Pelosi, you need to be arrested for loitering.


mysql> select count(*) from logs;

mysql> truncate logs;
Query OK, 14383750 rows affected (3 hours 11 min 15.98 sec)


3 hours to delete 15 million rows. Really? I’d think that’s a operation that you could speed up just a tad bit.

• Just because a table has two dimensions doesn’t mean it’s ok to put 4 chairs at it. This especially pisses me off in Japanese restaurants where you typically get a bunch of small dishes that fill up a standard two person table quickly. If it’s already a small table, get rid of any centerpieces or flowers. Damn it.
• My soup bowl is empty. I don’t care how quickly I ate it, or if the kitchen is backed up. Get rid of it. I don’t need to stare at an empty dish for 10 minutes. Make sure my drinks are full in the interim.
• No food other than ice cream should be served ice cold. This goes for salads, cold appetizers, anything. There’s a certain temperature that food needs to hit to actually taste like anything. My sashimi shouldn’t taste like it just came out of a deep freeze. If I have to wait 10 minutes for food to heat to a proper temperature, you’ve failed
• This especially goes for butter. It’s for spreading, not for carving.
• I’m done with my meal. All the dishes are gone. I can’t possibly be drinking anything because I don’t have a glass. Bring me my check. Bring it to me now. Just. bring. it. to. me.
• Know what you’re out of. If there’s a beer that you don’t have on tap, tell me about it when I order it, don’t check with the bartender. Know what soups you have, there will be a quiz.

Remarkably, Will believes everyone is basically good.

“Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, ‘let me do the most evil thing I can do today’,” said Will. “I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was ‘good’. Stuff like that just needs reprogramming.

Of course the JDL as an organization resembles PETA and godhatesfags.com in that they believe any press is good press so they issue a press release which says, in part:

Smith’s comments are ignorant, detestable and offensive. They spit on the memory of every person murdered by the Nazis. His disgusting words stick a knife in the backs of every veteran who fought so valiantly to save the world from those aspirations of Adolf Hitler. Smith’s comments also cast the perpetrators of the Holocaust as misguided fellows rather than the repulsive villains of history they truly were.

If people do not understand how idiotic and insensitive it was to make such a comment, it is like a Jew saying that James Earl Ray, the assassin of Rev. Martin Luther King, was basically a good person who did a “bad thing.”

The Jewish Defense League is calling on Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to repudiate the comments made by Smith, his friend and supporter.

Now, I ask you, what’s a better teaching device: The idea that Hitler is almost supernaturally evil, almost transcending humanity, or the idea that Hitler was a deeply flawed hateful human being that managed to get other people to follow him, who was partially insane and partially a product of his environment?

Which one is scarier? Which idea can we learn more from? Which idea allows us to study psychopathic behavior and maybe actually learn something to prevent similar occurrences in the future.

Nobody ever said Hitler was good, you pricks. It was said that he was misguided and his own flawed perception of “good” may have been different than everyone else’s. There are a lot of people (Fred Phelps for one) that could probably commit the same kind of atrocities, given the proper time, place, and audience. The same thing has happened in Africa and the Balkans on a smaller scale. A despot decides he doesn’t like a certain ethnic group, gets a group of followers, and things go to shit. Hitler just happened to be in the right place at the right time to do a shitload of damage. The lesson to be learned about Hitler lies in studying his humanity, not in the supernatural evil that he represents.

Turduckens, however, are allowed, and encouraged.

What does Big Bear have in common with Germany? As near as I can figure: pine trees.

For some reason I think this sounds like a fun idea, since hey, I didn’t have anything planned right now anyway except for playing with my camera (taking like 100 pictures of a fucking seagull, with different aperture settings, seeing what happens, hoping that one might come out ok so I don’t feel like a total waste as a photographer (even though I am a total failure as a photographer and my total knowledge of photography(despite having owned an SLR for close to a year now) entails the following: smaller aperture settings for a blurry background, the 1/3 rule, and a polarizing filter helps get rid of haze and reflections)). So I figure, I like Big Bear, I like beer, let’s do this.

In my rush to get up to Riverside to meet up with my friends I don’t go to an ATM so I can get money out, figuring hey, they’ll have an ATM there. I also don’t bother getting a jacket since, hey, it’s still October, which is one of the warmer months in California so the temperature will be fine at 6700 feet, since we’re closer to the sun if nothing else. I also don’t bother to grab anything for lunch because hey, we’re going to Oktoberfest, there will be food there!

We arrive in Big Bear, stand in line to buy our tickets to get into the place, then stand in line to have our tickets taken to actually enter the place. (As an aside, there were vendors at Oktoberfest selling Navajo blankets and dream catchers. I wasn’t expecting anything authentic, per se, but sweet Jesus, this guy was right at the entrance) At this point I’m hungry and thirsty and in desperate need of a beer. And having the sum total of 25 dollars on my person I go to stand in line for an (the(!) as it turns out) ATM. After an interminable wait for the ATM, the person two people ahead of me manages to drain it of its funds. So with the remainder of the money I have on me I go to get food.

Now for some reason they don’t take cash at this event directly. All beer and food sales are done through tickets of various denominations. And there’s really nothing explaining how the ticket system works. So you have to ask the attendant how the (fucking (at this point I just want a drink and a bratwurst)) ticketing system works. She spends a minute explaining it. And has to repeat this explanation for everyone in line. I get to the front of the (fucking) line and look at the prices. Large beer, 11 dollars. “Dinner”, 9.50. Well, fuck. And they don’t take credit. “Miiiiiiiickey”, I call to my friend. “Can I borrow some moneeeeeeey.” Fortunately he has cash on him (which surprises me because he usually doesn’t) So I manage to borrow enough to buy my (fucking) tickets and go to the (fucking) beer (fucking) line.

“What can I get for you?”
“Whatever has the highest alcohol content”

After this, I’m off to the dinner line. Dinner is a bratwurst, some sauerkraut, some german potato salad(which is inexplicably served cold), and a piece of rye bread. I feel like I’m in prison. This I manage to consume in 30 seconds and then go foraging. As it turns out there’s a place outside that sells bratwurst (or at least a simulacrum thereof) for 6 bucks. And they take cash! (Which is still a problem, but not that huge of one since I’ve managed to borrow another 20 dollars). I down the bratwurst (which is approximately the size of 1(one) vienna sausage, and has been roasted to within an inch of its life) and I’m starting to feel a bit better since my blood sugar has stabilized and there’s still the nagging problem of the altitude headache, and now it’s fucking cold. Apparently the temperature is in the high 40s and I don’t have a jacket (actually, t.b.h., I don’t even OWN a jacket at present because the mean temperature of San Diego varies between 69-75 degrees during the year). Well, fuck again. Jaeger shots. I hate Jaegermeister, but fuck it, I’m cold and it’s the quickest way to get alcohol into me. So now I’m cold, running low on beer, I have the fucking awful taste of licorice in my mouth and I’m still somewhat hungry.

We all sit around a table being miserable for a while until Carrie tells us there’s a log sawing competition going on inside. Inside is crowded, but approximately 40 degrees warmer and we manage to find seating on the floor so we can watch people risk life and limb for a 10 dollar gift certificate to Big Lots. Surprisingly this was actually entertaining to watch. The people competing in this seemed to fall into two categories: a) Those people from the mountains who have actually USED a saw before and thus know exactly how not to bind the things. and b) The people who were up from out of town who have probably only seen a saw on TV and were, thus, hopeless. I don’t know how some of these people managed to avoid cutting their own legs off but they did it. Most entertaining was the “Hansel and Gretal” competition where some hapless husband and his wife got on stage, he inevitably doubling her weight, she inevitably having a lousy choice of footwear(with a frighteningly low μ-coefficient), and attempted to cut through a log. This resulted in the female hanging on for dear life as the husband pulled not only the saw, but his wife back and forth the saw binding and unbinding as it slowly worked its way through the log.

At the conclusion of this event the chicken dance was played for approximately the 400th time of the night and we figured it was probably a good time to make an escape, considering it was cold outside, crowded inside, the ATM was still busted and we were out of money.

This is where the night actually starts getting pretty good. Carrie knows a bar in Big Bear called, simply, The Pub which is actually one of the better bars I’ve been to. Good beer, a good bar menu (get the crabcakes and avoid the potato skins(olives on potato skins? What the fuck), a not too loud band and a decent atmosphere. There also an actual fireplace where a couple in funny sweaters that looked like they were straight out of a Newhart rerun were sitting and drinking brandy.

After a few beers and some scotch I decide it’d be a good idea to call my coworker, Ryan, who was supposed to be at Oktoberfest and see if it wanted to meet up at the bar. Upon reaching his voicemail I decide to do this in the persona of a gay german named Hans, who “vants to share [his] crabcakes or maybe just crabs mit him”. I leave approximately 5 of these voicemails for him including one where Hans “vanted to put [his] strudel in zee kugel”.

We didn’t hear from Ryan for a couple of hours by which time we’d left the bar and were on our way down the hill. He pretended he couldn’t understand what Hans was saying and that he’d give us a call “later”. Inexplicably, we didn’t hear from Ryan after that. Lame.

So yeah. Fuck Oktoberfest in Big Bear, but it’s worth the trip up for the bar.

In the event that anyone reads this and wants some 30 minute meal ideas, check a couple of posts down. That’s the stuff you should be making — not “stoups” made out of precut potatoes.

(By the way, had the portmanteau “stoup” ever caught on, I’d probably have to take refuge in some South American country without televisions or Wal*Marts. It’s bad enough to hear the occasional utterance of “EVOO”, even in jest.)

“Tonight, on HGTV Landscapers, can Jerry and Gus get the sod installed in time for the governor’s inauguration?”

• The dude who constantly plays with changing the ringtones on his fucking cell phone. Who the fuck taught you that this was something appropriate to do in public.
• Dudes in sunglasses. People who wear sunglasses indoors are either blind or assholes. You don’t have a cane. These guys usually travel in packs of 3s with some kind of portfolio or binder thing.
• The guy who’s constantly milling about. It’s a fucking coffee shop. You get coffee. You get napkins where you put sugar and cream in your coffee. What the fuck is going on that you need to get up every 30 seconds and wander around? Sit down, drink your coffee, read your paper and shut up. It doesn’t help that you look shady as fuck and make me scared you’re going to try to steal my kidney or something
• The furniture rearrangers. Christ, why move a table halfway across the lounge upstairs if you aren’t going to sit at it? There’s plenty of legroom elsewhere.
• People constantly talking on their phones. It’s not a restaurant so I’m more forgiving than I’d normally be, but you get one two minute cell phone conversation, not 20 minutes of shrewish squawking to your vapid idiotic friends about American Idol.
• The slurpers. Get an iced coffee and not a fucking frappucino if you want all the liquid out of it. Leave the insipid slush at the bottom of the cup and save yourself the trouble.
• The people who feel the need to leave their detritus everywhere. There’s a trashcan right there, use it. Nobody’s going to read your leftover newspaper. And nobody wants to touch your disgusting coffee cup just so they can sit down.

Yes.
All of the above need to die in a fucking fire.