just one but two cities, I think I'll also take a page from the book of Lou and claim more or less that entire month. I'm going to have some quality time with some people I don't see that often, raise a glass or two, have some dinners, and just generally enjoy the life I've made. This sounds like a good idea, doesn't it?

Oh, and while I've got you here: Dogblog update went up just now.

THAT'S ENOUGH OF THAT, REALLY

2009-11-19T16:52:00.000-08:00

So it turns out I was in line to get my H1N1 visa renewed, as it were, and I'm over it now, but am left with a cough that my doctor says has the potential to stick around for up to four to six weeks. Just the cough, mind you. Why do coughs always do that bullshit? I remember getting a cough when I was in high school that stuck around for at least that long, if not longer. Or was that in college? Sheeeeeeeeeit, I guess I don't remember.

THE BAY AREA PASSWORD

2009-11-13T15:18:00.000-08:00

I was playing a videogame recently where two characters have to identify each other as friendly forces by each repeating half of a code phrase; I'd remember what this is called, but this cold I've got has put a serious dampener on my ability to think quickly. In any case, it got me thinking about what would happen if the Bay Area were ever invaded, and what we could use to quickly identify ourselves to each other verbally as friendly forces and not invaders.

Then it hit me: you could just shout out "I'm at the Pizza Hut." If they don't respond with "I'm at the Taco Bell," you are clear to open fire.

I know this would only work for a subset of the local population, but those people are definitely the subset I want to make sure I don't shoot.

SEMIPLAGUE

2009-11-10T14:21:00.001-08:00

I've got something, but I don't know what it is. Its most prominent symptom is a cough that seems to originate from the center of my being. There are very slight body aches and a mild chill. Appetite's down a little, but I still get hungry, and can eat and do everything else a human does. This can't be swine flu, can it?

Evidence supportin my theory is:

- Swine flu seems to hit people like a TON of bricks, with the speed of a striking snake. This snuck up on me the way a slime mold might sneak up on a log: the cough appeared on its own with no backup symptoms four days ago, and only now am I starting to feel kind of crappy.
- Seriously, swine flu hits really hard, basically incapacitating folks for at least a day. I went home from work, true, but I stopped on the way to buy supplies for the chicken soup I'm going to make myself tonight.*

Either I have something different, or I have swine flu and I'm just a tough motherfucker. The second option seems somewhat unlikely to me for some reason.

* And Modern Warfare 2. If I'm at home sitting on my couch, what else am I going to do?