I worked a ton this week and then had a friend in town over the weekend, thus the radio silence. A quick summary of the past few days would include going to karaoke and performing "Cover of Rolling Stone" to an apathetic crowd, watching multiple third-tier disaster movies, and coming fairly close to a nervous breakdown at work. More about all later (or at least the last 2), but I just wanted to let everyone know I'm alive.

Speaking of which, Bill wrote today letting me and others know that Gage Vandermark was born this week. Congratulations to Bill, Terri, and Gage, and I wish you all sufficient sleep. Good luck with that.

In addition to any other weirdness this past weekend, I watched just about the weirdest 4-pack of movies on video that you could imagine: Westworld, Rashomon, Russ Meyer's Up!, and Trog.

Westworld was that type of pre-Star Wars '70s scifi that I loved and it was fun, but it totally ripped off the Itchy and Scratchy Land episode. Rashomon was exactly what I'd heard it was--ponderous, interesting, well-made--but that's just my perspective. Up! isn't exactly a cinematic classic, but with Russ Meyer you know what you're getting, and it did exactly what I wanted it to do for me. Um, twice. And then there's Trog.

Here's the pitch meeting for Trog in a nutshell: Joan Crawford was a big bankable movie star 25 years ago, and now she's not, but if spend a low enough amount of money on the rest of the movie, maybe it will make a profit.

In Trog, the game(y) Crawford is sort of an anthropologist, or maybe a biologist, or something, and she runs this scientific institute in Britain. (About one-third of the time she seems to be trying a British accent; the rest of the time, not so much.) Some local biology (or something--it's not clear) students (or something--it's not clear; smell a trend?) go spelunking and find what seems to be the missing link, who is fearsome in spite of being about 5-foot-8 and totally human looking except for a monkey-head that's about as convincing as the masks you'd still find at Family Dollar on November 2nd. One of the "students" is killed, the other in shock, and the third never sees Trog. The third one goes to the institute and gets Crawford to go back in the cave with him, where they lure out Trog (short for troglodyte) and subdue him with a tranquilizer gun. Then Crawford spend the next hour studying Trog, teaching him rudimentary skills, and having a team of internationally renowned scienticians study and do surgery on him. Oh, and she has her eye-candy moron British daughter in short skirts feed him. All the while there's this subplot where one local hates Trog and wants him killed for some reason (say it with me: it's not clear). Then with 10 minutes to go they all realize nothing has actually happened yet, so Trog goes on a murderous rampage for some reason, kidnaps a little girl, gives Crawford back the girl, then gets blowed up by the military. Meanwhile, Crawford makes a lot of speeches that sound like extracts from high school science textbooks and/or beauty pageant speeches about world peace.

Speaking of beauty pageants, The Swan had it's pageant last night. I only watched the last half hour, but I just about swallowed my tongue at one key moment. After winnowing from 9 to 3 contestants, they announce the 2nd runner-up, and then in a ludicrous nod to beauty pageant tradition the host announces that the 1st runner-up (or as Kristan put it when I told her this story at work today, The Cygnet) will assume the title should The Swan be unable to fulfill her duties. What the hell duties does The Swan have? floating on top on water, and giving speeches to average-looking high school girls saying that with hard work, perserverance, and $250,000 worth of plastic surgery and therapy, they too can fulfill their dreams. Provided their dreams consist of appearing on Fox reality shows and crying a lot. But don't worry, The Cygnet is standing by in case that proves too daunting.

I know some people must wonder what it's like living in LA, being that it's LA and all. The answer is that 95% of the time it's just like living anywhere else--maybe a little smoggier, trafficky-er, and crowded-er (yeah i know, not words), but with slight variations you get up, maybe go to the gym, go to work, come home, watch the tube, and do it all again tomorrow. Just like anywhere.

Then some quiet Sunday afternoon your itinerant friend calls you from the West Hollywood apartment of his friend who is Madonna's personal hairdresser and asks you if you want to drive up to Canyon Country to watch the Laker game with his sister and her lesbian partner, and you say "sure" and wait for him to (he thinks) surreptiously do a quick line and then you get out on the road and you hope he doesn't go berserk and drive off the road, and you get there and are very nice to the lesbians even though they give you a Dallas Cowboys glass to drink out of, and you keep to yourself the fact that you are rooting against the Lakers because they fed you 4 separate food items in a meal which is at least 2.5 more than you average when you prepare your own dinner, and also because even though they're very nice something in our culture tells you that you just don't want to piss off lesbians, and then you end up driving home to Art Bell on the radio for some reason and get home just in time to hear Jenna Lewis be more fun in the half-hour of Loveline you hear than she was the whole Survivor series combined.

Yeah, sometimes it's like that.

In case Memetracker has made anyone else wonder too, not as far as I can tell, but something called University of the Incarnate Word thought about it.

I stayed out way way too late Wednesday night at a quasi-historic Hollywood bar and have been trying to recover ever since. Tonight I opted for a quiet haircut (though the night is young). I'm going to miss Rudy's Barbershop when I move--where in Ann Arbor am I going to be able to wait an hour for a $15 buzzcut from a 5-foot-7, approximately 62-pound Silver Lake hipster?

Over the past several months I've been checking out a good number of CDs from the LA Public Library, generally 6 to 9 per week. Recently I figured out that in addition to the regular media library area, there's something called "Teenscape" that has its own music area. I noticed that a lot of the CDs in regular circulation have this sticker that indicates it's from that section, so I recently wandered up there. So far I've taken 6 discs out of Teenscape, but I'm kind of skeptical about what they consider to be teen fare. Here's the list

• NakedSelf by The The
  
• Nebraska and The Rising by Bruce Springsteen
  
• Handcream for a Generation by Cornershop
  
• Songs and More Songs By Tom Lehrer by, well, duh
  
• Shonen Knife eponymous

OK, I'm not a trained deomgraphician or anything, but I see how maybe Cornershop and maaaaaybe Shonen Knife go in the teen section. Other than that: HUH?!?! Particularly Nebraska--I'm sure L.A. teens of 2004 are all over the timeless pessimism of "Atlantic City" and "Highway Patrolman". Blew up the chicken man in Philly indeed. Yet for some reason I have to wander up into the teen area and be the LAPL equivalent of the Old Guy In The Club just so I can enjoy Poisoning Pigeons in the Park. (The song, not the activity. I'd have to go two blocks down for that.) Ricockulous.

You know, every once in a while when nothing better is on, turning VH1 Classic on seems like a good idea. But I just got Pump Up The Jam followed by UB40's version of Can't Help Falling in Love with a Richard Marx chaser. So now I'm hysterically blind, hysterically crying for what they did to Elvis, and hysterically vomiting. And the Marx comes one day after hearing Rick Astley's Together Forever in Ralph's. Only in Hollywood does it briefly cross your mind that Astley's current gig might actually be sitting in a booth somewhere in the store singing his old hits. Or, alternately, possibly filling in on Register 7. It was similar to the time I suddenly realized that a Carpenters song was on the muzak in a Pittsburgh supermarket, and I wondered if we were all being subliminally reminded to eat.

I just finished reading It Ain't No Sin to be Glad that You're Alive: The Promise of Bruce Springsteen. This is the second book I've read recently by Eric Alterman, the previous one being What Liberal Media, which is brilliant.

While I appreciate Alterman's politics and generally agree with them, I don't know what to make of him. He's probably the first political commentator I ever watched on TV, agreed with everything he said, yet still wanted to punch him in the face. He was just so snotty that I felt like he was acting out all of the bad stereotypes about leftists at once. I wasn't at all entertained, I felt condescended to, and I just got madder as he went.

The Springsteen book is totally different, though. Instead of smarty-pants snooty, Alterman is a worshipping fan writing an extended essay to his idol here. I really like Springsteen and have found myself listening to him a lot lately--particularly Thunder Road and Badlands. But I don't have anything of the worshipful fervor Alterman and others portrayed in this book have. Springsteen's appeal is political in some senses--he is a champion of the working-class and the downtrodden, no doubt--but it transcends typical definitions of politics and touches something more holistic in the lives of his ardent fans. This is not a great musician biography, it's not great sociology and it's not a great political analysis. But somewhere at the nexus of those things it is a compelling and heartfelt story of artistic creation and fandom.

I have taken any number of people to Yai since Tim and Kristan first took me there, but tonight I took one of my former advisors, probably the most discerning Asian-food connoisseur I know. She loved it, so I can now say I'd whole-heartedly recommend it to anyone. Do not, I repeat do not, skip the Tom Kha Gai--quite possibly the best soup I've ever had of any kind.

I realized this weekend that I've basically been coming home and playing on the Internet for hours, then going to bed most weeknights for a number of months. Don't get me wrong, I love you all, but it occurred to me that pulling some extra overtime at work might be (literally) a more valuable use of some of that time. So instead of leaving at 5 the last two nights, I've gotten out a 7 and 6:30, and I imagine the pattern will continue as long as I can put up with the extra Ed time. (He managed to say less than 25 words to me in 3 hours this morning and still had me seething, but we'll save that for another time.) We have another one of our silly artificial deadlines coming up soon, so the extra time will be appreciated and productive too. (Even education has fewer silly arbitrary deadlines than law, but that's yet another one for another time.)

One practical upshot of all this is that I'm checking out various transportation options, since my bus becomes much less pleasant after 5--more crowded, and runs much less frequently. So I ventured, for the first time, onto the Metro Red line tonight, a.k.a. the L.A. subway. They've managed to accumulate an impressive amount of dank in a relatively small number of years of operation, but it's a smooth, quick ride to Western/Wilshire, and a short bus ride home from there. It's not as good as the direct bus ride if I can catch it quickly, but it beat the hell out of waiting more than 15 minutes in Pershing Square.

The Mayor of Ames is playing a prominent role on arguably the best team in the NBA--the #1 seed in the West anyway. The hell?! Wasn't he the Pacers' 12th man for about 17 years?