mahiwaga

I'm not really all that mysterious

Sep 2004

So I ended up being on the road for a good four and a half hours yesterday—as long as it takes to drive to Vegas, as long as it takes to get to Santa Nella on the way to the Bay Area. By the time I realized that I had forgotten my pager, I was already in Oceanside. Fuck.

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This little quiz that I found on R's blog matches rather synchronously with the book I'm reading entitled Peace on Earth by Stanislaw Lem.

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A quiz found on infiniti's site:

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a.f. 632—a brave new world

Another quiz sighted on infiniti's site.

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real city - episode I

I am chillin' in NYC, in the royal borough of the Queen, in Astoria, to be precise.

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I don't know if it's just the change in environment, the fact that I have so many good memories attached to this city, the fact that I'm not under the crushing oppression of working 12-30 hour days, 6 days a week, or the fact that I'm no longer deathly ill and sneezing out thick, brown snot, but I feel a lot more alive now. And I'm not really doing anything. I'm actually spending a lot of time on the internet, hunting down random mashups and bootlegs, walking around the tourist areas and doing a lot of window shopping, and checking out the Museums. On Saturday I revisited the Met, which I realize makes my head spin after three hours, and yesterday I headed up to the very northern tip of Manhattan to see Tryon Park and The Cloisters. That was nice, but a little disorienting. It's strange to have religious iconography somewhat decontextualized. I don't know if it's the conscious realization that this is a museum and not a sacred place that does this. The other disturbing thing there are the unicorn tapestries, which depict the hunting down and the killing of a unicorn, which can be seen as an allegory for the crucifixion of Christ.

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scrabble and the meaning of life

There is this Flash animation that tells the story of a woman who believes God talks to her through Scrabble, which entirely reminds me of a particular scene from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilog—or should I say pentology. In that scene, the protagonist of the book, Arthur Dent, who is one of the last living inhabitants of Earth AKA the largest computer in the Universe which was computing the question to the answer of life, the universe, and everything. As is well known, the answer is 42. Unfortunately, the Earth is destroyed right before it figures out the answer, so Arthur decides to see if somehow the answer if encoded in his brain, and he starts blindly picking out Scrabble tiles from a bag. The question that he comes up with is "WHAT DO YOU GET WHEN YOU MULTIPLY SIX BY NINE," leading him to comment that he's always thought that there was something intrinsically wrong with the universe.

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mountains and the city

I want to write something profound in these last ten minutes before I board the plane, but, as has been the case for a disturbingly long time, the words escape me.

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spammers must die

I just spent a ridiculous amount of time cleaning up the spoor of some spambots targetting Blosxom blogs. I have enlisted the help of Doug Alcorn's modified writeback plug-in and his spam killing tools. We'll see if I can stop these dirty bastards.

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k-ci and jo-jo "all my life"

It is interesting how travel to a distance place defines a boundary in time. Less opaquely, my trip to NYC sort of divides things into pre-vacation and post-vacation.

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I randomly decided to hop on the MTA Gold Line, which runs from Union Station in Downtown L.A. to the eastern edge of Pasadena. I got on at the Lincoln Heights/Cypress Park stop and headed north to Lake Avenue in Pasadena, where I hoofed it down to Colorado Ave to visit Vroman's Bookstore (for some reason I can't get the actual site to load up, so I linked Google's cache.) I splurged and bought too many books, but, oh well. I have no excuses. On the way back I hopped on at the Memorial Park Station, which is where you would get off if you were interested in visiting Old Town. The bohemian-like enclave that I sighted off of the Mission St Station in South Pasadena intrigued me, and I had a rather late lunch there. I kind of wonder if it has always been there, or if it literally grew around the station. Of course, it was mostly white people. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

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Jesus Fucking Christ. When "crash" just doesn't mean the computer is going down. Remember that 3 hour delay at LAX (Los Angeles International Airport) a couple of weeks ago? It was because a Windows server crashed, leaving 800 planes stranded in mid-air, completely out of touch with the air traffic control system, and leading to at least 5 instances of near-collisions.

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red line to the sea

As I pine for non-asphalt dependent public transit in L.A., the City Council decides to support an expansion of the Red Line [registration required] The Red Line is L.A.'s only existing heavy-rail subway, which currently runs from Downtown L.A. (starting at Union Station) up to North Hollywood (trying to bite off of SoHo in NYC and calling itself NoHo), with a little spur that goes a little ways down Wilshire Blvd. That spur was actually suppose to go all the way to the Westside, but, unfortunately, there were a bunch of explosive methane pockets in the way (undoubtedly inspiring the movie "Volcano") The straw that broke the camel's back was the huge sinkhole that formed in Hollywood, and politics killed any more expansion. The MTA has instead focused on light-rail and improving the bus system.

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messy, not dirty

So I like to claim, at least. So today I gave in to my Virgoness and decided to neaten the tangled web of wires running all through my living room. Power cords, 10-base-T ethernet, USB, audio, cable. Like a sea of tangled snakes. I went down to Target and picked up some 3M cord controllers (or whatever you call 'em) and went to town. I don't know what it is (maybe it's just the realization that I spent 3 hours of my life that I'll never get back) but it does seem a lot neater. Of course, the rest of the apartment is a complete shithole at this juncture. I really don't know where to start. Stupid vacation.

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Everytime I go on a trip, I always end up immersing myself in mind-numbing, artless pop music. These are the times I actually watch MTV (er, MTV2 and VH-1, to be precise) and I actually find out what they're playing on the radio these days. (I have saved myself from Clear Channel-style brainwashing by utilizing my iPod. How about that. Apple protects you from Big Brother, no?)

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It is exquisitely subtle, but there is indeed an autumn in Southern California. Despite the fact that the highs are still in the 70s, the evenings feel pretty chilly. Like sweatshirt or light jacket chilly.

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