Due to relationship-related social pressures, I once had to post a plug for a show by a *shit* band (and a San Francisco band, at that). This ex and the shit bassist in the shit band were way-back chums. Since I pretend I have a readership, it pained me to suggest said phantom readership go see all that shit. Today, I'm no longer in that relationship, and I'm free to endorse only quality friend-bands. And yet I let Battleship's first local show since getting back from tour go unpreslobbered-on. Now I have to atone for that, too. So: 11/2 at Gilman, Battleship, and god they're good, for punk rockers. And their fans, Aleks can attest, have exquisite aim.

I turned a two and a half hour drive into a five hour tour by totally misplacing Highway 205E yesterday, but there was a cuddly silver lining. I am in love with a Viking-proud Danish drummer raised in Stockton, it's rumored, and I learned, by seeing it on a water tower*, that this is their minor-league hockey situation:

Stockton Thunder indeed. Oh it's too parfait.


*My love for California's Central Valley, my home region as well, is unfeigned and frankly pugnacious, even though objectively I admit it's a long string of shitholes. I shoutily defend towns like Modesto and Bakersfield.

Wow. Apparently, adorable pink suds are no excuse for buying grapefruit-scented but wholly unnatural and allegedly "gnar-gnar" dish soap.


We viewed a pretty ridiculous National Geographic Channel job a few nights ago, in which two insufferable hosts pestered lots of meanie-mouthed animals with something called a "bite meter". When the targeted creature - great white shark, alligator snapping turtle, African wild dog etc. - chomped on the vaguely Eskimo Pie-ish device (baited for each target with species-specific bait: the best example of this was the entire head and neck of a gazelle, for the lion; more comical than it sounds, really), a dubious pounds/square inch measurement was displayed. Dubious, I'm saying, the science of it, or at least the pretending to get a really precise to-the-p.s.i. reading, but still. Just hold on. When they got to the spotted hyenas, whom I know had to coming, the chompiest jaws of the predatory kingdom thus far had belonged to the lion, at 600-something p.s.i., in the six-hundred-teens I think. This measurement was taken from the bite of a nearly adult male lion who was exerting himself pretty thoroughly. OK. So then. They get to a totty little spotted hyena, still a little fluffy. This time the "bite meter" is baited not with a head and neck but with - I can't - god - with fucking powdered milk. And what it did, this baby, was not chomp but lap, lapping interspersed with an occasional good-natured clamping down motivated by nothing more, looked like, than pleasure.

1,000 pounds per square inch. I don't care what the real number was, what a legitimate experiment'd've revealed, hails.

All girls of a certain sluttiness know that most of your younger boys emerge from showers largely undried. I feel uncomfortably like a standup comic noting it here, yet I do so not to lampoon but to honor. Hardwood floors across the country suffer for it and towels feel underused, dry and merely encircling waists, but all these water-dropped torsos compensate, yeah?

I've got this newfound complete lack of shame about any dubious arts 'n' lit preferences I may have. I'd been attributing it to my generally enthickened skin of late but I just now realized the source's much more specific than that - how emotionally vulnerable to criticism can I permit myself to be when one of my favorite bands looks like this? Hails, Satyricon, for this emboldenment.

An ongoing panel debate I've started: What is the worst possible band/solo artist shirt a theoretical blind date could show up wearing? Which fandom could most instantly doom? My #1's a three-way tie between Bonnie Raitt, Fishbone and specifically Achtung Baby-era U2. (Any U2'd start Blindie in a magma-deep hole, but an Achtung Baby job in particular, caw, scalding.) Lil' None More Metal offers "Uhh . . . Sublime? No jazz, a jazz shirt!"

"K, jazz isn't so much a band, though. You and parameters, not intimate."

"Prince."

"Oh ooog, dead on. 50 times worse if it's on a guy though."

"Oh 100 times."

Good absent Christ, are there some romantic butterfly species names: The Atala, Gold-Drop Helicopis, Jeweled Nawab, Two-Tailed Pasha, The Mosaic, The Wizard (these are all actual, again, actual), The Gaudy Commodore, Himalayan Jester, Cocoa Mort Blue, Small Postman, Scarce Bamboo Page, Little Wood Satyr

("But what of moths?" you cry, all tremulous? Fine, here: Argent and Sable, Garden Carpet, Pepper-and-Salt Geometer, Indecorous Eggar, Muslin Bombyx, The Geometrician, Inquisitive Monkey, The Infant)

A "mix CD" of mine, consisting largely of Allman Brothers and Lynryd Skynrd songs, has been crudely (and hurriedly by the looks of it, coward) defaced. The disc, formerly unmarked, now bears the Sharpied legend "FUCK THIS SHIT" surrounding a crudely-sketched Confederate flag. Of course this only improves its value to me, but were I inclined to be upset about the vandalism, I wouldn't know at whom to direct my anger, because I know three pricks actively proficient in this sort of advanced anarcho-santimoniousness. I think of them collectively as Professors Faggot Q. Boredom. (Private to one of them: How credible do you feel, as a man with "FUCK CARS" tattooed across your knuckles, begging for so many rides to shows?)

People giggle, with unattractive snobbery, at "farmers' tans", but surely no one can laugh at a muscle-shirt tan. Surely this is beyond reproach. And if there were upon an elbow a tattooed pentagram, one could forgive even a personal Do Not Play Around Me, Ever list that includes fucking Led Zeppelin.

An exceptional moment of premenstrual hyperemotionality just now - viewing a photo of two caterpillars approaching each other on a willow branch, inwardly exclaimed "They're going to be friends!" and was unfar from a single sob.