Lazy
 Today was an odd day. I woke up, talked with TAARG, ate, played with ACI, edited this slide show (it's a big file and is 17 minutes long), went back to bed, got up, played with, fed, bathed, endiapered and encribbed ACI, ate, and checked e-mail. Tonight I was supposed to go out to a very trashy event but I decided to stay in. Am I preparing for death?
Paint what you know, or: Don't fix what ain't broken
 From the web:
"don't come near me or I'll turn you into stone." Seemed appropriate for a really pissy teenage girl.
 Which is funnier:
The video of someone getting smacked in the face?
The fact that, for some reason, Unchained Melody is playing in the background?
Or that I found this via some random blog by a New Jersey teen who captioned the video: "This kid gets laid out! Aw Shit Son this kid takes it to the face!" - ?
 My young friend Jesse (pictured here with his special lady) is an up-and-coming standup comedian who faced down some tough odds on stage the other evening.
Performing in Los Angeles can be difficult because everyone from every part of the world who wants to become famous comes here (or goes to New York and learns despair + rats + a pervasive garbage smell). So every audience is usually made up of one's friends and/or other performers. It is only when one travels into the hinterlands of, say, Joshua Tree that one again finds real people in the audience.
So Jesse was faced with following up an acoustic folk singer and preceding a blues band (like Blues Hammer - no relation - in Ghost World) at an Irish place on Fairfax called Molly Mulwraith's or something.
If Jesse had had a comedy audience there, he would have had them doing that thing so common on 70's laugh tracks where people begin clapping and hooting at the jokes. Alas, they were a Blues Hammer/acoustic folk singer audience.
But he did not do that other thing that is so common: he didn't apologize for himself or his being there and, more importantly, he didn't berate the audience for not getting a joke or being more supportive. Other comedians I have seen would have antagonized the audience from the start and wouldn't have left the stage with the warm round of applause Jesse received.
I admit that I feared the evening would end in tears, binge drinking, and lamentation because the odds were stacked against our friend. Instead, he delivered an excellent 20-minute set with plenty of callbacks, confidence, and enthusiasm.
He did call the audience "people" several times ("I'm telling you, people," etc.), which struck me as odd because he doesn't address other groups similarly. I suppose I put on affectations of my own in my climb to the top, such as the one where I say I climbed to the top.
Mrs. Kobritz
I was walking to my car the other night when a journey that began in 1980 suddenly came to an end. I'd been thinking about Blanche Knott's series of books called Truly Tasteless Jokes. I don't know why they sold these books to us in school, but there were great jokes about all sorts of things kids like: abortions, Arabs, Protestants, rape, etc. One of them was:
Q. What do you call a leper in a bathtub?
A. Soup
And another was:
"Did you hear there was a face-off at the leper colony hockey game?"
I was thinking about the books because I was looking forward to seeeing the original version of The Fog again. I hear the remake is useless, but John Carpenter's original is just creepy enough to withstand 25 years of increasing "sophistication" as well as the presence of John Houseman in one of the many check-cashing roles with which he ended his career. The Fog is all about vengeful lepers.
So you can imagine my surprise when I saw this billboard for the L.A. Kings which made the city's hockey team look like lepers about to go for a face-off.
Why can't Firefox be Safari?
 I have mostly switched to Firefox to post to my various websites. Do you care?
I hate Firefox. It has the hype:payoff ratio of Oasis, but it has all the time-saving tools to add HTML that Safari doesn't.
But Firefox is aesthetically unpleasant. It's all table-y and thick. Firefox should be called Looks-Like-Ass-fox.
When will Safari add those features? This is the best time for all the blurkers on this site to come to my aid. (I know who you are.)
Vegas (baby)
When I think of Las Vegas, I think of weddings. That is because each of my visits to Vegas has preceded one.
I have been to Las Vegas four times. The first time I attended a wedding in one of the chapels of the Paris hotel and casino. At the reception, guests were taking bets as to how long it would last. New to Hollywood (and Vegas is like East Hollywood with more fat people), I was shocked that people would be saying out loud what I was keeping my mouth shut about. The marriage lasted nine months and the breakup somehow involved the band Ratt.
The second time I attended a convention with TAARG, who fell in love with me there and who pursued me until I married her six months later.
The third time was last May, when my pregnant wife and I passed through on our way to a wedding in Colorado. We had lunch at the Bellagio buffet. It was awesome.
Finally, this week my small family attended the elopement of our friends Alicia and Darcy. We drove from L.A., stopped in Baker, CA for food and gas, and got to Vegas in about five and a half hours. The wedding was quick and surprisingly Christ-filled for the chapel at which people like Britney Spears and Dennis Rodman have tied the knot, but there you go.
We stayed at the Paris Hotel. Our room, like most hotel rooms and rental cars, was better than what we have at home in several significant ways. There was a tiny sink next to the bar in our room in which we could wash off the ice cubes that had fallen on the rug. We don't have that here.
There was also an unused wing in our room, with a chair, desk, lamp, and several drawers. We felt bad not utilizing it for the length of our stay.
Despite all the uselesss fripperies, there was a charge to use the Internet. I tried telling the front desk that there were several sticks of furniture I would not be using in exchange for free Internet, but I got nowhere.
Because this was the Paris, in the bathroom there was a bidet. I understand that, at the Bellagio, the bidets shoot up much higher and have colored lamps and a soundtrack, but this one was fine. None of us used it except to use it incorrectly, anyway.
We ate at the Paris Buffet, which I understand is the best in Las Vegas. It was, in fact, very good. One of the things I dumped on my plate was garlic fondue. I can tell you I'm glad I fon-did.
But I did wonder about the type of person I might be in a few years, with perhaps more children in tow. Will I demand they eat shrimp and filet mignon at the Vegas buffets so I can be assured I got my money's worth?
"But we don't want shrimp, Papa," they might say. "We want noodles."
"You know how many fucking noodles you'll have to eat to justify 26 goddamn bucks a plate?" I'd scream. "Eat your fucking shrimp! You're ruining my life!"
"But we're only five!" etc.
"You're killing me!" etc.
We drove home the next day, through Silverton, Jean, Primm, Baker, Barstow, Hesperia, San Bernadino, Fontana, and Claremont. Things looked grim and less shiny. I thought about the Vegas convention I'm attending in January.
"Dave, I'm afraid."
 It's been about ten years since I last watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, a movie which introduced me to the idea of science fiction films saying more about the time they were made than the time they sought to portray (this theory put forth in the lamented Guilty Children van by Wallace M. Kemp in 1991).
There is a speech by Arthur C. Clarke on the DVD, delivered to a group of bored-looking movie types in Los Angeles in 1968. It's fascinating, and reveals the type of enthusiastic visionary who inspires people rather than freaks them out.
Speaking of freakouts, the journey Beyond the Infinite in the movie shows its age, making today's viewer think that Jupiter is merely a gateway to the iTunes Visualizer. Still, the gradual unglueing of HAL remains very powerful, and the Dawn of Man sequence makes me look forward to monoliths showing up in my life, justifying violence as an essential learning tool.
Some Austin fallout
In other news, I just got some pictures from my September appearance at the Austin Improv Festival.
Here is me delighting an audience volunteer. I think she was a real estate agent. I will not show a picture of the earlier volunteer whom I didn't delight.
Here is a picture of me on the floor. I don't know why I was there, but I'm sure it was germaine to my performance.
Here I am at the afterparty, talking to my new pal, Emily Mills of the Frito Banditos. "You look like you've begun to traverse your boundaries, Emily," I said. "Are you going on the lam?"
The family extrovert
 The American Actress Rebecca Gray (TAARG) has taken the first theatrical role of her post-natal career and made it her own, with a performance in dual roles as a 15-year-old debutante and a mature predatrix in Theatre of NOTE's Crawl, Fade to White. She doesn't read her reviews until the show is over, but here's a particularly good one from the local Hearst paper, the Los Angeles Times.
The play runs through the first weekend of November.
We are all very proud of her over here.
The Pan
 The standard for fast food excellence is higher in Los Angeles than it is on the east coast. In fact, the only standards for fast food on the east coast are that food be fast and that you can eat it; there's nothing implied that guarantees it will taste good, the east coast will argue.
When I moved to Los Angeles I was surprised how many burger places there were beyond the McDonald'ses, Burger Kings, and Wendy'ses I had known. There were many more chains and many stand-alone places.
The first time I went to an In-n-Out Burger I felt like going back to each McDonalds I'd ever eaten at (or worked in) and burning it down after getting a refund adjusted for 18 years of inflation.
I couldn't imagine a place could be better than In-n-Out, and I believed this for about 60 days, the time that elapsed between the first time I visited Los Angeles and had an In-n-Out burger and the day in late October, 2000, when I first ate at The Apple Pan.
While riding my bike in Boston in July of 2000, I was hit by a UPS truck, which immediately drove away, owing to the many members of my family that have worked for the U.S. Postal Service. The accident left my wrist broken. I kept the cast on through my first month in Los Angeles, cutting it off 30 minutes before my first trip to The Pan.
My left arm was withered and wasted, but after eating two exquisite hickory burgers, it was still withered and wasted. The point is, I ate with my right hand, like I always do.
People who know me now will find it hard to believe this, but I eat less meat these days than I once did. That is why when I went to the Apple Pan today (served by a guy who's been there fifty years) and ordered my two hamburgers, I emerged onto Pico Boulevard feeling like I could kill ten men.
I should have done it while I was still out of the car, because driving home from the West Side of Los Angeles took 2.5 hours in traffic so bad that I considered finding some bar to sit in for six hours. Then I realized I had people waiting for me at home to provide guidance to them, so I kept driving.
Somewhat related to this, I have often prided myself on my ability to avoid L.A. traffic, but over the past few weeks I seem to have lost that gift. I need to create a situation where I ride my bike everywhere like my dishwashing friends on Martha's Vineyard.
Here is a good review of The Apple Pan with some history.
Here is a slightly more comprehensive, but also more precious review.
Another review with pictures. (This review mentions Cassell's in Koreatown, which has the best potato salad I've ever eaten.)
Wanna go to a gargage sale?
 Gargage is the residue you spit out of your mouth after flushing it with Scope or Listerine, and apparently there is going to be some kind of celebrity gargage party this weekend. I wonder what sort of things the rich and famous keep in their mouths?
I was driving up Highland Ave. the other day when I spotted this sign, and thought, "Five years in Hollywood, and just now do I find a gargage sale?" This is very exciting. I hear that W.C. Fields would rinse whole office sets from his mouth, while Norma Shearer would keep dainty things, like gingko leaves and de-boned fish.
I plan to go. I hope I'm not too uncouth or starstruck when I ask things like, "Is it true Harry Houdini gargled the Lindbergh Baby?"
The best way to atone
 For those of you who haven't seen me on an LA stage in a while, I'm goddamn brilliant.
What better way to chastise me for my pride, then, than for you to come to the Creative Grounds in Atwater Village tonight at 8 to see me and several other improvisers put on a musical that we make up on the spot? Included in the lineup, I'm told, are a few people I worked with at ImprovBoston several hundred years ago.
Many people are repenting their Yom Kippur sins this evening, starting at sundown. If the Messiah comes to L.A. while you're at home gnashing your teeth, you'll be really sorry.
****
 A little while ago I was advised that my various means of making money (writing, performing, technology consulting, Talmud scholarship) would best be served by incorporating, or at least getting a d/b/a. Naturally I thought something involving "mavervorl" would be a good idea for a business name and was therefore SHOCKED to find that someone registered that domain out from under me.
I owned Mavervorl.com for several years, having invented the word in a dream, and when it became overwhelmed with spam due to my own web naivete at the time I let it go. Now some clown who won't answer the phone or (his) e-mail is squatting on it, anticipating my becoming rich.
Joke's on you, sucker!
So I picked up MavervorlMedia and have consolidated affairs under that rubric. So if you're plannning on sending me a check, use that name instead.
Mavervorl Media is now active with a meth-fueled freakout soundtrack of my own composition that will make you have seizures.
 I recently finished the two-volume autobiography of Anthony Burgess, Little Wilson And Big God and You've Had Your Time. Burgess, whose Enderby series and the Shakespeare fantasy Nothing Like the Sun are some of my favorite books, wrote an autobiography that made me less interested in him.
I did not know that he was also an accomplished composer. He once wrote a song called "Cabbage Face" which used the letters of the title as the notes of the song.
He referenced, on the second-to-last page of his final autobiography, a poet I'd never heard of, Coventry Patmore, and how he, Burgess, might be getting sentimental in his old age because a particular Patmore poem made him cry.
Here is Coventry Patmore's poem, The Toys:
MY little son, who looked from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quite grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobeyed,
I struck him and dismissed
With hard words and unkissed,
His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep,
With darkened eyelids, and their lashes yet.
From his late sobbing wet.
And I, with moan,
Kissing away his ters, left others of my own;
For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-veined stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach,
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells,
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.
So when that night I prayed
To God, I wept, and said:
Ah, when at last we lie with trancèd breath,
Not vexing Thee in death,
And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thou'lt leave Thy wrath, and say,
"I will be sorry for their childishness."
I went to a bar the other night and they were playing A Clockwork Orange on the wall. That's a fun movie.
 My friend Alx sent me the link above, about British schoolchildren questioning why Our Lord was named after a swear-word.
Apparently, UK Christians sprang into action when it was made plain that "Jesus Christ!" was used more often when spilling stout on themselves than for devotional purposes, so they commissioned a video called "It's A Boy!" about His birth, and why one should not say "Jesus" when dropping cricket balls on one's toes.
While that was interesting, further reading revealed that the music would be composed and performed by the execrable Cliff Richard, and that the song stylist behind "It's So Funny (That We Don't Talk Anymore)", which was the first song in my experience that got played so much on the radio that I called the station to complain, and then found that complaining is useless, is now a Sir.
As a Canadian and Commonwealth citizen, Richard Marx will probably be next.
As if Sir Cliff Richard's involvement in this project was not enough, the story will be told through the perspectives of three quails.
"And you thought L.A. was so cool."
 So there I was at one of those rent-a-red-carpet premieres in Hollywood last night and, looking up, noticed a skywriter at work up in the, you know, sky, like.
He was writing the word "Respect" but by the time he got to the T the rest of the word had become amorphous. As a metaphor for Hollywood, it was reasonable. As an omen, it was inappropriate.
Following the afterparty at Tommy Lee's Rokbar (I like that place - they serve shots in square glasses), my errant friend Paul and I emerged onto Hollywood Blvd. to see a full-fledged fight in action. A gang of 20-something guys was kicking another guy into the street, in traffic, and further kicking him as he lay on the ground. I started walking back there but Paul said something like, "Forget it, Jake - it's Chinatown" and we headed to our cars.
Not ten steps later, a woman shouted the following at us from a passing car:
"I'll sit on your face and eat your face all night!"
All I could say was, "All right," but nothing came of it. I don't know how she could eat my face by sitting on it, unless she has vagina dentata.
A fight in the street and people yelling stupid things out car windows, I said. It's like being back in high school.
"And you thought L.A. was so cool," Paul said.
The millennium of AfterM*A*S*H
 All I'm saying is: It's funny when the white girls rap.
****
Good heavens, Miss Sakimoto
 John Hall, who is the father of my brother in-law, Thomas, has won a quarter of this year's Nobel Prize in Physics. I haven't seen "Jan" for two years so I did not ask him what events lead up to this, if he secured the prize in a knife fight, or how this compares to his Grammy for Best Pop Song with the hit "My Love Is a Spectroscope," but we are all very proud of him even though his research into the optical frequency comb technique did little to keep his office remotely uncluttered.
Jan was interviewed by a clearly-starstruck Nobel hack and reported that he was happy to have made a living in his chosen field. This is very encouraging. He also said he was going to celebrate by taking his "best wife out to lunch."
He is to make a speech in Stockholm in December and, though we are not close and he has not asked me, I have often found that science types have little inclination toward the oratorical arts and, as an entertainment professional, I have written his address.
Nobel Committee, fellow laureates, members of Abba, A-Ha, and Roxette, lutefiskwives, disgraced representatives of the avoirdupois community:
Hi. How are you? (Wait for response.) That's super. I, too, am fine.
I see you admiring my outfit.
Because I have spent my life making superpreciser and superpreciser measurements, sometimes using lasers and other times just using my thumb, which measures both a perfect exponent of Pi and is expandable to microns and centimeters, I am dressed far better than any of you in a bespoke suit precisely tailored to my own measurements. The relationship science has to fashion cannot be underlined enough, and I plan to spend the second half of my career determining hemlines and crafting universal formulae for cuffs, fob pockets, and cleavage.
Before my retirement from the University of Colorado, an Army Corps of Engineers unit determined that the best way to clean my office would be to divert a river through it. I say this to the Army Corps of Engineers: no one ever got a Nobel Prize for building a dam, losers!
Speaking of losers, just one letter away is the word lasers. It is a crime that science has become so ignored in our schools. Well, America's schools. I understand that science is still required here in Sweden and is just as rigorously studied around the world (though I would hardly call what those Australians did with Pepto-Bismol "science"). What I'm saying is: there is no Swedish term for "nerd." And you don't pelt smart kids with ice chunks here. Why? Because you are too busy drinking in your saunas.
I only have a few famtoseconds, so I'll wrap this up.
In conclusion, I am going to take my quarter of the prize money and buy one of those table versions of Ms. Pac Man that they have in pizza parlors. I am going to eliminate the high scores and type in my own name ten times. Then I am going to go down to the high school and shoot the football team with lasers while me and my friends make up anagrams at them.
Peace. I'm out.
(Drop microphone and jump into crowd)
Going too far
 So we had some people over the other night, and the conversation turned, as it inevitably does, to vomit.
"A bunch of us were watching Prince of Darkness at the 86th Street Loews in New York, on mushrooms, and my friend just stood up and threw up all over himself," my friend Andrew reported. "He kept asking, 'Do I have vomit on me?' and we kept saying, 'Yes, you still do.'"
Jessica was at Miyagi's, a sushi place on the Sunset Strip, when a woman walked into the bathroom where Jessica was and stopped just outside of her stall.
"It was perfectly silent," Jessica said, "and then a white puddle began spreading toward me from under the stall door."
Everyone at the party expressed surprise and admiration for the silent method employed by the unseen regurgitatrix.
"I'm never silent when I throw up," my friend Brian offered.
I thought of the scene in Jaws in which Hooper dissects the tiger shark on the dock and the white contents of its alimentary canal spill out.
"Could you detect anything recognizable?" I asked.
"Oh, that's gross," she said.
I always find myself in situations where my contribution to a conversation started by someone else is considered the inappropriate one.
 Ever since Princess Diana saved me from those landmines I have been concerned about the limits to which entertainment photographers will go to get their shots.
As a media celebrity, I laud our otherwise-regrettable governor's signing of a law that restricts the rights of paparazzi. Paparazzi will no longer be able to profit from the sale of photos taken when a celebrity punches them out for being parasites.
Whenever I take a picture, I ask permission; so many of my colleagues do not, and hope for the best or, at least, hope their subjects will not want to undertake legal action.
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