Incident at Oakland West
Two hours ago, I had my first fistfight in 16 years. I'm not that handy with the arithmetic, but seeing as I'm 32 now, that would make it half a lifetime since my last altercation. That one ended in a draw — I had my thumb in his eye, and he had my nose in his mouth. No shit.
This particular fisty cuff occurred at the West Oakland BART station, with a bike messenger. Now I've got a pretty short fuse, as those of you who know me know, but if ever a guy was askin' for an ass-kicking, he was him.
So there I am on BART, quietly enjoying my quadruple espresso, when said bike messenger got on at Lake Merritt, with his bike. Now this wasn't your average dirty junkie bike messenger — he looked like a guy from blink-182, all 6' 2" and 200+ pounds of him. He was rolling a serious $1,000 road bike, not some crappy beach cruiser or BMX. And you're not supposed to have bikes on BART during commute hours.
A nice lady was trying to tell him that as he was boarding, and he was popping off about how he had to get to work like the rest of us. He rolls his bike over near me and rests it up against me. I ask him, not nicely but not meanly, to not rest the bike on me. He grudgingly complied — for a second. Moments later the bike is on my leg again. I remind him that bikes aren't allowed on the train during commute hours, and he gets right up in my face, calling me "BART police" and giving me a load of shit. I tell him he better pipe down. I've finished my 4x espresso by this time and am in no mood for his shenanigans.
Anyway, the nice lady got on the intercom to the train operator and reported bike guy. Train operator guy comes on and tells bike messenger guy to get off the train at West Oakland because bikes are not allowed on BART during commute hours. So the guy has just been moded in front of a whole trainload of people, and he's feeling embarrassed and angry, but mostly angry. And for some reason I become the lightning rod for all these feelings of his.
We get to West Oakland, and he's gotta go by me on his way off the train. I want no part of his arrested adolescent angst, so I get completely off the train to let him by. As I feared, he takes this opportunity to get up in my grill again, and then starts pushing and shoving me.
My blood is boiling at this point, but I'm still maintaining control. It's not until he gets in my face and calls me a "dot-com fuck" or something to that effect that I snap. I slam my metal travel mug into his jaw and start throwing uppercuts. Apparently this took him by surprise, because he didn't know what the hell to do. He kinda curled up to the extent that he could, covering his face. I got in two shots.
Next thing I know, I'm being flung to the ground and put in cuffs.
Apparently the real BART Police were waiting for dude to get off, but instead came upon an altercation on the platform. To them I look like the aggressor, probably because I'm the only one getting any punches in. Funnily enough, my first thought isn't for my own health and well-being, but for my $125 Sony headphones. (They're fine, thanks for asking.)
So I'm on the ground in cuffs and the cops are asking him if he's OK. I get a sick feeling in my stomach. He started it and I'm going to jail. But it was not to be.
My fellow BART riders, to a person, pipe up and tell the cops that it was the other guy who started it. The cops look at each other for what seems like a long time but probably wasn't, and they finally start cuffing the guy. People come pouring off the train handing business cards to the officers, offering to testify on my behalf. One lawyer guy starts conferring with the cops, and an English guy yells at them to let me go. I breathe a tremendous sigh of relief. They take off the cuffs. The cop who had flung me to the ground apologizes not once, but several times. Justice has been served. My once-wavering faith in humanity has been destroyed, and then restored.
I give a statement that takes forever, and they finally let me go on my way.
I figure the moral of this story is, "Don't fuck with a guy who's just comsumed his own weight in espresso." Or something like that. ßßß
Pud from FuckedCompany must be really bored. He created this vaguely amusing fake fan/stalker site and then posted it as a fuck on FC. Don't know what he was thinking, but it was only a matter of a minute before FC readers did a Whois search and saw that Pud himself owns the domain. That was just dumb.
There's not a whole lot else going on in these parts. Went to see Snatch with some homies from work, and fun was had by all. I thought the movie was pretty good, and we all agreed the soundtrack was ill. That means good.
Limp Bizkit killed a girl in Australia, and David Cronenberg told C-2 Pictures, producers of Basic Instinct 2, to suck it. John McTiernan, who is fast becoming the go-to resuscitator of lapsed film franchises (Thomas Crown Affair, Rollerball, T3), is now attached to the project. Sharon Stone is gonna be 80 years old before this movie gets made. And that's not good for anyone, least of all you, the viewer.
I did catch most of Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey the other night, which was super cool. For those of you who don't know, the Theremin is considered the first electronic instrument. It was invented by a KGB scientist (who also invented the bug [the surveillance kind]) and was made world famous in the Beach Boys' Good Vibrations. The Theremin is that wacky high-pitched ethereal-sounding thing you hear. The coolest part for me was the Bob Moog interview (he'd be the inventor of the analog synthesizers that bear his name), in which he talked about how the Theremin inspired him to create his Moog synths. So it turns out that the KGB is responsible for electronica. Who knew?
OK, I'm even boring myself here. Think I'll go watch some funky-fresh Fox Sports hoops ads. Razzle ma damn! ßßß
This hardly qualifies as news, but Amazon is officially fucked. Sort of. They let go 1,300 employees — about 15 percent of its total workforce — in a bid to achieve that ever-elusive "profitability" by the end of the year. It was interesting that the cuts were coming from fulfillment (Does this mean I'm not gonna get those emo CDs I ordered?) and customer service. Interesting for two reasons: Bezos has always claimed that great customer service is essential for e-commerce outfits, and because the customer service folks were trying to unionize. Now I'm not saying there's a causal relationship there, but there may be.
My brother's well-reasoned comments re. the two budding Connecticut rocket scientists what lit themselves on fire à la Johnny Knoxville:
Dude- i'm sorry, but if you're fucking stupid enough to pour gas on yourself and light a match, you should be terminated with extreme prejudice, or at least sterilized.
I can find no fault in his logic.
But those kids are only a fraction as dumb as the Dairy Queen cashier who accepted a $200 bill with the likeness of George Walker Bush on it. The bill was so fake-looking that they can't even prosecute the bill-passer for counterfeiting. I tell you what, I'd much rather have burn scars over half my body than be forever known as the guy who took the $200 bill.
All manner of news is happening in music today: Shyne says Puffy did it, a new star-studded Hank Williams tribute album is in the works (and will probably suck), and, in what's starting to look like a most disturbing trend, dead-and-gone mediocre female-fronted college-rock bands are reuniting by the dozens. Or at least by the pair. The Blake Babies and the Breeders are both threatening to hop on the reunion bandwagon, and that's not good for anyone. Except that maybe the Blake Babies reunion will prevent any future Juliana Hatfield solo releases.
Oh, and Napster should be officially ruined by summer. Metallica 1, Ian 0. Download those guilty pleasures while they're still free. Later. ßßß
News Flash: Britney Spears is a stupid 16-year-old kid! Here's tape of her cussing her lungs out at the Rock in Rio festival. Vaguely amusing, but remember: You heard it here first.
In a sorta related story, rapper and Steven Seagal costar DMX is going to jail. C'mon, the guy was in a movie with Steven Seagal. Hasn't he suffered enough?
In the Exactly Who Were They Trying to Impress? Department, we have these Spanish scumbags. Turns out that only 2 of the 12 members of Spain's gold-medal-winning paralympics basketball team were handicapped. If my math is correct, that means that 10 of those cats were perfectly normal, which means they beat up on a bunch of handicapped dudes. They may not have been physically or mentally disabled, but they certainly have a profound ethical disability. And what if they had lost?
Speaking of ethical disabilities, it seems our new president hasn't quite figured out this whole "separation of church and state" concept. Yesterday G.W. signed two executive orders that will establish five Cabinet-level agencies to funnel money to ... I mean, to work with church organizations. Somehow the administration's assurances that "They would not be allowed to use that money to promote a particular religion" doesn't assure me.
Mr. Philip Kaplan of one FuckedCompany seems to have been revitalized by his recent trip West. The home page of FC today is awash in obscure and not-so-obscure heavy metal references, complete with a link to a picture of Pud @ age 13, rocking a G-n-R T-shirt and a bizzare bleached pompadour. Now that's just wrong.
In a story that's near and dear to my heart, it seems two Connecticut yutes (I'm sorry, did you say "yutes"?) tried to reenact a stunt they saw on my favorite show, Jackass. Apparently they burnt the hell out of themselves. Geez, I didn't see that coming. Predictably, within minutes, professional wet blanket loser Joe Lieberman had piled on. Dude, get a hobby. You suck.
GO.com is going, and I'm sure NBCi isn't far behind. See you in the Happy Slander Fun Corner. ßßß
So that happened. That being the not-very-Super-at-all,-now-was-it? Bowl. Even three touchdowns in a 36-second span couldn't save this god-awful game. And the commercials weren't that hot. There were two notable exceptions, though: E-Trade's Dot-Com Graveyard, a tongue-in-cheek take on the classic crying Native American guy pollution commercial, and Budweiser's incredible cracker version of the Wassup! guys. Jésus Cristo, I'm still laughin' at that one.
The real sports drama this weekend had already happened a half a world away: Jennifer Capriati rose from the dead to spank Martina Hingis and win the Australian Open. This is the woman that imploded at age 17 and was essentially finished in tennis. But no, she came back and whupped up on my least-favorite female tennis player of all time. But it's tennis, so no one actually cares.
Apparently the new Survivor season started last night. You would think that would have been enough impetus for CBS to update its Survivor website, but I guess not. That shit is like 9 months old. Losers. At least SurvivorSucks is keepin' it real. My brother says he's officially obsessed with Temptation Island. Anything's better than Survivor, so I say go with it.
Somehow I got signed up for the Afternic.com newsletter, the URLY Indicator. I was in the process of trying to unsubscribe from the thing when I discovered its true genius: it lists shitloads of domain-name auctions. Some of my favorites: CelluliteUpdate.com (no bids yet — this may be your big chance!) and boobjobs.net. The current owner of the domain has this to say:
Boobjobs.net: Superior and memorable generic domain name! Drive traffic to your Business with this intellectual asset. BIG potential as a portal site for the entire industry.
The bad news: The Wedding Planner is No.1 at the box office; the good news is that it unseated Save the Last Dance. Out.
Don't miss last week's brilliant insight. ßßß
