Alex­akis had two respondents, Craig Mon­toya and Scott Cuth­bert. The trio became the first incar­na­tion of Everclear.

…you know that some­thing like this is coming:

After Cuth­bert was replaced by Greg Eklund, the band spent the better part of a decade as a dom­i­nant act on alternative rock radio.

Oh Scott, you never stood a chance.

I hope you’re doing all right.

• Mex­i­can Coke: Made with pure cane sugar instead of high fruc­tose corn syrup, it packs much more sweet­ness for the same number of calo­ries, and in glass bot­tles tastes crisper and brighter than that swill in plas­tic ever could.
• Stir-​fried fish cake: The store has its own Korean restau­rant inside, and there’s always a woman in the back making fresh kimchi and other ban­chan good­ies that are spicy and deli­cious. I’m so glad the lady at Nam Kang the other day pointed out that what I’ve been loving is fish cake, because I never would have guessed.
• Better spices: Yeah, I like chili powder as much as the next guy, but the stuff they carry is like a chipo­tle ver­sion - smoky and deli­cious. No, they don’t have McCormick, which I feel bad about since it’s a local Bal­ti­more brand, but what they do have seems punchier.
• Veg­eta­bles that look like veg­eta­bles: No wax on the apples, no sprayers hosing down the greens, and almost every­thing reminds me of what veg­gies looked like when I was a kid instead of the franken-​plants I see at Safeway.
• A world of Goya: So far no huit­la­coche (meaning “raven shit,” a.k.a. “corn smut“), but every kind of canned, dried or liq­ue­fied Mex­i­can ingre­di­ent I could desire from pineap­ple juice to eigh­teen kinds of kidney beans is for sale.
• Crazy Asian junk food: For instance, “Soda Drink (Pineap­ple Flavor),” which con­tains, “water, sugar, citric acid, sodium acid, fruit cloudy, straw­berry flavor, lemon flavor.” But it does taste like pineap­ple. Did I men­tion that it’s blue? Or that the bottle looks like a panda? Of course it does.
• The rest of the animal: Have you noticed that your local mega­mart no longer has things like chuck roasts, flank steaks or skirt steaks? What hap­pened?  What are they doing with the rest of the ani­mals? I don’t think I want to know, but they have all the pork belly, chicken necks and assorted offal you could want at this place. As a guy who craves tripe and ten­dons when he gets a cold, this place is going to pay off this winter.
• Some­thing inter­est­ing done with the animal: Chorizo? Sev­eral kinds of chorizo? Made on the premises? Sign me up.
• Kimchi refrig­er­a­tors: $800-$1,700 will get you a fridge ded­i­cated to making rotten cab­bage. Isn’t that what they’re sup­posed to prevent? 
• Things I want to try but am a little con­fused by: Spicy mango pick­les? Instant Pho? Cut­tle­fish? Mulle? Some crazy thistle-​looking fruit whose name escapes me? I’m gonna need a recipe or a rec­om­men­da­tion before get­ting into the weird stuff.

Prob­a­bly my favorite thing is that unlike the Super­Fresh where I’m sur­rounded by white people (you folks smell like bologna, did you know that?), this place is like a school-​house rock vision of what Amer­ica ought to be. There’s obviously-​former-​military white guys with their asian wives. Mex­i­can cooks stock­ing up on masa. Japan­ese fam­i­lies going ape-​shit about some­thing in the “Asian Powders” aisle (!?). Today I saw a tall black man, a young Asian guy and his Latina girl­friend talk­ing in sign lan­guage. I love shop­ping at places that make me thing all this post-​racial Obama-​era hooey is real.

All of which is a long way of get­ting to: I decided to make some chili. I don’t have a recipe or any­thing, just the con­fi­dence that if you put any quan­tity of tomato prod­ucts, onions, meat, spices and beans together and cook it on low for an hour, you get chili. So I got some cheap stew­ing meat, chorizo, a selec­tion of beans, and a couple kinds of canned chiles and cooked it up with some chili powder and what­not. And it turned out great. I’d have to say that this is not only the best batch of chili I’ve ever made, but it’s my favorite chili I’ve ever eaten.

That’s not saying a lot though - from what I can tell, the magic of the stuff is that any­body can make a decent pot of chili with what­ever hap­pens to be in the pantry and freezer, and the less time you spend wor­ry­ing about fresh­ness of ingre­di­ents or qual­ity of meat, the better. My prob­lem is that I didn’t have any idea how spicy the chorizo was - and it’s not a good idea to taste pork before you cook it. So I used my normal quan­ti­ties of chili powder and jalapenos and sriracha (I told you I put it in every­thing), and ended up with some­thing just slightly too hot. This, dear friends, is the down-​side to that fresh-​made chorizo. When you find your­self snack­ing on spicy Korean fish cakes as a palate cleanser, you’ve gone too far. 

That’s how I hope it’s going to go, at any rate. Let’s think of it like one of those bio-​rhythm things -  can you help make the map bluer, America?

Make sure to let Chad know how you feel.

Love the site. The new redesign is going great. Simple, clean. Really pretty. And I hope Habari is work­ing out for you - if you ever get that nailed down, I’d love to switch too! But could you do me a favor and put up some kind of con­tact link or email address?

The reason is that I’d love to talk to you about how your feed is messed up. Instead of  getting HTML, it’s spit­ting out the textile/markdown you’re using to create the entries. I’d even vol­un­teer to help you figure out what’s caus­ing it. But you know, there’s no way to con­tact you.

Best of Luck,

Jemal

“There is a huge boom in autism right now because inat­ten­tive moth­ers and com­pet­i­tive dads want an expla­na­tion for why their dumb-​ass kids can’t com­pete aca­d­e­m­i­cally, so they throw money into the happy laps of shrinks . . . to get back diag­noses that help explain away the defi­cien­cies of their junior morons. I don’t give a  shit what these crack­er­jack whack jobs tell you - yer kid is NOT autis­tic. He’s just stupid. Or lazy. Or both.”

I don’t get it - where’s the punch line? Oh, his career. That is funny!

And on that day when you squeeze the bottle too hard and squirt a couple table­spoons of sriracha into your entrée, don’t be an idiot. Just throw it out. You don’t have to prove any­thing to anyone.

I speak, of course from experience.

Four years ago, in order to raise funds for MoveOn.org, my friend Yosha made songs in exchange for dona­tions. Jared had been obsess­ing about get­ting stuck in things, so Yosha wrote a song called You Can’t Get Stuck, and Jared lis­tened to it, loved it, and never com­plained about get­ting stuck again. 

So I got out my handy Flip Mino (Thanks, Shel­ley!), and we recorded about 3 min­utes of him rant­ing about how much he wanted to watch the old shows and how the big com­pa­nies like Viacom need to bring all of them out on DVD. I edited it with iMovie to make it a bit more Ze Frank-​ish, and uploaded the fin­ished prod­uct. It’s actu­ally quite endearing.

I don’t know if it’ll help Jared with his per­se­ver­a­tion, but I’m hope­ful. What’s amaz­ing is that a kid at 8 years old is already feel­ing nos­tal­gic and fed up with these whip­per­snap­pers and their new-​fangled pro­grams. He’s actu­ally got some pas­sion about this stuff. And it’s even more amaz­ing since just about all of these shows were can­celled before he was born.

Also, I should point out some things for anyone who stum­bles across this video that doesn’t know Jared:

• I scripted this only by edit­ing it. I wanted to remove some of his ram­bling, put the cute bits from two takes together and take out the parts where he was whis­per­ing too qui­etly to pick up.
• Jared isn’t look­ing at the camera much because that would con­sti­tute eye con­tact. Jared is autis­tic and although he will make eye con­tact more than most autis­tics, he’s more com­fort­able look­ing off to the side like that. 
• Fur­ther­more: when you see autis­tic kids on TV scream­ing and crying and bang­ing their heads, remem­ber that they’re only show­ing you the absolute worst parts of the day. Mostly Jared is just like this.

So here’s what I’ll be send­ing PR Flacks in the future:

Thank you for your inter­est in Tan­gle­Bones Brand Pre­mium Taco Sea­son­ings®! While we are not cur­rently taking orders, we appre­ci­ate your excite­ment for our broad range of prod­ucts and hope that you’ll join us in taking a bite out of hunger with our deli­cious new fla­vors! Go online to our site now to vote for your favorite!

• Spicy Chipo­tle Chicken
• Zesty Poblano Pork
• Bold Banana Pepper Beef
• Eat a Shit Sand­wich and Die!

Vote early! Vote often!

Thanks again!

Jemal Cole
Direc­tor of Mar­ket­ing
Tan­gle­Bones
1414 Dirty Spam­mer Drive
Alameida, CA, 91919

We’re spend­ing $700 bil­lion on this “rescue” plan, right? And there are 1.4 mil­lion homes in some stage of fore­clo­sure in Amer­ica? And the aver­age home is about $150,000? Some­thing doesn’t work out right for me:

$700,000,000,000 ÷ 1,400,000 homes = $500,000 dollars/home
1,400,000 homes x $150,000 = $210,000,000,000
$700,000,000,000 - $210,000,000,000 = WTF?

Are we expect­ing that there are more than three times as many homes headed for fore­clo­sure as there are now?

George Carlin had a sim­i­lar prob­lem with “pre-” any­thing, and I think it’s best to quote him:

“That’s another com­plaint of mine, too much use of this prefix ‘pre-.’ It’s all over the lan­guage now. ‘Pre’ this, ‘pre’ that. ‘Place the turkey in a pre­heated oven’ - it’s ridicu­lous. There are only two states an oven can pos­si­bly exist in, heated or unheated. ‘Preheated’ is a mean­ing­less fuck­ing term. That’s like ‘pre-recorded’ - ‘this pro­gram was pre-recorded,’ well of course it was pre-​recorded, when else you gonna record it, after­wards? That’s the whole pur­pose of record­ing, to do it before­hand! Oth­er­wise it doesn’t really work does it? ‘Pre-existing,’ ‘pre-planning,’ ‘pre-screening,’ you know what I tell these people? ‘Pre-suck my gen­i­tal situation!’ And they seem to under­stand what I’m talk­ing about.”

Wow, do I miss that guy.

I don’t think the people eHar​mony.com matched me with are even real. Some selec­tions from the sug­ges­tions they emailed me (empha­sis mine):

Kim (Alexan­dria): It’s impor­tant for me to make new friends, and to keep phys­i­cally fit.
amy (Abing­don): It’s impor­tant for me to be in set­tings where I will meet new people, and to keep phys­i­cally fit.
Amy (Bal­ti­more): It’s impor­tant for me to create romance in a rela­tion­ship, and to keep phys­i­cally fit.

Really, ladies? Really? Guess what went in my profile?

Jemal (Glen Burnie): It’s impor­tant for me to hunt you robots down and kill you before you and Skynet take over the world on judge­ment day and to keep phys­i­cally fit.

Here’s the sad part: these three “ladies” were sent to me sequen­tially within 20 min­utes. Great minds think alike, eh?

As some of you know, I’m the kind of person who likes to ago­nize about things for 9 months before doing any­thing about them. Buying a car? Gotta research, gotta test drive, gotta ago­nize. Get­ting a loan? More ago­niz­ing. But what you may also know is that I’m also a multitasker.

So I fig­ured that I wasn’t plan­ning on even think­ing about the con­cept of dating until Decem­ber or later. I didn’t think you should go on a date when all of your sto­ries start with, “my late wife once said,” or “when my wife died,” and your inter­ests and hob­bies are “grieving” and “crying” respec­tively. But at the same time, I knew that when I finally decided to do some dating, I was going to have to ago­nize about that for a while. So why not grieve and ago­nize at the same time?

Add that to the fact that a friend at work sug­gested that I look around at Match.com to find people who are even more pathetic than me to laugh at, and guess who had a pro­file? Hey, you got it in one!

It wasn’t much of a pro­file since it actu­ally said, “I’m not look­ing to date any­body and am only using this to check out pro­files - please don’t talk to me.” Not that this pre­vented people who live a thou­sand miles a way and look sur­pris­ingly like escorts from trying to send me messages. 

Where this becomes inter­est­ing to you (let’s hope) is that every so often the site sends you a list of people who “match” you. And this is fun in itself, because you get to play the “next level” game. This is like when you’re a kid and the doctor says “this won’t hurt” and you know that means it’ll hurt a little. And if he says, “it’ll hurt a little” you know it’s gonna hurt a lot. Right? Well when you look through the pro­files you dis­cover that “slender” means “a few extra pounds,” “a few extra pounds” means “overweight,” and “overweight” means, “HOLY SHIT WHAT THE HELL DID YOU EAT? LET GO OF MY LEG!”

That’s not to say that you don’t get all types. In fact, there are some cute folks on Match.com. Case in point, one of the first pics they sent me wasn’t too shabby, but the angle was sketchy. People have learned every trick in the book to hide neck fat, etc. I cer­tainly did. But regard­less, she was an okay look­ing girl. That’s not the prob­lem. The prob­lem was the second pic. The “match” that they sent me? That match is HUG­GING former speaker of the house Newt Gin­grich. Repub­li­can poster-​boy Newt. Conservative-​to-​the-​core Newt. How the hell am I matched with a girl that would a) go to one of his sign­ings and b) not stab him in the face?

Which brings us to prob­lem 2: her user­name was snowflakeGOP. Now the GOP is obvi­ously to indi­cate that she’s a Repub­li­can. And hey, that’s fine and dandy. Odd that they matched her with some­body who listed him­self as “ultra-liberal,” but what­ever. The prob­lem is that once you iden­tify as con­ser­v­a­tive, snowflake starts making me ner­vous. Are you inter­ested in winter sports? I don’t see that in your pro­file. Or are you call­ing atten­tion to your white­ness? Why would you do that? OH SHIT ARE YOU SOME NEO-​NAZI?!!?! WHAT THE HELL?!?

So there’s my review of Match.com: they set you up with your enemies.

Do you remem­ber when you bought that Connnect-​Ed system to “alert par­ents to emer­gen­cies and other impor­tant issues and events through­out the school system?” Yeah, that was great. But lately, I’ve been get­ting a little frus­trated with the mes­sages you’ve been leav­ing on my answer­ing machine. Maybe we have dif­fer­ent def­i­n­i­tions of “emergencies” and “important issues,” but last night’s mes­sage about how there’d be more locally grown pro­duce in school lunches didn’t meet that cri­te­ria for me.

Maybe it’s just that I was feel­ing sick, or maybe it was the way it woke me up from a dead sleep, but I’m really tired of that crap. Is there a way to stop receiv­ing the, shall we say, “completely bull­shit messages,” and still get the actual emer­gency noti­fi­ca­tions? That’d be great.

Thanks!

Jemal

I was will­ing to chalk that up to the ever-​crappy Mac ver­sion of the Adobe Flash plugin (so slow, Adobe! Why do you hate us?), but then I opened a link to this nifty new Javascript-​based graph­ing library in a back­ground tab in Google Chrome and when I clicked over got this:

(It’s a little tricky to see, but a bunch of the graph’s labels are way off to the left.)

Now, Safari on Win­dows doesn’t have this prob­lem, and I’m not sure if that’s because it’s an issue with a par­tic­u­lar snap­shot of WebKit, or some­thing Google did in imple­ment­ing their custom Javascript engine V8. Either way, that sucks.

Update: So of course I had to add an iPhone-​enhanced ver­sion of the site for the two iPhone users who might visit. So pretty.

Update: it has a feed, of course.

1. I’m not voting for a Repub­li­can because they’ve gotten every single issue wrong for the last 8 years,
2. I like both Hillary and Barack, and will sup­port either of them, and 
3. I don’t really care to hear them tear each other apart.