Dude, where's my car?

Someone stole our padiddled, stinky feet smelling, no radio having 1995 Honda Civic last night. From right in front of the building. Wow.

On a tree-lined street full of Lexuses (lexi?) and Beamers, they took our rust-rotted, stick-shifting, stall-prone ride. With a padiddle! Jokes on them!

But also on us.

Pass the Rickrolls please

I can't believe I just got rickrolled by the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

I love Paste magazine. Their year-end round-up of the best the indie world has to offer mirrored the piles and piles of media accumulated in my living room to a tee. Their pick for album of the year was She&Him's delicate and instantly adorable self titled release. Big-eyed indie starlit Zooey Deschanel pairs up with guitar virtuoso M. Ward, combining their years of southern California radio-listening, excellent song writing abilities and unique voices to make 2008's best album. No robot voices, no collabos with big name producers, DJs or singers, no dramz -- just good ol' listening songs, for people who like to listen to music. I went to see them at Park West last July and was blown away by their stage presence...it was old timey and no-frills, and I sat on a stool against the wall and clapped my hands with others and felt like I was at a Carpenters show. Thats what its all about.



And then they did it again, Paste picked the best TV show ever for their fav of 08. Battlestar Galactica. And I've gone on about that series enough.

Battlestar Galactica Full Series Torrent Download

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back at 1619 i hardly ever dreamt. which was a contrast from richmond hill's lucid era. i read books on astral projection. i did visualizations that were meant to bring on that body vibration, that mind-tone, that thing that would snap the elastic that ties you to the ethereal. it worked once. i looked at my hands. and then i moved and chicago gave me nothing but the infrequent visions of hollis, distorted, hazy and unjolting. but now, 1709 is like a dreamer's paradise, no search for the hands required..just fall asleep and let the past haunt your soul. not any past you have ever known, but instead a history of things that are real and very useful when watching jeopardy. i dont even need my hand-drawn star of asteroth beneath my pillow, the sciences are with me.

Girl at bar has clearly had enough of the double-Marty McFly serenade.

Another party, another Marty McFly.

Not Mitch Mitchell!

something i learned today, from lady on the train

In order for Captains to be effective, they must have either a hook hand, peg leg, distinguishable beard color, or be made of spiced rum.

Do You Believe In Gosh, the posthumous CD release of Mitch Hedberg's most recent work is hilarious, yet very very sad. Recorded at the Ontario Improv in 2005, by one James Franco (I dunno if this is actor James Franco, or some other one), it is the deepest and most honest of Hedberg's observations on how silly life is. He muses that Dr. Scholl wasted time getting his Phd because people would buy foot cushions from a Mr. Scholl. He imagines that the inside of a bottle of cleaning fluid is fucking clean.

S.A.D

I suffer from S.A.D. Ya know, winter blues. The colder and cloudier it gets, the worse off my anxiety is. I should probably get one of those special lights, but then the hypochondriac in me would worry about cancer from artificial rays.

Only one more month of school left to go. I'm already excited about some mid-winter leisure reading. Chapter after boring chapter of textbooks has me eyeing Amazon in a dangerous way. I plan on continuing my collection of fake knowledge and satirical non-fiction but I also have a new reading list of Chicago themed books.

Yesterday at Borders I got the new John Hodgman compendium of complete world knowledge, More Information Than You Require, a follow up to the hobo cult starting The Areas of My Expertise. On the busride home from Borders I began t he book, starting with the very informative but tiny type printed cover. Both the front and back cover, oozing with TMI. Fellow passengers gave me the same odd stares that I received when I read the first book on the bus. They must be wondering why I am staring at the cover of a book for so long instead of opening it. If only they could see the brilliance that is detailed in tiny print! I'm only on page three of the table of contents and already I am inundated with whosits and whatsits and lists and things of that nature.

During the same Borders trip I also got a book called Chicago: City On The Move. It's a gorgeous coffee table book chock full of black and white photos of the CTA's early days, street cars, trolleys, men digging blue clay by hand beneath the city. Now that I've taken B&W photography and learned how to develop film, I have much more appreciation for the tunnel dig pics of the '20s and '30s. But besides all the eye-candy, this book was also peppered with excerpts from books and newspaper articles that had to do with Chicago transportation. Already, one excerpt struck me as profound and puts into beautiful words an experience I've felt many many times.

"For hours each day Donald Ray rode them: the Howard, past Addison and Wrigley Field, then Belmont, then Fullerton, then the most exciting, the most dazzling part of the line: the descent into the underground tube just past the Armitage station. It was like a mouth consuming them all, changing light into shadow and darkness, the sound from a hum into an echoing thunder of vibration and noise. Once beneath the street, he would study the houses as they slowly drifted into the landscape; he was suddenly in the lead of a long, curling missile propelling itself through a hole under the earth, and only he was in control."

--- City Dogs by William Brashler

I have to get that book.