Picked Cousin Frankie up at the train station and walked around downtown, showing him the city. Fed him a Chicago-style hot dog (mustard, relish, onion, tomato, pickle, peppers, and celery salt) which quickly offended even a Southerner's belly. Visited various parts of the city of interest to one who has never been to a city bigger than New Orleans. Survived an accosting by a group of smacked-out rockstar types in the rockstar ghetto, who were likely induced by a combination of pills and likker to feel Frankie's hair. Did some work on bikes to get them working for Friday's CM ride. Rode around on newly repaired bikes through the alleys, where our attention was quickly turned from discarded junk to a burning pizza factory. Watched pizza factory burn down. Was surprised by the loudness of a fire, and the tediousness of firefighting. Saw a cop parked across two lanes in order to prevent traffic from approaching the fire. Wished we had a camera to photograph cop passed out asleep at the wheel of his cruiser with towering flames in the background. Dined at an ethiopian restaurant where a smooth, funky worldbeat band induced, through the bow-chicka-bow-bow of their music, a dining couple to start sucking face. Frankie did the wrap-your-hands-around-back-to-make-it-look-like-you're-making-out thing and we couldn't stop giggling. Finished out the evening on Monkey Boy's 22nd-floor roof deck, where we noticed that one of the buildings had its lights randomly arranged in a way that looked like a skull. Watched the moon pass between buildings at an observable pace.
posted by Johnny on 30.8.02 |

If you're not an Eminem fan, but you can stomach a few minutes of his usual guaranteed-to-offend flows, don't miss "My Dad's Gone Crazy", a song he recorded with the help of his (then six-year-old) daughter Halie. It's just so cute!
posted by Johnny on 26.8.02 |

Thought this was pretty damn interesting. My cousin sent me these from Afganistan. They're some of the pamphlets that the U.S. Military is distributing over there. I'm working on getting them translated, but if anyone happens to read Arabic...















Take a close look at the third one... very subtle.


posted by Johnny on 23.8.02 |

Hmmm...

Where in Afganistan, where people are starving and dogs are considered too unclean to be kept as pets by Muslims, did the Al-Qaeda get ahold of a cute, fwuffy, well-fed & groomed golden retriever puppy?

Probably the same place the Iraqis got their incubators.
posted by Johnny on 22.8.02 |

Another Rat Ride. This one featured an appearance by "The Captain", a truly amazing machine. Pictures usually take a couple of weeks to end up my hands. The Rats had a field day, though. Among the things that awaited us in the alleys were a four-foot teddy bear, hundreds of pictures strewn about depicting various people holding the same grey notebook, and an electric organ.
posted by Johnny on 22.8.02 |

I found this story, about a carrot that looks like it has a peeper, while doing a google search for "bizarre" (unrelated to the blog of the same name). This guy has taken an unhealthy number of pictures of the carrot.

Oh, and by the way, that icon at the top left is JFKFC.
posted by Johnny on 21.8.02 |

I don't know what the fuck is going on in these pictures.
posted by Johnny on 19.8.02 |

This weekend jets have been flying overhead constantly practicing for the Air and Water show, which is expected to draw a million people (!) on Saturday and Sunday. It reminded me of living in Dayton, Ohio, where the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (motto: "America's Parking Lot of Flight") had odd military aircraft flying overhead constantly. Can you imagine how unnerving it is to be walking to work and to hear a loud noise and to look up and there, in the narrow column of sky that the buildings afford you, is a smoke-spewing fighter jet corkscrewing towards the Aon Building?!? Jeez, an air show in a big city in America these days is like bringing your baby and his little rattle into the hospital to visit your friend who is sick from a rattlesnake bite. The intention is good but it's a little unsettling.

So we went to the zoo on Friday and the jets kept whizzin overhead and every time they shook the Big Cats building with their engine noise the lion would go ROOOOOAAAAARRRRRR as if to show the jet who's boss.
posted by Johnny on 18.8.02 |

Singular Girl and I chose Zentra's 3rd-Anniversary party as this weekend's entertainment, an invitation-only event that promised to deliver all of the swank and none of the wank, if you follow me. Zentra is one of a number of clubs in Chicago that go for a neo-Turkish-opium-den theme, mixing brushed steel fixtures with lots of draped satin. I've made this observation before, but I'll say it again: Ostentation is a marketing ploy here, which gives rise to an interesting paradox: If you try to portray your club as exclusive in order to draw more patronage, any success detracts from the very perception that caused it (the "nobody goes there, it's too crowded" effect), forcing clubs that take this path to forever seek better ways to give the appearance of lavish expense and special treatment. Witness clubs like White Star and Crobar, which charge a $20 cover... unless you put yourself on the online guest list first. The suckas pay the Jackson, and people who signed up online feel special because they're "on the list"... when all they really did was visit a web site. The club rewards faithul and the faithful are impressed.

Another tactic that these clubs use is the "reserved" table. Usually they're situated in a prominent spot, like right across from the bar or the dance floor, or if not, they have velvet ropes to signify their oh-so-exclusiveness. If you and your friends buy a bottle of liquor, such as a 750ml bottle of Absolut for $180, you all get to sit at the table, and everybody gets to look at you and wonder who you are that you can pay so much to sit down. The problem with places like this is that they're often filled with people who are after that behind-the-velvet-ropes feeling, but don't bring anything to the chic-table, so you get a lot of marketing/advertising types who can afford to blow tons of cash to feel like they're hanging with artist/rockstar types. No expense is spared on the swankiness of the place, for there are a lot of rich young folks in Chicago eager to spend their money to get that I'm-special feeling. I suspect it's the same all over, from the guys at the Elks lodge in Podunk Corner, Pennsyltucky to the most strung-out see-and-be-seen club in L.A.

But hey, my good time has never hinged upon the other clientele at the place where I'm having it, and let's face it- when it comes to bars, you get to pick pretention or desperation. Sometimes both, and in that rare special place that you found in your neighborhood, neither. All I cared about was that the well-dressed masses are likely to both look and smell better than the teeming ones, and the drinks were free, and I wouldn't trade the company for anything, so I had a blast.

Still, I've been to a few clubs that try to outdo each other with swank, and this one had them beat hands-down. The House of Blues V.I.P. room had Zentra beat in terms of the "you are the Almighty God" treatment by the staff but Zentra won through excess. I can't think of a floor-covering that beats live grass, which not only carries the Michael Valentine seal of approval, but also I must say makes an excellent floor for a bar or party setting due to its cushiony and muck-absorbing tendencies. Even the line where you stand to get in was carpeted in live grass, and it was cut in swoopy curves, not just laid down in square sod blocks. The lounge room, with its low draped ceiling and short-stooled hookah tables, was the most impressive ... though I doubt British-Colonial Era Turkish hookah lounges had grass floors. Hookahs are part of the shtick here, with body-painted hookah-girls allegedly circling the establishment, though I didn't see any tonight. In fact, I didn't see a single soul suck the fruit-flavored tobacco from the hookahs available at the tables, which was kinda disappointing. Come on, people, when in Turkey...

The buffet contained your usual bruschetta-and-asian-meatball stuff along with olives and grilled fruit to go along with the theme. I'd never had grilled fruit before but it fit my theory that any two foods or preparation methods, if tasty apart, are tasty together. The bartenders, men and women alike, wore nothing above the waist but body paint. The ceiling was covered in of thousands of helium balloons. Allegedly there were bellydancers and flame-eaters performing at some point in the evening. But I gotta say, the winning display of pointless expense was the live camel.

I was impressed. None of the other faux-Turkish lounges I'd been to had a live camel. In fact, I haven't been to ANY bar that had a live camel before!
posted by Johnny on 18.8.02 |

My cousin Frank hitchhiked over to Austin from Mobile back in May, and he reports on a local collective he fell in with:

everyday i ended up at Barton springs, jumpin off of bridges, garbage can divein from Taco Cabana. i stayed at a couple differernt collective house's and some parks and a roof for a while. the city was very kind to poor travalers, there was a resturante called Veggie Heaven that would give you free food and it wass all vegiterian. i had a good experience there.

while i was in Austin i hooked up with this collective house that runs a recycled bike project. they have a program called -bikes across borders- they fix up as many bikes as they can, get um runnin, then drive um to the border. since it cost 700 dollars in taxs to drive them across and only 25 cents to ride them across they park on the u.s.a side then criticle mass them across. then they give them to locals who are being explioted by big american companies and cant afford cars.

i met them a few days befor the trip so i went along. it was a great experience, they had made some great bikes, double deckers, unicycles,
bady bikes. none with fur though. when we pulled up to the border we were waiting for the others to arrive the weirdest thing happened- it started hailing, in the middle of may, 103 degree heat, the mexican border, it hailed really hard for like 15 minutes. very strange. then as we rode the bikes over the rio grande a huge
storm was coming over the horizen, i swear to god the clouds were increadible hulk green, with lightning every second. it was an extramly beautiful moment.

posted by Johnny on 15.8.02 |

I was talking to a guy I know, a former webmaster for Anderson Consulting who is, of course, unemployed. He recounted his last 30 years in the job market- being laid off, being let go, or the ole employer-tanks-and-yer-screwed. He went all the way back to what he called his Major Career Error:

When he was 17, he was enrolled at a technical high school in a sort of fine arts program. Their career placement office sent him to a monument company that was looking for a stonecutting apprentice. He turned the offer down, not wanting to carve gravestones for a living, and ever since has regretted his choice. The market goes up and down, but people never stop dying. They might buy bigger or larger headstones, but they'll always want a name carved on 'em. He woulda had the ultimate job security.

I have my own career regret, too. When I was about that age, my parents arranged for me to meet a guy who designed animatronic mall displays, elves-at-xmas sort of stuff. He couldn't afford to hire me because it was a slump year, not too many people buying mall animatronics. For some reason (I have no idea what I was thinking), I didn't just apprentice with him for free. Who knows why? I spent all day building model robots anyway. It wouldn't have been work for me at all.

If I'd have taken that job, maybe I wouldn't have had any job security, but damn would I be happy being poor.

I guess I'm thinking about these things because I'm in the process of enrolling in classes at an adult/continuing education high school.
posted by Johnny on 12.8.02 |

Watching tapes of commercials for Smokey's Steakhouse (West Fargo ND) over and over again.
posted by Johnny on 12.8.02 |

Here are some pictures, taken by Matt the Rat, of the 7-31-02 Rat Ride. His photography reflects the elusiveness of the rat, our moral role-model.

Nine choppers (interestingly all choppers, no tallbikes, sleds, funnybikes, etc) met at a location halfway between the north side and the west side to fuel up at a nearby taqueria and take the obligatory test-rides on each other's contraptions.



We soon took to the alleys, scurrying along in a pack. Rats survive off of the scraps of society. All bikes made by the Rat Patrol as a group are composed of 100% trash.



Deth displays his unnamed chopper, featuring the longest fork of the pack. Like the brontosaurus and his two brains, a front wheel this far out often makes its own decisions as to where it will go, leading the rest of the bike into parked cars and such.



We rode in circles in a playground for a while. That's Noam on the left- I can tell by the flourescent "School is Cool" reflectors in the back wheel.



That's Alex on Choppasaurus Wrecks to the left, and Dan on an unnamed chopper to the right.



Chopper Bob on Chop Suey, with the impressive fork design that he put together at that chop session at my house a few weeks back. The third bar goes into the crotch of the top fork and is bolted through the little caliper-brake hole.



Johnny Payphone on Noam Chopsky. Check out the funky new dynamo-powered headlight and new straight sissy bar.



This is Al the Pal on "Big Poppa Choppa", which he rides 10 miles just to get to the Critical Mass rides. Behind him is John on an amazing chopper that became even more amazing before the night was through.



Alex on Choppasaurus, which I saw Al the Pal ride 30 miles one day.



Dan on an unnamed chopper.



As true today as it was... when it was written.



One of the things the Wurlington Bros. love to do is make a wall of discarded couch cushions and try to bash through it and stay on your bike.



John found a schnazzy stainless-steel chair that he taped on top of his seat... and rode the rest of the night on! Due to the razor-sharp metal lightning bolts running down his fork, we started to call this bike "The Electric Chair".



As you can see, it has deadly eye-gougers extending out the top of the sissy bar as well. Also, having the greatest rear-to-front-wheel radius ratio is a source of great status among chopper riders.



Our secret meeting location, and secret meeting activity.



We ride off into the night.

posted by Johnny on 8.8.02 |

No way in hell could you get me to do this.
posted by Johnny on 5.8.02 |

I took this picture from across the street, of the coaster that was driving me nuts all week last month. The arrow indicates our infamous front porch.
posted by Johnny on 5.8.02 |

My uncle (and first cousin once removed, love those Alabama relations) spent three days workin' the barbeque for this family reunion. He cooked six shoulders, some sirloins, thirty whole chickens, and another thirty quarter-chickens. They all go in the smoker and then he tends it for three days, never sleeping more than three hours at a time, and pulling out the fire and re-starting it if it gets above a certain temperature. His dedication was worth it, as that barbeque beef just melted in your mouth and tasted like a dream.

My grandmother, like a true southern farmer, can polish off eighteen ears of corn at one meal. However, since she got the "die-uh-beetis", her doctor says she can only have one ear a day. "How are you doing on your corn diet?" my mom asked her. "Oh, just fine," she said, "I'm up to February 2003."
posted by Johnny on 4.8.02 |

I have joined the Rat Patrol.
posted by Johnny on 1.8.02 |

JohnnyPayphone@yahoo.com