Question…
Thursday March 29th 2007, 3:02 pm
Would the instrumentals from Frank Zappa’s The Grand Wazoo make for good children’s music? Because I keep listening to “Cleetus Awreetus Awrightus” and think how it would have appealed to my young and tender mind, and the results are pretty darn good.
And while I don’t want to be one of those parents who shovels Bach down his kids’ throats (”You’ll take your ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’ and take it, little mister!”), I also cringe at the thought of the apartment filled with the sounds of “The Wheels on the Bus” as done by the Saccharine Kidz Korale. Is the silliness of this album, or the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band or anything of this nature good or bad for the tykes?
This just in: Entire Membership of Oprah’s Book Club Commits Suicide
Thursday March 29th 2007, 9:13 am
…’cause, dude. Cormac McCarthy? That takes some serious ovaries, Ms. Winfrey.
The other Rakunas boy…
Tuesday March 27th 2007, 1:34 pm
If you haven’t been following my brother’s adventures as he treks across the frozen wastes of Siberia (he’s actually in beautiful Lithuania right now), you’re missing out. Clicky the linky and hop on the Big Red Train
RAGE!!1!
Tuesday March 27th 2007, 9:51 am
Dear Santa Monica City Council Members-
Yesterday, I got a parking ticket outside my apartment.
Now, this happens on the occasional Tuesday or Wednesday when I forget to move my car for the street sweepers, but yesterday was Monday. The SMPD Interceptors usually stay away from my neighborhood on Mondays, so you can imagine my surprise and anger when I leaped in the car to go to the gym and saw that little white and sea green envelope stuck in my windshield wipers.
As I plucked it off, I noticed a new sign, one that, as far as I can tell, hadn’t been there until this weekend when I was in Oxnard for two days. It said this:
NO PARKING SCHOOL DAYS, MONDAY-FRIDAY, 7-9 AM AND 2-4 PM.
SCHOOL LOADING ZONE.
Now, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Lincoln Middle School since I moved here eleven years ago. I love the community orchestra that plays on Tuesday nights. I hate the morning drop-off traffic. I love that I can jog on the track in the evenings. I hate the way parking vanishes whenever there’s a school function.
This new signage knocks our relationship way into hate.
I’m mad at two groups, folks, and one of them is you. It’s not the ticket, but the lack of warning. Never in the past twelve months have I gotten a letter, a door-hanger or a phone call that had to do with this change in parking. Why is it whenever there’s something that has to do with the City’s long term planning, I’m inundated with mailers, but when something happens that affects the day-to-day living of me and my neighbors, I don’t hear a peep out of the City offices?
The other group, of course, is the parents of LMS students. I find it amusing that the City will undertake traffic calming measures to change people’s driving habits on Wilshire Boulevard or enact legislation to make Santa Monica more sustainable, but it won’t do a damn thing to encourage kids to walk, bike or take the Big Blue to school. More importantly, it won’t do anything to discourage parents from clogging up the intersections of 14th Street with California and Washington Avenues, intersections that already get plenty of traffic thanks to 14th Street’s reputation as the fast way to get across town.
There is, I think, a solution that will help maintain a balance between the parking needs of the neighborhood and the safety needs of the students and parents, and it is this: blow up the school. Just pack the fucker with dynamite and level the goddamn thing. Then pave over it, build a monument of a man with his head between his legs and his head up his ass, and we’ll always remember how you continue to screw up and make me resent ever voting for any of you.
Love and kisses,
Adam Rakunas
[Note: no, that last paragraph won't be in the letter I send to the City Council. But, dude, it felt good to write.]
Some quick thoughts before the carbs kick in…
Sunday March 18th 2007, 9:25 pm
So, John Scalzi, whose work I quite like, is throwing his hat in the ring as a write-in candidate for president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. I’m pretty sure only two readers of this site give a fig, but what the hell.
I find this whole thing interesting, not because of the inside baseball aspects of it, but because it’s taken John’s posting to create a spike in blog traffic regarding that hoary old organization whose purpose is…well, damned if I know. SFWA has always seemed like the kind of group one joins just to have the privilege of resigning in a huff over something. Yes, SFWA members vote for the Nebulas. Yes, SFWA does the excellent Writers Beware microsite to warn the unwary about the bastards in the publisher/agency scam axis.
But the fact that SFWA is dealing with the literature of the future, of the yet-to-be, of the wild and out there, and yet hasn’t leaped onto the Intartubes with gusto is funny and sad. Funny just ’cause it’s the kind of thing that provides one’s RDA of irony, and sad because of all the people who should be down with things like social networking, crowd intelligence and Intartoasters, the membership of SFWA should be at the top of the list. I’m really curious how many people have read Jason’s series on marketing for science fiction writers and said, “Really? I didn’t know that. Huh.” I do this crap for a living, but there are bits and pieces of it that any person can and should grasp just because they’re about sharing information, and despite what the people who take pride in their not know how to use a computer say, you are ignorant of this stuff at your career’s peril.
Yes, this is arrogant as hell of me to say. Yes, I don’t have a reputational leg to stand on. Yet I don’t want to see the craft I love go down in flames just because its supposed protectors are too fucking stubborn to learn how to use the internet for promoting themselves, their works, and their publications. I don’t know if we’re going to have an e-reader that’ll make things easier. I don’t know if America’s going to get its mobile phone and connectivity levels up to that of Asia. I don’t care. Just stop bitching, suck it up, and get on the stick. The future is coming, people, and you’d better start paddling right the heck now so you have a chance of catching that wave.
(Executive summary for the unmedicated: don’t let Adam eat a lot of yams before going to bed.)
Tough to tell…
Friday March 09th 2007, 10:17 am
This morning’s ride was good. Kept up with the pack, had a nice guy who manufactures snack foods pick my brain about advertising (I now understand why golf is the business sport of choice; it’s tough to get chummy at 20 mph on a busy street), didn’t have an H2 attempt to crush me.
One odd thing: as we got into Marina del Rey, we passed a tall, disheveled girl in a plaid skirt, blazer and white blouse. Either the messy look is making a comeback at the Brentwood School, or some working girl who caters to the Naughty Schoolgirl clientèle was waiting for a cab home. In that neighborhood? Tough to tell.
No more hate
Wednesday March 07th 2007, 9:41 am
I had an idea for a book that stemmed from a story I wrote. It was about the aftermath of a second American Civil War, when the country was partitioned along the mythical red and blue lines. One of the things that helped precipitate the war was good ol’ talk radio, which I’ve written about before. I keep listening to it, telling myself that great writing lie: “It’s just research.”
Not anymore. It’s become an addiction, and I’m done with it. I’ve gotten enough of the rhythms of the hosts’ cadences, from their bloviating self-aggrandizement to their shrill cries of how everyone, including the host and the listener, are stupid to know how to recreate them on paper. There’s only so much time, and only so much bullshit a man should have to put up with. Whether it’s Michael Savage railing about how people like me want to bring about the destruction of America and turn all of us into Muslims or John Ziegler screaming about how the media is getting the story wrong about Iraq because they want us to lose, I’ve had enough. (And, by the way, John, you’re 40. The Army raised the recruitment age to 42. Isn’t there a recruitment office nearby KFI’s studios?) First it was educational, then it was comedy, and now it’s just sad.
There are better things to do with my time in the car, like listen to audiobooks or learn Mandarin or memorize song lyrics. So, adios, boys. You never were talking to me anyway.
