The LiveJournal

8:49AM

This morning I was trying to send a text message but I don't get good signal in my apartment so it was taking a while. I tried moving the phone all around me and I held it up in the air and as my arm straightened upwards I thought to myself, "by the power of Greyskull!" and off the message went.

8:16AM

Yesterday I filed my Tax returns.

Then I spilled tacks all over my floor.

3:58AM

I really want to update this. Not quite ready yet.

Graduated though. That was kind of an ordeal.
Life's been a little crazy since then. Calming down a little.

2:51PM - How I cook Mac and Cheese

I've been eating Annie's Wisconsin Cheddar (the orange one) for a while now. It's my favorite, but this probably works for any of the powder-cheese mac and cheese kits.

Boil noodles until toothy.
Strain and leave in the colander -- do not rinse!
put a small amount of skim milk and like a quarter stick of butter into the now-empty pot.
Turn on lowest possible heat to melt butter.
Mix in cheese powder -- I prefer not to mix it well so there will be dry chunks of cheese powder (which I love) in the finished product.
Mix in pasta and stir until sufficiently coated with cheeese.
Serve and enjoy.

3:51AM

I'd like to develop some intuition about form and composition. So, as an excersize, I took some abstract photographs so that I could focus on those elements. A few of them have interesting form and composition, and are worth looking at. I would appreciate constructive feedback and suggestions of ways to expand the excersize.

Enjoy:

8:24PM

This talk was given as CBGB's closed. The original version is weighted down by the rhetoric of economic class. The author's implication that revolution, art and heroism are the birthright of the economically disadvantaged is misguided and offensive, so I've edited it out the reader can focus on what are some really important, powerful statements. Or maybe I've co-opted proletarian rhetoric and am putting it in service of my own bourgeois agenda and am perpetuating the yuppification of The Revolution.

Six of one.

Edit: The original talk is here.
http://brooklynrail.org/2006-10/express/farewell-to-cbgbs
I meant to include this. I'm not that much of a fascist.

[...]Looking radical but being apathetic makes you a poseur. Doing art for commerce makes you a sellout. And acting smug and pretentious about cultural bullshit makes you an asshole.

[...]

We are at the end of a cycle. We’re imitating people and things that happened 40 and 50 years ago. Hipster culture today is harmless culture. And that’s an epic tragedy because being hip used to mean that you were heroic and dangerous. That you waged war on soullessness and greed through art and resistance. That you were passionate and not afraid to show it. Being hip meant that you had dirty sex in dirty bathrooms and wanted upheaval in society. Being hip meant you were intense lower class, not detached upper class. Being hip meant being revolutionary.

But now hipsters have succumbed to the fear and apathy same as the rest of the country. Now we hide in safe and exclusive MFA programs, rather than staying on the outside and creating art that speaks to the disenfranchised streets. Now we wear t-shirts that indirectly mock [...], rather than simply hitting the streets with a banner that says: Go Fuck Yourselves You Sold Out Scum!![...]

Look at tonight. This isn’t a metaphor. You don’t have to draw inferences or study media ecology to see what’s going down. This is the death of hallowed ground. I got off the Greyhound bus from Albuquerque in ‘88, walked straight here from Port Authority with my taped-up suitcase, scored a hit of acid and sat right there on the sidewalk tripping for four hours before a shitfaced sculptor from the Rivington School said I could come to their party and crash on their floor. This is where Richard Hell and Joey Ramone took on The Man. The punk rock values that came out of CBGB’s made me who I am. And now it’s gone. One more chunk of our lives handed over to bourgeois jerks who think rebellion is doing a line of blow in the bathroom on a Friday night.

[...]Was it your goal in life to collapse on the couch and watch TV every night because the day kicks your ass so hard? Was this how you envisioned your adult life?[...] Did you ever think that you’d be here at the closing of CBGB’s? What’s it going to take for us to mobilize? What’s it going to take for us to engage?

I’m talking about getting brutally weird again. I’m talking about doing art that’s beyond co-option. I’m talking about forging new myths. I’m talking about creative resistance that scares the shit out of the rich robots, Sex in the City slaves, stockbrokers, cultural gatekeepers and pigs in power. I’m talking about dangerous expression that’ll make Todd and Ashley think long and hard about moving into the ’hood and exposing their little banker to the new hip warriors of the American night.

7:23AM - On Bees and Stinging

One of these appeared under one of the eaves of my house:



I decided it would be a good idea to roll up some newspaper and try to smoke out whoever was inside. Apparently it was hornets (or wasps, I'm not quite sure). In any case, they came after me and one stung me on the underside of the chin and another on the arm. I am apparently immune to wasp stings because it stung for about two minutes and then went away.

I am also immune to mosquito bites.

5:39PM

I have the flu. Yesterday it was a stomach flu. Now it seems to be a head, legs, joints, back, nuts and throat flu. It's also a sleeping like 18 hours a day flu.

Good thing I only have 5 final papers to do. Otherwise I'd be fucked.

12:59PM - BBC News Has a Particularly Interesting Day

1:24AM

And every once in a while, there's something worth fighting for.

12:01AM - Two Years Worth of Abstracts, Happy Accidents, Bad Pictures and Cats for Valentine's Day

( These have been two of the years of my life. )

9:27AM - Coffee Burgers

When you're making a burger there are two countervailing concerns: you want the meat to be undercooked and pink and juicy; and you want the outside to have some charring on it to add a bit of bitterness and complexity. The difficulty is that, if you don't have an extremely hot open-fire grilling element, it's hard to get both. My broiler will eventually burn the outside of the burger, but by that time you've got a well done piece of meat. It also does a very fine job of making a rare burger with just some browning around the edges, but there will be no charring what so ever.

My solution has been to just grin and bear it with one or the other of these options, but a couple weeks ago, I had an idea: add some dark roasted, oily, espresso ground coffee to my burger meat before cooking. It may sound odd but frankly it was a wild success. Here's what I did:

1lb 80%lean ground chuck.
sea salt.
seaweed flakes.
Dark roasted espresso ground coffee.
Cayenne pepper.
Sesame seed buns.

Turn your oven on to full power. Knead ingredients into meat. Form into reasonably thick burgers. Place on a light, oven-safe tray (you probably want it to have a lip or something to catch all that oil that will pour out of these and prevent it from getting all over your oven). Place in your broiler for 3-4 minutes. Remove. Flip. Replace for 3 minutes. Remove. Add sesame seed buns. Enjoy.

Note: this recipe doesn't make sense for anything but a broiler. If you have a grill, you should be able to get it hot enough to make good charring. I mean, you're welcome to try it though, the flavor was really excellent.

Oh, and a bit of a warning: this might be more appropriate as a breakfast item due to the high caffeine content.

4:17PM - Self-Portrait

11:28AM

1:31AM - I'd say it has me pretty well pegged.

Dear Santa... Dear Santa, This year I've been busy! Last month I bought porn for donrumata (10 points). In November I ruled Duluth, Minnesota as a cruel and heartless dictator (-700 points). In September worded and I robbed a bank (-50 points). Last Saturday I put money in thrownoverbored's expired parking meter (14 points). In January I pushed dgame84 in the mud (-17 points). Overall, I've been naughty (-743 points). For Christmas I deserve a lump of coal! Sincerely, mattraibert

Write your letter to Santa! Enter your LJ username:

Today, I posted a meme. (-432842930840192834093284 points)

7:19PM - Happy Halloweeen!

9:48AM - A Dream

I just dreamt that I was marrying a unicorn. She was beautiful and we were very much in love. But then, before we were to get married, I was buying a car, and she asked if she could drive my car.

"No, it's my new car. And besides, you have hooves! I mean, you're a unicorn, you can't drive a car."

She was very angry, "you don't trust me!?" she whinnied. And she turned in a huff and a cloud of dust and galloped off into the sunset.

And so I woke up feeling pretty dejected this morning.

8:33PM - www.skype.com

Dear Skype,

I am interested in purchasing a SkypeIN phone number in the US. But I would like the 10 digit number to be prime. I see that you give users a fair amount of ability to search the list of available numbers, but I was wondering if you could give me a copy of the list so that I could run a primality testing algorithm on the phone numbers and choose one. Prime numbers are fairly common and I believe it is likely, even given the limited list of numbers available, that I'd be able to find a suitable prime telephone number.

Thanks,
Matt Raibert

1:38AM - This is kind of like a Postsecret except that it's not a secret, just a post.

I really enjoy removing people from my friends list. Stay tuned for more.

3:26PM - A Good Song

click

"I'll be the platform shoes, undo what heredity's done to you. You won't have to strain to look into my eyes."

Is he saying that he's kinda short?


"I want to take you far from the cynics int his town
And kiss you on the mouth
We'll cut out bodies free from the tethers of this scene,
Start a brand new colony
Where everything will change,
We'll give ourselves new names (identities erased)
The sun will heat the ground
Under our bare feet in this brand new colony


Everything will change, ooh [etc]"