In a CNN piece on the controversy surrounding the sex tape from actor Verne Troyer (aka Mini Me) the website included this comment regarding the site/show TMZ, which aired part of the tape (emphasis added):
The celebrity Web site posted the short segment on its site Wednesday; Troyer sued the site and porn distributors Thursday for $20 million in damages.
A few developments recently in the saga of the house mice.
First, Abby was cleaning out her closet and found, inside a shoe box, a pile of our dry cat food stored up from one of our rodent friends. That would certainly explain why they don't always hit the trap when we set it, they're all burrowed up for a mousepocalypse.
I have started calling her closet the condomousiam.
In what will shortly turn out to be oddly related news, my car wasn't working right yesterday. I drove it a few feet, got a low engine pressure light and went back to my driveway. A call to On Star and my dealership and I was told to call for Roadside Assistance to give me a tow, which they did. It was as painless an experience as one could have considering my car had to be towed and repaired.
Today the shop called, they were getting a "failed fuel switch" from the diagnostic computer, so they dropped my fuel tank which is when they found peanuts, raisins and chewed wires.
Here's what I'm pretty sure happened. We let the captured mice out in the garage in the winter so they don't freeze. We leave some food for the mice. Said mice realize my car is much warmer than the garage, they crawl up into the car and start a nice little nest with my fuel sensor wiring as insulation.
I'm not sure if I should laugh or not (I am) but I do feel obligated to call Car Talk.
Next mice we find we're driving up to Albany before we release them.
Travel is starting to get to me. In reality I did more last year, but less of it was to teach. Maybe teaching is getting the best of me? I'm not sure, but something, while I'm in a hotel room in some city that doesn't have my house and my hammock is getting to me.
Maybe it's cause last year we were starting up a new business, so many of the trips were business idea and planning, and the educational ones were new. This year the students are decidedly coming to the classes with more information already, and each class they seem already more familiar with the subject material, so that's good. But it's wearing on me.
Spent some nice time with Josh and Wil this week in Tampa, a strange, strange place if ever I saw one. Like many southern cities, empty after work hours. But also empty during work hours. Ybor City, THE tourist destination? Empty. It was as if the Rapture had just occurred and we had just found out that watching too much web porn was a sin after all.
It was so empty that Wil and I played a version of our popular game Craneo (where we have to pick out five construction cranes in a row without getting blocked) as "Pedesterino" The goal was to get to 25 on one walk, and we failed. We got to 11 and then found a street festival, which clearly made the people there not pedestrians, so much as attendees of something.
By the way, as you'll notice from the sidebar here on the left, I'm now Twittering as a result of peer pressure and frequent distance from a computer. davidjschloss is my tweet stream, or my "twit" as i prefer to call it.
A chainsaw with fake blood on it, another chainsaw without fake blood, a table saw and a generator.
They were all stolen from our garage while we were away. Oh yeah, and our bike trailer was taken too, which I think they used to haul everything else.
This stash will go nicely with the big contractor-sized garbage cans stolen last year.
Here's something I've been thinking about, in the wake of the massive drug busts and gang fights in Nyack.
In all the meetings I've ever been to about the future of Nyack, and the current situation of the village, what I usually hear is complaints about parking, high rents, lack of nice sidewalks and few things for the teens to do.
How about this one?: Someone in the 70's put projects in the middle of the village, and thought that would be a great idea.
I know very few people who ever say this: when Nyack is trying to revitalize why is there a project-style housing complex in our village?
I'm all in favor of mixed income dwellings. Shit, put up a few apartments for people that can't afford the six-to-seven-figures that houses in Nyack command and make them sustainable, attractive and connected somehow to the community and I'll help you paint them.
But the idea of concrete-block style "housing projects" is dead, as experts tend to agree that they are great place for crime patterns to develop, despite the efforts and wishes of the hard-working people who make a living there.
Why don't we get a lot of retail in Nyack? Why don't we get a lot of folks with money looking to spend it on our restaurants and our shops? Yes, it's the sidewalks, and the parking and the lights and the trees, but it's also the massive dope dealing on Franklin Street that recently resulted in the arrest of 24 people and seizing of drugs and cash. It's the specter of gang violence that's hung over Nyack's head until it broke this week leaving people stabbed and beaten in the streets and had to be quelled with a flood of cops.
In fact, the only time I ever hear the projects get mentioned at all in Village meetings is when Irv stands up and says that we can't build a parking garage next to them, as it will give the residents a bad view.
I bet if you ask the hard working parents who live there if they'd rather have a parking garage or, say no more crack dealing going on in their courtyard they'd probably go for the lack of crack. I would.
I suppose the lack of public discourse is because saying you're opposed to a major public-works housing project being located directly adjacent to the retail hub of the village makes one sound like a bigot—it sounds like you're saying you're not in favor of the people who live there.
Personally, I'm not in favor of the criminals that live there, just as I'm not in favor of criminals that live anywhere else. But really I'm not in favor of is a social-political development that fosters the continued dependance on the broken unemployment and social assistance programs in our country. I'm not in favor of any development that makes people of any income class live in small, squalid housing with little to no job training and no connection to the community.
I'm not in favor of treating people like lesser citizens because they make less money on average than most. I'm not in favor of ugly subsidized public housing that ends up fostering crime.
Maybe instead of talking about parking meters and who is going to run the marina and to what end, we should talk about how to develop sustainable housing in Nyack for ALL income classes, without making any look or feel like they are second class citizens, and without creating further blight in Nyack.
Well, what an interesting 10-hours or so it's been here in Amsterdam. Started with an upset stomach at around 7pm local time and then escalated into full-blown food poisoning. Worst I've ever had too, and that includes a bout with it in San Francisco that left me in the care of the hotel doctor, full of antibiotics and meds.
While Amsterdam has a lot of great things, one thing they are sorely lacking is a good 911 system. When one calls it, after having passed out from low blood pressure, they find you a nearby doctor to go to. That is NOT what I want. Taking a cab to a clinic when I can't stand up? Priceless.
But off to the clinic I went, where they didn't give me antibiotics, didn't have any anti-nausea drugs on hand, didn't give me fluids and mentioned that it was 11pm, and they were closing so... you don't have to vomit and poop at home, but you can't do it here.
Another cab ride back to the hotel, more moaning and laying on the cold tile floor of the bathroom. Abby's a frigging saint, running around to get me stuff, dress me, undress me, put me in bed, help me off the floor, and so on. We exchanged a few "this clinic sucks" looks as I lay under my coat on the exam table with my teeth chattering, while I was told I didn't have a fever, and that it was impossible for someone of my build to have been dehydrated enough to pass out.
Course I was, and I did.
The pregnant doctor was nice enough to shake my hand and say "good luck" while I left (not nice enough to have washed her hands anywhere). Now my body clock is off from so many hours being in a semi-conscious state, so I'm writing in the bathroom, trying not to wake up Abby.
Not exactly how I expected the vacation to go. Now I'm starving and thirsty and trying to hold out till sunrise to go get some crackers or something somewhere.
I picked up some Lysol 'fresh scent' disinfectant at my local Staples the other day to replace the nice-smelling Lysol I just ran out of, when I realized that our recording room is suffering from a case of slightly moldiness.
Turns out that the folks at Lysol think that "mobster's cologne" is a nice fresh scent. It's like Tony Soprano played cards in my attic.
I am really, really swamped right now. It''s a good sort of swamped—not in an "Army Corps of Engineers built me a shitty levee system" way—with work projects.
I've been generating some content for upcoming seminar tours and so far I've written about 10,000 words this week. We're trying hard to launch some new programs around the PMA trade show, which I am thankfully not attending as I can't stand where it's being held.
"What happens in Vegas can go fuck itself," as the ads say. No, wait. Maybe that's "Vegas: What's that burning smell?" 
Back to life. I like being busy, though I'm up against a bit of a deadline and that's why I'm so swamped. Naturally the way that I'm wired I'm unlikely to do any work until a deadline looms anyhow, so this is just business as usual.
I've also had someone else interested in helping us look for a bit of capital contact me, which is nice. It's a good feeling building something that people think has a lot of potential. Never can tell where these lead, but it's nice to go down these roads.
The other night I was riding my bike in New City, headed east minding my own business, blinking lights and headlight a blazing when a car (of course a large SUV) passing in the other direction slowed and the driver yelled "get off the road asshole."
This made me more upset than the random comments I get while riding a bike tend to make me. I'm not sure why, perhaps because it was a vehicle passing in the opposite direction—there's some understandable stupidity from those who are passing a bike and take the moment of caution required as a reason to blame the cyclist for a terrible day—but when you're going on a part of the road I'm not even occupying, that's just not cool.
I've lingered over the things I wish I'd said to him, something like "I can't get off the road, I'm in a rush to get home so that your mother can perform fellatio on me while your sister records the moment for posterity on my Canon G9—now with RAW shooting modes," but I demurred.
Instead I went on fuming, my night pretty shot as I imagined myself riding up the the SUV (he was stuck at the light for quite some time) reaching in and hitting his face on the horn.
Which brings me to my point.
Yet again on our bike club's blog a flame war broke out over a comment read wrong. Once again it was the same old people doing the same mis-interpretaton of events. And once again it was caused by someone who didn't really think carefully about the way they were saying something.
While I'm certainly guilty of this behavior—albeit mostly in email not on forums—I generally try to let them pass because I recognize that no one wins these kinds of conversations. Everyone gets hurt.
It makes me wonder a bit about the sense of tolerance we used to have in this country, or at least we supposedly used to have. I'm not sure that owning another human being counts as tolerance, and we've been pretty guilty of doing some other beastly things over the years here. But this country was founded so that individuals could seek "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Okay, tying a flame war into a systemic system of injustice is a tad spurious, but I think they're linked. I think that we, as a race tend to be exclusionary and petty, and that the Internet—and SUV driving yelling-guys, tend to just be the visible manifestation of that, like so much flotsam and jetsam on an ocean of grumpy pissed off folks.
I know I've had a busy schedule recently, but this modern jet travel thing, it's really blowing my mind.
A few days ago I was in the desert of Las Vegas for YAFTS (Yet Another Fucking Trade Show) marking something like my 10th or 12th year of going to shows in Sinister Disney. It was unreal-hot out, 102 on the coolest days, and we spent a lot of time inside the air conditioning of the hotels. (Although our room, at the top of an all-black pyramid facing the sun at the Luxor was annoyingly hot despite the full-blast AC 24/7. Dear Luxor, put in better AC when you update your crappy hotel.)
Saturday I flew to NJ, met up with Abby and we flew to Ft. Lauderdale for one of the stops on the Aperture Road Tour where Abby helped by proctoring. After we packed the class up Sunday evening, we hopped into the ocean for a half-an-hour or so, a strange and warm baptism after the hell-fire of the Vegas desert.
Today we flew from Florida to Oregon where we're enjoying the (global-warmingly hot) Pacific Northwest, and will start bike riding tomorrow for a few days of R&R. I am looking forward to that.
Then next weekend I'll be a bit lower down the coast in San Fran, and then finally back home.
So desert, Atlantic Ocean, Columbia Valley, Pacific Ocean, Bay, Hudson in two weeks.
No wonder I'm so damn tired.
Change is good
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