defective yeti is punny

copied and pasted from defective yeti:

Lowest Form of Humor
Q: What does a copy editor do when she's not feeling well?
A: Calls inn [sic].

Egged On
The vending machine at my work contains Hershey's Ultimate Soft-Baked Cookies.
From a marketing standpoint, I guess the name "Soft-Baked Cookies" is catchier than "Undercooked Pastries." Though not as clever as "Salmo-Nilla Wafers."

we are very amused.
walk good.

for those aforementioned hip hop heads and all my music lovers

...and scrawn, whose birthday is today and is wonderfully pregnant, so she deserves double celebrating.
found this via keif, on youtube- a must-see/listen for those who know and for those who need reminding that guns, bitches and bling were never part of the 4 elements.
and a reminder that global6 spins live every wednesday- i'm adding them to the sidebar too...
walk good.
ps: you can now officially envy me- i got my tickets to see stephen+damian (jr.gong) marley, and manu chao! (lucky for us, grims spoke too soon when he lamented manu chao not doing d.c. this summer)

post-paris post: part2; ballsacks to strip clubs

so i got to notre dame, which was worth the pain of my pulled groin trekking the 422 spiralling steps, and all decorated with what appear to be large stone ballsacks. the exterior detailing is all 3d fleurs-de-lis; here's grims' post with photos of me licking ancient stone ballsack (you know i'm faking it though; germaphobe that i am, all i could think was "birdshit!"). notre dame was massively beautiful and so was the view from the top- we went all the way up to the bell-tower, and i got to be a gargoyle in a window and touch some gargoyle ass on the roof. very cool.
one of our favourite meals was @ this ordinary little cafe en route to the picasso museum- epices et delices on rue de vieille du temple has a fabulous pork with pineapple thing (it was the plat du jour) and rabbit terrine and duck confit and an old chinee waiter who claims his name is "magique" and wears cool pumas. grims was looking for somewhere with available outdoor sunny-side seating and we'd walked long enough without something fulfilling his requirements that i was getting ready to settle, and then we saw its empty table for 2. the food was so rich and so good and so satisfying that i had to finish it all, even though it took until it was cold and i ate way too much. i couldn't bear to send back a bite, and wasn't about to carry it all evening. the picasso museum itself was also great- the collection is wonderful and bigger than i expected and the building it's housed in is lovely. and we got art books, which i'm always excited about.
i mentioned previously (abovelinked) that we went to pompidou too- the permanent collection was, sadly, put away in favour of a special exhibit, but the exhibit was excellent- chronological post-impressionism through the roots of cubism and surrealism to modern art- loved it. and since the louvre is a lifetime project anyway, when we go back we can revisit pompidou for their permanent collection and anything else we missed. we also saw a shitload of impressionism @ musee d'orsay (which we saw all of), so between d'orsay, pompidou and the louvre we saw some of any kind of visual art one could hope for, plus the erotique, dali and picasso-dedicated musee's.
@ the louvre, mona lisa was as unattractive as every replica'd led me to believe. and i don't care what they say, i don't find her smile mysterious or engaging in the least; undeserving of the word enigmatic. i'm almost more inclined to believe the self portrait theory- that bitch look like a man. venus de milo was alright, but disappointing- her appeal is simply that @ the time of discovery people weren't doing work of that quality, but centuries later, the quality of work seems virtually commonplace so it's hard to find her that spectacular. maybe if she were exhibited alongside other pieces from her time i'd be more impressed. i did love winged victory, though. it was my favourite of the famous louvre pieces and its placement at the top of the staircase is brilliant. we saw amazing art, but what stuck in my mind is something by (i think) delacroix- huge room filled with massive paintings, the 1 that struck me was some dudes @ war. now i don't usually go for war imagery (i like dark, not brutal) but this shit was crazy- these dudes were dressed for war in strappy leather sandals (period, not girly) and plumed helmets with shields on their arms, and not a damn stitch else. who the fuck goes to fight in sandals and helmets with their junk hanging out? they obviously grasp the clothing-as-protection concept, but only see fit to extend it to their heads and feet and not their balls+dicks. i don't know, man. i'm guessing those dudes lost the war. or at least, the future of their people. and a side note: the dutch masters can paint like nobody's business, but they loved portraits, and they painted some ugly-ass people. when i looked at their work, i thought- what skill, what talent, but holy shit, who could live with that face hanging around? how could one eat with that on a wall facing you? and what's with their fascination with dead rabbits? ugly people and dead rabbits...
the louvre was stupendous, though. each room's as ornate (and sometimes more so) than the art in it. some of them are so overly-decorated with gold-leafing, painted ceilings and wallpapers of varying patterns all @ once that they surpassed overdone and arrived @ ugly- just taking it all in is exhausting and some of the rooms almost made me want to throw up, even without dutch masters' work in them (and at the same time, way too many of those rooms were empty). combined with the unnecessary replenishing of bread @ restaurants (they'd take away a basket we'd only eaten a 3rd of and bring back a full, fresh basket even if we said we didn't need more) and everything else we saw, it made me feel the french maintain a culture of gestures of excess. i don't know that they're excessive in daily life, but there were so many symbols of grandeur, oddly combined with rampant inefficiency (see abovelinked paris post)- @ the louvre, too many exhibits and rooms were closed for no apparent reason, bathrooms were virutally inaccessible due to some being in a locked-off area while others were being cleaned (and some bitch insisted that although she could only clean 1 stall @ a time, i couldn't use one of the empty ones), exits closed before the building did so there was a ridiculous crush through some minimal number of doors when they had so many others, plus they forcibly kicked us out @ 9.30pm instead of 10pm when they're supposed to close- i know it must take time to get everybody out of a place that big so they wanna start early, but if you say you close @ 10pm, then @ 9.30pm you could at least let us finish the room we're currently in before you bitch us out of your musee.
apart from the art, we saw lots of people- paris in spring is the most crowded i've ever felt except for summer @ rehoboth and carnival- and we walked more than i should've prob'ly, but if you get all the way to paris you can't let your groin stop you, right? besides the walk from le jardin de tuileries through place de la concorde to the champs elysees and arc de triomphe, the catacombs, strolling through pigalle and the latin quarter, we also walked to+from just about every musee and restaurant we went to. the only times we really used public transport was to get to+from montmartre and the catacombs, and back from pigalle- so by the time we got back i was so sick of people that i dreaded returning to rehearsals with edward3's cast of 25 (thankfully, the cast is so cool that i ended up not hating or feeling so crowded after all). but all the people-watching made me realise that contrary to popular belief, parisians are not particularly stylish- unless only rich parisians who don't walk around with regular people can afford to be stylish, so i just didn't see them. but i saw nothing in paris that i hadn't already seen on the streets of d.c., london, australia, or even trinbago, and not one person impressed me. on the cool side, though, 3quarters of the people we saw were wearing chuck taylors, so i felt right @ home. for real, i've literally never seen so many chucks in the same place @ the same time, and it was age-indifferent, babies to old ladies. the closest parisians came to "stylish" was leather chucks like will smith wore in i, robot (and i fully admit to shoe-envy) and balancing the leather chucks were entirely too many people in hideous 3musketeers' boots. but between my chucks and peeing not once, but twice in the street on the way back from too much late-night wine-drinking, grims says i'm a true parisian now, and i better be, having used 8pages of my invaluable notebook to facilitate pissing in parisian alleys.
i like that their train doors open while the still train's moving even though traincar and platform aren't the same height and the difference differs @ each metro stop- very fun. you know they'd never allow that in d.c. because all of usa must be idiotproofed. but they also have bigger doors to better facilitate rush hour, and they're smart doors that you touch to open so if nobody's getting on or off the doors stay closed. in spite of these intelligent choices however, their train stations have too fucking many stairs. espcially when one has luggage. but then they make up for it by having durex dispensers in metro stations, which cracked my shit up- again, you'd never see that in the usa.
speaking of metro stops, the catacombs are so huge that when you walk through them you emerge on the other end on a completely different rue, 2 metro stops away from where you entered. we came out and were lost for a minute until we found a map. the catacombs themselves are unbelievable until you see them yourself- you walk down 83 (i think) stairs then through dank underground tunnel for about 15minutes before you even see the 1st bone. but once you get to the bones, it's miles of thousands of millions of them- walls of stacked vertebrae with skulls, femurs, et al used to create decorative patterns- and until you see it, you forget that most skulls look like children because they're so small without flesh and hair and bodies attached- it's overwhelming and sad and amazing and brilliant all at once.
i don't really even know what to say about the catacombs without getting all fucked up in the head, so i'ma move on to strip clubs.
paris was so shockingly disappointing for strip clubs that i'm embarrassed for them. they fail miserably. you can pay a shitload of money and see a show @ le lido or moulin rouge, but that's showgirl shit. so we went to pigalle for strip clubs, and when we saw the multiple-floor sexodrome and all the smaller places lining both sides of the street we thought we'd hit jackpot. but apparently in paris you can pay about 80euros for a private show @ somewhere like the sexodrome (which, we learned the hard way, was the better deal) or you can pay a 20euro cover to enter a club where girls dance very badly without actually getting naked for 1song every 10minutes. not 1 set, just 1 song. every 10 minutes. and for those 10minute intermissions you're expected to buy drinks and chat with the marginally attractive girls. now, we expected the 1drink we bought for sarah to be expensive, but in my mind, expensive is 30euros rather than 10-20euros; we got fleeced. 1st time ever for me, and i'm as embarrassed for myself as i am for paris to admit that the drink cost 80euros (after the 20euro cover). needless to say, i felt no qualms about making it clear i wasn't impressed with the dancing, and we left without giving any of the girls $, after seeing 2 (maybe 3) dances so poor that all together they didn't add up to 1 satisfactory performance. fuck that. or not, i guess. had we known, i woulda got the private show back @ the sexodrome instead- value for $, right? if you're in pigalle though, the erotique supermarche was good, with pleasant and helpful advice offered and a nice array of toys, clothing, etc. i recommend it if you're shopping for paraphernalia rather than performance. we wished we'd talked to the erotique supermarche dude before dropping $ @ the club, because he explained there's nothing like a real strip club, except this 1 place in a different neighbourhood that'd be closing by the time we got there.
so the strip club was the biggest disappointment of the trip, but charles de gaulle airport, the stupidest airport ever, wins the most frustrating award. heathrow might be slow+crowded but charles de gaulle has an even worse layout, no signage, and even toilet access is ridiculously difficult. and it started right away with the escalator with a divider @ the base, before baggage check. why the fuck would you make it harder for people you know are carrying luggage to get on your escalator? bags bigger than ours would have to be lifted over the divider onto the escalator. and the whole airport's under construction so the shuttle dropped us in the middle of nowhere, where there's nothing to indicate that you need to go to another terminal because the one you're at doesn't function @ all, or how to get there once you figure that out. and they run trains that don't pick up passengers so if you happen to just miss one, you assume you should wait for the next one and waste 10minutes only to discover that they aren't really in use when it speeds by without stopping. once you finally find your way with only minutes to check in, there's a tiny holding area with no amenities (not even a vending machine) and to go to the bathroom you have to go to security and get a pass to go around the corner (although it'll feel further as the complete lack of signage means it takes forever to find) then go back through full security to return. and when i say no signage, i don't mean that they didn't cater for non-french-speakers, because we know enough french- i mean no signage at all. thank god we flew lufthansa to frankfurt, to help lift the mood charles de gaulle airport induced. it is the shittiest airport i've ever been in, and as the child of a flight attendant, i've seen plenty- charles de gaulle was worse than caribbean airports with so few amenities that you check in @ the edge of the tarmac. then, of course, after we flew the lovely lufthansa i was manhandled by frankfurt security (this bitch actually pulled my waistband out and looked down into my pants without permission) then had documents checked 4 times during a single transfer, only to end up in a more miniscule holding area, to fly united back to d.c., whose service is poor as american (aka "stank-ass fat ho airlines" who i've said i'll never fly with again).
all in all, we did and saw wonderful things but the beginning+end of the trip and the faux strip clubs were the pits. plus, i think i ate better in oz (although i admit that french is not my favourite cuisine- i thought eating both traditional+modern @ the source might change my mind, but i'd still rather eat anything asian/indian- not that i didn't enjoy the food, but i guess i had higher expectations). but it was totally worth it, and we'll go back so i can hopefully experience it without a pulled groin and freezing hotel room- besides, we have to revisit the louvre and pompidou and do the loire valley, versailles, chartre, etc.
i'm looking forward to it.
walk good.
ps: i know a few people who may be reading for the 1st time, so if you wanna find the australia posts (which i've been told are quite entertaining since the strip clubs and food were more enjoyable for me) we got back to d.c. on january 14, the posts are in my archives for the latter half of january-february 2006.
pps: why is vittel water grammatically incorrect? the label prints both "eau" and "bouteille" without the article- i'd never seen that before but haven't studied french since high school and am curious about whether it's now ok to omit the gender-matched "the" that precedes every french noun, and if so, when is it ok?

impossible quiz

the link in my previous post about it now says that they only allow people to link to another page to get to it, so i'm giving the link where i originally played the "lite" (their spelling, not mine) impossible quiz, so-called for lack of music, not questions.
sidebar link updated and playable.
walk good.

post-paris post: part1

tardy again, i know. life keeps geting hijacked by unexpected but well-paying work so every time i almost catch up, something else falls in my lap. and i can't really complain about that.
so. paris...
allow me to preface this adventure by explaining that i went to paris with a pulled groin because of my last shakespeare performance before our trip. it shoulda been cool because it was @ the secondary schools shakespeare festival on the performance day for the youths i directed, so their surprise was seeing me perform too. and we'd planned to do our very cool scene from richard3 (richard woos anne over the corpse of her father-in-law who he killed after killing her husband; she knows) which my youths woulda loved. but @ the last minute, already onstage, our boss decided we should do kung-fu macbeth instead. now, if this means nothing to you, it's like rehearsing dangerous liasons then unexpectedly performing charlie's angels. without a proper warmup. plus, i had to admit to the gremlin in person shortly thereafter, that i pulled my groin doing kung-fu macbeth...i mean, we know the scene from doing it last season, but we haven't rehearsed it since, and haven't needed to be that limber in a year. so i pulled my groin doing some ralph macchio shit.
then, i got to play the victim in a racial discrimination scene @ dulles on the way out, reminding me of 1 of the reasons i hate usa and will prob'ly never return once i get the fuck out. then nico was lame and didn't lime+smoke by zed with us on our night in london; i was already writing the interview in my mind but he denied the power of decades of friendship with some weak claim of being under the weather. i was thrilled to see zed+chad on our night in london, but overall, the trip didn't get off to a stellar start for me.
but we did excellently cool shit in paris. in no particular order:
weird moment in london, boarding the eurostar for paris- going through security, the woman @ the luggage x-ray asks, "how old are you?" now, the question's not ridiculous, it's just that there was no preface and it's a somewhat intrusive questions to be so abruptly asked by someone who's never spoken a word to you before. so i asked "why?"- turns out you can't travel alone on eurostar unless you're over 18, and she was in doubt about my legality and didn't think grims was fatherly enough. is it like that on other trains? can a minor not travel alone on amtrak from ny to d.c.? because you can get on an airplane and fly from trinbago to barbados, jamaica, usa, europe, wherever, alone.
we visited montmartre to see sacre coeur which is also near that artists' square with all the red umbrellas you see in movies. sacre coeur was, of course, beautiful- i was let down by the view of paris from sacre coeur after climbing all those fucking steps with a pulled groin but it was a slightly cloudy and smoggy day, and still, the stained glass alone was worth the trip. and in the alley next to the church, somebody was being a purple-turbaned still-life deity, which was a pretty fun backup view. we ate an ok-ish but ridiculously overpriced (55euros!) light lunch in the square and went to the dali museum. i adore salvador dali's work, and grims is similarly enamoured, so we were in our element.
the dali collection was as good as i hoped, as were pieces by other artists bigging-up dali, except for loris azzaro's hideous woman in flames, and "queen of knitwear" sonia rykiel demanding a rose be named after her when her dali dress was so awful (i know nothing of her other work; i guess i'm not of the knitwear court). otherwise, the art was good. what drove me crazy were the myriad typos, motion-sensor light on pieces that decided for itself when there was nobody watching anymore and shut itself off, text about pieces partially tucked behind display cases and thus unreadable, art displayed without information about itself or its artist, and a piece hung so that a large part of it extolled in the typo-filled details was completely invisible. i mean, for fuck's sake, people, you're presenting great art and its background to the world- get that shit right! and neither the dali nor the erotic museum had a good grasp on optimal painting height, or light reflection off glass. and as for said erotic museum...speaking of lack of information and typos, they mostly knew where stuff was from but little else until they got into very recent history, then when they decided they knew something, text was posted willy-nilly with no sense of continuity or context. holy shit, they make trying to educate yourself hard. but with all that, the erotic museum was cool too. 4-foot penis, 5floors of sex-related art and objects, open until 2am (i think) in pigalle, on the same strip as moulin rouge.
i had wonderful provencal-style stuffed mussels @ au pied de cochon and grims had "the temptation of st.anthony" (patron saint of sausage-stuffing) which included pig's ear, foot, snout and tail, and it was all so good. and so nice to have that quality meal after midnight; the 24hour places i can ordinarily eat @ are diners. grims says they also make a wicked french onion soup; he vouches for the claim that it's the best in paris (i hate onions; stick with chives). plus, their favours are the cutest little pink piggy soupees (meringues).
the 1st serious meal we had was @ chez pauline, traditional french cuisine. i don't remember the name of my meal, but it was pork that was wonderful with the sauce served with it, and completely bland without. i understand that sometimes a dish isn't intended to be deconstructed, but no bite of a meal should be bland. but with the sauce, it was yummy. and grims' beef bourgogne was lovely.
for real though, for all their claims of being a grand cultured civilisation, french service is shit. @ almost every place we ate i was either asked (literally) immediately what i wanted before even opening a menu, then repeatedly, then harassed while i was obviously still parsing it, or i'd close my menu, choice made, and wait 15minutes before anybody came to ask what we wanted. sometimes we'd wait forever just for a waiter and menu, as if they were unsure what we'd come into a restaurant for. at pinxo, she opted to repeatedly harass me while i was still reading my menu, including one occasion where i was obviously hunched over in the process of trying to fit a bulky object into a tightly-packed backpack. i would have beat her, but the fresh radishes they serve with pepper @ every table were interesting enough to save her. and my veal sweetbreads with chickpeas and whatever grims had were very good.
one of few waiters who didn't almost ruin my appetite was emmanuel neveu @ angelina's- their petit dejeuner is why breakfast was created and their smoked salmon sandwich and signature hot cocoa are amazingly delicious too. i would eat there every day, and i'm sure their bakery makes fabulous confections to take home.
we also liked la verre luisant @ 64 rue de la verrerie in the 4e- found it en route to pompidou and liked it so much we went back after- fresh caramel popcorn @ the tables, decorated with books and show posters and suchlike, brazilian flag and strong caipirinhas, good wine, grims had a cassoulet so good he was inspired to come home and make it because we needed more, which i'm thrilled with, and i had wonderful noix de petoncles en cassolette. it's definitely my favourite paris bar. and we had a hot waiter.
a petit pont was the other real bar we checked out (latin quarter) and was pretty ordinary, except for a waiter named eyuhl who looked remarkably like a healthy version of an ex of mine (diabetic skinnywhiteboy, so any other version of him could only be healthier) who delighted us with his personality and the knowledge that we could get our bottle of muscadet to go. oh, and the lounge singer and pianist in darkers covering everything from stevie wonder to somewhere over the rainbow to my way (the last in french with unrequested segue to english during the 1st chorus)- which reminds me that we heard the best one-man rendition of proud mary ever on drum-kit, trumpet+accordion as we came off the bridge across the seine to dip down and cross under the rue de rivoli to get back to the jardin des tuileries.
our neighbourhood was right by the louvre and felt like it was near a chinatown- very interesting mix. knowing that european hotel standards are lower than american, we'd looked @ photos online and chose the prince albert louvre for location, affordability and amenities, then just hoped for the best. on arrival, i was happy to find the room and bathroom bigger than expected, until night fell and we learned that the prince albert louvre's heat (which they only turn on @ night with no in-room control) was broken. as an asthmatic, cold, dry air is harder for me to breathe and spring is always difficult with pollen and shit, plus i hate nothing more in the world than cold+hunger. i coudn't breathe well enough to get a good night's rest. it was saturday, and they said nobody'd come on a sunday, so the 1st night we'd possibly have heat was monday. i was miserable.
on monday, they said somebody came and fixed it, which we believed, since the deafening noise of dudes literally drilling into the hotel wall outside our window woke us by 8am with no warning from hotel staff, but we checked all monday night since our room remained freezing, and heat never came on- a 3rd miserable night, after a miserable morning.
when i complained again on tuesday, i found out that part of monday's fixing required the dude to go into each room and manually drain the radiators, and since we'd asked housekeeping to stay out of our room because we didn't need fresh towels and soap every single day, they didn't go in and drain ours; so the hotel had heat on monday night, just not our room. after finally having heat for the 1st time on tuesday night, i woke up wednesday morning and found there was no hot water. i went down to query and was told it just stopped and they'd called the dude to fix it but he hadn't arrived yet. i had an icy cold shower. i was pissed. with my pulled groin...
in spite of which, since we were there, we went to notre dame and stood in a lame line for 45minutes and climbed the 422 steps to the top. with a pulled groin. actually, with that pulled groin and almost-constant low-grade asthma attack we also walked from the jardin des tuileries via place de la concorde up the champs elysees to the arc de triomphe, and through the catacombs, and the louvre and several other museums- i'll get to all that- for now, i'm pausing here- i need a break, and this is prob'ly way too much text in the interest of readability anyway, so post-paris post: part2 sooncome.
walk good.

in the interim

here's the impossible quiz (courtesy catching up over @ keifel's) to keep you entertained while i compose my paris post in another window...
walk good.

musical linkage (edited tuesday april 17 + wednesday april 18, 2007)

big-up etienne charles, a youth i knew back when his knees was scabby and his nose runny, making wonderful sounds now. i linked him on the sidebar too, for future listening. and i heard that one of the marsalis brothers said in an interview that etienne was one to watch/listen for- if i find the link, i'll add it later...
i also linked the oscillators, a jazz combo my bassist friend's in with drums, electric guitar and sax (composer)*. they're good- we go to as many of their gigs as we can and i love them more with each new piece we hear.
and i finally noticed the sacrilegious typo in the title of a previous post and fixed it, and am sufficiently mortified. i apologise.
plus, i finally sent my noir off to the editor, so my only other project this week besides performing, is the (sooncome) paris post.
walk good.

*ombudsman's edit: grims just pointed out to me that the drummer is the abovementioned oscillators' composer, not the saxophonist, but we think i always make that mistake because said saxophonist is the composer for another combo our bassist friend plays with.

happy days

yesterday saw an unexpected return to the radio station for the week, which is why i didn't spend the day posting about paris, as intended. and since i didn't have time to post, today i say happy belated b'day to zed+fred, happy anniversary to me+grims, happy opening night to me, and happy b'day to the skinnywhiteboy.
here's hoping tonight is a good opening for edward3's cast+crew- they're such a good group- it's shocking that in a group of almost 30, a hardcore hater like me only hates 1 (ok, maybe 2)...
walk good.

subtitled

why do we need to hear what they're saying on tv even when we don't understand the language? i turn up the volume anyway, reminding myself that the problem isn't that they're speaking too softly; it's not like i'll understand any better...
walk good.