O! the irony. A specialist in unauthorized media gets his feathers ruffled when his media is used without authorization.
What was (or is) your favorite subject in school?
Art History. Odd then that I majored in statistics.
How well do you know your next-door neighbors?
Well enough to know that I don't want to know them.
There have been so many brushes with fame, but I have to single out Donny Osmond.
In the early 90s he was touring in a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and the tour eventually made its way to Minneapolis where I was a student at the U of M.
Mypart time job was working the customer service counter at Best Buy and, one day, Donny walked up to the counter to exchange a broken boombox--I can't recall what was wrong with it.
He asked if he could exchange it, I said "sure," he went to get a new one. When he returned and the transaction was complete, he said "thanks."
Gives me shivers.
Growing up, it's a toss up between Galaga and Centipede.
I gave up video games a number of years ago. The last one I played was Escape Velocity. Fun!
Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head and
Justify My Love, respectively. These make me realize the extent to which I have never had any connection to the pop charts.
Upon arrival, a quick jaunt up to the Promenade for a cappuccino reminded me of several things:
- LA is car-oriented. This commonplace cannot be overstated. LA is car oriented in the same way China has a growing population.
- LA looks like a movie. Everything about it is stylized and saturated. The birds are chirpier, the sidewalks make your feet hurt faster, and the people are more self-conscious.
- LA has the best bums in the US--particularly in Santa Monica, where I'm staying. In Santa Monica, the bums are bums for bum sake. They really don't need a handout--who needs money in a place that's temperate and has better dumpsters than most cities have restaurants? So, many bums here have dispensed with the formality of asking for money in favor of cultivating their bummyness. There's the bum pantomiming the sex act, thrusting her pelvis in the air with mock misogynistic vigor; the skateboarding bum astutely weaving among pedestrians on LA's vestigial sidewalks and commenting to gawkers "no pictures please"; and the traditionalist bum whose entreaty "a nickel, a dime, any little sum will do" rolls out in the mellifluous tones of a Lutheran Pastor.
I'm convinced that arriving in LA is one of the most disheartening things one can do. For me at least, the unremittingly grey-blue skies, dingy freeways, and scrubby vegetation is always a disappointment--no matter how low my expectations.
This is not a wholsesale attack on LA--just on arriving here. No doubt, LA has its charms. Perhaps I'll find some while here....
Tomorrow I fly to Los Angeles for a quick, two-day biz trip. Meeting/hanging with Byron both days, going to the Six Apart seminar on Thursday, and generally staying connected. Should be fun--I've found that in doses of 2-4 days, LA is perfectly acceptable.
