The new toy is smaller than a pack of cigs, and it can blast music, something the earlier ipods could not. Whilst listening to the Brainbombs and GBV I have already walked into a cement wall, and stepped in someone's discarded frozen yogurt. It blocks out the world and the other senses. I speak in monotone, leave my fucking life alone...

So, what in the hell has gotten into Bay Area sports? The Warriors fire Mike Montgomery and are set to hire, nostalgic gulp, Don Nelson Sr. The Raiders deliver an undefeated preseason and the new coach bitch slaps a mouthy star. The Giants begin the big tease that could land them atop the pile of mediocrity that is the National League West. One prominent sports analyst picks the Sharks to win the Western Conference. The A's ride into a kelly green sun.

Am I going to have to start caring again?

With all this time, I've almost made it through the complete works of Albert Camus, inspired by our president's recent dabble in high school perennial, The Stranger.

Must pro sports on television replace the printed page?

Its the end of summer. Where did it all go? Only sub-par quarterbacks, extended family dinners and increasingly shitty weather await us. Is anyone else sad?

What does Forbes know about America's drunkest cities?
You decide.

On the Couch with Lee
When you wake up to the dreary grey morning light of an Oakland August, and even your Bathory records won't salve your sadness for no reason, I can think of no better cure than Lee Hazelwood. Just hearing him croon "These are cold hard times" confirms that any blues you might want to insist upon are delusional and motivated more by self-pity than anything else. Lee's melancholy numbers are always delivered with just the most subtle winks, and suddenly, yupster drama is exposed for what it is-nothing. Think of Lee as emotional Raid- kills self-induced BS theater dead. I'm telling you- Lee Hazelwood could save you thousands in psychotherapy- raid my Soulseek now if only for your mental health.

I finished my last test and passed the Series 86

"Company A has a debt to equity ratio of 40%. Their pretax cost of debt is 6%. The risk free rate of capital is 4% and market equity is 11%. Company A's beta is 1.2 and their taxed at rate of 28%. What is their Weighted After Tax of Cost of Capital rounded to a hundredth of a percent?"

Anything, Anything
Desperately trying to avoid the JonBenet Ramsay shite on tv, I headed to a local tavern for a respite and a calm down. Evidently, Oakland has found karaoke, and I win. Obese Chinese man sings in the most perfect of Motown getdowns, "If Loving You is Wrong," and I'm flabbergasted and howling and begging for more. Dorky professor dude monotones Ghostbusters and irony is no longer dead. Fat black chicks belt out "Anything Anything" by Dramarama with big soul and irony is too weak a term to describe whatever it was. Life exists. Comedy exists. Best of all, surprises exist. Get out on a Wednesday in Oaktown and you too might believe you exist.

Good Luck on the test, Tuna!

Rein Vogel, stop lurking and start posting. Life is short, Bye- Atcccccchhhhhh!

The Nation in the Plastic Bubble
Memo- life is dangerous. You, personally, could die at any moment. Somebody once wrote something about the tenuous nature of our existence adding to its meaning. He might have been on to something. In Brave New World, they replace the innate human need for adrenaline with VPS, Violent Passion Surrogate, a virtual danger experience that feeds adrenal lust. In America, we go the other way. I'm thinking that keeping baby formula and water bottles off airplanes ain't that far from Ronnie's Star Wars, in which each and every American could live in his/her own national plastic bubble, protected from life's contigencies and safe to consume and consume again. Wouldn't it be refreshing to do cost/benefit analysis with human lives? You know, we spend a kajillion dollars retrofitting the bridge to save X number of folks who might be killed when the Big One hits, but how many lives might that kajillion save if we poured it into other areas? We spend a kookookajillion on the War on Terror without ever discussing how many dollars we would place on any one American life. $300 billion so far in Iraq to fight them over there, and that would save how many lives over here in health care?

But we're not allowed to place dollar values on people's lives out loud, even though we do it tacitly everyday in policy decisions. It only takes one grieving widow on television to open the coffers and close off reason. We are a lugubrious people in love with a security fantasy, and I can't imagine anybody in power ever saying that out loud. But let's indulge our own fantasy- try to imagine some crusty old gentleman staring into the camera or at his opponent and saying, "Look, I'm not going to talk to you as if you're children. We'll never be completely safe. Ever. But we can intelligently reduce our risks. Let's all take a deep breath and figure out how to do that without bankrupting our future on politically expedient pipe dreams. Let's be adults just this once." Of course, I wouldn't find out the reaction because I would drop dead of a heart attack, but it would be a fine moment. And a good day to die.

Now More Than Ever....

Death to False Metal
The summer is almost over, and what do you have to show for this season's excuse for laziness? A golden tan to hide the etched lines around your drooping eyes? Several more corrosive spots on your turgid liver? Fourteen forgotten novels and the wisdom that came with them? A belly to be proud of?

No, no, I merely jest. No darkness in the time of bright skies. No baseball either. Just small boys headbanging between double-horned finger signs while Slayer blasts our dinner's soundtrack. The realization on the other side of middle age that Philip Roth is the great American writer of our time, chronicling the second half of the 20th century by illuminating the broad political landscapes and the nuanced personal quirks of those particular citizens that must act as representatives for ourselves. Who melds the personal with the political better than Roth? Who sustains relentless psychological insight together with the contradictory nature of perspectival social truths better than he does? Who is funnier? Who raises your hackles of recognition on the page more acutely painfully than this man? Who makes it OK to feel that way more compassionately? I've heard cries about American authors' failures to address OUR TIME and that they insist on looking only in the mirror and at their own toes. Read I Married a Communist, American Pastoral and The Human Stain to be disavowed of that observation forever.

The best record I've heard in years is Slayer's Reign in Blood. Why I had to insist on an anti-metal bias all those years is just further testament to the wrongheaded and myopic taste quotient of the aging hipster still clinging to the superiority of his own taste. I usually laugh out loud at least three times during the duration of its playing, and none with irony. If I had been 14 when I was first heard it before I was contaminated with the compartmentalization of music into acceptable and noacceptable categories, I might have been a proper satan worshiper and would have been able to slaughter that evil bastard that attacked me at the Motorhead show when I was defending that young maiden's honor. Better yet, that bitch's maidenhood would have been mine.

Fucked Up's Epic in Minutes is generous hardcore, in that you can listen to it with more than just the need to salve your festering rage. You can sing along without scrinching up your face into that bathroom scowl, and you can vacuum to it.

Morrissey cannot be denied. Don't try. Get the greatest hits and let the inner gay you out for a dance around your living room carpet. At least twirl as if you're polymorphously perverse.

Steve Earle is too earnest by 4 but the man is a consistently great songwriter. "John Walker Blues" is a haunting, gorgeous classic that could only have been misconstrued by the same condemners of art who didn't understand The Last Temptation of Christ. Or anybody who doesn't fathom irony. Or most of our dads.

I like to listen to Deicide while I'm on the stairmaster at the gym looking at the inevitable decay of moms' bodies. I find it comforting.

Philip K. Dick is terribly overrated, as far too much of his work is pedestrian sci fi with a dash of psychological horror. He does, however, hit on occasion, and it is with those hits that I'll be trading some of his stories for Gibson's in the Visions class this year. Wish me luck.

When Bass beer tastes closer to Bud than Racer 5, you know you're in the hands of IPA mania. Thank god Red Tail is considered a delicacy in Tahoe, or those late-night card games could have gotten ugly.

The very definition of mediocrity?

When will the Giants give us a reason to be excited?