Late last night, I emailed Helen something funny about how much I hate birds. She thought it was funny, and this got me to wondering whether there was a facebook group for people who hate birds, and sure enough, there was. “I Hate Birds” has 3,948 members. I joined and posted part of my email to her, here for your amusement and/or horror (you have been warned):

just a little while ago, the moon set. it’s still nice out, though much cooler than earlier. and guess what. there’s a fucking bird tweeting. not just once in a while…. like crazy, and on and on and on. like the ten millions others do at sunup, but here we have one that is different.

I asked myself just one question, and it’s the same question I ask of myself: in the grand scheme of evolution and influence on the world, how will this individual do — success or failure? be interesting to know. I only knew one other bird, that I can recall, that tweeted at night. It was in 1991 at my dad’s when April was there. we had a couple of drinks and just laughed and laughed and laughed…. eventually I was like, “I hate birds. I’m going to go shut it up. do you want to come along?” (she did), so we went outside, snuck around to try to get close, and blasted a gun near it (which I had conveniently remember to bring along). It shut up. 5 minutes later when we got back in the house, it started up again! You might imagine the uproarious laughter we extracted from that experience!

Now bringing this story up to the present (yesterday):

Today not long after i got up, before coffee, i heard really loud tweeting….now remember, I hate birds with a passion except if they’re cooked and served on my dinner plate (or flying around in the air near me, shotgun in hand, on their way there). I’m one who will let the windows open at night and who detests the morning, but will get up just to shut the windows so I don’t have to listen to those fuckers tweeting, squawking, chirping, squeaking, screaming, twittering, or making any other heretofore unmentioned useless obnoxious noises, except possibly the screeching of an owl in the night and the quiet clucking of a chicken living in oblivion.

So I’m hearing this tweeting, looking for an open window to close, but all the windows were shut because it was so hot today… perhaps you’ve heard scientists describe the planet Venus in the daytime. it was like that only different. I traced it down not to a window, but to the garage door… I threw the door open to surprise it, and sure enough, a bird flew out of the open garage door. As I was looking in the area it flew from, searching for a nest, another flew out — right out of my tool box! those little fuckers had built a nest in a cardboard box in the top of my tool box. there were no eggs in it so I dumped it outside and picked up all the little pieces of grass and then put a grinder in the box… which was labeled “Angle Grinder”, not “Bird Nest”!

the bastards can’t read anything for shit, but they sure do shit on anything they can’t read.
which is *everything*.

A bird is just a digestive tract with a mouth at one end and a perpetually open asshole at the other where black, white, and purple shit constantly emanates because nature forgot to design them a sphincter!

I can’t believe I just typed that out loud but I *really* hate those disgusting little fuckers.

Do you?  You can join my own I Hate Birds facebook page.  The other eventually went away after attaining 6000 likes.

I had to share this thought from Barbara Sicuranza’s Facebook page:

Barbara Sicuranza:
“Passing a waterfall today Vali asks, “Is that man-made”?
“No baby, that is nature”, I said.
Akira asks “how come you never hear of anything that is woman-made?”

Laurel Katz-Bohen commented, “Tell her everything is woman made!”

Amazing.

It annoys me that my phone erases voicemails even though I press the Save button.

That means that the Save key is actually a Delete key two weeks in the future.  How useless.

If I wanted the message to be deleted, I would have pressed Delete, not Save.

I like the 22nd of months. Maybe I’ll explain sometime.

Completely unrelated:
Today I was thinking that I know very few people nearby (there are a few proportionately speaking) who I think are genuinely good people (all you have to do is drive anywhere to know what I mean), but realize that I know so many genuinely good people if I look at everyone I know online and include those who aren’t nearby geographically. I don’t know that I could count them all. This got me to thinking: do people who are genuinely good to others have more of an impact on the world (more accurately: on the people living in the world) than those others who are “average” or not genuinely good. I think this is true. I don’t quite know how to express this idea, but here’s an example:

Five years ago, I ordered a really tasty Hungarian Goulash (Gulaschsuppe) at a local German restaurant, and being a cook, wanted to develop my own recipe. My process is to do a lot of internet research and then iterate with revisions until successful. I am at the point now where I can think in my head how a recipe will taste just by reading it, and I invariably know if it would be good and how it would need to be changed to make my zero-calorie imaginary culinary delight into its real-world reciprocal. One of the things I did to develop this one was read voluminous material on recipe sites (allrecipes etc.) and I found someone who seemed to have just the right background, so I scrounged around until I tracked down an email; I wrote her, and she wrote me back, contributing her personal recipe, experience, and insights, uncompensated, just because she agrees with me that recipes are guidelines and she’s a genuinely nice person sharing a common passion.

Last week, just after Debbie did the rainforest benefit, I was looking for something specific in my old emails, and of all the things, I found her email from four years ago, so I wrote back with the link to return her favor with my own version of the recipe I developed (which is one of my best, at least in the “easy” category). Such a delight to discover this morning through her reply that her email was still valid.

It really put me in a good mood, and I try to return favors and give back to anyone and everyone who gives something of themselves, something that makes a difference in the quality of life of someone else. Do you know anyone who just radiates? I do, and I gravitoward them.

Also on unrelated tangents:

I liked Google’s playable pac-man logo today, but I had to keep closing it because the cpu fan on my lapdance, er i mean laptop lol, ran constantly at cruising speed. (My car has six speeds, but the laptop only has four: Off, Turtling, Cruising Speed, and Jet Engine).

I made shawarma today, but had to mix up a new batch of Baharat (the spice that’s the primary flavor in it). The big batch I mixed on 12/2/07 got used up. I haven’t cooked it yet. It’s one of my very best recipes… if I ever get an opportunity to cook for Debbie, it might be this one.

I like snakes (and reptiles in general) and was trying to figure out why some people don’t like or are even afraid of them…
Snakes are just flexible tubes covered in hard little plastic scales (like glitter), and upside: you can even order them in different colors and sizes!

I originally wrote this in an email on April 30:

I have been working ALL DAY on Blondie’s new Links page (deploying Monday) and I wanted to link in the rock and roll hall of fame, and they have added really great content since my last visit, and they had — fuck me — a transcript of Shirley Manson’s beautiful induction speech. I have never seen anything so lovely and sincere. I can’t even *read* it let alone watch it. It just shreds me up into little pieces in the first three sentences.

http://rockhall.com/inductees/blondie/transcript/shirley-manson-inducts-blondie/

The beauty of this is not constrained to humans. This is why I believe in aliens. plus the fact that Debbie revealed it to me in a dream, and Chris had already taught me that those you meet in dreams, they are real.

There is no one on the planet I would have rather had induct Blondie than Shirley Manson.  Perfection.  Another dream come true.

At least once a day I get the stupidest spam emails perhaps ever. The subject line is “Please update your firewall” (the capitalization varies).

What this makes me wonder about is whether there really is someone, somewhere, who would act on an unsolicited commercial email asking you to install any software, let alone a firewall. Could someone look at this and actually believe that their firewall (assuming they even use one) needs updated, and go to this site and download (or purchase?) and update and execute it?

The only thing I can think of is comedian Ron White’s You Can’t Fix Stupid.

(see also, another article I will write in the future about stupidest and funniest spams).

I really like libraries. In Mechanicsburg, where I grew up, we had a great library that was supported by a library tax that was overwhelmingly approved by the voters. I always voted yes on those.

I still live in a county that has a great library system. Where else could you go to a place that’s exactly like one of those big bookstores with a music and movies section, choose all the things you want to purchase, and go up the checkout counter and have someone ring you up, say “That will be zero dollars, sir. Come back anytime” and then you get to take your three DVD movies, six music CDs, and a shopping cart full of books home for free.

Now maybe this next idea belongs in the halfbakery, but the one thing for me that could improve a library is if it would be noisy some of the time. I’ve noticed that for some reason, all the places people go that have books are quiet and all the places that have drinks are noisy. What if someone were to open a library with a full bar? Nuclear explosion maybe? I’m fairly sure that in Pennsylvania, you need a trillion dollars to get a liquor license, so if that’s out, how about a library where people who read something they like are encouraged to read it aloud or to start impromptu discussion groups so other patrons can listen in, discover new and exciting literature, and meet people just like library day at Monroe Elementary!

A friend who I met online asked me today if I had the new Hole CD, Nobody’s Daughter. This brought back a really beautiful memory that I want to share.

Those who know me surely have a clear perspective of how important music is to me. It hasn’t always been that way. The first show I ever saw was Blondie in 1982, just after my high school graduation. It changed *everything* and as that band became a central part of my entire adult life, I came to realize that what I had been missing all my life was the emotion and meaning and insight that I derive from music now. It’s not entertainment for me, it’s life itself. That said (again), I’m also very sentimental and lucky enough to have received a few truly great gifts over the years, things with real meaning and a deep and irrevocable emotional connection. I keep these things near me all of the time and when I see them, I realize that these gifts are so great it made me actually integrate the person who gave it into my self, into what I am.

so just off the top of my head, here are a few…

a lovely and brilliantly insightful girl whose humor, wit, and inspiration is dearly missed, gave me a black refrigerator magnet with a Carl Jung quote printed in white but could just as easily have been printed in my own love and blood:
“the meeting of two personalities
is like the the contact of two chemical substances;
if there is any reaction,
both are transformed.”

Chris Stein, by putting me on the guest list for four shows on June 28, 1990, gave me a lifetime of Blondie experiences, and his personal insights about so many things started an avalanche of self-discovery and ambition and the realization that the only thing that was limiting what I could accomplish is me myself.

my friend of 26 years, REB, knowing how much I love Blondie, gave me free hosting of blondie.net and debbieharry.net since the mid 90’s, and a plane ticket to England in 2005 so I could go see them on tour.

someone I met in Debbie Harry’s front row in 1993 gave me a red silk rose because it was what I needed at that moment. (Twilight Zone: “What You Need”)

the lovely Apes gave me a Debbie Harry postage stamp from Mali and the inspiration to fly around the world chasing my dreams before I had realized that was the right thing to do every day.

Killola gave me the last fragment of what I needed to demarcate the end of the previous part of my life from the beginning of the next part. That one is going to gets its own article here when I figure out how I can express it. It is unreal what they gave me.

Now with that all in perspective, I want to talk about what my dear friends in the band Cilver (on the original date of this still known as Me Talk Pretty) gave me on May 2 when I went to see them play at the M-Room in Philadelphia (the same place that Killola played on TMI Day (March 28). Both Me Talk Pretty and Killola are two of the three bands that searched my music preferences on myspace (back when it used to be good… not like now, just a dumbed-down version of facebook that limits how much you can say at a time… one of the primary motivators of me doing this site, in fact) and afterward, when I listened to them, I loved them immediately and bought everything they had for sale. I have been into them for years and to watch them, all of them, make it, is fabulous. Why two of those three are from California isn’t clear since I hate California with a passion. But I digress, so back to the story, mostly quoted out of an email I wrote the next day:

first of all it is always supremely exciting to see Me Talk Pretty, and the fact they had advance copies of their new CD that won’t be out for months already was already sufficient to make me burst.

so I wanted to know what time the show was and brought up the bar’s website and fuck me! The Action Design is playing!! I like hem. They are also from California, and played with Killola the first time I ever saw them live, on my birthday in 2008… I didn’t know about them, but Killola Johnny said that day, “you should check out this next band, they’re good and you’d probably like them.” A hot grrrl was waiting for me at the beach in NJ so I figured, okay, I’ll check out a few songs and split, but she had to wait: I ended up staying for the whole set and buying their CD (and a second one that came out a year later). I love their songs “Pale Horizon” and “Landmines” (oh so relevant!) , plus they covered Hanging On The Telephone (had it on their site). Imagine the chances they’re actually playing the same night. WTF?!! they were good too, luscious. I got some stickers and got to tell them how happy I was to see them here! that is so crazy. but not so crazy as this….

so Me Talk Pretty (guitarist) Leon, my friend, says, “I have something for you. Don’t leave.” That was rather early and I’m like “I won’t leave until there are no more bands here.” Then they played, it was soooo good 🙂
they were hungry and I guess it’s the owner who was working the bar (and maybe cooking?) is Greek, and Me Talk Pretty (singer) Uliana’s sister lives in Greece and is married to a Greek man, so he made her a really nice salad for free and gave her some more drink tickets, one of which, to my delight, she placed in my hand. the others in the band ordered food as well; I think they were eating while I was watching The Action Design.

Afterward, we all had drinks together, and later, Leon had me follow him to the van and as we were walking there, I asked him what he thought he of the Hole show he’d said he went to on April 27, the day before I saw Hole at Terminal 5 in NYC with Steph “front row grrrl”, and Debbie Harry saw me there. Leon was describing how she did four songs acoustic and that everyone had to buy the CD to get in, then how there were 100 people waiting in line to get their CDs signed and when they got their turn, Uliana asked Courtney Love if she could give her a sticker from her band, and Courtney was like “sure” (really nice about it) and liked the name. Just at this moment, reaching across the front seat, Leon produces his signed copy of Nobody’s Daughter and handed it to me and said, “I want you to have this. It is a gift from us.” It was a complete surprise, so there I was standing next to him holding this disc with both hands and just looking at him, frozen. I think the word “Seriously?” was the only one I managed for like the next two minutes, maybe three. He asked me not to be speechless, but I couldn’t help it. Courtney Love lives in fucking California and never does anything where you can meet her, I would never be able to get an autographed disc, and these lovely people bought this disc and waited for a hundred people ahead of them to get it signed and give it to *me*. When I got home at almost 3am, I took a photo of myself with the Hole disc, my arm signed by Uliana (how lovely!), and holding their new album We Are Strangers. Their new video Wake Up came out that same day. Leon said it would be on MTV in about 3 weeks or a month from now. Looks like I’m not the only one who likes them heheheeeee.

This is one of those gifts.

I owe my dear friend April “Apes” Kincaid a debt of gratitude for teaching me that great word. I don’t really know how to define it, but I can describe it by example and I know when something is ruint. It doesn’t mean ruined or match any of the urban dictionary definitions. Try this example that just happened and made me want to write about it:

So I have this “sort of” friend who calls from time to time, but she really just wants to pump me for information about life updates and gossip about people we know in common…. she doesn’t actually want to talk to me, and we don’t have much in common, and she is always elusive, doesn’t ever tell the truth (then wonders why I don’t believe a word she says), never answers a question straight up (changes the subject or talks about something unrelated).  ‘She doesn’t take calls / she only makes calls’ [Killola reference], and she only calls me while driving (probably when no one else answered and I’m the last resort) then brags about some dickhead guy she hangs out with and…. never mind. I want to hear about that about as much as I enjoyed listening to everyone throwing up on South Park last night. Then, when I didn’t answer, she left a voicemail that was just four seconds of that farting noise that kids make. What did *I* do?!

Ruint!

One definition I wrote that’s close but not quite on is this:

“Ruint” (adj.) pathetic and without foundation; irrelevant; consisting only of meaningless diversion or distraction.

That definition came to me after reading a somewhat nonsensical article on Yahoo news about scientists who allegedly cooled atoms below absolute zero (?).

Like most of their articles, stupid people who can’t spell wrote completely worthless comments, references to politics, Obama, whose fault it is, that sort of thing.  Ruint!

I wrote in a reply to one of those comments:
Are you right?  Who knows.  But I thought this was supposed to be a science article.  It’s definitely not a politics article.  Right or wrong, these comments are off-topic and stupid.  No wonder everyone who wants news and can spell is looking for a better source.
I propose the introduction of a new word into English for your comment:
“Ruint” (adj.): pathetic and without foundation; irrelevant; consisting only of meaningless diversion or distraction.

It’s different than “annoying”, which would be like how I was just now making a drink and putting ice into my glass from a container, carefully avoiding a small bug that had flown in there, but observing when my was glass was full of ice, the bug was unaccounted for. [No, I didn’t just drink it you fools! I threw it all out and got new ice after washing everything!]

A person can’t feel “ruint”.  In fact, usually “ruint” applies only to situations and actions that people do, rather than the people themselves (like in the above example).  Here’s another really good example:

An ice storm froze my car window and caused it to detach from the regulator and fall down inside the door (letting a lot of rain in as well).  On Jan. 7, 2014, on the coldest day of the past year, I spent many hours cleaning the garage to get the car in, and worked off and on for the next two days tearing the door apart to fix this.  The procedure is very involved: I had to follow 23 steps to remove the door panel and more than 50 steps in this great online tutorial for fixing the window problem.  Although I got it fixed, just as I was finishing up, of course I had to get injured.  I cut my hand down near the wrist… out of all that, when I was cleaning the window.  Ruint!  Hit some stupid sharp edge doing the most mundane step in the entire procedure.

Now you know what Ruint means.

And that I like South Park. Don’t miss Grey Dawn (old people driving! eeeek!), Cat Orgy, Scott Tenorman Must Die, Gnomes (underpants gnomes!), Cow Days (“I Declare Shenanigans”).

Although I’m very allergic to cats, I have two: Belly Rub and Velcro. A few months ago, I discovered that Velcro insanely loves sauerkraut. He never gets on the table, but he climbed over me to get to it. I never heard of such a thing. I gave him some and he ate it all.

Velcro got his name because when he was a kitten, he always had the claws out which fastened him to the carpet. When you’d pick him up and pull him loose, it made that same sound as velcro does when you pull it apart. This would happen repeatedly if you’d put him down and pull him back up again… one day I was demonstrating and said “Look, he’s just like velcro” while I was sticking him to the carpet and pulling him back up five or six times in a row, giggling.

I think Belly Rub has itchy skin because I just saw him rolling around on the concrete patio to scratch his back, and when I scratch his back, he licks my arm. Continuously. It’s very funny (and scratchy!) and I need to get a video of it. Belly Rub is fully recovered now from his horrible ordeal last July, my pretty baby lovecat.

Today is Alison Goldfrapp’s birthday and the new moon (which Chris Stein says is as powerful as the full moon), so I figured there could be no better time than now to finally start writing publicly again…. I finally did it.

The layout here *will* improve but I have to evaluate what I’m going to use that will let people comment and leave me with ownership of my content. I’m not sure how the free sites get away with claiming ownership on content written by someone else without paying them, but I don’t want involved in that. “Include me out.” Yesterday, I was doing some research and someone had “guidelines” for writing on the internet (they called it a “blog” but I despise that term; in fact it is on the LSSU List of Banished Words, so I will not use it). This person suggested that because there are so many people out there writing, that one should write on only one topic you are knowledgeable and passionate about. And to that, I say this:

I am knowledgeable and passionate about a lot of topics, I’m funny, and I’m a better writer than most. Sure, I’m no Diablo Cody (except maybe the diablo part;)… more on my favorite crazygrrrl another day… but I’m going to write about whatever I feel like writing about, and say it’s like a smut magazine: If you don’t like it, don’t read it! As for the rest of you, I hope I can bring some Blondie stories, laughs, insight, magic, bizarrely skewed reality, new music, and weird shit into your life.

The title of this thing is “10 Minutes After Midnight”, which is a line from the song “Mid-Day Rebel” off the new Killola album Let’s Get Associated. I love Killola. I love their music and the talented, intelligent, caring people who are Killola and who I am beyond delight to call my friends. And I love what they and their self-published status represent. I will discuss them in vivid detail another time soon…. for now, I’ll just say that is one of only three bands: Blondie, Goldfrapp, and Killola, who I would die without. These three, together with Crossing The Rubicon by The Sounds dragged my ass out of the darkest place imaginable. Goldfrapp turned out to be right: “What you thought you’d lost was just mislaid.”

For those readers of my past work who, like me, are very observant and recall a lot of detail, you might remember that After Midnight was the working title to the movie Intimate Stranger starring Debbie Harry. I’m a creature of the night, and she has an 11 in her email address, and 11 minutes after 11:59 is 10 minutes after midnight. That’s about as appropriate and personally relevant as it gets… just like naming my Debbie Harry fanzine Fan Mail.

BLK 2:22pm
May 13, 2010

—

I don’t often edit my older posts with new information, but on “site launch day”, November 3, 2013, I’d like to point out one other strange development: the coincidence that 12:10 also happens to be my lovely girlfriend Steph’s birthday.  I had met her when I wrote the above and had already chosen the name, but I didn’t know her birthday and I certainly had no idea we’d become what we are now!