brand new. brand new. brand new and the economist. and you.
not you so much. This entry is going to be mostly about the other four things in the title. first up brand new.
Most important news of the decade. Brand New has put up two tour dates in cold far away places where I will not be on those dates. Why is this vitally important? Because it means they intend on being done with their album by 4/20 (hehe) the date of their first show. Mmmmmmm brand new brand new album. Of secondary importance maybe they will finally come and do a show out here. and when they do I will be very very happy. I'm going to start saving my money now for a brand new show and 3 copies of the new album. cuz that was my justification for downloading the leaked demos. which I have listened to at least 11 times on iTunes and some similar number on my ipod. Multiply that by the 44 minutes that the album takes up and for a very real fraction of the past month I have been listening to those demos. I'm going to be singing along with my new cd the day it gets released. hopefully the RIAA doens't notice. but then again it's already in this journal and I've read several stories about police agencies reading livejournals, deadjournals, myspaces, facebooks looking for crimes, so if they really cared I'd probably already be sued.
brand new. live or in round plastic form soon. mmmm. I think I'm just going to be inserting that into random conversation for the next while.
Professor: It forms toluene as the major product because aromaticity is a stronger stabilizing factor than conjugation.
Me: mmm brand new. How many copies of the album are you going to buy?
Professor: Quoi? Je n'écoute pas la musique américaine. C'est merde.
Me: Homo says quoi!
Professor: Quoi? [slowly releases what I said. dejected look] C'est vrai. J'adore le cock.
I have no reason to believe that my chem professor speaks French or that he loves the cock (in fact he's been married three times, so I doubt it, but then again, now that I think about it, maybe that's why he's been divorced three times) but the visual of that man speaking french is hilarious. I know most of you can't visualize that because you've never met him, but I promise, it's great. Also I like how this illustrates my stereotype that all French people are outraged by everything and their immeidate response is always to shriek Quoi! It's mostly true. At any given time 40% of people in Paris are in the process of looking aghast or shrieking Quoi!
other things on the agenda.
The Economist. Best thing ever. A couple weeks ago they had an article on French anti-amercanism ( I didn't even plan for that to link up so well. I also didn't plan to start using link up. It's a british thing that I guess I've now stolen) anyway I saw it in the table on contents and I was like "Great, another article on this crap. None of these articles is any good because everyone assumes we don't get along with the French because we are very different people, when in fact we clash because we are exactly the same." Then the economist pulls a fast one on me. It gets it exactly right. The whole article is on how similar we are and why. How the french drink up american culture like it's, well like it's coca cola back when there was still cocaine in it, how we both think we have a responsibilty to change the world, how we both have foundations in radical political idealism.
Then the other day they had an article about racism in Los Angeles and the attention it is getting because of, that movie I hate, Crash. OK I don't hate it but I hate that it won the oscar (brokeback and good night and good luck are both much better movies. the oscars went with the populist choice, maybe that's the road the want to go down) and I hate the way it portrays Los Angeles as some seething pot of racial hatred: several ethnicities sharing the same space and clashing while the do it. When in fact Los Angeles is the most culturally diverse city on the planet (in the history of the world) and it does a pretty damn good job of having it's enormous population of white americans, mexicans, black americans, chinese, persians, koreans, japenese, jews, hungarians, (bet you didn't know that LA has the largest population of hungarians outside of hungary) guatamalans, nicaraguans, ecuadorans, columbians and many more. The one thing it doesn't do a good job of is getting its blacks and hispanics to get along, and that tension is the one of the biggest problems facing the city. I wrote a whole long journal entry about how Crash presented tension between the major racial groups in LA in pretty much every combination except hispanic-black, the one we need to be worrying about, but I didn't post it publicly because it ended up being for ever long and no one would have read it. Then last week or so the economist article went into detail about the hispanic-black problem in LA and praised Crash for bring race in LA to light. So minus 5 for not realizing that it's the one racial tension that Crash didn't mention, but plus 10 for at least knowing that that's where the problem is. Another 2 for pointing out that that issue doesn't get attention because all the white people live on the west side and the blacks and mexicans are fighting it out over turf in south and east LA. We see the middle easternerrs because they live here too (as I write this in westwood, a five minute drive could take me into either bel-air or little persia where are the signs are in arabic and farsi) We go into downtown so we see the the asians too but hardly any white people spend any significant amount of time in any of areas that used to be 99% black and are now 49/49% black/hispanic. The blacks aren't happy about the new guys taking their houses, job, and drug turf and the mexicans are immigrating and reproducing faster so their demand for more room isn't stopping anytime soon. The blacks are also angry about a perception by whites that hispanics work harder than black people so it's getting harder for a black man to get hired in tough but decently paid manual labor jobs like construction.
that's my rant about racism and how crash gets us looking but in the wrong direction. although it was right in pointing out how much improving police-black relations need to do. I think it's gotten better since the rodney king incident but neither group trusts the other and I don't know how/if we are going to fix that. More black police officers?
go see good night and good luck. not enough poeple did. depressing and enlightening at the same time. If TV news was like this 50 years ago, we've definitely slipped, about a mile or two, but it gives me hope that one day it'll improve.
only 365 days till the next saint patrick's day. god that seems so far away. I fucking love this holiday and had to spend most of it writing computer code. laaaaame. the party was pretty good though.
Most important news of the decade. Brand New has put up two tour dates in cold far away places where I will not be on those dates. Why is this vitally important? Because it means they intend on being done with their album by 4/20 (hehe) the date of their first show. Mmmmmmm brand new brand new album. Of secondary importance maybe they will finally come and do a show out here. and when they do I will be very very happy. I'm going to start saving my money now for a brand new show and 3 copies of the new album. cuz that was my justification for downloading the leaked demos. which I have listened to at least 11 times on iTunes and some similar number on my ipod. Multiply that by the 44 minutes that the album takes up and for a very real fraction of the past month I have been listening to those demos. I'm going to be singing along with my new cd the day it gets released. hopefully the RIAA doens't notice. but then again it's already in this journal and I've read several stories about police agencies reading livejournals, deadjournals, myspaces, facebooks looking for crimes, so if they really cared I'd probably already be sued.
brand new. live or in round plastic form soon. mmmm. I think I'm just going to be inserting that into random conversation for the next while.
Professor: It forms toluene as the major product because aromaticity is a stronger stabilizing factor than conjugation.
Me: mmm brand new. How many copies of the album are you going to buy?
Professor: Quoi? Je n'écoute pas la musique américaine. C'est merde.
Me: Homo says quoi!
Professor: Quoi? [slowly releases what I said. dejected look] C'est vrai. J'adore le cock.
I have no reason to believe that my chem professor speaks French or that he loves the cock (in fact he's been married three times, so I doubt it, but then again, now that I think about it, maybe that's why he's been divorced three times) but the visual of that man speaking french is hilarious. I know most of you can't visualize that because you've never met him, but I promise, it's great. Also I like how this illustrates my stereotype that all French people are outraged by everything and their immeidate response is always to shriek Quoi! It's mostly true. At any given time 40% of people in Paris are in the process of looking aghast or shrieking Quoi!
other things on the agenda.
The Economist. Best thing ever. A couple weeks ago they had an article on French anti-amercanism ( I didn't even plan for that to link up so well. I also didn't plan to start using link up. It's a british thing that I guess I've now stolen) anyway I saw it in the table on contents and I was like "Great, another article on this crap. None of these articles is any good because everyone assumes we don't get along with the French because we are very different people, when in fact we clash because we are exactly the same." Then the economist pulls a fast one on me. It gets it exactly right. The whole article is on how similar we are and why. How the french drink up american culture like it's, well like it's coca cola back when there was still cocaine in it, how we both think we have a responsibilty to change the world, how we both have foundations in radical political idealism.
Then the other day they had an article about racism in Los Angeles and the attention it is getting because of, that movie I hate, Crash. OK I don't hate it but I hate that it won the oscar (brokeback and good night and good luck are both much better movies. the oscars went with the populist choice, maybe that's the road the want to go down) and I hate the way it portrays Los Angeles as some seething pot of racial hatred: several ethnicities sharing the same space and clashing while the do it. When in fact Los Angeles is the most culturally diverse city on the planet (in the history of the world) and it does a pretty damn good job of having it's enormous population of white americans, mexicans, black americans, chinese, persians, koreans, japenese, jews, hungarians, (bet you didn't know that LA has the largest population of hungarians outside of hungary) guatamalans, nicaraguans, ecuadorans, columbians and many more. The one thing it doesn't do a good job of is getting its blacks and hispanics to get along, and that tension is the one of the biggest problems facing the city. I wrote a whole long journal entry about how Crash presented tension between the major racial groups in LA in pretty much every combination except hispanic-black, the one we need to be worrying about, but I didn't post it publicly because it ended up being for ever long and no one would have read it. Then last week or so the economist article went into detail about the hispanic-black problem in LA and praised Crash for bring race in LA to light. So minus 5 for not realizing that it's the one racial tension that Crash didn't mention, but plus 10 for at least knowing that that's where the problem is. Another 2 for pointing out that that issue doesn't get attention because all the white people live on the west side and the blacks and mexicans are fighting it out over turf in south and east LA. We see the middle easternerrs because they live here too (as I write this in westwood, a five minute drive could take me into either bel-air or little persia where are the signs are in arabic and farsi) We go into downtown so we see the the asians too but hardly any white people spend any significant amount of time in any of areas that used to be 99% black and are now 49/49% black/hispanic. The blacks aren't happy about the new guys taking their houses, job, and drug turf and the mexicans are immigrating and reproducing faster so their demand for more room isn't stopping anytime soon. The blacks are also angry about a perception by whites that hispanics work harder than black people so it's getting harder for a black man to get hired in tough but decently paid manual labor jobs like construction.
that's my rant about racism and how crash gets us looking but in the wrong direction. although it was right in pointing out how much improving police-black relations need to do. I think it's gotten better since the rodney king incident but neither group trusts the other and I don't know how/if we are going to fix that. More black police officers?
go see good night and good luck. not enough poeple did. depressing and enlightening at the same time. If TV news was like this 50 years ago, we've definitely slipped, about a mile or two, but it gives me hope that one day it'll improve.
only 365 days till the next saint patrick's day. god that seems so far away. I fucking love this holiday and had to spend most of it writing computer code. laaaaame. the party was pretty good though.