August 2007 Archives
I have my issues with the West Hollywood Sheriffs, mainly because they seem to do nothing about my noisy neighbor downstairs. I used to think they have nothing better to do, but I may have to rethink that assertion. Yes, I may even owe them an apology.
Yesterday, I woke up once again in the middle of the night because of some noise. The details are hazy, because I didn't bother getting up out of bed (although if I thought they were famous, I would have dug up my video camera and sold it to TMZ), but it appeared like a couple of people chased down some guy who had been doing something or other in the neighborhood. I heard one of the chasers say "You are not getting away with it this time!" Then some silence, followed by a couple of police cars pulling up.
The person who has being chased, as well as one of the people doing the chasing, were thrown on the ground and placed in cuffs. This surprised the person who was chasing down the criminal and the chaser's friend said "he didn't do anything!". One of the cop says "He sucker-punched that other guy! I saw him myself." The person who they were all chasing was pretty silent.
Over the next few minutes, the police took statements, tried to get the sucker puncher to shut up. A few more cars showed up, and it looks like the perpetrator, who from what I heard had been pulling fire alarms at nearby businesses, will probably show up on the streets in a few more weeks in an orange jump suit collecting trash with Winona Ryder or Paris Hilton or whichever celebrity has been in trouble lately.
Anyway, here's to the WeHo sheriffs for getting their man.
I think one of life's greatest pleasures is listening to conversations you aren't necessarily supposed to hear. It's always great for a little bit of amusement. I'm not talking about planting bugs in somebody's bedroom. Rather, I am talking about those people who love to have conversations in public and don't care what people think or who might hear them.
Public cell phone conversations are really funny.. A lot of people think that with only one half of the conversation public, nobody will be smart enough to catch on to what is really going on. Those people are wrong, and while they are annoying, they can be funny as well. There are a few times when I have been on the humorous end of a public cell-phone conversation. For example, I was returning a phone call to a friend of mine while at the supermarket after she said "Hello", I said "Hey baby!". A woman who was picking out some apples in the produce department turned around, thinking I was talking to her (she was cute, but married, and I am no home wrekcer). The look on her face said she wanted to smack me like I had just pinched her ass, but when she saw that I was on the phone, her look turned to one that was slightly perturbed, as if she was upset her husband doesn't answer the phone like I did.
However, the best conversations in public happen at a restaurant. I've mentioned Genghis Cohen, my favorite Chinese place in LA before, and the combination of their layout and the eclectic clientele always make for some good eavesdropping.
Case 1: There were two older couples eating at a table about halfway across the restaurant. I couldn't really hear their conversation, but you could hear the laughter at the table. I am not sure what was so funny, or if there was just a few more extra martinis at the table, but one person in particular was really enjoying themselves. the laugh sort of wound up from a chuckle into an all-out wail. The people at my table started laughing immediately, and every single time it happened, we would laugh a little louder. Then we started noticing other tables were all laughing at these other people laughing, and it got a little crazy. Eventually, the original offenders got their garlic chicken, and things calmed down, but it was funny.
Case 2: Sometimes, there are things that you just don't want to hear about at dinner. One of those would be a person describing in detail their escapades with prostitutes in Asia. On a different day at Genghis Cohen, that is exactly what happened. Somebody was telling his friends about his time taking advantage of the rampant poverty in some southeast Asian nation where he had a hooker or two. After getting the gist of the story, I didn't really want to hear anymore, but I did here the guy talk about the nickname one of the girls gave him - Mikey Strong Cock. Yes, Mikey Strong Cock. Hearing that was bad enough, but this guy also imitated the accent his concubine had, and that made it even worse. I couldn't have been the only person who heard him, and I wonder how many people he tells that story to thinking that it will make him look impressive.
So, I'm going through the blog, attempting to finish up some old entries that I was too lazy to publish. One of them was called "Reply-to-all". I try to keep in touch with people as much as possible, and I do it through e-mail. The problem is that I don't always get right to my e-mail, so it may be weeks or months before I get around to replying to something. But that has absolutely nothing to do with what I am talking about.
The title "Reply-to-all" had to do with a particularly annoying part of e-mail correspondence. I generally can't stand forwards, but I understand why people send them, and I read all of the ones sent to me. I guess the thing that really pisses me off about mass e-mails is the way people will reply to everybody instead of just replying to sender.
As rants go, this is a pretty week one, I'll admit, but it pissed me off enough one day that I had to write something about it. I figure if I establish enough of my neuroses, I will eventually have a built-in insanity defense in less than a decade.
Movable Type recently released version 4.0 of their product and so I've upgraded the blog. I had to fool around with a bunch of templates, so some things may be broken. Let me know if something is f-d up. I am still tweaking fonts and colors as well, so let me know if anything is hard to read.
It's taken me a little while to write about Phil Rizzuto, the great Yankee shortstop who died yesterday at the age of 89. I was really saddened by the passing. I never saw Rizzuto play in the field, but as I grew up in upstate NY in the 80s, I listened to him call many Yankee games on television.
I've mentioned it before, but the Yankees during the 1980s were horrible. There was very little to cheer about. I probably should have been a Mets fan because they were the ones winning World Series games and pennants. The Yankees had Mattingly and Winfield and Henderson, but from the time I came to the states, I didn't see a Yankees playoff victory until 1994.
One thing that kept me coming back and loving Yankee baseball, even in the lean years, was the Scooter. I would watch games with my grandpa and listen to Rizzuto talk about DiMaggio and Berra and Mantle when the Yankees were always winning world series games. Even if there were no other reasons to watch the Yankees, you could always count on Phil Rizzuto.
Scooter knew a lot about baseball and had some great stories about some of the greatest teams and the greatest players, he never came across like he was trying to impress you with his knowledge. He was just passing along a story to the people on television like he was everybody's uncle. Scooter would sometimes ramble, but he really made Yankee stadium a fun place to be.
Holy cow, indeed.
Anyway, just to show you that I have always been a little moody, I offer you my first passport picture, taken 25 years ago, a little while before I came to the states. There are plenty of pictures of me as a baby out there, but I've always liked this one. I like my routines, and I have been pulling off that face for a quarter century.
I am not sure what I was thinking in that photograph. Perhaps "The rain forest is too fucking hot" or "I hope my head grows big enough to contain these ears". One great thing about that picture though, is all the hair I used to have. My middle name comes from my African grandfather, and I really did inherit his hair line.
