By: Annna
[2001-05-04]
Ukulele Week: Day Five
two more days, dammit
Image stolen from Carol Lay
Okay,
this time when I say "no text," I mean it.
I didn't get to a scanner for the
[REDACTED] so I have to do that early tomorrow morning, before the librarians send their stapler ninja squads over here for renewing books too many times.
Instead, I went to class. Then I wrote a paper. I do that a
lot. I was going to submit sites to
Portal of Evil (I have a whole bunch I need to get in), and I was going to go through the ads looking for an apartment, but I ended up doing more translating for Old English and working on another paper. Old English is getting pretty good - we're at a point where I can go for lines and lines without looking anything up. It's going on my résumé, you can be sure.
Then I went to the vegan Chinese restaurant with a couple of vegetarian associates. It was all right, particularly if you like tofu, which I do. I like tofu and I like anything that you put sweet and sour sauce on, so it was a nice experience. They gave us not only fortune cookies but ginger cookies as well. Neat!
(I ate an entire box of ginger candy a few weeks ago when my bloodsugar was low. I think it dissolved the lining of my throat; I caught cold the next day. Moral: ginger candy is a tremendous force for good or evil.)
Then the two vegetarians and I went and played pool. I won once out of three games, which at least preserves my equilibrium. Then we played air hockey, and I won quite a bit. I really like air hockey, particularly with people who are careful enough not to hit the puck while it's still spinning. We played long and hard - the table had moved several feet from its original location by the time we were done playing.
Then I went back to my dorm and saw the last 10 minutes of
Survivor, long enough to grab many unopened bags of snacks and bottles of soda at the urging of the RAs who had grossly overbought for the hall
Survivor party. Their loss, my delicious chips and stolen soda for
Spider!
Anyway, in between that I managed to record two songs:
Electric Guitar, by the Talking Heads, 1.53 MB. I had to be quiet because my neighbors have been striking up ukulele-related conversations with me lately. Not
angry ukulele-related conversations, but they're still entirely too abreast of my ukulele situation.
Then I did, at Jonas' suggestion,
Rockaway Beach by the Ramones, 1.52 MB. I have other Ramones songs I'd rather do, but I think they'll wait until tomorrow.
I also got a telephone call today from a young man. At first my heart leapt into my throat like it always does when I get calls from guys with a certain kind of voice -
crap, it's a lawyer, the hammer has fallen, I'm getting sued for Portal of Evil/Worst DM Ever, time to dye my hair and change my name and go live in Montana, killing people and taking their pancreases - but it turned out to be the guy in Hawaii, saying he shipped my tenor ukulele. Also he was from Corvallis, so we talked about Oregon on his employer's dime for a little while.
So that's good news, then.
Well, you could write a song to the tune of "Green Beret;"
"The Ballad of the Worst DM"
Yes, because everyone does what I say, hahahah!
Well, so far I've had a couple of Bombay Gins&Tonic with Rose's Lime
and a Twist; I'm going to have a few more with raw salmon for breakfast, with rice rolled in seaweed. My 1st (E) string broke, I'll
bike to the Guitar Center before it gets to 90F today; what should I do after that? Strum somnolent Mexican Cinco de Mayo Siesta Misic?
http://www.ezln.org
she likes me!
she really likes me!!
there's a really good vegan restaurant in Toronto that has pretty good substitutes for almost anything you'd find in a normal chinese restaurant. After going vegetarian the only food I really missed was sweet n' sour chicken balls. Last week I enjoyed a large order of fatty fried gluton in sugar sauce, and I am now a complete man.
There's a vegetarian chinese restaurant in Oakland's Chinatown. (Oakland's Chinatown is the best place in the whole damn bay area). I want to go there sometime and see if they have schezhuan (sp?) tofu, or kung pao tofu.
I am not an ethical vegetarian.
I'd kill a cow with a damn hammer, right on the floor of the restaurant, if it meant eating it wouldn't give me the HORRIBLE HORRIBLE BRAIN HOLE DEATH. But since that's not happening, I eat no mammal and as few mammal-squeezings as possible, living off dorm food as I do.
No birds and fish because I don't like birds and fish because I don't want to be half-assed about it.
And I'd eat nearly anything if you battered it, deep-fried it and covered it in sweet-n-sour sauce. I'm talking leaves and twigs that have fallen into the fry-o-later, here.
I like driving thru the Oakland tunnel from Alameda at 100mph and crowding the rail to watch the sparks fly. Coming out of the tunnel and seeing Oakland's Chinatown with it's totally unintelligable street signs in the afternoon sun makes me want to hurry home and stir my cast iron cauldron of fried tofu, mung beans, lentils, macrobiotic brown rice with my banjo. Then, I look for the store with the nekkid ducks hanging in the window; I call it the nekkid duck store, and get one pound of duck, chopped, and a pound of bbq pork. It's great washed down with Cinzano, and moon cakes for dessert with black tea. As the Chinese say, "Wah ping!"
Deep purple. I didn't mean that like a pun. A dark purple, like the visited links colour. That's my suggestion.
"The Battle Of Maldon" arrived today, it's fabulous! The certificate of aunthenticity is great, and so are the bonus rabbit meat ads. Rabbit is really good, and one of the many protein-filled reasons I could never become a vegetarian. My philosophy of religion prof this term was a vegan. Priorities? He couldn't show up for the final cos he went to the U2 concert... But yesterday I mowed down on lemon chicken, pork dumplings, and chicken fried rice, at the Ridge Restaurant (I believe it's called -- the Chinese restaurant right next to the Ridge theatre, where the UBC student film festival was playing! Hooray for the UBC student films. Except for the fourth years, because they were mostly garbage).
Anyway, yesterday I played these songs to a devout Devo/TH/TMBG fan
friend of mine (and aforementioned student film maker): he was initially reluctant to hear ukelele (oops) renditions, and I believe was disturbed to be listening to them, but deep down I know he liked them. How could one not? Indeed.
In fact, yesterday was quite the Devo Day: after an enjoyable experience at the film festival (we left before the fourth year movies, having seen them all the night before), and two Aqua-rific games at Commodore Lanes, we were walking down Granville St, and lo! there was the Pita Pit. Well, we had been advised to go there earlier for it was Thursday, and Thursdays are "Wear a tie, get a free Coke" day at the Pita Pit, and
Louie always wears a tie. But we weren't hungry. So we walked on pastt -- but wait! Why, they're playing "Gut Feeling"! In fact, they were playing all of "Devo's Greatest Hits", so we felt compelled to go in, and Louie bought a pita, and got his free coke, and that's basically my story.
David Byrne is playing in Vancouver on the 27th, so I think I just might go; but now, I must to the mall and buy the
Wipeouters and
Gorillaz CDs!
Well that was a lot.
David Byrne's playing here, too! There was a Chinese bakery in Van called, "Wo Fat." They had the best damned moon cakes, and black bean cakes, and some kind of squash cakes. If I could get those moon cakes,
I'd give up meat, for a while, anyway. Adults don't need long strand protein, but growing kids need milk and eggs. Adults can survive on beans and grains. But there's nothing quite like the thrill of chasing down a wildebeast.
You did no such thing as driving 100 miles per hour through the Posie tube, and the Chinese don't say wah ping, the Jamaicans do. I'M TOO SHARP FOR YOU TO PULL THAT KIND OF STUFF ON ME.
I eat meat. I like animals and don't like the thought of slaughtering them, but as long as I can maintain the belief that there's no connection between cows and shrinkwrapped beef at the store I'm OK.
David Byrne is already sold out for his San Francisco show. I am considering a trip to Portland for that show. I don't know yet. I'll have to act fast.
They were here just last week or the week before filming The Matrix 2 in the Webster tube, the underwater tunnel that connects Oakland to Alameda. Apparently they shot stuff in downtown Oakland too.
and workin' overtime.
that's my request for a uke cover during the weekend, since at the beginning I thought Annna would put in a standard 5-day work week.
that, or Workin' For the Weekend, which Mr. Bungle also covers.
hey, Weezer fans. I hear the singer used to be in a metal band. curious to hear them, if anyone knows the name.
meat, fish, and poultry are all nice. dairy, though, is better as an occasional treat, since I don't digest it as well. I am trying to cut my sugar and processed grain intake, not because I'm on that goofy caveman diet, but because my dad's diabetic, and I'm trying not to inherit it from him. I could give up meat if I had to, but I've no health demands hanging over my head, and slow-moving, stocky quadrupeds fit into the same place in the food chain no matter which carnivore makes lunch of them, so I see no reason to.
that said, one of the best meals I had was at a veggie Chinese place in Philly, called Harmony.
Why, suh! Do you doubt my veracity? My bud Klaus had bought two big Ford Galaxies for two hundred bucks to use for work, real junkers. So,
would you believe 78mph and bouncing off the tunnel walls in a shower of sparks? "Wah ping!" means "peace" in Cantonese, but be careful how you say it because it means something rilly bad in Mandarin! They make a lot of movies around there. Once, when Valerie Bertanelli was filming "The Princess and the Cabdriver," I discovered that the catering wagon will give out great food! Niles, California is worth a short visit, close by, there's a street of antique shops and lots of statues of Charlie Chaplin. Charlie filmed many of his films in Niles.
In Mexico City, there was a veggie restaurant called "La Cumbre." It means like "meeting" or "summit meeting" but it's kind of a pun, too,
"legumbre" is like lentils and junk. Instead of saying "bon apetit" at the beginning of a meal, the Mexicans yell "buen provecho!" to the room in general after they finish.
Well if you swiped the side of the Posie tube then I am impressed. I Didn't know wah ping meant anything in Chinese, but I'm pretty sure it means "what's happening" in batwah, or whatever that Jamaican language is. (Maybe it's spelled wa' 'ping?)
I want to go to Mexico city someday. Just to see the most populated city in the world. I think it's that, anyway. Someone also told me it has lots of VW vans. Someone else told me it had choking dust that came from lots of dried up dog feces.
I think that the best way to travel in Mexico is by train; it's fun and cheap: Laredo to Mexico City for about ten bucks. Also, they want like a five hundred dollar deposit if you take your car in. There's a great place on the way there called Real de Catorce, "The Way of 14"
There are 28 days in the Lunar cycle, and the Huichole Indians there have major festivals scheduled on half-moons: 14's
That Caribean patoise is a delightful language, although I don't understand much of it. That's cool about Matrix2 being filmed in Oakland. There's a Silent Film Festival in Niles the first part of June.
