Now I Really Am Going To Drive To -- and Through -- El Paso

Sonic Youth has added a few Texas dates to their current tour. And one of them is in Marfa, which I can drive to from here, though it be a long, long journey. Best of all, I can stay to see the art!

4U

I don't think Prince gets enough credit for promoting the shorthand used in text messaging. By other people, I mean. You won't catch me using any of that newfangled code.

The Day the Music Passed Us By

Basically, once most of the bands I like can afford to fly from Austin to the West Coast, they stop coming to Arizona. There aren't many places in the States this populated that have a more paltry concert calendar. And the problem is getting worse. I have a theory why. Many of the acts that do come here make references to getting stopped somewhere in the state by the police. Could it be that the Border Patrol and their local assistants are discriminating against bands that travel in vans? Goodness knows that there's no easier way to getting police attention in these parts.

Feel Change

All of a sudden, most kinds of toothpaste here in the States come in plastic bottles as well as tubes. At first, I welcomed the change. There's little that's more consistently frustrating that a nearly-empty tube. But then I started to think about this development more carefully. Surely, the technology to make these bottles has been around since the 1960s. So why is it only now that the manufacturers are paying belated attention to all those comedy routines about how there's little more consistently frustrating than a nearly-empty tube? Perhaps there's a sinister backstory to their sudden willingness to make it possible for consumers to abandon an inefficient delivery system. One possibility is that this change is part of a broader assault on tactile experience. Even when tubes of toothpaste are pain in the ass, they give the user a sensation that the bottles can only gesture clumsily towards. The tube allows us to feel its contents without actually touching them. It's the condom of consumer packaging. Let's see a neat-and-tidy bottle provide that kind of indirect sex education.

Keep Your Care Off My Body

Also, since I'm apparently in a mood to rant such as this journal has not witnessed in many a moon, let me take this opportunity to lash out at the practice of making cole slaw without mayonnaise. Sure, vinegar slaw can be tasty. But eating it also feels like a disciplinary process. I don't need the state, or its de facto representative, the chef to impose health upon me. Maybe I need a tattoo, prominently displayed, of a snake rampant coiling itself over the azure field of a Hellman's/Best Food label under the words, "Don't tread on my cholesterol!"

Time For An Upgrade

Earlier today, e_compass_rosa posted an entry with this "blog rating" meme and I figured, "What the hell?," because this is clearly one of those increasingly rare days in which I make my presence on LJ repeatedly felt. I was still full from another delicious sandwich of turkey breast, mayonnaise and cranberry sauce. And I was in no mood to brave the still-hellish heat of late June for a nocturnal run.

So I went to the site and discovered that my blog earns a PG rating:

I was a little bummed, hoping I'd at least rate a PG-13, and wondering, as I looked at the "Paste the HTML code below" window, what any of this had to do with online dating, when I realized, to my deep disappointment, that the only reason I'd even scored a PG was because I've been going on about heat and poultry of late and posted an entry about a certain punk legend née Richard Meyers. I'm a G people, the extreme folds of my desires be darned!