Chopstork

We all know any commercial image you see has been photoshopped, but it was still surprising to see before and after examples.  I wish I knew how to use photoshop other than just to adjust levels.

I hate mail. I like email and gmail (pronounced “guh-male,” of course). The only unwanted things I get from them are the occasional offers to enlarge a piece of anatomy I do not possess. And I love how I can send a message to my best friend 2000 miles away, and she gets it near real-time. But nothing good ever seems to come out of USPS mail, nor does anything come in a timely fashion. Current case(s) in point:

1. My cowbell came today. A week later than it was supposed to. What the hell am I going to do with a coda percussion cowbell now?

2. I got a letter from Blue Cross, my HMO. They sent me a form that pretty much wants to know if my stroke happened as a result of “an accident in which another party may be responsible for payment.” Apparently, they want to get out of the near $300k they spent to save my (priceless) life. Too bad for them this was the wrath of mother nature and not an auto accident, workplace accident, medical malpractice, or “slip and fall” (one of the potential reasons they listed). I wish them luck when they try to sue God.

3. I got two letters from the San Francisco DPT. One for parking in front of my house for longer than 2 hours at a time, and one for street cleaning. F-ing street cleaning. Church Street still looks dirty to me. And how do they know how long I’ve been parked for? Is that douchebag in the makeshift golf cart stalking me?

I think I’m done ranting now. Time to watch “So You Think You Can Dance?” (fun useless trivia tidbit: last season’s winner was a guy from Sunnyvale. a friend of mine from work knows him. he’s hot, but his sexual orientation is rather ambiguous)

Oh, and does anyone ever see that Piper girl from B2B? I have her black hoodie (which is so obviously a woman’s garment). I don’t know who she is… my only encounter with her involved standing in an awkward pose while reinflating the back of her horse.

I’ve heard talk about this for a few months now, and it’s scary. The telecom companies want to charge web sites for boosted speed. That’s f-ed up. The beauty of the internet is that it’s the same for everyone. You pay for access to the internet, and you get the whole internet.

Yes, you can pay more for a faster connection (dial up, DSL, T1 lines), but what you get once you’re connected is the same as everyone else. Yes, the web sites pay to make their servers’ connections faster. We pay someone to host this website. If we think the service is too slow, we could upgrade or switch to something faster. That’s fine—it’s part of the business decision of the site operators. Yahoo pays for their connection to the world. If Yahoo decided they didn’t want to invest in good servers and connections anymore, people would use their website less cuz it’d be slow. By the same token, they try to design their web services so that people like it and use it.

The difference is, now the companies we pay to get access to the internet—AT&T for DSL or Comcast for high speed cable, for example—are trying to charge the websites for higher bandwidth (faster downloads, etc.). If that happens… Now you get on the web, and for some reason Yahoo’s sites runs great, but Google is slow as hell. Why? Cuz you use AT&T Yahoo! DSL as your connection, and naturally they’re gonna boost their own affiliate’s site. Your friend next door on Comcast high speed cable can use Google just fine, but he doesn’t get what’s all the rage with Flickr—it’s such a sluggish site, he claims. Why? Because Yahoo owns Flickr, and of course Comcast doesn’t want to help them out.

All of a sudden the internet’s not all the same anymore! How fucked up is that?!?!?!!!

Even worse, allowing the service providers to decide which sites work better opens the door for them to block sites altogether. Do we really want our access to the internet to be like our access to cable channels? Pay $20/month for Extended Basic Internet—1.5 Mbps downloads and “all the major websites such as CNN, AOL, Google, Myspace, plus all the major newspapers!” Pay $40/month for Premium Internet and “get the same lightning fast speeds and all the same sites as our $20 plan, PLUS access to major video sharing sites including Google Video and YouTube!” “For an additional $5/month on either plan we’ll let you see all those puny blogs too!”

Holy christ—nothing good can come of this.

Found a photo blog from one of the salmon that swim Bay to Breakers upstream.

Ah, just like last year, I finished this thing wondering, “What the hell is going on? Where the hell is everyone? My phone’s broken.” Chaos. I know there were lots of farmers and farm animals with me and the barn when we got to the water (the ocean is a lot smaller than I thought). I also know that all of a sudden they were gone. Big Bird was trying to get into the black party bus, I went to see if I read the 36th Ave sign correctly, and then he was gone too. I tried to get on the bus, “Is there a tall corn in there? The corn’s our friend,” but they said no. Then I decided I had to find our cow in Speedway Meadows, while the Red Strawberry—and Laura on the phone before it shorted out in the rain—told me I should just go home. I put our broken barn in the cart, plus a basketball hoop, and started backtracking to the cow. Red Strawberry and her friend must have gotten sick of babysitting me, cuz at some point I ran across the street chasing something and when I turned around they were walking away.

I ended up in some field and ran into some SFSU girls that fed me drinks off a cart they’d pillaged. I think they were Annie, Trashley, Mai, and a redhead that had at least three red-head-related nicknames that I don’t remember…Miranda might have been one of them. She liked to call me Bunny Foo Foo and sing the song. We hung out and played kickball. It’s a shame I didn’t remember to run back across the street and get the basketball hoop I’d found. Some weird dude in long johns was there too. Never mind that I was dressed as a bunny rabbit. Eventually we walked across the park, through a deserted Polo Fields, and onto Lincoln where Trashley and Miranda were waiting in their car (when did they leave to get their car???), and they went home.

Finding myself alone in the Sunset, I figured I’d walk to Naan ‘n’ Curry (yummy) and hail a cab if one came. After no cabs came, it dawned on me that Paneer Tikka Masala is not worth walking 20 blocks in pink Uggs. Heading back into the park, I had a 10 minute conversation with a nice lady walking her dog so she could explain to me over and over how to get to Speedway Meadows. Which I did find, finally. But the cow was not there. Wet, cold, with sore feet and a broken phone, I finally gave up and hailed a cab on Fulton. And when the cabbie woke me up, I was home.

Turns out Big Bird was on the bus after all—they dropped him off at KFC and he brought chicken home for everyone. The first field, where I met the SF State girls, was either right next to Speedway Meadows or it was Speedway Meadows. And the cow cart had been left somewhere else in the park anyway. I love Bay to Breakers!

Oh yeah, here are my Bay to Breakers pictures, Courtney’s pictures, and Andy’s pictures.

This isn’t our group. It’s not even from this year. But it’s an awesome Bay to Breakers video:  Pirates.

Um, that’s a good question. Let’s see….

The meeting place:

We will meet at the corner of 3rd St. and Howard St. at 8:15 am Sunday to join the “race.” Note this is not the official starting area. Make sure you have a couple cell phone numbers to find people in case you’re late or things don’t go as planned. If you need my number, email me.

Alternatively, feel free to come up the night before and spend the night, or come to our house early Sunday and take the MUNI light rail to the race with us. We will leave our house no later than 7:30am to catch the 7:46am train at 24th and Church. Get off at the Powell or Montgomery St stations (we should be able to get off, since it will be after 8:00—if not, we will have to get off at either Duboce/Church or Embarcadero and walk a ways).

Getting stuff together:

I reckon we’ll be fixing up the carts Friday night and Saturday. Maybe we’ll grill some dinner Saturday if you wanna come over. Oh, and we’ll need to test and mix up batches of Ol’ Bessy’s “milk.” And I still want to go find large quantities of Boone’s Farm for one or two of her udders.

UPDATE:

By the way, bring beer and snacks.  Do not bring glass bottles or coolers (won’t fit in the cart).

My uncle, Kerry: “I think I have something in my eye.”

(Yes, this is really my uncle. No, he does not really have a nail in his eye. He’s an actor; this is a clip from some safety-in-the-workplace video. Gross nonetheless.)

During the course of creating our paper mache masterpiece for last year’s Bay to Breakers, we got into a discussion that we never really settled: You make a big volcano (or big cow) with buckets inside and tubes coming out through which you and your friends will suck hot molten magma (or “milk”). Which is easier to suck the magma/milk through—a fatter tube or a skinnier tube? Discuss.

check out the rest of the set