Coffee

My coffee-drinking age is pretty young; I've really only been imbibing for a about a year and a half, which isn't long. It amazes me, though, how much I enojy coffee these days. I can be having a horrible day and then sit down with a cup of quality coffee and feel lovely.

My dad always praised my non-coffee-drinking, telling me "Don't start any bad habits you don't already have." It's good advice, and it's probably part of why I never started smoking. The problem in my mind is that drinking coffee isn't a bad habit in any way.

In fact, before I embarked on my quest to begin liking coffee (I started with the mocha and worked my way to plain coffee), I researched it to make sure it wouldn't be a bad habit. I'm in school, sometimes I need to stay up realy late, and really, I wanted to get my caffiene in the healthiest way possible. Now, because Wikipedia is the end all of internet sources, I checked out their page on coffee and found that while it has a couple minor negative effects, it has many more good ones. You can look at it all right here.

To me, the greatest danger in coffee drinking seems to be this:

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa - It wasn't just the caffeine that gave an Iowa woman an extra jolt after she had her morning coffee. It was also the bat she found in the filter.

The Iowa Department of Public Health says the woman reported a bat in her house but wasn't too worried about it. She turned on her automatic coffee maker before bedtime and drank her coffee the next morning.

She discovered the bat in the filter when she went to clean it that night. The woman has undergone treatment for possible rabies.

Health officials say that the bat was sent to a lab but that its brain was too cooked by the hot water to determine whether it had rabies.

Coffee? Generally safe, but sometimes with some extra protein and a side of rabies.

Tresspassing.

Anyone who has been to visit me at my apartment has read the note taped to my front door: "Please do not leave flyers or coupons on my door. Thank you!" It's on a pink background with flowers, an entirely polite way to ask people to stop wasting paper (and their business's resources) on me and my front door. For the most part, being polite has worked and people have respected my wishes. However, compliance has certainly not been uniform.

One local restaurant, who just opened a location a little ways away (it's not quite in my neighborhood, it's in Allandale and not Hyde Park), left me a menu. "Well," I thought. "This isn't a flyer OR a coupon. It's a menu. And I don't have anything about menus on my door!" I gave the restaurant the benefit of the doubt, dropped the menu in my recycle bin, and taped an addendum to my door: "OR MENUS."

Now, I know that this warning is completely comprehendable, because one morning (okay, it was a really afternoon) Corey and I had a pizza delivered. The driver scoffed at my door, "Did someone really leave you menus after you put that first part of the note up?" he shook his head.

I've lived on in relative peace since then, my door generally unmolested (someone did leave a voter registration form on my door, and although I'm registered, it wasn't a commercial endeavor so I didn't really mind). But yesterday, returning from 8 hours on campus, disgruntled and tired, I came home to find a brochure for a chicken wings "restaurant" on my door.

That was it. I was mad. MAD. I am a VEGETARIAN and I don't eat chicken, and even when I did eat meat, I didn't eat CHICKEN WINGS. I find it incredibly disrepectful for someone to ignore the explicit desire that I've spelled out on my door, as if it's either a joke, or as if their chicken wing product is above all the other products I receive flyers for.

This set me off on a vicious Googling binge for information about whether or not it was legal for companies to place flyers where they were expressly asked not to. While I discovered that lots and lots of people have the same problem as I do (a number of people with mail slots reported a much more intrustive problem of opening their front doors to find their foyers filled with this swill), I found out that there really isn't much you can do about it.

Leaving flyers isn't considered a form of solicitation, so you can't actually prosecute people who flyer you even with a sign up. A Google search of the terms "door" and "flyer" on the City of Austin website (http://www.ci.austin.tx.us) gave me nothing relevant, but brought up some examples where the city had even sponsored door flyers. This was lame.

The only thing I found that you can get people in trouble for is tresspassing. This is different for me than most people, because they have some type of front yard or the like that a flyer-person has to cross in order to leave flyers on the front door. Additionally, the outside of the door where I live isn't really "mine" since I live in a condo complex, and the outside of the doors are all, techinically I believe, the cohesive property of all the unit owners (and I am not a unit owner, by any stretch of the imagination). So I'm in a sort of legal quandry in regards to the flyering of my door. I'm thinking about putting up a sign that says something along the lines of, "This door is private property, and leaving flyers of any type on it will be considered trespassing. Violators will be prosecuted." Unfortunately, I don't own the door, and, if I did, there seems to be very little I could actually get out of prosecuting someone. It'd'be a scare tactic, really.

My mom proposed a much simpler solution that could have more of an effect: posting my sign in Spanish.

In the meantime, I've been progressing (in tiny, tiny steps taken very, very slowly) on my thesis. What I think I really want to write about right now is the San Antonio heavy metal scene and why it has been largely ignored, and how this is because it clashes with the image that the city wants to maintain for itself, which is largely one of iconic Texas history (the Alamo) and authentic Hispanic culture. In 1982, Ozzy Osbourne got drunk, put on one of Sharon's green gowns, and peed on the Alamo. Urban legend states that a faint 666 is visible where his urine came in contact with the wall, the mark of the devil left by the Prince of Darkness. The way he tells the story, he needed to take a piss, found a wall, and found out it was the Alamo when he got arrested; not a story of rebellion, but a story of drunken and accidental confusion. To sum up the story, he was banned from the city of San Antonio (by the governor!) for ten years, until he donated $10,000 to the Alamo in 1991. This is more or less a metaphor for what I want to write about.

Now, I'm no Ozzy expert, but like most people, I knew he'd bitten the head off of a live bat at one of his shows. As I watched youtube interview footage yesterday (the Letterman/Ozzy interview from 1982 was priceless), I learned the whole story. Ozzy had habitually bitten the heads off of bats at his concerts in the past--rubber bats. When a bat appeared on-stage that fateful night, he rationally assumed it was of the rubber variety. Unfortunately, it was a live, stunned bat, but Ozzy didn't realize that until too late. The best part about this story is that Ozzy had to receive a series of rabies shots, and even the Price of Darkness bitches about how much they hurt.



But what I didn't know--and I think, what most people don't actually know, if that Ozzy Osbourne did intentionally bite the head off of a dove, and he did it in a way that was a million times more bad ass than if he was onstage performing. After being kicked out of Black Sabbath and after a period of depression and self-destructive behavior (more so than usual), Sharon got Ozzy back on his feet, getting him signed with Epic to release a solo album and restart his musical career. As a part off this, she arranged a meeting with the Epic bigwigs, so that they could all see each other and Ozzy could reassure them, perhaps of his reliability, perhaps of his normality. I'm not sure. As a part of this meeting, however, Sharon and Ozzy decided to bring doves and rlease them in the meeting, both as a symbol of peacefulness and to get the executives to notice him. However, as with many things Ozzy, this didn't go quite according to plan.

Forgiving the fact that releasing doves in a meeting room has to be a horrible idea no matter who you are (bird shit, come on), things went horribly wrong. No one seemed to be noticing Ozzy, and he found this unacceptable. He sat down on the lap of one of the women there, I believe she was an advertising executive. In no terms did she want Ozzy on her lap, and this is plainly obvious in photos taken of the moment where she is leaning as far away from Mr. Osbourne as possible. As he was perched there, one of the doves landed in his lap. Wanting even more attention, he casually picked up the dove... and bit its head off.

While he talked about how awesome he thought the moment was in the interviews, talking about the blood and puke and feathers that the room quickly was covered in, Sharon was less enthusiastic and admitted she peed herself when he did it. But the point is this: They didn't drop his record, they didn't decide not to release it, they didn't penalize him. They banned him from the building.


It all comes back to tresspassing.

retail.1

Yesterday:

"Oh, yeah, well I'm from Beaumont, I evacuated because of Ike. My two kids go to school up here, so I got to see them. What about you? Are you in school?"

"Yep, sure am."

"Where do you go to school at?"

"I'm at UT."

"What are you studying?"

"Oh, I'm an American Studies and Plan II major."

"What'd you say? Plan what? What's that?"

"It's a sort of honors major."

"Oh, so you're brilliant. I never would have known, you're so cute."

"... Thank you."

"Usually the smart girls aren't as cute. You can usually tell."

"Mmm."

"My daughter's pretty sharp."



.... Did she just tell me her daughter was ugly?

Complaint #753:

I hate when the guy who lives above me gets high and drops cans of food on the floor. The THUD....roooooooooooll noise always catches me by surprise.

Losses.

In the last couple weeks, I have now lost a shoe, an earring, and my cell phone while riding my bicycle.

Palin's email

The point of this whole "scandal" is nothing political. 4chan and such don't really care that much about politics. The point of the whole debacle (because it's a debacle and not any sort of scandal) is that YOU SHOULDN'T USE FUCKING YAHOO EMAIL FOR IMPORTANT SHIT because it's not an issue of if it will be hacked, but when it will be hacked.

Everyone who knows anything about computers and the internet (which definitely isn't Senator McCain and apparently not Governor Palin) should be standing up and pointing out that using a Yahoo account--with a published address (she DID use it as a press contact)--is asking to get it hacked.

I have no sympathy for her, and I'm indifferent to those who hacked. You can't complain when you get what you're asking for.

Camila.

I love when class assignments allow me to write informally and self absorbedly about films. Like for Camila.

I think, as a whole, I liked this film, but at the same time, there were a number of points about it that I didn’t like.
The film begins sort-of in medias res in that Camila’s grandmother is arriving at their home, and it is not immediately apparent that she has been sexually involved with a member of the clergy—although it is vaguely implied, and it’s definitely spelled out on the back of the box. In medias res is actually fine with me, but I think the film fails to do it smoothly, and I find this grating.
Additionally, I’m not sure how good the production values are. I understand that this was filmed in the 1980’s, but to be honest, the harshness of the lighting, contrast, and colors, combined with the quality of the footage itself, make it look like a BBC TV series. Or maybe PBS. This is a shame. Although I do not know if the costumes, hair, and make up are appropriate to the time period and location, they are exquisitely and excellently done. I wish that the characters looked as good on the screen as I think they probably did in real life.
The script was well done, but certainly not perfect. A good amount of the dialogue between Ladislao and Camila was overdramatic swill. This is particularly aggravating in that this is certainly a stereotype afforded to Latin American screen productions—being excellently exhibited in Mexican soap operas (thank God Americans don’t all talk like the recently reborn 90210). Additionally, the passionate scenes—although there aren’t an abundance of them—are a little over the top, and rather sloppy. This, however, I found to be an endearing quality of the film, as it made the characters seem much more human. I do not believe in the existence of the overly glamorized sleekness of Hollywood sex.
I did feel like Camila’s brother, however, was a shill character, which is a shame. The religious brother of the philandering sister has a lot of potential for fantastic character development, and yet throughout the film he is a completely flat character. The father, as well, is very one dimensional—perhaps this is supposedly how people were in the mid 1800’s in Argentina, but I doubt it. If the film makers were really trying to highlight the difference between Ladislao and Camila with the rest of the characters as individual and independent, thinking characters versus the flat puppet like depictions of their counterparts, adamant and unthinking in their social roles, it could have been done much more artfully (or artfully at all), so that it resembled a story telling technique rather than a bleak omission.

The story itself was interesting to watch; it was particularly interesting for me because, although I began watching the film blindly, I happened to watch the first hour of the film the day before Dr. Burnett discussed it in class. This means that I had the perfect context in which to watch it—a discussion of the culture and history that were defining the time period and the area. Unfortunately, this also meant that she spoiled the ending for me, although I’d probably read it on the back on the box anyways, and then just forgotten. However, I think that, were the film not based on true events, it would have been an incredibly lame story—very trite. Instead, it was almost shocking, and I think this is probably what made the film worthwhile.
I think that the film did an okay job showing the context of the setting, but I think this could have been done better as well. I certainly got a feel for what life in Argentina was like in the mid 1800’s, but I’d hardly say I understood it. The film makes it clear that Camila is in the upper class, as she donates her old clothing, etc., but it never shows the other classes and what their life is like, or why, as Ladislao says, they would have no use for the clothing of a rich woman. At the very least, it seems they could be made into blankets or rags.
Additionally, there is one scene where Camila and her brother hear gun shots and run to the door to watch men ride past on horses shooting their guns into the air. This scene could contribute to the description of the period, but it lacks any type of explanation—leaving the watcher confused and uncertain what had just happened. Had we not discussed it in class, I would not have known what had happened, and it would have simply been an incongruous and out of place event in the film.
The tone was interesting; it was very open and nonjudgmental. It seemed to have little to say about what was happening within the film. Although Camila’s family (besides her father) seemed upset about what was happening, and although the men who executed the lovers seemed unwilling to do so, the script itself, as well as the making of the film, seemed to lack any real sort of commentary on the issue and the situation, portraying the whole situation very simply and straightforwardly. Once again, if this was done (in my opinion) more masterfully, it could have been a much more affecting film, but once again, I felt that it fell short of this.
Camila was a decent little film, but altogether seems to lack any sort of strong statement, either about the time period, the story, or the art of film.

Bummer

Today I lost an earring bike riding home in the dark.

Errata.

School is really interfering with my blogging. Sure, if I was just going to school and blogging, I'd have no problem. As it is, the fact that I do both of those things, work, and have a social life and a bunny rabbit make me a very busy person. I was actually going to sit down and do a nice, long, extensive photo entry today, but I haven't been able to find the cord to connect my camera to my computer, and there's no way my peice of shit camera would ever have bluetooth, so I'm kind of fucked at that. Anyways, I thought I'd found it, but it turns out that the cord to connect my camcorder to my computer is nearly identical to--but not compatible with--the one for my camera.

Speaking of going to shit, my computer is starting to fall apart. No, literally. Anyone who's seen my computer knows that it's been dropped more times than it should--and, here's a testament to Apple, it's still working today, three years after the first major drop that bent its shell casing.Since then, it's been dropped another two or three times by me, and once by Fidel. Goodness. It's amazing she's still here. The point of this being that the casing isn't at its high point. The plastic on the right corner of the screen is cracked (if I didn't have a metal casing on this computer I'm fairly certain it would have perished that day three years ago). Well, the plastic is attached to the metal that surrounds the screen, or, it was. This means that the metal frame is coming away from the rest of the screen, and yesterday, a mysterious metal piece detached itself from inside the screen. It looked like a fairly harmless piece, but In any case, it's a dangerous road to start down.

So it was a good enough weekend. Well, all in all it was a great weekend, but I had a bit of a slow start when my drawer was $300.00 under on Friday afternoon. Freaked me the fuck out, making me really stressed really quickly, but all in all it wasn't my fault, and since I'm no manager, it wasn't my problem. I just got really stressed about it. Corey called just as I was locking shop, wanting to come by and pick up his beer (somehow, we independently both bought 12-packs of Session on Thursday, which isn't a regular beer for either of us. It was strange.). He was waiting when I got home--he'd had a bad day too, it turns out, and we ended up getting some dinner, drinking a bottle of wine, and going to bed before midnight. Bad days are exhausting.

Saturday was nice; we went for coffee at Quacks and saw trash-can killer Daniel. Corey ran into an old neighbor, and I got to see Josh and Ann. It was a nice morning. Went to work (it was slow), and then headed over to Jenn's for a ridiculously amazing dinner party. Delicious marinated portabella mushrooms with goat cheese and basil and some amazing salad and humus and sourdough bread and did I mention beer and wine and cute puppy dogs and good music and even better company? It was way awesome.

Until about 11:30, there was no weather manifestation of Ike in Austin, but then it started raining. A number of the party goers ran out in the rain to dance around, but I sulked. It was Harvest Moonlight Cruze night! I didn't want it to rain THEN. Fortunately, the rain stopped around 12:30, about the time I got to Corey's. We hung out a bit then biked down to the ped bridge for the best ride of the year. I'm horrible at estimating numbers, but there were probably 400 or 500 people. Lots of good people there, way lots of fun. We got a little lost from the group when we stopped for some people who'd wrecked on Burnet, and Corey and I ended up swimming at a random apartment complex with about ten other people from the ride before heading back to his place at around six. Five hours later, we were up--Corey had to go to work.

Emily! was in town for a wedding, and she and Adrien and I met up at Tazza Fresca to play a game of Scrabble--I was second by a mere 15 points, and then Emily and I hit up Room Service. I thought I'd pick up some t-shirts for Corey since he seems to have a dearth of them, and she and I had a great time looking at all the ridiculous clothes and furniture, etc. If I had a camera cord, I'd post pictures of what all I purchased.

I dropped Emily off at the airport then went to dinner with my dad, which was really nice. My mom's been out of town--coming back tonight--and I think he's been a bit lonely. Darlene called me--she was at the reopening of the Peddler, and I called Corey to see if he was home, since I'd left Eileen at his house that day. I drove over to pick her up, and he felt miserably sick with a horrible headache. I picked him up some soup and food, hung out with him for a little while, then drove home. I biked over to the Peddler for about 20 minutes to say hi to Darlene and Jimi, went home, cleaned the kitchen, and was in bed by 10:30. I was exhausted.

Going to bed so early meant being completely and totally and fully rested when I woke up ten hours later, around 8:30. I had time before class, so I cleaned my bathtub, then headed to biology for the rest of the condom talk.



Hopefully, tomorrow I will have photos. We'll see.

Ike has hit Austin.

There's no rain yet, but I thought I'd "stop by" the grocery store to pick up some beer. It was as busy as Sunday afternoon--at least, as the one time I went on Sunday afternoon, and then decided I'd never do that again.

So, I park all the way at the end of one of the rows near the side entrance. What the hell! I never have to park this far away. No matter, walking is good for me, and I'm not going to complain. I make it into the grocery store, and blink at the vast number of people who are there. Goddamn. I make it over to the beer section, browse around a bit before selecting my beer, and head to the check out line.

Just a quick intermission, I hate how expensive beer has gotten since prices have been going up. Now I NEVER get anything nicer than Shiner. Nothing fantastic was on sale tonight--well, some good stuff was on sale, but only in 6 packs, and it's such a much better value to buy 12 packs. I've been drinking a lot of Shiner Black lately--anyone who's been over lately knows this--as well as the old standby, Lonestar, and wanted to mix it up a little. I'm drinking Sessions.

Anyways, I figure I'll check out the isolated little check out that's over by the produce; it rarely has more than three people in line and hooooly fuck, the line extends all the way into the sort-of "cafe" area; I can't even see the end of it. I head back to the mass check out area, and stake my spot at the end of one of the express lines.

"Gee, it's just going to be a little rain and wind!" the man behind me jokes, surveying the crowds. "Yeah, your trash might blow over, you might want to get some extra trash bags," the man in front of me shoots back, and their girlfriends exchange looks. "We came here to get sesame seeds," the girlfriend in front of me comments. "We figured as long as we were here, we might as well get other things we needed, like toilet paper!" I scope out their groceries as they lay them on the conveyor belt: sesame seeds, trail mix, provolone, and toilet paper. Interesting, but hardly hurricane supplies.

"Yeah, we were just getting the necessities," the couple behind me giggles, laying their soymilk, pudding, and Debbie cakes down behind my 12 pack. "We're ready for anything!"

"You can really tell who isn't buying stuff for the hurricane," I finally chimed in. "That kid has his skateboard and his ice cream," I said, pointing at the kid with green hair in the adjacent line. "And that person's only got air conditioner filters." I pointed at a girl.

"You guys check out the water aisle?" the guy in front of us asked. "Man, no one wanted Dasani! Everything else is gone." We laughed.

Somehow, our the guy who checked us out was still smiling. I guess there are miracles.

"Trees... tell them that we love them and that we don't want them to die."

I don't like posting too many youtube's at a time because it makes everything move soo slooowly, but this is sort of overwhelmingly absurd...

Things I've been (re)listening to

You are the music that you listen to?

The AP ran a very interesting article yesterday, titled, "Musical Taste 'Defines' Personality." Professor Adrian North of Heriot-Watt University in Scotland has been doing work on the correlation between musical preference and personality, by giving over 36,000 an extensive survey about music, and, unsurprisingly, found that people who like the same sorts of music tend to share personality traits. The article says:

The study concluded that jazz and classical music fans are creative with good self-esteem, although the former are much more outgoing whereas the latter are shy.

Country and western fans were found to be hardworking and shy; rap fans are outgoing and indie lovers lack self-esteem and are not very gentle.

Those who like soul music can take heart as the research concluded they are creative, outgoing, gentle, at ease with themselves and have a high self-esteem.

This is very interesting--I thought the fact that indie lovers "lack self-esteem and are not very gentle." However, I think it's entirely wrong to assume that the music people listen to is what defines their personalities. One of the first, and most important, things you learn in any statistics class is that correlation is not causation. The similarity of personality traits can be occurring for a number of reasons. For example, indie rock is a genre with a fanbase prmarily of young people--which are the type of people who seem to have more issues with self-esteem. Classical music's audience tends to be older or musically educated, both two groups which also tend to have achieved a level of financial security (at least more so than young people) and it makes sense as well that they would have higher self esteem. Jazz itself is a genre that's incredibly conducive to creativity, since it often has an emphasis on improvisation.

It's incredibly interesting to see what traits are associated with what music, but it seems totally obvious that the people who compose the differing subcultures would have similar values. While the data itself is very interesting, the most intriguing part, to me at least, would be a deeper analysis into how groups gather their own identities and traits, and how they arise.


I'd write more, but I've got to get beer before kickball starts. Just some food for thought.

Okay. I know this is my third post today, but...

Browing bicycling Reddit, I came across this story, which I found interesting (it's on bicycling safety). In any case, I did not notice the photo's caption, until Charles pointed it out to me:

President George W. Bush fell off his mountain bike and down a hill in May 2004.

This set me off googling for results about his bicyle fall. I stumbled upon this Washington Post article, which contained this gem:

In January 2002, Bush was on the third floor of the White House residence, watching a football playoff game between the Baltimore Ravens and Miami Dolphins when he choked on a pretzel. This caused him to faint and fall, bruising and scraping his face. Bush was accompanied only by dogs Spot and Barney.

I then found this about.com article mocking the situation, and topped it all off by finding this photo of Bush on an Israeli bicycle.

Oh man.

Today I purchased one of the greatest films. Unfortunately, it's in full screen, but that's the downside of purchasing used. What is this fabulous film I'm talking about you ask?




I'm a bit hungover this morning, and just remembered running into a parked car on my bicycle.

This film is the best thing that could have happened today.

Jen reads my blog every 1-3 posts.

JEN! Are you reading?

Mount Eerie is playing on Tuesday. I hope someone wants to go with me.

Okay. New hair.

Hair potential.

Thinking about this:


That is Alice Glass of Crystal Castles.