Okay, so I have a bunch of things to write about, but again, I am choosing to procrastinate and instead post this:

I do not know who these guys are or what terrorist cell they are with (those who mock Jesus can only be terrorists), but I have to call them traitors and hooligans!

I am off today for a couple weeks of holiday fun. I may post from my cell phone. Regardless, I wish all one and a half of you Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

I tried posting from my phone, but something went awry. So here it is unlive:

Matt and I are at the Instinct 9th anniversary party, W hotel, Westwood. What’s a gay “bash” without good-looking underwear models?

Taken from my car last night on the way home:

This was on Burbank Blvd. at Sepulveda, heading toward the 405. The photo is cropped but otherwise unaltered. Click the pic to see the high-res image, which is more interesting than this tiny one.

To all three of my readers:

I will be away until next Wednesday, so it will be silent here for a while. Now that John’s busy on his own blogging endeavors, I guess that means the Forum will be dead until then.

The good news is that I’m going to Lake Powell again, so I may have another photo page up sometime after I get back. Boo-yeah!

Uh, Coinstar, change IS cash.

ADDENDUM: After sending this snapshot from my phone this morning, the Coinstar machine at the Sav-On— er, CVS on Hollywood Way failed to give me the iTunes voucher I’d specifically gone in to get, and instead spat out a cash voucher, minus the annoying fee I specifically tried to avoid by specifically searching for this machine online that specifically doles out iTunes vouchers without that fee.

A deep sigh ensued. Time to embark on another painful voyage through the frowns and drowned dreams that drift like ghosts within the murky and churning waters of American Corporate Customer Service.

“Oh, I’m very sorry. What was the fee? We’ll send you a check for that amount.”

Another deep sigh, this time one of relief. I could not get my iTunes voucher, but that’s okay. The full price of my coins was enough for me. Thanks, nice Coinstar lady.

Now my coins have been turned into CASH! Maybe I’ll donate it to the Coinstar Marketing Department Rudimentary English Useage Education Program.

Sorry, Robb and other mathematically-challenged individuals. The addition field is back in the comments posting section. The new spam filters were excellent at catching spam. However, I was getting hundreds a day, which means my database was filling with crap. Though the spam eventually gets deleted, I did not like all that sputum gumming up the works.

We’ll see if the addition field will slow the flow. I’d hate to bring back that ugly captcha (“enter the number shown”) as well.

A reminder: If you log in, you can skip all of those extra fields when commenting! But logging in may be just as annoying…

As I have mentioned, I’ve been a bit too busy to properly post as of late. Yes, it’s “the plays.” What plays? Well, if you want to come see them, we open this weekend. Then you will know what plays. The info is below. I am in the first two, but not in the kids’ show. However, the kids’ show is right before my shows each week, and it sounds like it should be pretty good. So come out earlier and see it.

THE MADWOMAN OF CHAILLOT (FREE!)
Sunday, July 16, 23, and 30
Saturday, August 5, 12, and 19
2:00pm

THIEVES’ CARNIVAL (FREE!)
Saturday, July 15, 22, 29
Sunday, August 6, 13, 20
2:00pm

Kids’ Show: The Poet Who Wouldn’t Be King (also FREE!)
Saturdays and Sundays, July 15-August 20
12:00noon

All plays at Dr. Paul Carlson Memorial Park for FREE
Park is at Braddock Dr. and Motor Ave., south of Culver Blvd. and east of Overland Ave.
Just south of Sony Pictures Studios
Google Map Link (FREE)

Bring a blanket or some chairs, as well as some food to munch on (though there is a concession stand).

* * * * * *

I used to do work typesetting books for a publisher in Boston. That skill has come in handy quite often. I use it in my current job to make the text in presentations look good. I used it to create the program for the above-mentioned plays. And I used it to typeset both Sven’s novel and, most recently, my college friend Matt’s scholarly book.

I haven’t seen Matt’s book yet, but I decided to look for it on Amazon, and there it was. Then, while typing this, I wanted to see if Sven’s book is still on Amazon, and, lo and behold, it is. The typesetting for Matt’s book had to follow very specific style guidelines, so while I am proud of that work, it’s very, very dull to look at. Sven’s book, on the other hand, I am incredibly proud of. I think I did a bang-up job on the look and style of the typesetting.

Sometimes, tooting your own horn feels awfully nice.

* * * * * *

While doing the Amazon research above, I somehow mistyped “amazon” in my Safari address bar, and up popped this funny site: Wealthy Men. And I don’t mean funny ha-ha so much as funny what-the-hell?

Wealthy Men is a dating site for people who simply must have a significant other who makes over $100,000 a year. The site has a “Wealthy Men Verification System” to make sure the job, income, and pictures of each member are accurate. My first look around the site gave me the impression it was for straight guys and straight chicks with lesbian tendencies.

Yes, truly rich men aren’t gay, but truly rich men love it when truly rich women get it on together. Or something. It all made me want to reach for a Moon Pie. (Rich people don’t eat Moon Pies.)

Well, I could not let caste keep me from exploring this more, so I created a profile, lying that I make $100,000–$500,000 per year. (Why didn’t I lie big and say $2M+ per year? Because I do not think big. That’s why I’m a mere plebe.) Once in, I discovered you can put yourself down as straight, gay, or bi. What’s hilarious (and I don’t mean hilarious guffaw-guffaw so much as hilarious not-at-all) is that you can not do a search by sexual preference. Which, to me, is useless. I already fall for the straight guys as it is. I don’t need a bunch of rich straight guys messing with my head!

Aside from all that, it’s nothing out of the ordinary. Guess rich people don’t know how to write engaging profiles, either.

* * * * * *

While I was not a huge fan of Superman Returns, I was very pleased that they used the John Williams themes from the 1978 movie. I have been listening to that original soundtrack, enjoying how complicated but accessible but clever but awesome it is. Sadly, the CD I have was released back in the day when record companies were so cheap (glad to see that’s improved so much, guys!), that formerly double-record soundtrack albums, once brought to CD, were slashed down to fit on a single disc. For years, I never bought the Empire Strikes Back soundtrack on CD because it was missing a lot of music that I used to have on my album. That error was remedied a long time ago (and multiple times, I might add).

The soundtrack for Superman was always the same way. I put off buying the CD version for years because it had been cut way back. Finally, I broke down and bought it so I could at least listen to some of it.

Amazon to the rescue again! Yes, it seems a two-disc CD of the full soundtrack came out a while ago. The slightly flat, tape-hiss-laden version I’ve been listening to on my iPod is out of date; thankfully, the new one has been re-mastered and contains more music than even my double-album set from ’78. Hooray!

I am not going to buy it on Amazon, though. It’s $44. Gulp. I’ll wait ’til I get more credit at Amoeba. Amoeba to the rescue again!

* * * * * *

I really have to go to the bathroom. Thankfully, that will end this useless post.

* * * * * *

Yes, I’m back. And no, I haven’t gone to the bathroom yet. This was simply too odd to not include. It is both funny ha-ha and funny strange:

There are more of these on YouTube, but I haven’t watched any more yet. I simply had to put this up ASAP so I could go to the bathroom.

Did you know you could do this with Mentos and Diet Coke? No, me neither.

Go to that link and watch the video. It’s absolutely superb.

Thanks, Matt!

This is the most amazing thing! At first, I went, “Oh, yeah, that picture mosaic thing.” But it’s so much cooler than that.

Hint: Click, and keep clicking.

On further exploration, this is part of a Getty Images site that has more fun and interesting interactive tidbits.

Thanks, once again, to Jimmy for this one.

This post started as a small note at the end of the previous post, the one regarding MacBooks. But it grew quickly, like a weed on the side of the highway, demonstrating with utter clarity my absurd attention to useless detail. (Though, really, I think it’s not at all useless, otherwise I would not have written so much about it or care about design as deeply as I do.)

I had formatted my parts of the MacBook IM post in blue, and boy, did it look nice! It was obvious who was talking, and pretty, too! However, I keep forgetting that the design of the Forum is such that anything in that light blue is a link. I have posted stuff before where I have made plain text that same blue because it looked all pretty, but that was wrong, since that color is reserved for links.

This takes me back to another IM I had with Chuck as I was designing the new Wren Forum. Chuck did not like underlined links from a design standpoint. I thought it was a good concept, since anything underlined on the Web is, as everyone now knows, a link to something else. You can do anything you want with the text, color- and font-wise, but no matter what it looks like, if it’s underlined, it’s a link. Simple. Ugly at times, perhaps, but simple and, once grasped, intuitive.

So why didn’t I design The Wren Forum with underlines? Because style won out. Every link in the sidebar (Latest Musings, Categories, Wren Peeps, etc.) would have been underlined. In one of the first designs, I did this, and it was a mess! So I decided to do away with the established norm. A bad idea for ease of use, definitely. To compensate, though, I decided that all the text links in the Forum would be the same light blue color. Any text that color would be a link. Anyone visiting the Forum would soon be able to figure this out at least subconsciously. To keep the light blue links tied with the expectations of most Web users, the links change color on mouse rollover, and the underline reappears to assure the user that they have, in fact, rolled over a link.

Excellent. So it is. And I like it. Except that I have fudged on my own design standard in one place: The top link bar (About The Wren Forum, FAQs, etc.). Since I’m on a roll, I might as well explain that to you as well.

See, the links in that bar can not be my blue link color because they will not stand out enough from the bar’s background color and would therefore be hard to read. The solution, of course, was to make the background bar the same darker blue as the other blocks of blue in the Forum. But, once again, I chose looks over propriety. Having yet another bar of that very same color made the site that much more dull to look at. Having one bar of lighter blue ads a nice dimension to the look of the site. I have justified this change from my own convention this way: The top link bar is, upon glancing at it, different from the rest of the Forum. The text items in the bar are topics and suggest linkage. Therefore, the lack of the light blue is not detrimental, and the links still become underlined on rollover to confirm that they are, indeed, links.

I offer this all up as a sort of apology to those who believe, as I do, that user interfaces (which is what the entire Wren Forum is) should be clean, consistent within themselves, obvious, and, in the end, nice to look at. While I am okay with having dropped the underlined links because most nicely-designed sites have since done so and have, therefore, created a new expectation of Web users, I am less happy with my white text links at the top and my lapses in text formatting on some of my past posts.

I hope you can all forgive me and find mercy in your hearts for my wayward choices.

This is Scotty and me in Austin with some Amy’s Shiner Bock ice cream. Yes, it tastes like beer. I picture myself getting both my first intoxication AND my first DUI. In Texas, no less.

I am, of course, a sucker for great design. I also happen to be doing the organic food thing because sometimes you have to put thine moolah where thine gaping maw is.

So imagine my near orgasmic delight when I found the following at Whole Foods:

Can you just stand it? All their boxes are awesome. Just check their site to see the others. That these treats come from the people who make Cape Cod potato chips is not too surprising, I guess. And like those yummy chips, the saltines I bought are just about the best saltines I’ve ever had! No, I take that back. They ARE the best saltines I’ve ever had!

“But, Steve, they’re just saltines.” Well, if you’re used to throwing Krispy or Zesta into your tomato soup, like I am, saltines are about as boring as you can get without hopping the fence into the yard of the Water Crackers family. Oh, but these Late July saltines are so biscuity good, thick and crunchy, flaky and perfectly salted…

Oh, goodness me, yum.

I have to apologize for not writing much lately. After the Hawaii trip, I’ve been both busy and distracted. I promise The Wren Forum isn’t dying!

To make it up to y’all, here’s a fun juxtaposition of signage I saw while eating at the new Porto’s in Burbank:

Blurry at the edges, I know, but I think the message is clear. And when, oh, when does one not eat Chinese and feel freshly lubed inside?

While I’m stuck here waiting for my PowerBook’s new hard drive to fill itself back up with my old hard drive, I wanted to share something with everyone.

On Wednesday, four of us from work went on a field trip to Santa Monica to research high definition monitors at a store there. Beforehand, we went to lunch at El Cholo. It was very delicious, and though I’ve passed it by many times and wondered, “I wonder, is their food any good?” I have never stopped in. Sadly, I now know I’ve wasted years of happy Mexican food eating at a place local to me.

But that’s not the point.

The point is I now have a bag of El Cholo’s truly yummy pecan pralines. They are made with sugar, butter, corn syrup, and pecans, and nothing else. They are little hardened blops of delight! What makes eating them so much more interesting is that, when you open the bag and go in to take a sniff, you get the unmistakable aroma of the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland.

“This man has become too unstable for public consumption.” No, really. It’s true. The smell may be sweeter, but it is definitely of the same phylum. I do a double-sniff each time I open the bag, because I simply can not believe it to be true.

I will have the bag with me this weekend if anyone cares to snuffle.

It’s too late. Jeff is in L.A. I’m at home with the dogs. They need baths.

I need to be up in the morning far too early because a rock hit my windshield and caused a crack, and because my insurance deductible is $500 I have to pay it out of pocket.

It’s been a while since I wrote on here. So I’ll launch the new year (plus 11 days) with some random stuff:

* Why did I not think Brokeback Mountain was “all that,” though I admit it was pretty good.

* I found out over the holidays that a friend of mine is HIV-positive. It’s amazing how people can give up on life thanks to a basically invisible virus.

* The dogs smell and need baths.

* We’re moving. We sold the house, I made a pretty substantial profit, and we’re going to become renters for a while.

* I don’t like moving.

* Oddity: I dislike avocados intensely but discovered something I had forgotten about myself: I like guacamole.

* The Chronicles of Narnia was much better than it had any right to be.

* King Kong proves that money does not equal quality.

* I have dry skin and it itches.

* The dogs smell and need baths.

* Buying on the Internet is way too much fun.

* I’ve learned in the past week that managing other people is a very different task than managing your own damned self.

* Steve may be the only other person I know who likes Monopoly; I always imagined I was alone.

* The more money you have, the faster it goes.

* The dogs smell and need baths.

Good night.

Another greeting from the phone, 15 minutes from Mountain Time New Years. And a good way to start the new year: Winning Monopoly with $11,382 in assets. May the year be as good to you all!

Carol brought this to me today. It was in a batch of sodas at a meeting supplied by Disney catering. How it got to Disney, how it got to catering, and how catering managed to include it is beyond us all.

The label says, in its entirety, minus the boring parts, “Test Product Only. Not for Resale. Mountain Dew X, Variant No. 516 + Power Pack.” I believe this product must have ended up being Mountain Dew MDX, since it’s mostly the same ingredient list and nutrition fact content. Though instead of the first ingredient being carbonated water, as in MDX, Variant No. 516’s first ingredient is “treated water.” Yummy!

If I decide not to save it to sell on Ebay to earn enough to buy myself a life on unwarranted leisure, I will drink it, and then I shall let you all know how it tastes.

Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief, all kill their inspiration and sing about the grief.