This home-buying thing is turning out to be more expensive than we thought. Luckily, we've found a couple of great deals:



LARGE TREE ADDS TO THE BEAUTY OF THIS RARE 4 BR 2.5 BA TRACT HOME!
FREE CABLE! SWIMMING POOL! GREAT CUESTA VERDE NEIGHBORHOOD!
WON'T LAST! SELLER HIGHLY MOTIVATED!
built on graveyard. haunted by unquiet spirits of the dead.

________________________



LOVE THE BOATHOUSE!
HUGE 5 BR, 3 BA VICTORIAN FIXER-UPPER ON THE LAKE. HANDYMAN'S DREAM!
RECENTLY FUMIGATED! NO FORCED-AIR HEATING, PLUMBING UNPREDICTABLE, SOME COSMETIC DAMAGE TO CELLAR.
FREE NANNY SERVICE FROM LIVE-IN DEVIL-PIG!
gateway to hell included.

________________________

I don't know. Maybe I'll just take the caretaker job at that hotel in the Colorado Rockies and save up some cash.

  posted by kafkaesque @ 9:03 AM

 
Mojito:

Ingredients: Mint, Sugar, Lemon juice, Light rum, Club soda



I really just wanted to show off this nice picture I took.

  posted by kafkaesque @ 5:00 PM

 
Parking Spots

Super cool site with pictures of toy cars photographed to look like real cars...hmm. hard to explain. Go have a look.

[via iconomy]

  posted by kafkaesque @ 10:32 AM

 
I just heard Morphine's "Buena" on a Miller Genuine Draft ad.

I'm not going to bemoan the selling-out aspect of hearing good music on teevee ads, or the "songs that are about drugs being used to sell legal products" thing (see "Lust for Life" in cruise line ad), but I just want to say, couldn't we at least have made it Guinness?

  posted by kafkaesque @ 2:58 PM

 
I feel like I'm really missing out on a great thing by not playing my car stereo at high enough volume.

I want to join in the fun. I'm going to trick my car out with the biggest, baddest sound system around. My subwoofer will actually engulf my entire car. And this is the genius part: I'm going to drive around late at night playing only Whalesongs, preferably from those old black plastic 45s that came with National Geographic.

Imagine the swell of pride and ego I'll feel as I broadcast the majestic yowling of a Humpback to my neighbors at 4 in the morning on a Thursday.

That would rock.

  posted by kafkaesque @ 11:40 AM

 
Oh man! So much great Murakami stuff (while I wait for the English publication of "Kafka on the Shore"):

Probably in violation of all kinds of copyright laws, some hero has put the full text of Murakami's Pinball online. But hell, you can't get an English translation of it anywhere else, so thank you, kind stranger!

Download a film short of Murakami's Second Bakery Attack.

All of this is from the truly fantastic Elephant Still Missing, which includes all the Murakami you could want, including collected short stories.

  posted by kafkaesque @ 10:15 AM

 
Some thoughts about wrestling:

If I was a wrestler, I'd be The Baby (or El Niņo for our south-of-the-border friends). Whenever any of my mighty foes came near me I would begin to cry, vomit and possibly soil myself.

Every single wrestling match I've ever seen (which is not a whole lot, in the interest of full disclosure), one of the fierce combatants inevitably picks up a folding chair from the crowd and hits the other guy over the head with it. My question is this: Why not just bring the folding chair into the ring with you? It would save lot of time.

  posted by kafkaesque @ 8:59 AM

 
Updated the Music Trading List

New Arrivals:
Modest Mouse
Spoon
Dead Can Dance
Death Cab for Cutie
Underworld
The White Stripes
Marc Ribot

  posted by kafkaesque @ 8:35 PM

 
It's the third of February, and you know what that means, right?

No, it's not time for our annual seafood brunch. That's March, right? What do you mean it was last month? I missed the seafood? You couldn't call me and let me know? I guess you just ate all of the Ocean's Rich Bounty yourself, didn't you? Oh hell.

Anyway, it's time to grab links from Cardhouse. Because we all love Cardhouse.

1. Museum of Food Anomalies: Small, but good nonetheless.

2. Cardhouse's own The I Don't Like Hard Things in Soft Things Manifesto: The hard, the soft, and sometimes both, but not usually.

3. National Pie Day: Like you, Mr. Cardhouse, I also missed National Pie Day. But isn't every day really National Pie Day? Don't we all hold a little Pie Party in our own imagination every single day that we are granted on this beautiful planet, where wondrous things like pie are possible? Yeah, maybe not.

  posted by kafkaesque @ 9:49 PM

 
I'm feeling guilty about the lack of updates on the site, so here's something weird I found in the "drafts" section:

If I ever go back to school for a graduate degree, I think I'll enter the exciting field of Nerf Studies.

The Nerf people never really did take Nerf as far as it could go.

Nerf Prostheses: Cheap and way more flexible than organic tissue, Nerf Limbs are the medical miracle of the future. Bound along on your new Nerf Legs! Got cirrhosis? Get a low-maintenance Nerf Liver.

  posted by kafkaesque @ 6:27 PM

 
The Ongoing My Life as an American Gladiator Life-Skills Quiz

Question 47

Name the next item in this sequence:

Carrot Top
Pestilence
Balki
Famine
Gallagher
War
Dorf on Golf
Death
Waylon Flowers & Madame
_______________________

  posted by kafkaesque @ 4:27 PM

 
When I was young I told my mum
I'm going to walk on the Moon someday
Armstrong and Aldrin spoke to me
From Houston and Cape Kennedy
And I watched the Eagle landing
On a night when the Moon was full
And as it tugged at the tides, I knew deep inside
I too could feel its pull

I lay in my bed and dreamed I walked
On the Sea of Tranquillity
I knew that someday soon we'd all sail to the moon
On the high tide of technology
But the dreams have all been taken
And the window seats taken too
And 2001 has almost come and gone
What am I supposed to do?

Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and I'll never get to the moon
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel we've all grown up too soon

Now my dreams have all been shattered
And my wings are tattered too
And I can still fly but not half as high
As once I wanted to

Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and I'll never get to the moon
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel we've all grown up too soon

My son and I stand beneath the great night sky
And gaze up in wonder
I tell him the tale of Apollo And he says
"Why did they ever go?"
It may look like some empty gesture
To go all that way just to come back
But don't offer me a place out in cyberspace
Cos where in the hell's that at?

Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and I'll never get out of my room
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel we're all just going nowhere

The Space Race Is Over
Billy Bragg

  posted by kafkaesque @ 12:24 PM

 
A few things:

Thing 1: Hanging a CD From Your Rear-View Mirror: I don't get this at all. Are these people missing the point of the CD? Did people used to hang 45s and LPs from their mirrors in the old days? I did a little research, and it turns out that people who hang a CD from their mirror are actually trying to frighten away birds and deer. This is important if you have a sudden bird and deer infestation in your car.

Thing B: The Duck People: I drive by a park on my way home every night. This park has a lot of ducks. When I say "a lot" of ducks, I mean there's hordes of them. An unreasonable amount of ducks. Geese, too*. And no matter what time I drive by the park, there are people feeding the ducks. Now, you expect to see a few people tossing the odd breadcrumb to ducks. I have no problem with that. Ducks don't ever repay these small favors we do them, but there you are. They're basically a bunch of ungrateful jerks, the ducks. If they were a little bigger, they'd probably try to kill you. That's just conjecture of course. Don't tell any ducks I said that.

But I digress.

What I'm talking about here is The Duck People. They're feeding the ducks all the time. They pull up in their cars, and open up the trunk, where they have giant bags of seed, which they throw to these teeming throngs of duckdom that gather around them in droves. Sometimes there are three or four groups of Duck People out there. And not always the same people. So these ducks are being fed continually. Why? What are The Duck People doing? Are they fattening up the ducks for any particular reason?

Maybe The Duck People don't really want to feed these ducks. Maybe they have to. Maybe the ducks call them and set a schedule.

"Hi! This is Wendy!"

"Wendy. It's the ducks."

"Oh. Uh. Hi."

"You will be here at 4:30."

"Listen, I'd love to, but I have a dentist appointment."

"You will be here. Do not push us, Wendy. We can destroy you."

"I'll...I'll be there."

Thing 3: The Excuse: Please excuse Mr. Kafkaesque from writing in his blog for the period of one (1) week. For karmic reasons, he will be on a business trip to a place roughly the temperature of the planet Neptune.



* Geese kind of freak me out. When I was a kid, my mom would always say this to me when I was in a situation where a goose was involved: "Geese can break your leg in half if they want to." So every time I see a goose, I get a mental image of a goose snapping my femur in half with its razor-sharp devil-beak. Or maybe it was swans.

  posted by kafkaesque @ 4:03 PM