Friday, November 30, 2007

if the shoe fits. . .

i am not very interested in celebrities, especially now that you can somehow make a lot of money for doing really unintelligent, ridiculous things. but i go to web site for us weekly every now and again and for some reason, am in raptures over the collection of pictures called "just like us". and i feel so condescended on, so looked down on, but i love it. they get caught in the rain! they go to mcdonald's drive thrus! they shop for fabric! they have bad hair days!

in other news, i think my orchid has died. we are riding on the hope of one bloom that just sprouted will keep us in the game, but the other five blooms that have been going for 5 months are wilting away like barry bonds' weiner after steroids. chad bought it for me several months ago when we were on a 24 hour break. he said if i let the orchid die, i will let our love die.

Monday, November 12, 2007

diatribe of nations

well, it used to be that a person's taste in music was reflective of the soulful innards of the individual. it was like a metaphysical grocery cart, collected department to department, produce first, then dry goods, then refrigerated. what you get out with was usually in direct proportion to how much effort you put into it. if you did well, you would come home with the frost on the ice cream carton intact, enough food to replace the 80%-100% consumed items and a tranquil satisfaction, knowing that you purchased the one item that provided the impetus for the grocery excursion to begin with. you knew you wouldn't be back for another week and you acted like it. if you did not plan, list or map, you bought apples when you still had 5, slurp your way through a full carton of ice cream soup and forgot the friggin peanut butter puffins. again.

it used to mean a lot if a person had good musical taste. it meant even more if a person had bad musical taste. if someone said that they listen to fugazi, the flaming lips, chet baker and ulrich schnauss, your response couldn't be any less than teeming awe. this individual was certainly not bound by by time, by trend, by instrument, by intonation, by familiarity. this individual did not fall into the easy trap of finding and tying his identity with one genre. even if the person turned out to be a complete ass hole, you would still be forced to have at least a modicum of respect for him by virtue of this mad talent. but now, sadly, everyone has GREAT taste in music and is SO diversified AND lists every band they've ever loved on facebook. you don't know if the person's brilliant taste is genuine and hard earned and original or if he's hawked cds based off of someone's list on amazon.com. or itunes. or myspace. ugh.

i have always accepted and agreed that good taste is a privilege and mostly innate. it is not something that should be able to be synthesized or fabricated. and when i reflect on it, there is something quite menacing about the idea of an perfectly egalitarian culture, where everyone gets to participate in anything, on any level. people who, ordinarily, would first start with learning to love the ramones and then move on to madonna's early work and then graduate to radiohead, just jump in somewhere between the doors and bjork and come out looking like a pop music virtuoso.

something real wrong about that. reminds me of gilded gold, it's only shiny on the outside.

Friday, November 02, 2007

two sides of the coin laundry

a lot of people know the tough guy side of chad:



few people know the kinder, softer, pervy/creepy side:

Thursday, November 01, 2007

don't tase me, bro!

paul's new web site is up! check out the community forums, guitar tabs and click on as many ads as you can, you'll be sending future generations of kims to college...

christianguitar.org

perqs of the job.


here is what it's like if you ever come over and have a piece of pizza.

ps. i realize that there is a theme in these pictures of me looking like i got dressed in the dark, picking clothes from my wardrobe that consists entirely of sporting gear and that i subsequently survived a sandstorm. i don't deny that this is what i look like most of the time.

olive oil task force

there's nothing that bradley likes better than doing things he doesn't understand. not really. it pretty much includes everything outside of eating, sleeping and stretching. i sometimes think that his own bark startles him. but it doesn't stop us from stretching his horizons, even if it is just to fabricate a reality that he really isn't as dull in mind and personality as a penny loafer.

here he is, dressed up for halloween, as superdog.



chad "don't call me larry" craig

here is a picture that marcy took of chadsicle and me, after his first bike ride ever.

dog the quilted, double ply paper towel hunter

what sort of place is this anyway? we blithely call our society "home", "america", "land of the free" and all the while, dog the bounty hunter has to tuck his tail between his legs for making a racial slur...i mean, the guy is a bounty hunter - it would seem to me that he's not a part of the fbi or any other conventional form of law enforcement because he's subterranean in that way. part of the reason we watch him is an attempt to preserve the unkempt, prosaic man in all of us. dog the bounty hunter isn't supposed to follow the rules. his name is dog! he's a bounty hunter!

(no i've never seen an episode but from what i know, he is an archetype redneck who happens to be a bounty hunter with a tv show documenting his adventures. i "hear" from "experts" that he has quite a following. dang it. i just watered down my opinion.)