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I closed my ING Direct account today (they're great, but transfers took too long and I don't have enough savings to really take advantage of their rate). Check out the confirmation number for the closed-my-account transaction.

Yesterday I was at work for about an hour before I realized that I was wearing my sweater backwards. Fortunately, it wasn't a v-neck; and fortunately, I avoid human contact whenever possible. So I don't think anyone noticed.

I might as well just get a pipe and a lab coat and misplace my cat, so everyone will say, "oh, there's that absent-minded professor -- I wonder what he's put on backwards today!"

I got tired of my old iPhone wallpaper, so I made some new ones.

This will come in handy.

Related: holy fuck, I have gotten a ton of work done on my novel this weekend. It's kind of staggering.

Do these do any good? Who knows. I'm not giving up though.

Hi, The 5 line has always had problems with bunching up and long gaps. This morning, I was waiting for the 43 at Fulton/Masonic for about 15 minutes. I observed many, many series of bunched-up 5 buses going in both directions. For example, bus 5640 on run 92 was followed immediately, with no gap at all, by a second bus. It was hard to get the number since visibility this morning was poor, but it appeared to be bus # 5566. Bunched-up runs on the 5 appear to be the rule, rather than the exception. All of the riders would appreciate closer monitoring and enforcement on that line. Thanks, Matt

Plus a bonus complaint!

Hi, I've commented before on the bunching problem that the 43 line suffers. There was again a problem last night at around 6:30. The driver of bus 8365 lingered for a long time before starting his run; when he finally started, the driver of the next bus behind him, 8371, started his run only a few minutes later. The two drivers continued the remainder of their runs together, only ever putting about five minutes of space between each other. In the past, when I've pointed out the bunching problem on the 43, I've been told that Muni will consider increasing its enforcement on that line. That enforcement, if it's happened, doesn't seem to be catching all of the problems. Thanks for your attention to this, Matt

I went to a Burger King and ordered chicken fingers, but I did it wrong and they just gave me one single unadorned chicken breast. It was embarrassing.

Here's the symbolism, I think:

• - Meal = Decision-making and self-determination. Meals are one of my favorite parts of the day, because they're the parts over which I exercise the most authority.


• - Burger King = Recent relocation. Whenever I don't know where to eat in a new place, I start by eating at fast food places. The last couple times I've done that, Burger King was the only available option.


• - Chicken fingers = James. They're one of his favorite foods.


• - Chicken breast = work. No matter what day it is, you can always get a chicken breast in some form in the cafeteria. Yesterday, I specifically noticed that there was a large pile of chicken breasts sitting on a plate near a conference room.


• - Doing it wrong = A perennial fear of mine: that I'll misunderstand a process and get unacceptable results. This fear is particularly acute in retail settings, and especially where food is concerned. In real life as well as in dreams, I usually have to mentally rehearse ordering food before I do it.

And the context:

• - James isn't at work with me, as he usually is. Instead, he's been relocated temporarily to England.
• - I've been sending him emails every night -- it's the last thing I do before I fall asleep.
• - I haven't heard much from him, and I've been worrying that it's because he doesn't like the emails that I've been sending him.
• - Obviously that's a ludicrous thing to worry about. But then again, so are 90% of the things that I worry about.

So, there you go. That is, evidently, what is currently weighing heavily on my mind.

Did you know that Jerry Sharell from Kids Incorporated has a MySpace? Well. He does.

I thought it might be fun to show the process of getting from this photo ...

... to this one:

Here's all the layers:

I took a couple of pictures of the boys; fortunately I was standing in mostly the same position. I liked a different version of Evan, so I dropped that in; then dropped in a Michael from another photo. Their edges took a little sculpting to blend properly, especially where Evan goes behind Steven. Then I had to fix the room tone behind Michael; a blue tint in the upper right; and some splotchy noise that was amplified by the compositing. Then I made the room tone more natural, and added an effect I call "CD cover" because it looks nice: I take the channel with the best data (red, in this case) and overlaid it to improve contrast. The first CD cover appear just on their faces. The second one appears on top of everything except their faces, and has a blur attached. That helps soften the grain -- this was taken at a high ISO. The last layer is a vignette, darkening the edges and adding a bit more blur.

Here's the progress:

Ta da.

http://vimeo.com/mattymatt

And with that, my collection of profiles has hit 60.

I heard The Black Ghosts' "Anyway You Choose to Give it" on KCRW and went looking for more. Here's a nice DRM-free sampler.

I was just noodling around on the TurboTax website, downloading and stuff, when this image popped up:

Oh, hello.. What's your name? It's so nice to meet you. So, you're really into finance and stuff? Ha ha ha ha! You're so funny. Hey, let's ditch this website and go for a walk or something.

Paying somebody $50 to cut my hair, shampoo my head, and chatter for 20 minutes about nothing, that's what. I don't like listening to humans, and I can shampoo my own damn head thank you very much. And now, I'm reasonably confident that I can also operate clippers.

I have more money now than I used to -- not a lot, just enough to buy more than basic necessities now and then -- and one of the weird things that keeps catching me by surprise is now nice people are when you have money. I just got a very cute new wallet (the old one was about 13 years old, and disintegrated along with my phone in the laundry) that was a little pricey, and when it arrived in the mail, there was a hand-written thank you note enclosed with it.

Hand-written! With my name and everything! Signed by someone named Anjali! Oh my God! That's so NICE.

James and I were shopping for jackets a month or so ago. We went into the Diesel store (for the first time in my life seriously considering making a purchase there) and I was stunned to learn that if you like a jacket, but they don't have it in your size, and their sister-store DOES have it in your size, they can have it SHIPPED from the other store! As in, you don't have to get in your car and drive to San Jose -- they'll send it up for you!

That's SO NICE!

So, it turns out, when I was poor and thought that you could be happy without money, I wasn't totally correct.

OMG, I've been posting SO MUCH lately! It's actually just because I wanted to chase that autoplaying news anchor dance party video off my front page.

Here's Seth Rudetsky (who? I don't know, but he's great) talking about Barbra Streisand (who?) and why she's great and also annoying.

Via Shadowplay: here's a dynamite clip, a gorgeous scene that you hope will never end, from Sweet Charity.

I almost don't want to give this away, because Triumph of Bullshit is the best blog I've ever found, and if everyone else knows about it, then I will no longer be two or three days ahead of the memes. But this is too good not to reveal: ToB's entire Tumblr archive. I'm in heaven.

A few days ago, James woke me up in the morning.

"Were you expecting a call from Mark today?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, because I was.

"I don't think you're going to get it," he said, in that rare tone of voice that he uses when he's not happy to be delivering bad news. "There's been a death in the family."

I've been dwelling a lot lately on my brother's likely deployment to Iraq, and this news FREAKED ME THE FUCK OUT. "What!? Whose family?" I was trying to wake up, but there was that morning fogginess that make my panic feel like I was still stuck in a nightmare, so I wasn't sure if what he was saying was what I was hearing.

"In our family," he said, and now I was completely disoriented and just stammered a bit. I think he wasn't expecting his words to jar me as much as they did, because he looked a little guilty and said, "I mean, your phone died."

Oh. Alright then.

At this point, I was so relieved that no person had actually expired that I didn't really care that much that the night before, upon returning from a night out walking in the rain, we'd drunkenly put our pants in the washing machine without checking the pockets.

Remarkably, the iPhone is still able to power up a bit ... but only a bit. The logo appears on the screen for a few seconds, and then the whole thing just shuts off. We've tried every method of drying it out imaginable -- including putting it in the oven on "warm," surrounded by dessicating rice. No luck. So oh well -- I'll probably just be getting a new one, which is fine, and not something I'd have been able to do if it was an actual death in the family.

The New Republic combed through some of Ron Paul's newsletters from the 1980s and 1990s. Sorry this quote from TNR's analysis is so long, but it's all fascinating. Emphasis mine:

Like blacks, gays earn plenty of animus in Paul's newsletters. They frequently quoted Paul's "old colleague," Congressman William Dannemeyer--who advocated quarantining people with AIDS--praising him for "speak[ing] out fearlessly despite the organized power of the gay lobby." In 1990, one newsletter mentioned a reporter from a gay magazine "who certainly had an axe to grind, and that's not easy with a limp wrist." In an item titled, "The Pink House?" the author of a newsletter--again, presumably Paul--complained about President George H.W. Bush's decision to sign a hate crimes bill and invite "the heads of homosexual lobbying groups to the White House for the ceremony," adding, "I miss the closet." "Homosexuals," it said, "not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities." When Marvin Liebman, a founder of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom and a longtime political activist, announced that he was gay in the pages of National Review, a Paul newsletter implored, "Bring Back the Closet!" Surprisingly, one item expressed ambivalence about the contentious issue of gays in the military, but ultimately concluded, "Homosexuals, if admitted, should be put in a special category and not allowed in close physical contact with heterosexuals."

The newsletters were particularly obsessed with AIDS, "a politically protected disease thanks to payola and the influence of the homosexual lobby," and used it as a rhetorical club to beat gay people in general. In 1990, one newsletter approvingly quoted "a well-known Libertarian editor" as saying, "The ACT-UP slogan, on stickers plastered all over Manhattan, is 'Silence = Death.' But shouldn't it be 'Sodomy = Death'?" Readers were warned to avoid blood transfusions because gays were trying to "poison the blood supply." "Am I the only one sick of hearing about the 'rights' of AIDS carriers?" a newsletter asked in 1990. That same year, citing a Christian-right fringe publication, an item suggested that "the AIDS patient" should not be allowed to eat in restaurants and that "AIDS can be transmitted by saliva," which is false. Paul's newsletters advertised a book, Surviving the AIDS Plague--also based upon the casual-transmission thesis--and defended "parents who worry about sending their healthy kids to school with AIDS victims." Commenting on a rise in AIDS infections, one newsletter said that "gays in San Francisco do not obey the dictates of good sense," adding: "[T]hese men don't really see a reason to live past their fifties. They are not married, they have no children, and their lives are centered on new sexual partners." Also, "they enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick."

What's interesting to me is how unpalatable some of these sentences are ... and yet, uncomfortably, I can't fully distance myself from all of them. Only a few weeks ago on this blog, I echoed the "I miss the closet" sentiment. And although "Sodomy=Death" is neither catchy nor accurate, the meaning behind it (that unsafe sex is more to blame for AIDS than the lack of conversation about it) sounds, well, fairly rational.

Ron's newsletter is written in a tone that is alienating, and at times horrifying. But I wonder -- if they'd argued the same points but picked their words more carefully, with more charisma, how unlikeable would they really be?

A 1988 newsletter cited a doctor who believed that AIDS was created in a World Health Organization laboratory in Fort Detrick, Maryland.

Yeesh. Okay, maybe there was just no salvaging the enterprise.

I couldn't watch this without shielding my eyes.

I was just browsing my website's referral stats, and discovered that some user got here by Googling "how to jerk off a cat".

I just can't get enough of these.

Hi, I submitted several complaints regarding the 43 in December -- on the 6th, the 10th, the 12th, and 14th. Today, January 4th, I received a response via email. That's nearly a month after my first complaint. To make matters worse, the date on the email is December 21. That means that Muni waited between 9 and 15 days to write a response, and THEN waited two weeks to actually send it. That's just bizarre. Since emails are so easy to write, and Muni clearly just uses a form-email that would only take a few seconds to send, these long response times send the message that complaints aren't taken seriously. Thanks for your attention to this issue, Matt