Zip Me Goodnight

My duvet has given up on life, or at least on the part of its life that involved keeping me warm at night so for the last week, I've been sleeping in my sleeping bag. The first night I unfurled the sleeping bag, I got really excited and not just because I was anticipating staying warm all night--there's something about a sleeping bag that is inherently exciting. This is likely a Pavlovian response in which sleeping bags are connected to camping and sleepovers and the associated little kid excitement of sleeping somewhere weird and slightly uncomfortable and laughing about things in the dark until very late at night. Sleeping bags turn rocky beaches and the slick vinyl of summer camp mattresses into your own personal den of warm-cozy. Not only that, there's something about sleeping in a confined zippered sack that is actually super comfortable. Like how babies stop crying and conk out once they are swaddled.

Also, if the phone rings early in the morning, you can stand up, shove your feet into the corners of the bag and take your whole bed with you to answer it.

Google Street View

Google street view drove by my house in the morning when Eli was visiting. Weird.

Roach Patrol

My Spoon Is Still Too Big

The other day I was at the gas station again (the one on Fairfax and Beverly that's all dolled up to look like an oasis --turns out I go to a lot of theme gas stations) and they have these TV monitors on top of the pumps for people who can't stand to go without stimulus for 60 seconds at a time and I catch an ad for Poptarts with a very recognizable style.

Here it is:

I just caught the end of it. Just enough to wonder why someone would make this who earlier had made this:

Then I came home and did some research and found out Don Hertzfeldt didn't make the Pop Tarts ads; the Pop Tarts ads were ripping off Don Hertzfeldt. I guess one of the downsides of making a brilliant animated short about not selling out to the man is that it may get so successful that the man sees it, likes its countercultural morbid absurdity and uses it to sell refined flour and high fructose corn syrup to impressionable youths watching TV. Maybe he should have just taken the cash?

Walkscore

This is a good way to figure out whether you want to move to a neighborhood or not. One of the reasons I like my neighborhood so much is how much stuff is close by. My score is 92.

UnJunk

Remember that scene in LA STORY when Steve Martin's mail gets delivered and the letters come through the slot but then junk mail continues to be shoved through for another full minute until there is a puddle of it on the floor? Very true to life.

Here's how to opt out of receiving catalogues in the mail.

MAD Foldouts

When in elementary school, everything I learned about US politics in the sixties, seventies, and eighties was from MAD magazines. My Nana and Grandad passed on to me a bunch of Barbies from the sixties when I was around seven or eight that must have belonged to my dad's sister. A couple years later, my brother and I inherited a bunch of MAD magazines. It was a totally weird way to learn about sixties and seventies culture, but I think it worked. The foldouts were especially cool.

Art for Everyone

My new favorite website is 20x200.

Looking at drawings and paintings gets me excited to the point where I think I'm in the wrong business.

Things That Would Be Really Cool If People Actually Used Them

This, for one

Theatre Taste Test

Q: Wait, why is the Silent Movie Theatre on Fairfax the best place to see a movie?

A: Because the beer we smuggled in was the same kind as the beer the owner guy was wandering around handing out before the show started.

Q: Ah.

Green Gasoline and Other Miracles of Marketing

The other day I stopped for gas at the fancy BP gas station just south of Beverly Hills on Robertson. It's like fueling up at Pinkberry; the floor is really nice and kind of pebbly, everything is just so, aesthetically speaking. The lighting changes colors every couple seconds, there was peaceful music and the squeegee had an extra long handle so you don't have to lean on your car to reach the far edge of the windshield. The trash cans are futuristic like the pumps like the walls. There's a moist towelette dispenser in the wall. The cashier was a good-looking young blonde woman.

There was a woman at the next pump shrieking inanities into her cell phone while pumping gas, which is great only in that everyone within earshot was probably hoping that a spark in her phone would ignite the gas fumes and cause her to explode. I picked up some postcards that are biodegradable with flower seeds embedded in them.

The premise of this gas station is that it is eco-friendly. I read up on it, and apparently there are solar panels in the roof, the walls are made of recycled steel, the flooring is made of recycled glass, and fleets of seraphim form a protective angelic filter around the gasoline so it is non-polluting. Except that last part isn't true. Yeah, that's right, it's a gas station tarted up to make people feel super ecological and stylish about using gas.

Trendy environmentalism annoys the shit out of me. Environmentalism is not chic, folks. It's utilitarian and non-matching. It involves having less and using less. It involves washing it and using it again. Every ad I see touting a company's ecological consciousness has people wandering around in slomo through a rainforest, or an artfully composed shot of a sunflower, but they all involve the same aesthetic as this gas station: environmentalism equals clean. Are you kidding me? Chemicals equal clean. Environmentalism equals me not having AC and finding maggots in my trash can that I try to clean with vinegar but at a certain point say fuck it and clean with bleach. Environmentalism equals shoveling cow shit into your manure pile of hot rotting vegetables. Or hanging onto the same cell phone or computer when it is dinged up and ugly and parts of it don't work. Or flitering tap water instead of buying bottled. Or bringing your lunch to work in a jar. These things are not clean, they are not stylish and they don't make a much of a palpable difference to the environment, but that's what living ecologically actually is.

The danger of cool, clean, hip eco-friendly products is the same problem that Marie Antoinette had: you can run around and pretend to be a milkmaid all you want, but if the only savvy it brings you is to suggest cake-eating to cure the bread shortage, then you may find yourself out of game earlier than you had originally planned.