Pacificapocalypse

Married, a month later it’s Thanksgiving, found a house we like (and can afford!) bought said house, packing, moving, and we get the keys on Christmas Eve.

So yeah… it’s been busy.

Going to have to rename the site. Merry Christmas everyone.

Put up a page of the Best.Day.Ever.

Cheers!

And so… the countdown starts. Everything is (fingers crossed) all good to go.

I think.

photo credit: laffy4k

….when you can find parking in the Mission.
Yes, indeed, once again, it’s Burning Man.
Take it away Violet Blue:

While attendees of the yearly arts festival known as Burning Man come from all over the nation and the world, the impact of the costly desert bacchanalia is felt pretty strongly around San Francisco. Many rejoice at the sudden lack of rich hippies and art cars dripping Barbie heads and Legos onto the roads when fog breaks down cheap art-store epoxy, and the ease with which one can get brunch in the Mission. There are virtually no white dudes with dreadlocks for seven square miles. San Francisco smug levels ratchet back to tolerable in the absence of arty hipster trust fund brats and Web 2.0 lets-resurrect-Pets.com-as-a-vlog leeches. Super annoying guys don’t hit on me in bars assuming I know what the hell they’re talking about when they use terms like “the burn,” “the man” and “off the grid.”

And at house parties, there are no chicks that become uncontrollably drunk and then attempt to show you how they can “fire dance,” accidentally setting fire to the host’s potted plant/small dog/infant

From the article, how to enjoy Burning Man and not have to leave the City:

• Before eating any food, drop it in a sandbox and lick a battery.
• Stack all your fans in one corner of the living room. Put on your most fabulous outfit. Turn the fans on full blast. Dump a vacuum cleaner bag in front of them.
• Buy a new set of expensive camping gear. Break it.
• Get so drunk you can’t recognize your own house. Walk slowly around the block for five hours.
• Have a 3 a.m. soul-baring conversation with a drag nun in platforms, a crocodile and Bugs Bunny. Be unable to tell if you’re hallucinating. Lust after Bugs Bunny.
• Cut, burn, electrocute, bruise, and sunburn various parts of your body. Forget how you did it. Don’t go to a doctor.
• Pay an escort of your affectional preference subset to not bathe for five days, cover themselves in glitter, dust, and sunscreen, wear a skanky neon wig, dance close naked, then say they have a lover back home at the end of the night.

I’ve said it many times, and so I’ll say it again:
I have a perfect Burning Man attendance record: zero.

We made an offer on the place in Oakland last night, an offer with MASSIVE contingencies. Now we wait; it’s like some Rube Goldberg machine; every piece of the puzzle has to fit and function perfectly for the whole thing to work. If one part fails, even a little bit, the whole deal falls through.

Which wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, the worst thing would be Raptors with with guns, or carnivorous bunnies or swarms acid diarrhea bees. That’s worse that losing this deal. Seriously, especially the bee thing.

Exploding Head Syndrome; it’s real, look it up.
Not as sexy as it sounds; there *no* actual exploding heads, just a bit of an auditory misfire, probably caused by stress and/or fatigue. Which brings me to the point, stress.

The wedding is less than two months away. Invites are out, her dress and my suit are coming along. Caterer is all set, cake is booked. But still….

Layoffs announced again at the Chronic. My position is secure, but what if the whole company goes under? Possible, not probable, but who really know?
To add the final cherry to this heart burn inducing Sundae, we’ve been house hunting; found one we can afford (oh yeah it’s definitely a fixer upper, but we have no problem at all with ’sweat equity’) now we’re on tenterhooks while the financial people and the bank people and lords know who else people crunch the numbers and decide if we’re worthy of owning a house.

So I guess my question is… crying/screaming uncontrollably or fetal up and deny the universe exists?

How about neither? Just suck it up and see what happens?

Yeah, I’m going with that one. Fingers crossed.

Shamelessly stolen from Boing Boing.

Carla and I had a nice time at the 2009 San Francisco Zine Fest on Sunday. This week and next, I’m sharing some of the photos I took of the zinesters who came to sell their comics and zines. I’ll post a new photo each day.

This is Doctor Popular, a professional yo-yoist and cartoonist. I bought a couple of “24-hour” comic books from him, which are 24-page comic books that were created in 24 consecutive hours. My favorite is Robots Don’t Know Anything about Twitter. Doc Pop made the comic by tweeting “Robots don’t know anything about…” and used the answers that his friends tweeted back as the panels for the comic. Fun!

I don’t know if he sold out of the print version of Robots Don’t Know Anything about Twitter, as it had a print run of 100 copies (each cover was hand colored!), but he is giving it away as a free PDF. What a swell guy that Doc is.

Handsome mother fucker.

Via Boing Boing

Okay, tragedy averted, everyone relax; I think the most important thing we can take away from this incident is this:

One student, Hongying Markowitz, compared the sound of the explosion to a “gunshot.”

Hongying Markowitz?
Most awesome cross-cultural name ever.

You know that thing where you technically have a weekend, but you pack so much into it, it flys by and you blink and it’s over?
Yeah me too.
Last Friday night was Spamalot at the Golden Gate Theater which was hilarious; I mean come on JOHN O’HURLEY! Dude’s funny and I forgive him for Seinfeld which I loathe. Not a exactly a straight stage production of ‘The Holy Grail‘ but a good mix of the more popular Python skits and I was grateful that they didn’t try to have actors try and portray any of the actual Python cast.  So yeah, if you’re a fan of MP, you should go. Oh and court got some really cool Killer Rabbit slippers.
Ok so that was Friday night, didn’t get back home until midnight, then have to be up at 0600 Saturday morning because….

River Arts Festival!

In Sacramento no less. We picked up Kelé and hustled up to Sac. Set up the table and then I got to play photographer amongst the various homemade… crap. Hey no offense but most of it was garage sale quality. Court hawked her custom hula-hoops and Kelé had a bunch of knit stuff that was pretty cool, and there were one or two other vendors with neat stuff (Roger the depressed carved wooden spoon man being one) but mostly it was just okay.

Court sold I think eight hoops, which is cool (I think her demoing one in the aisle every once in a while really helped sales; that’s called marketing children) and more than paid for the material to make them, so yeah, this whole custom hoop thing may be a viable money maker… especially when a vendor is charging $60.00 for the exact same thing at…

Makers Faire 2009

Which we got up, again, at 0 dark 30 for. Court and Kelé were volunteering at the Bizarre Bazaar so we got there way early, which turned out to be a very good thing ’cause the place filled up quicky and we were able to score a pretty close parking spot. Too many cool things going on to go into in detail; suffice to say that crew from The Crucible were wicked cool as was Cyclecide.
I have a full photoset that I’ll get up later today. The Crucible had their E.R.V (Educational Response Vehicle) on scene; a converted 1960’s firetruck… no seriously, a real firetruck. Like Bradbury’s Firemen from Fahrenheit 451; a truck that shoots fire. Loud as hell; it set off car alarms for Christ’s sakes. So cool.

Well fuck a doodle doo. They’re actually laying people off in the business and advertising section of the once mighty San Francisco Chronicle, right this moment. They’re literally tapping people on the shoulder, telling them and then escorting them from the building.  Is this the way you let people go? So friggin’ archaic. They might as well have a Bugs Bunny cartoon executioner bare-chested in the full face mask with a head lopping axe at the ready. Holy crap. Hey I just had a thought; if they can’t tap you on the shoulder, can they still let you go? I mean if you just dodge them all day, are you cool? Que the Scooby-Doo chase scenes and the Benny Hill music.
Guess who knew first? Not me thank god; the couple that run the little in-house cafe knew it – they were here at 0 dark 30 when the extra security guards showed up.
Extra security?
Well… yeah I suppose that’s just CYA.
More later.

photo credit: ooOJasonOoo