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Few things transcend class and society better than the above phrase. It was something said fast and often in my hometown of Oroville. People there would stare you down, get in your face, yell, cuss, flap their arms, and in a few rare instances, even fight. Naturally a lot of it was just puffing up their feathers to look tough, since not a lot of the guys there were very big or tough and could get pasted by their wives.       You don't usually hear such a direct confrontation too much in the City. People are pretty frightened of just about anything here. They try to avoid getting in the face of other people and avoid conflict whenever possible. I actually don't like this, since anger doesn't go away if not released. It comes out in little bursts that are pretty crazed. I'll see people trying to kill each other when they both go for their favorite water at Whole Foods, or better yet, come at each other with salad forks when one person overhears another sending back a particular varietal of wine they really like. It's a very strange thing to watch and I wish people would knock about each other a bit more. Some physical adversity is also good; a little character building if you will.       So, here we come to me, walking up from the Bart along Cyril Magnum, my little shortcut to avoid Powell when coming home. Don't get me wrong, I really like Powell, it's just really slow to walk through during commute times. Anyways, as I'm walking up the street, I look across and see that a car has gotten The Boot.       Now, The Boot is a beautiful thing. I don't have to worry about it because I don't drive. Most other people don't have to worry about it because they pay their parking tickets on time. The Boot is reserved for only the worst offenders in ticketdom who don't pay their tickets and let them build up. If you see someone with The Boot wrapped around their front tire, it's because they're simply assed-out and finally gotten caught.       So, as I was staring at The Boot on this car, I see there's a guy in the driver's seat listening to the radio. I'm looking at him and what he's doing and I'm thinking, "No way, this guy is going to try and drive off with The Boot on his car." That just isn't possible. Well, it's kinda possible as shown by Homer Simpson when he drove out of NYC with one on and tore up the front fender of his car. Not possible in real life, but here's the guy and it looks like he's going for it. Oh yeah, I might add that if he did get some momentum going, he was parallel parked and would have had to nudge his way otu of the that before loping down the road with Said Boot.       In all my fascination, I didn't notice that he was starting back at me while I was staring at his predicament. Upon noticing me, he yells out, "What are you lookin' at?!! Move on bitch!" Normally, one isn't too in to being yelled at like this, but I looked at his car, him, and most importantly, his Boot, and could only laugh and walk away while he kept yelling and cussing at me.       I know I was being rude and staring and he was probably justified in yelling at me, since I wouldn't take to kindly to people staring at me if I had that happen. But, I make sure things like that don't happen to me and god damn, it was just hilarious.

I've had it with this woman's interpretation of classic plays. In fact, I've had it with anything that she does. As Creative Director for ACT - www.act-sf.org/ - she seems to do fine and stays out of the way of the performances. But, as a director of stage she a failure. Anything she touches is tedious, poorly paced, and will have characters and actors you just can't give a damn about. I have yet to walk out of a show she directs with anything more than a "Well, I guess that was okay..." It's this signature style of hers that just leaves you cold and without any interest in what she does.       Such is the case with The Voysey Inheritance which opened recently. The script is great as it was written by a great writer and adapted by a great adapter (David Mamet) and you can feel the narrative coursing around. But what Perloff has done with this work is just criminal. It's bland, banal pace at first seems like the mechanism to draw you in to the material of the play, but it soon shows you that that's all there really is to it; nothing. The actors sit there like paperweights, waiting to be moved by some force that doesn't exist or doesn't have the ability to move them, i.e. Perloff.       And this boring event is not the actors' fault. I've seen many of them in other plays by ACT which were excellent. The main difference? Yes, you guessed it, Perloff wasn't at the helm. I feel sorry for them being trapped by this woman's decrepit and stymied "style". Of course they're probalby used to it, because just as they're rolling along with some good part sin some good plays, Perloff comes in and craps all over everything with something like Voysey.       The really amazing (or maybe not so much if you know San Francisco) is the fact that she seems to be the critics' darling. Voysey has been getting rave reviews. The Chronicle gave it their highest score for instance and this is always the case. It's like there is this fanclub of 10 people chanting "Carey! Carey!" anytime she takes the reigns at ACT. But, everytime she does, the play falls flat on its face.       It's not just me that feels this way. Anyone I know who knows her and what hse does agree. Beyond the fact her directing skills are piss poor, she also has a bad habit of trying to toss in a dash of Post-Modernism just for flare. Given the idea that you need a damn solid foundation to build something like that on, you can see that it is destined for crapdom. My girlfriend feels the same way. After walking out of Voysey, she looks at me and says, "I just really didn't care much about that." to which I naturally agreed. Needless to say, we went home and watched a good movie from Netflix called Arlington Road that was considerably more rewarding.       Carey, do us all a favor and step down. Let someone run ACT that has a love of theatre and isn't trying to press their own ideas into what is a centuries old and extremely well-established medium. You do the drama community of San Francisco a great disservice. Everyone I know shall be boycotting anything you direct from here on out.

As news of this whole Schiavo fiasco has been circulating around recently, I've found it interesting how people fight for life in their own way. For instance, there are the woman's parents who won't let go of her and then there are the lawmakers who are doing everything they can to make sure that th plug doesn't get pulled on her. What's amazing to me is that all these lawmakin' people are putting out all this effort to save a woman who is for all intensive purposes, brain dead when these same people have killed more than an estimated 100,000 people in Iraq as well at the 1,500 US troops who have died there.       And this is my big beef right now. There are countless people who disagreed with Bush on just about everything he stood for with the exception that he was "pro-life" and so they voted for him. I find it amazing someone would do this since Bush is really not pro-life. How can you be when you're pro death penalty and pro-war?       Don't get me wrong on this. While I don't completely agree with the pro-life crowd, since they're rooted in organized religion groups and are really a very vocal minority that's trying to grab hold of things they don't understand, I also feel that they're entitled to their viewpoints, just as I'm entitled to mine. But, here's the issue I have, because they will be against abortion or euthanasia, but then in the same breath they're all for killing a person in prison or killing people in another country. This is foul. It's unjust and beyond hypocritical.       If you stand for something then actually stand for it damn it. You can't run this middle ground of morality and think that you're doing good in the world. Pro-life people need to wake up, see the end result of what they have created, grab hold of the process and get the train back on track. There is simply no way to take people seriously who are unable to have a solid backbone in what they believe.

No where else does it seem that pedestrians rule as much as San Francisco. In the US at the very least, SF seems to be one of the few towns where drivers have to watch out for we strolling fools as we go about our ways. If you see someone who doesn't understand this, then they're not from around town most likely. I remember a woman honking at me because I was walking across a crosswalk once on Broadway where I had the green. She was something else, damn near tried to kill me, and damn near got a turkey with swiss chucked in her open window.       Overall, it's a peaceful relationship I believe. The drivers realize the god-like powers of the walkers and how they cannot be touched. I enjoy it quite a bit and I think that it's one of the reasons I liek Europe so much, although in central London and Split, Croatia, the drivers verge on homicidal. In London this is worsened by the fact you're not used to looking the other way when crossing the street. In Split the biggest problem is that they'll always cuss at you in Croatian, which is a shame, since hearing the insults of people in other countries is one of the highlights of traveling.       So I shuffle on home and wear through another pair of shoes. I'll buy them yet again to wear them away, all the while realizing they're a damn sight cheaper than car insurance.

It's amazing. All of this recent to-do about steriods in professional baseball smack of the McCarthy witch hunt trials in 50's. I'm hearing things like "name names" and what have you. It's all really ridiculous.       While McCarthy and his evil, putrid ilk were starting off on what they felt was solid footing (rootin' out them damned Commies) these hearings that are happening today are absurd. There is no reason for Congress to have any business in professional sports. It's weird. It's odd. It's uncalled for and just plain bizarre. The last time I checked, there were a lot of problems in the US and one of them wasn't pro-baseball. If anything that's probably good for people since people like entertainment and sports are something that a lot of them find entertaining.       I have no idea where it's going to end and what the overall purpose of this is. I doubt that many people out there will know, Congress included. I wish we could push things back and knock this crap off. Our politicians seem to think their gods (case in point, the Florida woman in a vegetative state that they say can be let die.) There are times when I wonder if the current system we have can be fixed with the current system or if we're headed towards some kind of social revolution like the sixties.

Whomever the little wankers that came up with this acronym were, I think they should be publicly lynched.       Why? Simple, everything is ASAP now. Everything needs everything As Soon As Possible and it gets to be stupid beyond believe. I see it from people all the time telling me they need something ASAP. Here's a little hint; if you have to tell me in technology about it, then most likely you need it done pronto. While there are only a small percentage of people who insist on using this at my company, it seems that they're using it more and more as I look through the tickets and see how prevalent it is.       I guess its something of a nervous laugh or a finger twitch for people, because if they thought about it for more than a second, they'd realize how dumb it. And its not just dumb for the basic reason that acronyms from the 80's shouldn't be used today unless you want to proudly proclaim you're an ass, it's dumb because it is so non-specific. It's like someone has a problem, they don't want to think about it or deal with it so they toss this non-linear non-quantified time figure on there. Saying, today, or tomorrow, or this week, or whenever you get done being a slacker would be much more helpful. Of course, something else helpful is if people don't come down to you saying, "Hi, I deleted a file and for some reason, it's gone." "Yeah, it does that..." :(

If San Francisco can love nothing else, it's parades and as you may guess from the title, that I'm not much of a parade guy.       It seems like this is a pretty commonplace thing in big cities, but it really seems like there is some kind of parade at just the regular amount of intervals where you forget about them and get caught in the quagmire that ensues. Case in point, I had no idea that the parade was happening and thusly it took my an hour and a half to go a distance that usually takes five minutes. This is the beauty of the parade: it closes main streets and it drags everyone to the same speed as the parade. It's ever so fun.       The thing I just can't get with stuff like this St. Patrick's Day parade that happened nearly a week before the actual holiday in question is why the hell do they close off half the town. There are times it feels as bad as Berkeley where there is this believe that the traffic is secondary to everything else in existence. I agree on the pricnipal, but SF is a pretty big city and you just can't shut off a manjor artery like that and expect things to work. About the only fun thing in all of it is listening to some of the traffic cops let people have it for being stupid. I guess my parade yesterday was one more of profanity than an appreciate for whatever the hell it is they are celebrating.

Guys, you need to lay off on the law suits. If it wasn't for people leaking info and getting the public excited, who would care about you? yes, you have your loyal fans, but they're getting older and being replaced by youths who are growing up on PC's and Windows XP.       Let's face it, you have an overpriced machine that is of poor quality. What keeps your stock high and people buying is the buzz you create. Steve Jobs may be a charismatic guy, but he'd be nothing without the throngs of dweebs who follow your product. It's all these little pain in the ass bloggers that let people know when something comes out from you. it's free advertising for Christ's sake! How can that be bad? So what if they let people know about stuff before its released. This is not giving the competition the leg up, since honestly you don't really have any competition. People who buy Apple products buy them because of the aforementioned buzz and for some other reason that remains elusive to me. I've seen people who have had three Macs die on them buy a 12" iBook, one of your most worthless machines, just because its an Apple.       This goes beyond a 1st Ammendment issue and is purely and Apple stupidity problem. It's a problem in the staff at Apple that is leaking important information and it's the same problem that has plagued Apple for years in that there is dying, crazed, delusion believe that anything created there can't be released and being proprietary is the way to go.       It burned you in the PC rush and it will probably burn you again.

So, it seems that we're having what a lot of people (myself really and truly not included) call "good weather". This is weather in San Francisco that allows you to outside without the onion-layering setup because it is generally quite pleasant to most. I however do not like this warmth and more than happy to be a constant onion, thus the reason I live in San Francisco.       I remember this weather quite well last year, because it was two days from now, one year ago where I started my dastardly trek to Walnut Creek for my current job. This week also happened to be one of the warmest ones that they've had on record for the Bay Area. Many people loved it. They walked around, shirts unbuttoned a bit, burning a little, and generally stating how great it was. My poor self on the other hand was busy walking from the Walnut Creek Bart station to Diablo magazine's offices, which happen to be a mile away. I'm certainly not adverse to walking and I do it a helluva lot around town since I don't have a car. But, this is a long walk of nothingness and in this case, a considerable amount of heat. My new boss, took one look at me as I walked in drenched in sweat and red in the face and probably thought I was having a stroke, since I was and currently am one of about four people who commute from SF to Walnut Creek for the job. Everyone else there drives and yet they still bitch about the heat. They're a funny lot.       So here it is again. I suppose I won't be needing my 3/4 length black wool coat that has been such a good friend for the last few months. Perhaps the rains have stopped and perhaps it is getting warming, thus leaving me in the lurch and pining for my cool days back again. Maybe we'll get some massive fog this year. One can only hope...

There are times and albeit these times are not for everyone, but there are times when people need to some how stand outside of the big ugly bag of mostly water that they call a body and go, whoa, what am I thinking? Or, in lieu of that and at a bare minimum, just look at the exterior of their car and see what that says about that.       There have been some good ones I've seen lately, such as the personalized license plates. One that's in my parking lot sometimes says, "BNARDS" Now, I realize that this is probably short for Bernard's or something like that, but buddy, your license plate reads out at Be Nards. While its infantile and childish to laugh at that, it's still pretty damned funny. It reminds me of a sitcom bit where this guy who likes sailing gets a plate that says "Sea Lover" except that it reads out as "CLOVER". I'm not really a big fan of the plates, except for "310H55A" Think about that one for a minute. If I ever got one, it'd just be a jumble of letters that I'd let people try and make out, just to drive them nuts.       Another one that was laughable was this wannabe thugesque black guy who was driving an Acura that had "MSKIKI" on the back. Naturally, I was staring at it and he was staring at me staring at it. I think he was rather sensitive about it. Maybe that's what his girlfriend likes about him, since I'm assuming that that has to be her car or the guy just has one of the best senses of humor I've ever seen.       By the way, if you're a middle aged, balding Korean guy and have a "Fear This" plate on the front of your car, realize that the people laughing in front of you are really laughing at you and maybe a tad frightened as your driving could be very suspect.       Overall, I'm glad I don't have a car and I think the only thing I'd put on a car should I own one would be a Croatia country sticker that says "HR". But even this I'd be worried about, since people would think I'm some kind of Human Resources software salesman or something and that's just not quite the self image I'm looking to exude in my vehicle.