Strange Pulse

So you can imagine the horrific stories he comes home with.

But here’s a funny one. He said his class was given an assignment to find a poem about the Holocaust on a certain website. So he asked the teacher if he had to use a poem from that website, or if he could use one from somewhere else.

She said he could use one from somewhere else, as long as it was about the Holocaust.

Then he asked what if it wasn’t a poem, but instead a song.

She said that could work, too, but wanted to know who the song was by.

He said, “Uh, well…it’s by Slayer.”

Slayer’s “Angel of Death.” I just read it, it’s pretty dang graphic. Think I can get him to use the Indigo Girls’ “This Train” instead?

Yeah I didn’t either.

I guess it might be hard to find anything about the Holocaust that isn’t graphic.

Today when I picked him up from school he said he wants to write about a war criminal who goes to Bermuda to hide out and ends up disappearing into the Bermuda Triangle. I asked if he meant writing a song, a story, what. He said a story.

I asked if it would be a Nazi war criminal? Or something set in the future? What? He wasn’t sure yet.

I asked if that guy was going to be the villian. He said yes.

I asked if he was going to have a hero. He said yeah, the guy who is trying to catch him.

Then he went on about a helicopter chase through the Bermuda Triangle and people hiding underground only to be destroyed by The Real Enemy, which he said would be similar to the alien creatures in War of the Worlds, but different. Similar in that they’ve been hiding underground, I guess. He went on for awhile about it. I wonder if he’ll actually write any of it down.

He used to write stories all the time, some of which I have saved still. My favorite is probably “The Candy Machine of Doom.”

If you’re a big fan of the TV show House, you might want to skip this one. Cuz I’m gonna go on about how lame it is.

When I was a kid, I loved TV. All TV. My mom would never watch sitcoms with us. I never understood it. She said they were too stupid. Stupid! How could TV be stupid?

Of course now I watch almost no sitcoms whatsoever. The majority of them are so bad, I wonder how anyone can write, produce, or act that crap and still live with themselves.

I watch a lot of bad TV now just to laugh at it. Especially a lot of crime dramas. Our favorites are Criminal Minds and NUMB3RS. But one show I don’t usually watch because it’s just bad is House.

My kids love this show. My daughter, because she thinks it’s good. My son, because he thinks it’s horrible. He’s absorbed my penchant for making fun of bad TV. I’m just amazed he realizes it’s bad. He’s 17 and jaded.

So Dr. House is on an airplane. Someone is very ill. Other people start to become very ill. He worries it’s some disease, forget which. To determine if it is, he has to take a spinal fluid sample. On a bumpy plane. From a patient who is shaking and convulsing. Yep.

Turns out he doesn’t have the disease. So, that means everyone else who’s been throwing up and running fevers aren’t really sick—it’s all in their heads! They’re obviously all just psychosomatic. Phew!

But the sick guy…hmm. He must be a mule smuggling cocaine! He obviously swallowed a bunch of drugs and now is having a reaction. No problem, House will just cut his stomach open. On a bumpy plane. A patient who is shaking and convulsing. Yep.

So he has a kid (yes, a kid) help hold the guy down. Just as he’s about to slice into the guy’s gut, he notices the patient reacting to the kid leaning on his elbow joint. Joint pain! Hold everything! House checks his pockets…aha! The patient has a receipt from going scuba diving the day before. He has the bends! All they have to do is drop the plane to below such-and-such a level and he’ll be fine. (The high altitude/air pressure was causing it.)

Ugh. It’s bad. Not as bad as Criminal Minds, though, which is awesomely bad. Criminal Minds…where the FBI can find a weapon hidden in a kitchen wall just walking by and hey, let’s knock on the drywall above the sink. You never know! But they can’t find a 10 year old girl hidden in the killer’s attic. Until they see a broom that has a little tuft of wall insulation on it. Aha! She’s in the attic! Who would have thought!

As for NUMB3RS…I think next time a new episode’s on, I’m gonna start a running tally of the number of times they use the word “algorithm.”

…bands contact me. Usually it’s via youtube, cuz they want live video footage I’ve taken and posted online. I usually only take 30 second clips, though, so if they’re somehow thinking I have more footage than what they’ve seen on my youtube page, they’re bound for disappointment.

If you want to see what I’ve posted on youtube, you can view it all here.

Latest addition is a Meat Puppets clip, from the show I saw the other night:

If I take video of a full song, I can’t upload it to youtube, because the file size is over their limit. So I have to use google video. Which is where I posted the Built to Spill 4-minute clip I took at the same show:

You can get to my other google video stuff if you click on “from the same user.”

BTW, I posted a review of that Built to Spill/Meat Puppets show here.

Bands that have contacted me about either pics I’ve taken or video I took are: Khanate, Voxtrot, Bad Wizard, and…I can’t remember who else, but dang it, there’s others. Honest!

With my hair.

You know how you sometimes see a woman and you think, “She’d look so much better if she just blew dry her hair”?

Or “Is she growing out the dye job? If not she really needs to touch up those roots!”

Or “Why does she look like Kristi MacNichol in the 70s? Feathering is dead, lady!”

You’d be thinking all that, and more, if you could see me.

I’ve been keeping my hair short for a long time now. Only problem is it grows out so fast and looks incredibly dorky almost immediately. And then there’s the issue of actually getting a good cut that looks good from the get go. Usually it has to grow out a bit to actually look ok. And then it grows way out and I look like an idiot.

Case in point:

That’s me at the Unida show. I’m the one who looks half dead. Now you see why I like to be the one behind the camera rather than in front of it. My eyes never stay open when faced with a lens. Even, apparently, when I don’t know I’m facing one.

Whenever I tell my kids I need a haircut, they say, “Don’t cut it! I like it long!”

We recently watched some old home movies and my hair was really long in them. I explained to my kids that I mostly only kept it long because we were too poor for me to get regular haircuts, but they still think I should grow it out again.

So I tell my husband I need a haircut and he’s no help either. “I like it long.”

Me telling him I like his hair long doesn’t stop him from buzz-cutting it every few months. Actually, I’ve wished for years he’d let it grow a little and actually get a real haircut, but his hair is so thick he claims any hairstyle besides buzzed or really long would look all wrong. He’s probably right, but I’d like to see him try at least.

When I went hiking with Nathaniel at Vasquez Rocks, I had him take a picture of me. At first I was wearing my sunglasses, and I asked, “Do I look stupid with my sunglasses on?” He said yeah, so I perched them on top of my head.

He could have mentioned I looked stupider with them there.

(Camera had some light leaks, that’s what the white spots are from.)

I need help. Should I grow it out? Or keep it short? And just suffer with the dorkiness in between haircuts?

I saw Unida on Thursday. They were opening for Mondo Generator. I’ve seen Unida a few times before, but it was years ago, and I thought they’d broken up. The singer for Unida, John Garcia, used to be in a legendary stoner rock band called Kyuss. (Along with Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age.) Unida is back together! And playing shows! And I heard they’re working on a new album. Such good news.

Some pics:

Unida were opening for a band called Mondo Generator, which features Nick Oliveri (formerly of Kyuss and also Queens of the Stone Age) on vocals/bass and sort of a revolving door for for all the other members.

I’ll post my favorite Unida song, “King,” to the radio.blog.

I also saw Built to Spill with the Meat Puppets last night. Totally blew me away. Nathaniel came, cuz he loves BTS, and unfortunately he got sick and went on a puking spree once we left. Puked outside the venue in the middle of a big bunch of people, then again on the sidewalk. Poor kid. It was horrible.

I’ll post pics from the show tomorrow most likely. Still need to get them off the camera.

OK, so Elijah’s in 8th grade and he’s taking a careers class. They keep having different people come in to talk about their jobs. Today, it was a policeman. He brought his partner along, a K-9 officer. I mean, a dog.

Elijah was telling us about it during dinner. He told us the cop said most people hate all cops, when it’s really just the few they encounter (the ones who give out tickets) who are the jerks. He also said he doesn’t usually give out tickets to people if it’s their first offense, especially people from Huntington Beach.

Now there’s some useful information!

Elijah started telling us all the questions he asked the policeman. He kept rattling more and more off. I was getting a very distinct impression. I had to know if it was accurate.

“Did anyone else ask any questions?”

“No,” he said. “It was mostly me.”

Figures, I thought.

His best question for the cop: “Do you know what a 502 is?”

Daniel and I looked at each other. What’s a 502 and how does he know it?

“It’s for drunk driving,” Elijah said. “There’s a Megadeth song…”

I didn’t hear the rest. I was thinking, “Great, now everyone in his class thinks one of his parents has to have had a 502. Including the teacher and the cop. Especially the teacher and the cop.”

As we were heading out the door on our way to the grocery store, I asked my oldest son to take a kitchen-sized bag of trash out to the dumpster in our apartment complex parking lot.

He was about 15 to 20 feet away from the dumpster with the garbage bag when he said, “Mom, think I can make it from here?”

I looked from him to the dumpster, which is in a containment shed with a very small opening, and realized he wants to try throwing the bag into the dumpster from where he’s standing.

I said, “NO! You better not try it! You’ll get garbage everywhere!”

He said, “I’ve done it before.”

I was almost to the car when he added, matter-of-factly, “I got garbage everywhere, too.”

I sat down in the car. When he joined me, I was holding my head in my hands, my shoulders shaking with laughter.

And he said, “I’m four for six!”

Nathaniel’s friend wasn’t able to go to Magic Mountain yesterday, but we still went up north. Nathaniel just came with me rather than go ride rollercoasters.

First we went to Vasquez Rocks, an area my mom told me about awhile ago. It’s pretty cool. These giant rocks poking out of the ground. You can hike up on top of them. I took tons of pictures but need to develop the film.

We only hiked around on one side and decided we’d hit the other side the next time we go. There’s been tons of movies and tv shows filmed there, and we overheard a park ranger telling someone she’d discovered an illegal film shoot the other day. Whoever was filming didn’t have a permit or insurance or anything.

Then we attempted to take the Sierra Hwy back towards Newhall, veering through a small town called Boiling Point. But either we ended up on the wrong road (my map wasn’t very detailed, next time I’ll print out full directions), or we went through it without knowing it—we never saw any Boiling Point. Just modest houses and trailers.

We went to Newhall for lunch. It’s a small old west town that reminds me of Sequim, the small town in Washington we used to live in. We had lunch at my favorite Mexican place, then I walked around the town a bit taking TTV pictures of the storefronts.

The garbage cans were all painted like that.

Actually, I’m dropping my son and his friend off there today and heading out towards Palmdale. Won’t go all the way to Palmdale, it’s too far, but I’m bringing some cameras and gonna check out the scenery. There’s a little town called Boiling Point that I just have to drive through.

Is that the best movie ever, or what?

This was taken in the tunnel under Pac Coast Hwy on the way to Crystal Cove beach.