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Good Thing, Bad Thing: Of Monopoly and Perverts

  • August 12, 2011 3:52 am

Good Thing:

While cooped up in a rental house on an ill fated vacation recently, we found ourselves playing Monopoly and someone drew the Chance card

“Pay Poor Tax of $15.”

My son Rafael burst out laughing.  The card appealed to his grim sense of humor: you got taxed for being poor?  How wrong is that? Hilarious!

I hadn’t ever given it much thought, but I wondered aloud if maybe it was the exact opposite, that what the card really meant was that middle class people had to pay $15 toward government aid programs for the poor.  Read more...

Photoshop Looter

  • August 9, 2011 2:39 pm

Is the above image confusing? Let me explain… The London riots this past weekend seem have simmered down a bit, with more cops on the streets, but there are still pockets around the city. The damage, physical and psychological, has truly affected citizens as class tensions become even more fiery in the UK. In fact, a colleague of mine, who runs a film distribution company felt this first hand, as his inventory that was stored in a Sony DVD warehouse and hub was burned to the ground last night.

The photos of rioters coming from the AP Wire are truly weird. It’s as if ATTACK THE BLOCK became a reality! Well, it’s just human nature to eventually laugh after the face of tragedy, and here’s a prime example: a tumblr feed of photoshopped looter pics. Some are really hilarious. Hence, E.T. with the juvenile delinquent above.  Read more...

Suicide Bride

  • May 18, 2011 5:59 pm

Whoo, a jilted bride. Talk about major draaamaaa! On May 17, in Jilin Province, China, a 22 year old college student put on her wedding dress and climbed out of a window on the seventh floor of her apartment building. According to local media, the woman tried to commit suicide after her boyfriend of four years broke up with her, just as they were making plans to get married.

A local municipal officer was able to catch her, while neighbors one floor down were grabbing her feet and were able to help by pushing her up. The whole drama unfolded on national television and as you can see, it was quite a rescue. Check out a news clip from The Today Show:
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Good Thing, Bad Thing

  • January 18, 2011 4:04 am

One Good Thing


Doing Dell crossword puzzles makes me feel like Einstein’s great grandson.  You can find them for about three bucks at the supermarket checkout.  In fact, my copy says so right on the cover: “Find us at the checkout!” That’s how you know it’s important.  Just like Rolos, Trident Layers and breaking coverage of who has the best – and worst – beach bodies this season.

How good am I at these brain teasers?  Let’s just put it this way: I don’t do these babies in pencil.  I do them in pen.  Read more...

Good Thing, Bad Thing

  • December 31, 2010 3:44 am

One Good Thing


I was catching up on some paperwork at one of the bars last week when I took a break to grab a sandwich at Subway.  I had just sat down at a table to eat when I noticed someone looking at me through the window.  She was a large black woman and she was smiling and waving.  She was obviously hoping to hustle me for money, so I looked back down at my sandwich and pretended that I hadn’t really seen her.  But it was too late: out of the corner of my eye I could see her heading for the door into the restaurant.  “Great,” I thought, “she’s gonna hustle me right here at the freaking table.”  Read more...

TECH TECH TECH

  • September 14, 2010 5:27 pm

We all love our smart phones, our laptops, our gear… our TECH!  We need it, we love it and we lust over it.

I was born with wires in my soul.  I always got the latest and the greatest to fill the need of being first and ahead in tech.  WHY?  It made my life easier… right?

I’m sitting with my friend in my favorite ramen house called “Quickly” in Alhambra (plugging away) and we’re ready to devour some ono-licious food.  I then get an email to make an emergency edit on a video and it had to be done now.  I’m about to eat and my friend is here and my home is 5 miles away… what to do?  Read more...

One Good Thing, One Bad Thing: My Semen Test

  • June 29, 2010 8:55 am

Good Thing: I finally got to live out my fantasy of having sex in a public place.

Bad Thing: It was with myself.

Last week I went into a Quest Diagnostics Lab for a semen test.  (gasp not, dear readers, there is nothing wrong with my spunk – and I have the two children to prove it.  Before you roll your eyes, believe me, if you saw their noses and eyebrows, you would have no doubt as to their paternity – this was a different health matter, and I’m fine).

 Read more...

One Good Thing, One Bad Thing

  • March 9, 2010 8:31 am

One Good Thing
My son didn’t shatter his wrist. ‘cause if he had, I would be in deep shit.

A week ago my nine year old Gabriel asked me to take him and his friend Teddy to the skate park. It was a sunny Sunday, I was in a good mood, what the heck. “Let’s do it,” I said enthusiastically. I jumped up, checked for my keys and was about to open the front door when I caught sight of my wife, caught sight, that is, of her stern glance.

A keen sense of self preservation overwhelmed me. I made a prompt about face, turned back to Gabriel, wagged my forefinger and reminded him that, “Of course you can’t go today! You forgot your helmet at Tristan’s house! It’s unthinkable!” My wife returned to her current issue of “Simple” magazine and domestic tranquility was preserved.

This last Sunday Gabriel asked me again if he could go to the skate park with Teddy. During the week he had retrieved his helmet, so of course I could grab those keys without giving it a second thought. My spring friskiness had returned.  Read more...

One Good Thing, One Bad Thing

  • February 16, 2010 8:05 am

One Good Thing
Best…title….for a book….EVER.

Also by the author: “Slash,” with Slash. “Too Fat To Fish,” with Artie Lange, “Tommyland,” with Tommy Lee.

One Bad Thing

Amy Bishop, the biology professor who shot three of her colleagues to death during a faculty meeting in which she was denied tenure. It’s awful. Tragic. But I have to confess that, for me, this is a good thing masquerading not exactly as a bad thing, but perhaps a bad thing with a silver lining, because we finally have some gender and class parity on the “going postal” front. The woman is 42, a Harvard educated neurobiologist, a mother and a professor working at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.  Read more...

One Good Thing, One Bad Thing: The Asian Parents Edition

  • February 10, 2010 11:25 pm

One Good Thing – Celebrity

You get a guest starring role on Dexter, they smile. You get an interview on CNN, they nod with approval. But if you score a spot hawking Salon Pas or boba drinks on an in-language (insert appropriate ethnic group) commercial for your local international TV station, they turn into drooling, screaming 13 year old Hannah Montana groupies. And you’re Hannah Montana.

One Bad Thing – Organic what?  Read more...

One Good Thing, One Bad Thing

  • January 29, 2010 10:08 am

One Good Thing

Ben and Jerry’s ice cream cake.

My dear friend and business partner, we’ll call him Nick, is going through a very rough separation from his wife, Nora. They’ve dated for 11 years, been married for five. I’ve known them both since I opened the bars. He built the dj booth, built our sign, and has been a key dj of mine to this very day, spinning once or twice a week, every week, for the last ten years. She, too, has been one of my right hands. She’s bartended for me since day one. She’s charming, sweet, kind. We tease her that she makes “Hello Kitty” look like a bitch. They’re just this super cute Oakland hipster couple, driving around in a ’64 T-bird that he airbrushed with skulls, dice and all sorts of other Oaklandish totems. Picture perfect.  Read more...

One Good Thing, One Bad Thing

  • January 15, 2010 3:17 pm

One Good Thing.

I’m reading a book about the Donner party, the fated group of emigrants who traveled by wagon train in 1846 from Springfield, Illinois over five difficult months to make it to the promised land: California, where the weather was supposed to be perfect year round and land was supposedly being given away to anyway who pitched a tent on it.  Read more...

One Good Thing, One Bad Thing

  • January 8, 2010 8:41 am

One Good Thing.

Oakland has converted from old fashioned parking meters to those little kiosks where you put in cash or a credit card and get back a receipt which you put on your dash board. It’s a true paradigm shift: linking the parking fee to the car rather than the curb in front of it. From real estate to mobile property. If you had enough time on your receipt, you could theoretically park in five different spots in the city on the same ticket. This is a tidal shift, people…

But I digress…  Read more...

One Good Thing, One Bad Thing

  • December 23, 2009 2:03 pm

One Good Thing.

(quick disclaimer: today’s prayer is gonna get real corny real fast…)

There are moments in life when you realize your children really are your guests, people who you help care for, but whose destiny it is to become themselves. Yesterday I experienced just such a moment. I took my 13 year old son Rafael to the soup kitchen where I volunteer once a week. You have to be 14 to work there, so I told him to lie if asked about his age. First time I’ve asked him to lie about anything. But I thought I was setting a pretty healthy precedent as to the kinds of lies that are okay to tell.  Read more...

F** you! It’s called PMS!!!!!

  • December 20, 2009 5:56 pm

YouTube Preview ImageHonestly, it sucks to be a woman sometimes.  I wish I had a penis.  All it would do is stand up at inappropriate times and maybe even entertain me for hours. (Look!  It goes up, then down, then up, then down…)

In celebration of Alfredo’s ongoing “3 Good Things, 3 Bad Things”, I’ve got a list to share with you.  It’s the PMS list.

3 Good Things About Being A Woman

1.  We get to wear bright, soft things made of cashmere and fluff our faces with the finest powders and silkiest brushes.

2.  We are naturally able to multi-task.

3.  We are more flexible, physically and mentally.

3 Bad Things About Being A Woman  Read more...

One Good Thing, One Bad Thing

  • December 20, 2009 12:21 pm

coffee0

Ricardo. My coffee guy. The man makes a little drawing in each and every drink he serves. Chocolate syrup on foam, that’s his medium. A little sun, maybe. A smiling coffee cup. A Christmas ornament. When Ricardo smiles, his little round cheeks poof out, chipmunk style, and his eyes look like upside down crescents. He wears big gold crucifixes around his neck. What can I say? The man enjoys life. He’s a freakin’ Bodhisattva, is what he is. One of these days I’m gonna screw up my courage and ask him what the secret to his happiness is. But I’m afraid he’ll just give me an answer as cryptic as it is true, something like, “Oh, Alfredo, all you have to do to be happy is….be happy!” Ah, Ricardo, you bring joy to my life.  Read more...

One Good Thing, One Bad Thing

  • December 19, 2009 9:29 am

Today’s prayer, the Reader’s Digest version:
One Good Thing:jaws01

Flipping through the channels last night (yeah, big Friday night party time!), I came across “Jaws” on TNT. This is my favorite movie of all time (a close second is “Withnail and I,” but this one has the added sepia fuzz of childhood nostalgia). I caught about twenty minutes of it, the scene on the boat where Quint and Hooper compare scars, and where Robert Shaw, as Quint, does a magnificent job chewing up the scenery with his Indiannapolis monologue: “1100 men went into the water, 300 come out, sharks took the rest. June the 14th, Nineteen hundred forty five.” That movie is the perfect blend of character, action, humor, suspense and horror. And just in case you feel you’ve accomplished anything in your life, remember that Spielberg had it in the can well before his 30th birthday. God I love that movie. It’s one of my favorite comfort food flicks.  Read more...

3 Good Things, 3 Bad Things

  • December 18, 2009 8:56 am

This weeks prayers…
Three Good Things:

1. Christmas lights. If they don’t bring a smile to your face, you really do deserve a lump of coal in your stocking. Even my jaded 13 year old metalhead atheist son, whose favorite bands are Cannibal Corpse and Artery Eruption, gets googly eyed at the sight of shiny colored lights.lights02  Read more...

Three Good Things, Three Bad Things: 12.11.09

  • December 11, 2009 10:11 am

Three Good Things:

bulletproof01

   Read more...

  1. My local bank does not have bulletproof glass in it.  It’s quaint, and I like it.  I do my business banking in Oakland, where I’m separated from the tellers by a thick layer of bulletproof glass.  Most banks I’ve been in are like this.  In fact, now that I think about it, I feel a bit vulnerable without the glass, like the tellers could pull glocks on me at any moment.  But I already know what I’d say: “this doesn’t have to end badly.  I’m reaching for my wallet.  You can have my ATM card.  I’m guessing you already know my PIN number.”

3 Good Things, 3 Bad Things: 12.7.09

  • December 7, 2009 8:19 am

We never used to say grace at the dinner table.  Until two years ago.  That’s when we had two Japanese exchange students stay with us for a week.  The two teenage boys introduced us to a family tradition in which everyone at the dinner table talks about “one good thing” and “one bad thing” that happened to them that day.
 YouTube Preview Image
It could be something as profound as my nine year old son’s two (ex) friends taking a vote that they don’t want to be his friend anymore, or as trivial as me finding a killer parking spot (it’s sad how many times “killer parking spot” shows up when it’s my turn).    Read more...