Names is for tombstones, baby! Y'all take this honkey out and WASTE HIM! NOW!

Chocolate News is a must see. David Alan Greer is fucking brilliant and his diatribes about the election is amazing. Check him out every Wednesday night. Right now he's playing a professor trying to de-wigger a 50 year old wigger. Hilarious! This isn't that clip but check this out anyway, it's great:

Anyway, just spent the whole day at Panavision, prepping cameras and dealing with the madness that is anamorphic film making. If you don't know what anamorphic is that's cool, I'm a fucking professional and I'm still not sure what it is. An anamorphic lens is a lens that bends light so that you can shoot really wide panoramas and still fit the image on a regular piece of 35mm film. Think of the beauty of Lawrence of Arabia and the vistas that Freddie Young shot. They look great but they're sort of a bitch to deal with because they're all different sizes, really old, and sort of fucked up. It took forever to get all of the various little bits and pieces that you need to make movies but hey, at least I got paid. We're going to do a night shoot Thursday night into Friday morning and then we come back and finish up all next week. Good times. Oh, funny thing, it's a commercial for Crown Royale. That's right, Crown Royale, the ghetto fabulous drink of champions. I hope it's funny.

Peace out, bitches!

Oh, don't worry about the critics! You got a smash hit! It's in the air, kid! It's in the air! You can't stop anything that's in the air!

Happy days are here again! I voted today, early voting here in the Southland, none of that waiting around shit for us! I might end up in a photo in the Los Angeles Sentinel. They had a very stylish young man out photographing, as far as I could gather, groups of black people voting early. If I make it I'll be in the background, scowling and reading the LA Times front page. I was standing behind a very annoying group of older black men and women, well, three women and one very annoying man. He was some sort of ex-cop or detective who does consulting now and had a very officious tone and a hell of a lot to say about his radness and what young people need to be doing today and blah, blah, blah. The lard-ass behind me was infinitely less annoying although no less vapid as she babbled quite audibly into her earpiece. By the way, if you're really fat don't get the smallest earpiece you can find, it ends up looking like you're trying to talk to the last bit of Oreo stuck to your cheek. Alas, there were no voluble McCain supporters to clown. Everywhere you looked there were people of different ages and ethnicities chatting each other up about how far the country has come and how happy they are that they're alive to witness the first black president of these here United States. I must admit to feeling quite proud myself although the imbecilic skinheads who got caught before they could launch their racial holy war ("rahowa" to the skins apparently) gives one pause. How many more are out there like that? Can we start a lottery system where you can get tags and go out and hunt them down? Will racism finally be considered a traitorous offense, punishable by death? I wonder.

In less exciting but somewhat related news, I went to Bass Pro Shop today and had fun. I'm going hunting up near King City, CA for my birthday in November and I needed some supplies. Goddammit, I love that store even though there are some mounted heads of animals I would never in a million years think of killing. Too bad all hunters aren't as humane and cool as my family and pals. Bakum! Bakum!

Peace out, bitches!

I've seen guns, guns too, they don't mean shit. But that's when you gotta watch yourself.

Random images of an afternoon downtown in Chinatown's arts district. The only one that really needs explaining, I would think, is the photo of the sodas. If you look closely, you'll see that this is a photo of Jones Cola bottles bearing McCain's image. Jones makes really good soda that has a lot less weird shit in it than the big soda companies. It's still not good for you but less so than a Coke. Anyway, they made Obama soda and McCain soda and sold them in mixed four packs. This photo was taken downtown at Pitfire Pizza and the checker told us that when people realized the soda packs were mixed they would walk back in and swap out the McCain bottles. Pitfire now has nothing but McCain bottles and no one, and I do mean no one, is buying them. Ha! It's the same damn soda in both bottles but I guess no one believes in Grampy enough to even buy a bottle of soda with his old mug on the label. I think it's safe to say that the election is fucking over. The phot next to that is of a video installation which showed the Washington monument violating the Pentagon. Odd.

Peace out, bitches!

Gentlemen, please rest your sphincters.

This was brought to my attention by Melah and is the funniest thing I've seen in a while. Eat shit and die, ignorant people! I'm looking at you neo-cons!

In other less funny Arab-guy news, I'm about to begin a very nice long run of work with fun little bits of dicking around interspersed throughout. First up, Axe deodorant has a new hair care product and we're going to advertise it by annoying innocent idiot tourists out by the Santa Monica Pier. Goof balls galore! Wish me luck.

Peace out, bitches!

There's always a way to blow up explosives. The trick is not to be around when they go off.

Today I skated a mini-ramp for the first time in ten years. I completely and utterly sucked ass and I don't care. Full-on old guys session with the owner of the ramp, Panzer, and his buddy Bob. Those guys could actually skate but my ass took forever to get warmed up and rockin'. I got a few basic tricks back but the real point of the whole thing was that I fell a bunch and banged myself up and I loved every moment of the whole deal. I've got my first masonite burn in ten years, my ankles hurt, and I'm exhausted. Sweet. I know I'm an old fart in skateboard terms but I feel like a teenager again after skating. We had the punk rock/hip hop mix roaring, the sun was beating us up, and everyone kept trying to push everyone else to get broke. Good times. If I'm not totally in traction by Sunday I'm going back for more.

Peace out, bitches!

This sho' enuf a bizarre sight in the middle-a all this shit!

I have a confession- I shot an innocent bird today. He was beautiful, too, orange feathers under his wings, blood red cheeks, and a sleek and stunning look about him. He popped up and looked exactly like a damn alpha male quail out scouting for the rest of the covey. I popped him from about thirty yards out and clearly I should have waited. I felt really bad about shooting him but as Ani said, there's nothing you can do about it now. Poor little guy. Sorry Bird God, I shall make amends some how.

We didn't actually find any quail out in the middle of nowhere but we did see some incredible vistas and I got to watch Ghost completely fail at being a bird dog. Nowhere to go but up from here, I guess. I did bag a huge jackrabbit but upon further examination I found out he was completely and utterly infested with both grubs and ticks. I'm talking gigantic desert ticks, not the little goof balls you see in town. Scared the shit out of me when I picked him up. All in all it was a lovely long walk in the high desert for no good reason. I personally loved being out there under the big blue sky, wandering around and enjoying the air and the land. Sigh. I think the next trip is going to be either down along the Mexican border or possibly up in the Central Valley. Maybe after the Valley I'll head out to Doug's for a little gourmet meal and some coastal living. It could happen.

Hope all is well with whoever might be reading this crap.

Peace out, bitches!

There's only one proper way for a professional soldier to die: the last bullet of the last battle of the last war.

It is now time for some serious ranting as it is 4am and I'm just getting home from a "freebie." Yep, worked three days in a row for just above minimum wage, as a favor, and got served. Showed up for work, dropped my pants and grabbed my ankles for 2o hours! Why? What the hell is up with these people?

Geek Squad has something to do with Best Buy, the discount electronics mega-corporation, and we had something to do with making a commercial for these smug bastards. For some gawd awful reason Local 600, my union, my labor relations representative, decided it would be OK to drop my rate from $55/hour to $8/hour but still give me my union hours, of which I now have a ton, and hey, why not? I mean, who the fuck wants to get paid their actual rate by a company who is shitting money left and right? I guess Best Buy isn't weathering the financial crisis so well. Boo-hoo, I'd better help them out by dropping my rate? Yeah, I could have said no but the DP and director are great guys and I did just make a crap load of money off of them although I did work for every dollar of said funds. I don't mind doing freebies but I do mind when everyone in charge shows up with no fucking idea of what they want to do. As a testament to the professionalism of LA crews, we worked. We worked very hard for at least 14 hours a fucking day while the creatives (two twenty-somethings with zits and bad haircuts) and the agency (four fat chicks in designer fat chick clothes) all dicked around and kept inventing shots. Good times. I can't wait for the economy to really hit the shitter if only so that people like this get shit canned and swept into the dustbin of the country's memory. "Hey, lookie here, I found a whole dumpster full of ad dicks! Looks like someone threw away a bunch of useless jackasses." 

What really made it painful was that we were doing special effects shots: shoot a tv and then make a scaled up green screen version of the TV out of pipe and what not so you can shoot the actors interacting with the TV. Comp it together later and it should look great if you shoot all of the separate elements correctly. For some reason our thoroughly useless Post Supervisor who, in a curious twist, was old, kept insisting on shooting the plates, or real stuff, first. This led to the rather annoying discovery that we needed to shoot most of our green screen stuff from 150 feet away (I knew right away this would happen but didn't say anything because I'm a jerk). Good thing the stage had other sets built on it. To get the proper distance away took some serious fucking rigging and maneuvering and basically added a ton of time on to our day. In addition, I had to keep rigging the camera into a scissor lift and then back to dolly over and over again because no one could figure any of our shots out ahead of time. The DP and I started loosing it and eventually began pelting everyone we could with racist slurs and jellybeans. Who says educated people can't have fun?

I am so very tired of this kind of dumb-ass, amateur hour shit. I'm also just really tired. Ghost is asleep and brushed out and happy. I'm going to pass out now and in the morning we're going quail hunting. I don't even care if I even see a quail or a rabbit, I just don't want to be anywhere near Hollywood for a little while. I want to walk around in the high desert and enjoy the air and the smells and the big blue sky and my dog's company. If we're lucky I'll murder a few critters and Ghost will retrieve them and we both will feel very happy and at one with the world. Hallelujah.

Peace out, bitches!