afrojet

Today, special guest The Good Doctor F, takes over afrojet to offer his: “top tips for success / general strategies for excellence when completing
court ordered
community service (6:00 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. landscaping shift)”

1. Be sure to get to the sign in desk by 5:55 a.m. in order to get a “good”
   orange safety vest; note that there are only two vests with reflective
   stripes and the others feature grease stains and body odor musk.

2. Never take off your orange safety vest until 3:30 p.m.
3. When assessing which city landscape employee to work with all day choose
   very carefully; there is no real true plan in this area – just dumb luck.

4. If you work with Stan take care of any number two business in the bathroom
   just to the left of the desk before 6:00 a.m as the morning :15 break is a
   long way off.
   

5. Do not rush! There is no need to hurry as 9 hours of landscaping in 85
   degree weather affords plenty of chances to get work done.

6. Do not mention any extra areas you might think need pruning, cutting, or
   raking.

7. When cutting, make two sets of cuts: the first to generate a pile of
   greenery on the ground and the second to cut the plant material at the base
   / trunk. You use up more time and still look like you are working.

8. Place your traffic cone arrays diagonally back from the edge of the truck
   when parked on roads and insist that the stobe light be engaged to warn
   oncoming speeders there are human targets ahead.

9. Try not to focus on going down to the mall with a rapid-fire assault
   weapon and “wiping the slate clean” as you pick up all the different types
   of roadside garbage thrown from vehicles by the miserable mewling skin bags
   that are human beings.

10. Whoa.
11. Never carry more than one tool or leaf bucket at a time.
12. If you have a tool, try to use it for the task at hand so it will be
    shown that you need to walk all the way back to the truck to get the correct
    tool. This all uses valuabel time.

13. If you have to sit next to another rotund citizen “volunteer” named
    Earving from Guatemala, roll down the window to escape the foully inhuman
    blasts of gas he dispatches with a big smile, all the while yelling about
    how he wants a “fucking Chinese girlfriend because their fucking pussy is
    tight, man!”

14. Watch the facial reaction of your devout Baptist crew leader as Earving
    delivers short, vicious rants in a pseudo-English language that may be from
    Star Wars; the only understandable words are every other one (“fucking”)

15. Do not volunteer for anything involving dead, brown, itchy juniper
    bushes.

16. Do not wake Stan up or make any sudden movements in the truck if he falls
    asleep during either of the two daily :15 breaks.

I think I’m officially on Korean time now. Got up to watch the Brazil match somewhere in the 47th minute and passed out shortly after. Awoke again to sit slack jawed and comatose through the first half the US/Germany match. Somehow, on the day of all soccer matched, it was 7:15AM, and I was out of coffee. Denver.

Well The boys in blue went down but not before giving Germany some good licks. It wont be long now till the kids who were watching these games grow up, get sweet scholarships and dominate all in their path. NCAA get ready to produce some strikers. The first thing we need to do is grow some taller players. There’s no getting around the fact that everybody but the Koreans were able to take advantage of us in the air. Listen up parents – take the basketball out the hands of your height privileged youth and start working ’em on headers off the cross.

After a dissapointing lose like the one today, I look forward to some inconspicuous consumption to take away the pain. My first choice would be the DJ Kremmy turntable by Karim Rashid. But after loosing so much money on today’s Match, I think I will have to settle for something else. Also isn’t Rashid German?

Shit. Cheap shot. Sorry Karim, I take it back.

On the cheaper side, I’ll go with a time appropriate Pele T-shirt. I didn’t know Pele was the official spokesperson for tang.

I found that the good folks at United Bamboo have an interesting fashion sense of humor. Check out the spring collection, click on the number “2” and then rollover the number “32”. Also, I swear one of those models is Reese Witherspoon.

A real hog belly of a morning ahead of me already I can tell. Some malicious bastard has installed an aviary of sorts right outside my bedroom window. This morning, as I lay fetal in a double pillow headphone grip trying like mad to drown out the chirps and ornery songs of my new natures alarm clock, i wonder what or who have i wronged to deserve this. What’s the deal man? Are they mad? Are they talking to themselves or to other birds? Can the bird that emits the almost ultrasonic quick three chirps understand the one that coos like a lethargic rooster? Make it stop!

I tried seeking refugee at Kelly’s place the other night only to discover that her head case neighbor had installed not one but two wind chimes right outside our bedroom window. In a backyard already pock-marked by the gardening tendencies of a clueless and bored women, these new additions make me want to move right to a deed-regulated community, where the installation of shit like that would need to be cleared by a homogenous room of property owners who have no time for the wayward gardening antics and home improvement disasters of people who went into the closet door and never left Narnia.

Well since I’m up now and there’s no soccer on for almost 24 hours, I can now write that letter to NPR telling them to knock off the big corporate posturing and take the web for what it is. I encourage everyone else to do the same.

I’ve been burning a healthy amount of music CD’s lately and franticaly backing up all my data in case Germany invades us after we skunk ’em in tomorrows match. It has been said here before that the amount of design energy companies put into their Blank CD’s is horribly lacking, that’s why I’m psyched to get my hands on these wooden blanks. They are too damn sexy and with the Southdale library having as good a jazz selection as most stores here in town (I even found three Sun Ra records) I now have more money for the horse track.

Did you read the one about the robot that couldn’t take anymore crap from his nerdy designer/owner so he ran away.

Afternoon bike Commute: stopping at the museum.

This mornings Korean v. Italy match and the events of the internation world at large are starting to spin together, form networks, and draw parallel lines where there’s no good reason for there to be any. The Mexican’s are heartbroken. Politicians run at the mouth and lay claims to victories that may or may not be theirs. It is evident in watching these matches that the rest of the world hates our guts. For every goal we score there’s a billion people who contemplate their revenge. A sporting Imperialism that can be counted off in 90 minute battles and red cards. I fear for us all while watching the US march closer towards the final frontier of soccer.

I’ve been checking the state departments website every hour for the last hour to see when they are going to release a recommendation that all Americans leave the country of Germany before fridays match.

We really have no idea.

The Germans have history and century old stories with this sport. This is the real deal. If you need further convincing, read Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs. It’s an eye-popping, sick look into the hooligans now dictating the direction right now. I think the Italian would have been slaughtered if they had taken it from the Koreans today. I don’t blame them for losing.

Sometime I bike home from Minneapolis rather late in the evening. Lately, as I make my final push towards home up Summit Avenue I’ve been noticing strange antics, lights and some jiggy hip hop “shake-you-rump” styling emitting from what was supposed to be an otherwise empty and abandoned governors mansion. I was always too tired to investigate but I was fully convinced our Governor was in there with a head full of crank entertaining Chinese dignitaries with some serious Eyes Wide Shut type of shit. But turns out it was only his 22 year old son throwing raves for underage high schools girls. It’s all just too much to take right now.

Exhausted, broke, and almost blind. My devotion to the game is starting to put major strain on relationships, work and life. But we do what we do. It was a damn fine thing to stay up till the sun began to rise to see the US trounce the Mexicans. I’m just amazed that in a world where US embassy’s are shut down because of the real fear of fanatical retaliation after a soccer match that Tiger Woods winning another round of golf can still be the number one sports story.

My friend Elizabeth has pointed out how terrible it is that I continue to link book and media selections to the one -click union busters over at amazon.com, when a perfectly viable, friendly and unionized (ILWU local 5) book store exists at Powell’s books. So as soon as I stop watching soccer and start reading again I will link those selections to Powell’s and other employee friendly alterna-bookstores whenever possible.

Afternoon bike Commute: outrunning the storm.

Fatigue sets in early this morning. The US scores in the 83rd minute and I’ve been up for 84. Of course, the first six minutes was hard to take. I only had a handful of Crunchberries in my gullet and no coffee when Poland stuffed two in the nets. When was the last time I woke up this early to watch sports? I can’t remember. Breakfast at Wimbelton? No. I believe that still starts at a respectable hour, closer to brunch. My favorite part of today’s match was the crowd reaction to Korea’s goal against Portugal some 130 miles away in a different stadium. The crowd made more noise for that action than anything that happened in the US v. Poland game. International sports are SO much more interesting than our own national ones. L.A. Lakers? NBA titles? What a bore.

In local sporting news, Wellstone still looks to out dribble and out score Norman Coleman for the US Senate. Now if only the damn Greens can find the right team to cheer for. A good article in The Nation spells out impending doom for Minnesota and the nation if the Greenies can’t find the right pitch to play the game on.

“Men are gaining real confidence from using cosmetics and toiletries” I love reading some good marketing demographic break downs and the Emap Report on Young Affluent Males 2002 is an honorable benchmark and the new mission statement for afrojet and all it subsidiaries. However, the report does mention that the one-dimensional macho hero is dead, which makes me nonsensically nostalgic for Rambo movies. I mean if Frodo Baggins and ultra-geeky Peter Parker/Spiderman are what’s now “in”, than I’m going to read some Hemingway and rent “Die Hard” this weekend.

For what it’s worth, I’m reading Opera, Sex, and Other Vital Matters. I found an excerpt from one of my favorite parts of the book: the philosophy of punctuation. Robinson breaks down the significance of discipline in writing and chastises people with sloppy punctuation. Something I hold very close to my heart, as I am one, of the worst — punctuators! on the planet.!. I love it when he writes, “Appropriately, the disappearance of the question mark largely reflects the disappearance of questions”. Jigga-huh?

Helluva nice article on Salon about file sharing and the real potential of mp3 swapping and CD burning and its ability to bring down the record industry. Stan Liebowitz, argues that it’s possible that people will continue to buy CD’s just because it’s the most honest thing to do and people are generally pretty honest.

My experience suggests the same. I love music and love FREE music but musicians need to get paid or else there ain’t going to be any good music to listen to. Downloading music serves two purposes for me: filtering out garbage (I buy a lot less one-hit wonder CD’s) and expanding my tastes by allowing me to find and listen to all kinds of new music (and genres) I wouldn’t necessarily take a $16 chance with at the local record store. Internet radio offers the same filter/research potenltials. But the end result is always the same; I’m at the Record store plopping down my $16 for a shinny piece of plastic or engourged double-vinyl set, and at the end of the month I have many new CD’s and no money for groceries. Q.E.D.

I finally REALLY found the ultimate flip flop, just in time to sit around and watch world cup action and pirate music.

Designers: a call for new Open Source OSX icons. Submit your own and customize what you got with what other people did and so forth.

Morning Bike Commute: Hula hoop vandalism!

Well it’s about time, and also far too late, but Earth First Activist Judi Bari finally got what’s due yesterday when it was ruled that the FBI must pay 4.4 Million for their actions perpetrated against Bari and her husband Darryl Cherney. It’s a great reminder of what savage crimes “The Shield” is capable of when trying to protect homeland security.

At the DJ Shadow show this last weekend. Shadow Debuted to the Twin Cities Hip Hop Activist and Photographer Brian Cross‘ (a.k.a. B+) Video Documentary Short, Keepintime: Talking Drums, Whispering Vinyl. The currency of the film is Super Funky Beats. The film captures the musicians trading currency back and forth in a gritty intergeneration dialog of scratches, beat juggling and live drumming by the original jazz cats who recorded the beats on wax in the first place. The film goes way beyond tribute. Give me some more. More B+ photography: [1 & 2].

The word of the day is sobriquet, a word I discovered while playing the game Cranium yesterday. A word which I swear I had never seen used before or heard pronounced by anyone. As luck would have it, I started Jim Thompson’s autobiography Bad Boy last night and ran into the word within the first 50 pages. It makes me wonder if I’ve read it before somewhere but always just skipped over it — unable to deal with the fact that I didn’t know what it meant.

Candy of the day comes from Japan and it’s Super Wasabi Peas. I’m also eating the ginger candy right now and it’s the craziest combination of Asian spicy hot and sugar sweet goodness. It seems very wrong but it’s actually quite addictive.

Site design of the day comes from Sweden. I wish I could read it cause it looks dope.

Wanted: have you seen this chimp?

I’m having a great time with the new Mozilla browser. Simple. Powerful. Love the search capabilities. I can’t wait to update my power book to OSX and get my Mozilla creeping all over it.

I found the documentary on Road-Side Shines tantamount to discovering a perfect diamond in the mines of doc-cinema. Thanks to the G-man for the Deliriousla link. Lots of great urban stories and architectures for building livable communities. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the grid vs. non-grid forms of development as I’ve looked at neighborhoods to live in both in the city and in the first ring suburbs. I’m very pro-grid right now. The grid system has really shown its true colors to me in my morning bike commutes from Uptown to Downtown. Without the grid system of development I think this journey would become an epic struggle in futility. One of the benefits of the grid system is that it allows me to take multiple routes home, which is great when traffic backs up on any one street I’m able to just hop over to another parallel street and avoid the pack of steel and wheels. I also find it’s nice just to mix up the route to see new things. G-Chei gave me Suburban Nation which also preaches the pro’s of the grid system. This book will make your stomach turn as you read about the development practices and the laws passed to fuel the sprawl mentality of some of the most criminal design practices ever. If ever there was a need for a Jakob Nielson, it was when people were building suburbs. I mean who wants to skate in the suburbs. Boring.

Speaking of skating, I can’t decide whether I want to drop the $19.95 for the pay-per-view King of Skate.

Be down at the Third Lair Skate park Sunday Afternoon to see the “REAL Skateboards team”. Nate Jones and Cairo Foster will be there as will my camera.