Wacky Christ Bus Signs

Oh dear lord, aren't these a blast from the past? Some stoned-hippie-jesus-freak past that other people did. I didn't. And the thing is, GW Bush could sit down and smoke a spliff and agree with these people.

As everyone knows, I am not religious. I missed that bone when I was made. But all adolescents go through a religiosity period, where they try and understand why they are odd and different and maybe God will give them meaning in life. So there was a period when I thought about being a priest. (Notice the gender\career issue) So I thought I'd start by becoming an altar boy. But Father Sanner told me I couldn't be an altar boy since BOY was the operative word. Well that put me off good old roman catholicism, that and Father Bill's nose hair, which frightened me, and his guitar, which seemed out of place in a catholic church and his wanting to do in person confessions. I wanted to confess in darkness, thank you very much, though I always lied about my sins. I didn't sin enough and so my list was embarrassingly short, so I would just add some for good measure. I didn't really know what any of the big bad sins meant, so I had no clue that what Susie and I were doing in her closet was a sin, so I couldn't confess that.

So I went to a synagogue, a mormon class and sampled what the episcopals, baptists and methodists had to offer. When my brother had the great idea to try the hippie jesus freak prayer service the next town over. We went to this flat-faced apartment building, up to a second floor apartment filled with tattered couches and cushions and HIPPIE JESUS FREAKS. They had HAIR. Lots of it, all over not just sprouting out of their noses. They prayed and sang songs and spoke of Jesus, and they had a leader and they embraced peace and love and hugged each other. So I was hugged. By people I didn't know. Which sort of made me uptight. But I was a totally un-cool prig wasn't I???? They were full of Jesus' love and so why would I not want to hug them? The whole thing made me more and more uptight and I thought they were a little silly, but also scary. Of course, when you're 13 and out of your element with HIPPIES, it all seems a little scary. Anything new is scary. And being the new person in a group is scary. The hippie jesus freaks all knew each other and they new that my brother and I were fresh blood. After a while the leader asked that all those people who hadn't accepted jesus and been born again should go with him into the back room so they could bring jesus into their hearts. There was no fucking way I was going in the back room. My brother of course, who WAS an altar boy, was waving his hands and jumping up and down like a jackass. As if people didn't know we were there already. As if they weren't looking at us, as if the invitation wasn't specifically addressed to us and go in the back room, accept jesus and drink the Kool Aide kiddies RIGHT NOW, wasn't the message.

So I just said, "I've done that." "You've accepted jesus into your heart and been SAVED????" "Yeah, last month. It was great." My brother looked at me and said, "No you haven't" Thanks a lot Mr. Altar Boy who has to confess that he steal's grandma's cigarettes and smokes them when he goes to confession. Thanks for the sterling example of honesty. So we start to bicker, "Yes, I have, you weren't there." "No you didn't." "Uh, huh, at Janice's you're never at Janice's so how do you know?" The leader broke the bickering up and took C. into the back room where he drank the Kool Aide. (My brother was completely insufferable after that for about one month. Then he became a Buddhist and started walking around town in torn up sheets, which went over really well in suburbia.) I was left with the rest of the congregation doing super-secret jesus stuff that you only can do after you've drunk the Kool Aide, so I mumbled along and kept alert so that I could kneel at the appropriate time. When we were done I was out of there like a bat out of hell, and I made my brother come with me.

So my friend M. saw this bus and figured it was a sign, luckily she had her camera with her. So we have M. to thank for my ranting trip down memory lane. When I first saw these I thought "It's Dr. Bonner's Bus!" remember that soap?

Purchasing while Unemployed

Well, I counted up my schedule for the last three months and I have gone on over 22 interviews and phone screens. You think I would be getting good at this, but the old grey matter is not what it once was and I get stymied by the differences between UML and XML. So I say Oh yeah UML really needs to have a consistent structure, it needs to be well defined, which is you know a big foot in mouth gaffe. You wouldn't think that one letter would make a difference but tell that to the kids who lost at the national spelling bee last month. They know. They're prepared for a life in IT with it's TLAs. (Three Letter Acronyms).

I read an article in the LA Times about Charisma and how scientists are trying to identify what makes charisma. Personally I think I have charm, but was passed up on the charisma helping. They said in the Times that if you wanted to have charisma you should cock your head and open your eyes slightly wider when the other person is talking. Whatever you do, don't flare your nostrils as that is a sign of aggression, I learned that from my Karate teacher - I flared my nostrils a lot in NYC on the subway but it didn't seem to do that much. Anywho, I have been trying to cock my head and open my eyes wide while interviewing, but it makes me feel like Norma Desmond. I spent a lot of time cocking my head at the international house of soft porn, but they failed to see my value as a charismatic leader able to motivate employees into performing IT miracles. Oh well.

But speaking of unemployment, we purchased a new jungle gym for the hounds, they quickly identified it as upholstery to be assaulted. Here's a shot of them testing the quality of the stuffing. What were we thinking of? We purchased an apple green leather couch while unemployed! Stop me someone. It's like stalking your ex on ebay because he said that he was in creditors anonymous. I mean, we're unemployed so we have all this time to shop, for couches. We went and test drove a new car the other day. This morning I poured a glass of water on my wallet to cool off my credit card.

My next door neighbor, a very cool woman, mentioned her store - here's the web site:
Face City Shop

It's very cool and I haven't decided what to purchase. I need the "employable me" face cream. It's all possible in America with a credit card. I will report back on what I found, the eye cream and Fiji products (helping women and the environment in Fiji by creating sustainable products for export) are cool.

Bad Leche

Our apartment was recently raided by the homeland security forces. They found, among other things twenty pounds of fertilizer, some blasting caps and large quantities of rawhides stashed under Leche's bed. Worst of all they found large quantities of cash and a passport hidden in a dog-eared, hollowed out copy of "The Art of Raising A Puppy."
Apparently Leche has become an Islamist Militant and the Canadian Security Forces tipped off the Feds. She had been writing some dangerous stuff in AlQueda.MySPace.com - she's shown on her home page with an AK-47, wearing a head scarf and eviscerating a stuffed care bear.
I pleaded with the officers, she's just a teenager! But they took her away to Gitmo. I have contacted lawyers and they say that there's nothing to do since she's been classified as an enemy combatant. I did receive this picture of her in her new surroundings.

Bread

For years I bought bread in a local bakery or at the bread counter of Balduccis or Citronella in NYC. And I made bread with my own two little hands. Bread requires flour, water, yeast, salt and maybe a pinch of sugar to start the yeast feasting. I have made flat breads, crackers, english muffins, slicing loafs, artisanal pain de levain and bread where I have coaxed wild yeast to grow in my own kitchen. I like bread and I never had problems finding bread in NYC. There was a darling little whole grain loaf at Citronella that they would slice up and it was wonderful on sandwiches and it was not huge so it was a good size for a two person household. And it toasted up so warm and crunchy that it really made you appreciate the handmade artisanal butter in the European style that you put on it. Yum.
I usually buy bread at the health food store; I like brown bread, whole grain bread, bread that has fiber in it. Well, actually, I usually buy most everything at the health food store. But we had to buy grocery store things and so we popped off to an actual grocery store to shop and I wanted to have a sandwich for lunch so I went to the bread aisle.
Now, I was actually prepared to not want to buy 98% of the bread in the bread aisle. But it's granola tofu fuckin' California here, we invented health food, you think you could get a whole wheat loaf of sandwich bread.
I actually looked at the ingredient lists of the bread, because I had no clue about the brands. This was actually harder than it sounds because I didn't have my reading glasses on. I don't really wander around with my reading glasses on, because they distort everything far away and so I tend to fall down if I just wear them. And I'm too vain to carry them around. So it's often hard for me to read menus in dark restaurants or ingredient items or fine print. However I persevered and found out something horrifying and shocking. In every loaf the second ingredient was high-fructose corn syrup.

Which means it is not bread.

Which means that diabetics should not be in the same room with it.

People think they are being "good" when buying these ridiculous "whole wheat" products that have absolutely no nutritional value. This is NOT BREAD. Bread does not contain CORN SYRUP. In my "Baking with Julia" bread bible book there is no entry in the index for corn syrup. Corn Syrup is something that mega-agri-business invented so that coca cola didn't need to have expensive sugar in it, it could have inexpensive corn syrup. CORN SYRUP is evil!!!!
And that is NOT bread!

So fear gripped me, what if I had been eating corn-syrup-fake-bread all this time. I had never checked the ingredient lists at the health food store! What if, like Canola Oil, it was all a crock o' shite, and we had been conned into thinking this was a better choice that we were willing to pay 2 dollars more for?
The next time I went to Whole Paycheck I checked the bread ingredients. We are safe. No corn syrup. In fact, often no sugar and when it is present it is like the last ingredient, which is where it should be. I was really worried that I was going to have to bake bread on a regular basis, which is one thing when you are unemployed, but another when you are employed.

Read the ingredients!

Signs: Joe's Cafe

Here's a sign from Joe's Cafe in Santa Barbara. We got the dogs groomed first and then went to the beach for a day, which you know is always a clever thing to do. We did not eat at Joe's, but apparently the food is good. We did eat at a local joint in the harbour and watched the sea urchin catch get loaded on trucks. Amazing how much those little fiching boats hold in their holds. We also watched some evening sail boat races and swimming races.


My friend M. has sent me a sign from Seattle.

Signs: Pub & Things I wonder About

Here's another pub sign.

Lately the federal reserve and some other economists have been shouting about inflation inflation inflation. Now. In 2006 - not last year, not the year before. Where have they been for the past five years??? Housing prices have quadrupled in the past five years. Doesn't that count as inflation? It seems to me that it should, duh!

What were they Thinking!!!!

This is what I woke up to this morning as I opened the LA Times to the front page:

The Pentagon has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans "humiliating and degrading treatment," according to knowledgeable military officials, a step that would mark a further, potentially permanent, shift away from strict adherence to international human rights standards.


My first response was that if this was not grounds for impeachment for cause, it was grounds for impeachment for sheer stupidity. Currently we are investigating - Oh! So Many! - allegations of torture and murder that our troops are accused of committing. From Abu Grahaib to Haditha to Gitmo, we have killed and tortured people who we didn't have enough translators to interpret, all to keep Amerika "safe." Alberto Gonzalez, the chief architect of the administration's it's fun to torture brown skinned people in violation of international law because we have god on our side - actually got promoted for writing the memo that says torture is okay and legal if we do it, but not if they do it. In an appallingly sick show of alleged honor, Gonzalez threatened to resign last week because representatives thought he shouldn't have searched the office of a congressperson who had 90,000 in his freezer at home. However his real shame is letting all of our servicemen and women become potential torturers. What does it do to a young person to be directed to put electrodes on another human?

The administration's response to the Haditha massacre was to put together a "Core Values" slide show for the troops in Iraq. It was to emphasize the legal, moral and ethical standards for war. What happens when the policy manual doesn't have any ethical or legal standards?

America is a long-time signatory to the Geneva Convention. The thinking goes that there are rules of war and if we abide by them we can expect others to abide by them. We can't be shocked, shocked, shocked if our service men and women come into harm's way, get tortured or beheaded - because we have no moral standing to complain.

We win the war by being better, not by being just as bad.

International House of Soft Porn

So I went on an (onan!) interview for a position at the International House of Soft Porn; cable channel & web porn division. It was not in a mansion and there were no men in bathrobes wandering around. It was typical corporate blah land, plants, "designy" lobby chairs, anatomically correct manikins and some soft core mags to flip through while waiting.

There is much art in the world. Much of the art in museums has naked ladies in it. Therefore if you paint a picture with a naked lady it is art. Alas, there is so much bad, bad, bad non art that has naked ladies in it, but I've rarely seen it as a corporate decorating motif. (Though I have seen it used with abandon as a motif at a friend's house - particularly the little naked lady dwarf stool.)

It is very interesting to pass by cubicles filled with pictures of your kids, dogs, kitties and Miss June's titties.

The job was a typical IT job. They had systems, they had business needs, they needed things to work. I had a pleasant chat with the manager (VP) of the department for an hour or so. I asked the penetratingly direct question "So, are you a waterfall kind of guy?" Notice I refrained from asking about water sports.

When I spoke to the HR person she said, "we have benefits, but the PRODUCT is around." She couldn't say "Hey, we make PORN! You gotta be comfortable with PORN to work here." Which would have been refreshing. I said "Well it's just a different kind of cupcake, Kerri."