SMELLS LIKE...
There is just no socially acceptable situation in which a person may smell their fingers in front of another person.

TODAY'S JOB POSTING
As I have had more jobs -- and more sorts of jobs -- than your average Joe, I get LOTS of notes from folks looking for employees.
A good one today:

House Democratic Whip Nancy Pelosi [D-CA]

SPEECHWRITER - Democratic Leadership Office seeks experienced speechwriter with excellent writing skills and the ability to work under pressure. A successful candidate must be able to work in a fast-paced environment, and possess knowledge of labor, women's, and environmental issues. Salary commensurate with experience and skills. Please fax a cover letter, resume, and writing samples to Chief of Staff at 202-225-3304.

Don't think West Wing. Think PR Agency.
enjoy.

CraneAccidents.com
Official Site for Reporting Crane Accidents (mishaps)
"CraneAccidents.com is the Official Web-site for reporting crane related accidents on a world wide basis. The site is loaded with photos of crane accidents."

from Metafilter.

B.K.M.
random note from my sister:

Dear BJM & BRM,

Remember when Mom and Dad used to go on dates on Saturday nights and we would order pizza, drink pop and watch movies. We lived like slobs for 3 or 4 hours and relished in our filth until we heard the sound of Mom or Dads car coming down the street. We accomplished in 30 seconds what it takes some people 45 minutes to clean the entire kitchen and family room. We even knew our designated jobs that were discussed in a half a second. I brought the dirty dishes to the sink, Brandt loaded the dishes in the dishwasher while Bryan wiped down the counters. We cleaned out the sink, picked up any trash on the floor, put the cushions back on the couch, dusted the floor and mopped up any spills on the hard wood floors. After everything was done we ran back to the family room and jumped into our spots on the couch, turned the channel to a show more suitable for children while we tried to conceal that we were out of breath as Mom and Dad walked through the door. I was just remembering that today.

anil
Anil has a "bizarre, jokey sense of humor", but believed that his friends are rational and mature. As an experiment, he posted his link to NetGrocer and encouraged them to buy him an item. Not because he's broke, but just because he lives alone now and no longer has opportunity to steal from roommates the unexpected treats that any group fridge provides.

Anil did not know his audience here. Items that were delivered to his home:
A tin of SPAM.
A 4-tube package of Mentos.
1 package of Easter-themed Crayola sidewalk chalk.
A squeezable bottle of "cheese".
A package of purple marshmallow peeps.
A jar of marshmallow fluff.
A box of fortune cookies.
A plastic-wrapped tube of "beef sausage".
A box of Quisp cereal.
A candle shaped (but, fortunately, not scented) like a buffalo.
A handheld electronic basketball game.

buggier than a flophouse blanket
I miss Nixon more than you know. I used to work for the guy who was the lead investigator in the Nixon impeachment and he helped me understand what a complete whack-job Nixon was. The latest tapes are out (it's better than Steve Martin coming out with a new comedy album)

Right after his May 13, 1971 tirade about "faggy" Northern California, where "I won't shake hands with anybody from San Francisco.", his boys "Bob" Haldeman and John Ehrlichman are there as he goes after
ALL IN THE FAMILY's Archie:

"Archie is sitting here with his hippie son-in-law, married to the screwball daughter. . . . The son-in-law apparently goes both ways."
(what?)
He is "obviously queer. He wears an ascot, and so forth."

"The point that I make is that, goddamn it, I do not think that you glorify on public television homosexuality. You don't glorify it, John, anymore than you glorify, uh, whores."

"I don't want to see this country to go that way. You know what happened to the Greeks. Homosexuality destroyed them. Sure, Aristotle was a homo, we all know that, so was Socrates."

"Do you know what happened to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors were fags. . . . You know what happened to the popes? It's all right that popes were laying the nuns. That's been going on for years, centuries, but when the popes, when the Catholic Church went to hell in, I don't know, three or four centuries ago, it was homosexual. . . . Now, that's what happened to Britain, it happened earlier to France. And let's look at the strong societies. The Russians. Goddamn it, they root them out, they don't let 'em hang around at all. You know what I mean? I don't know what they do with them."

"Dope? Do you think the Russians allow dope? Hell no. Not if they can catch it, they send them up. You see, homosexuality, dope, uh, immorality in general: These are the enemies of strong societies. That's why the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing it. They're trying to destroy us."

From a great story in the Wash Post.

BIKE MESSENGER
I was crossing the street in the heart of San Francisco's financial district with a friend and her 6-week-old baby strapped to her belly. We were in the back of a pack of people and didn't notice the flashing "Don't Walk" hand turn solid. A cab came barreling at us, getting really close as the cabbie yelled "GET OUT OF THE CROSS WALK".

Outraged at seeing the man come so close to a woman with a baby, an enormous, really grimy bike messenger employed his booming street thug-meets- James Earl Jones voice:
"SHUT UP, BITCH"

Me, in a forced calm:
"Thank you very much"

Matching my tone perfectly,
"Oh, you're very welcome"

Thank God foul mouth civility isn't dead.

WOULD YOU EAT A DOG
Twenty bucks ($20) says that Lori eats dog before she gets back state-side.

From a students journal entry:
We, Koreans, have very unique culture. It is eating dogs! When someone who lives in other country hears this culture, they may think Koreans eat their pets. But it is not. No one eats their own pets. There are eatable dogs that are different from pets.

PICASSO
I talked my housemate into clearing out some space in a back room, so I could set up an office. He's an art dealer and has been here for 12 years. As I was moving one box of God knows what, he stood up very straight:

HIM: "Where's the Picasso?"
ME: (laughing), "Who knows..."
HIM: "No, really. Where's the Picasso?"
-- beat --

ME: "You really have a Picasso here? You don't know where it is?"
HIM: "I left it on the sofa, or the coffee table. It's a rolled up canvas. A charcoal study for a later painting."

I had been cleaning all day and was suddenly terrified. We looked in mailing tubes and under coffee table books. Under the sofa and behind the side tables.
Finally, he pulled back a seat cushion and lifted this crumpled, off-white something.

HIM: (smiling) "Here it is. No problem" He stretched it out, rolled it up and went back to cleaning.
ME: (I stood, silently thinking of the grilled cheese I'd just eaten atop a Picasso.)

ENDANGERED
What do you do when your 68-year old Dad's pet dachshund is carried off by our nation's bird, the bald eagle?
You call CNN.

VEEN

Even if you don't know Jeff, you've got to admit he looks like Shaggy.

CHAT
My neighborhood coffee shop has ethernet connections for your laptop, great coffee and serves as your local traffic school.

SxSW
I just got back from 5 days at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, or as I like to call it, The 10th Annual Austin Margarita Drinking Contest.
Some notes –

SFO
Whenever I see a guy walk from the urinal straight out the door, I often want to yell, paternally, “Hey. Get back here and wash your hands!”
It almost happened yesterday. I’m certain it’s going to come out one day and I’m going to get my ass kicked.

Why are there bio-hazard drop boxes in the SFO men’s room? I can’t have tweezers, but someone’s getting surgical equipment to the boarding gates?

FIELD&STREAM
Waiting to board my plane, I grabbed a few of Continental's complimentary magazines. After flipping through Latin Finance and Black Entrepreneur, it was the equally irrelevant Field and Stream that I spent some time with.

Favorite articles include
~ The Wonderful 20 Gauge
~ Tender Mercies: The Perfect Venison Dinner
and, the one I had to read 3 times to believe,
~ Distaff Distress : How to stay in the pink while in wearing camo
Once this 2-page gem got past the fact that women are often pregnant and will therefore have a very hard time dragging the carcass back to the car, it got questionably offensive. There’s one paragraph on avoiding UTIs and better ways to carry gear, then it was back to “I once saw a New York magazine editor pack in 4 liters of Diet Coke and a cell phone to an elk hunt”.

Next time, I’ll stick to 101 Hairstyles or Working Mother.

FIRE
Josh was writing for MTV when those kids decided to set each other on fire. While MTV went through all his scripts looking for trouble (litigation), (which, of course, they found), he wrote this.

Damn, it's funny.

FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHT TO PARTY
Understanding the subtle difference between San Francisco democrats is like telling the difference between 'Off-white' and 'Bone'. So, when the openly gay, way-left SF Supervisor Mark Leno wanted to distinguish himself from the openly gay, way-left SF Supervisor Harvey Britt in his quest to be California's first openly gay, way-left Assemblymen, it was hard for him to find issues to disagree upon.

But Mark Leno found something upon which to take a stand. I found a flyer on my truck:
WHEN SAN FRANCISCO NIGHT LIFE WAS THREATENED IN RECENT YEARS
MARK LENO FOUGHT BACK!

It then describes all the things he did to help the community. My favorite:
"When dehydration became a health problem on the dancefloor, Mark Leno required clubs to provide free cool drinking water."

Leno won yesterday by 1 percent.

BACK IN SF
You know you're back in San Francisco when your laundromat has a better web site than most Fortune 500 companies. And it serves beer.

PARKING
The great thing about spending the weekend with the whole family is hearing new stories about people I’ve known my whole life.

Dad told about all the letters he got starting mid-1965 from the Hawaiian Department of Motor Vehicles. For several months, the DMV would insist that he move the old jalopy he had bought just weeks earlier. The letters kept coming for over a year. And he would have heeded their request, but he was busy serving a 13-month tour of duty in Vietnam.
He thought it was really funny that they were up in arms about his illegal parking, when he was chiefly concerned with getting home. And he liked that even the DMV wanted him to get back.

FLYING
To get from Houston to Galveston (50 miles), my cousin picked us up in a twin-engine Sesna, instead of the Mercury Sable we thought he would. It wasn't the fact that we were putting our lives in the hands of a guy we haven't seen in 18 years and it wasn't the Gulf storm bouncing us around that had me sweating bullets. What freaked me out was the simple fact that I couldn't understand one damn word the Texas air traffic controllers said. There was not a single consonant spoken.

GALVESTON
When you're drinking with your cousin and the bartender wants to go home, her husband will take you to a bar with karaoke.

If, then you are tired of the bar (i.e. it's last call), the 19-year-old cocktail waitress' mom, who gives plenty of romantic advice, will talk her mime-of-a-husband into giving you a ride home.

Great town!