UNIVERSAL DONOR: MA VIE EN CROUTE
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Universal Donor
We can ill afford another Klendathu  feed it up!
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You are just a number to me! And that number is: PAGES UD MADE: My Books Page My Reviews Page My Reference Page My Music Page My Pictures My Store UD-RELATED PAGES: My LiveJournal My MySpace music page My Flickr page My del.icio.us page My Last.fm page My Amazon Wishlist HEAVY ROTATION TV on the Radio: Dear Science Walkmen: You & Me Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes Ratatat: LP3 Beach House: Devotion BLOGS ETC claude le monde nuncstans rock 'em stock 'em tomato nation postmodern drunkard tuckova 22 ghastly mess constintina total virility fuzzysquid drunken bee stacey nightmare elyse from ANTM stereolabrat dark side points jf_franklin 123 i love you READ NOW brotherhood 2.0 NOT BLOGS ETC qwantz (dinosaur comix) go fug yourself the burg cat and girl book of ratings married to the sea icanhascheezburger fire joe morgan fivethirtyeight.com READ NOW hospitality on parade WEIRD LOVE dead amusement pks craters! all content © 2002-2008 Jeremy Broomfield 
Hosted by: HostRocket.Com Comments by: YACCS PRAISE & REVIEWS "[UD] is a genius." --Christian Oates "[Claudia] is fucking awesome, and [UD] is a genius. And vice versa. You should all buy Fear Not." --Tricia Howey MOTTO egeo huic vigorum MY WRESTLING NAME Titan Gently MY PUNK NAME Razor Ection 
WHO LINKS TO UD? • from Technorati • from Google • from Yahoo and here's something weird: my place in Humor 3-space |
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
It takes so much to make the world run, and so many people working feverishly all the time to keep everything from slipping into toal chaos. I'm thinking specifically of the people who work at my medical insurance company and make sure that my doctors get paid and that I don't have to pay them. Bless you, hard-working paper-cutted people. Salt of the earth. Except you fucked up. Yeah, I got me a bill from a doctor with some crazy three-digit "amount due" and I'm sorely tempted to show it to the shredder right now. Mr. Bill, would you like to meet the shredder? GLLLARGLE! Invisible people keep the world spinning, so I hate invisible people.
Imagine all the jobs you never think about. This is just off the top of my head: Surplus Industrial Plastics Byproduct Auctioneer. Llama Handler. Toy Designer, Inflatables and Watersports Division. Assistant to the Head of New Donut Development. Foot Remover. Nickel Miner. Weigh Station Agent. Taster. Administrative Wilson. Kickle Gabber. Spin Targent Monitor. Apple Shonker. Fish Raper. Oh what a world, to create so many ways to occupy yourself in service to your society! So many roads on which to drive your car! So many overpass supports into which to ram your car, flinging you through the windshield at 70mph and you grind your face over 200 feet of gravel to end up dead with your head stuck in a culvert. That was gloomy. But it made me think that I wish I had a private joke with somebody, or, no, I guess it's just like a shared verbal shorthand, where "head in a culvert" would be a catchall phrase to stand in for pointless, tragic death. Whatever happened to old Bob? Head in a culvert. Damn, too bad. He was one of the good ones! Shit! Still gloomy! Is it possible to have Seasonal Affective Disorder that kicks in after one day of constant rain? (Yesterday it rained so hard my underpants got wet -- and I'm from Canada!) Speaking of SAD, have I ever told you about this new disease that I have, which I was diagnosed by Zorgot, who also discovered the disease? You're no doubt familiar with SIDS, or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome -- very tragic. But no moreso than my affliction, which is called GADS. Gradual Adult Death Syndrome. You should get checked out. Maybe you've got it too. There is no treatment. Symptoms include breathing, brain function, and a heartbeat. Woo-pah! Friday, September 24, 2004
So I am tinkering away at the utterly arcane underpinnings of Blogger, changing a line of code here, nudging an image a bit to the left, trying to make UDvCLM into a better site in which two near-strangers can bicker matrimonially and make intimate suggestions about where one of the writers might want to "store" that "Suggestion" about that last post, there. I'm Tinkering!
Not that you care, and why should ya? but I gotta tell ya: Blogging ain't any easier than pimpin' (which ain't easy [c.v. Kane, B.D., 1989]) and in fact it may sometimes make you a little crazy, make you wanna drink an entire bottle of engine coolant and slap some bitches all up and down their calves with a snow brush! You know, the brush that you use to wipe the snow off your car? That's the one, you sicko. Trying to hit little girls. Tsk. Shame on you, Old Timer! For Shame! Back to the tinkering: My point is that my attention is divided, and I hope you will excuse what may be perceived as creative gaps; I'm simply overextended. So if you see a problem on either site, whether typographical, grammatical, hyperthermological, or if it involves tigers in any way, let me know. Thanks. Thursday, September 23, 2004
O, faithful readers, look what you've done! By reading this blog and Vodka Catatonic (or its LJ cousin) you have catalyzed the spontaneous generation of a little baby bloglet. Less than 10 posts old, it is cute and fresh, and you should poke your finger into its fat little cheeks.
Universal Donor and Claude le Monde
are pleased to announce the arrival of their new blog which doesn't have a name, really, but which we think of sometimes as @-,-`-'- The Universe vs. The World -'-`-,-@ which is appropriately grandiose and conveys its adversarial conceit that "point/counterpoint" structure but we just usually call it UD v. CLM Please come and visit this new project. In addition to argumentative ephemera, we have also created comics -- which, um, also feature us arguing, except with more pictures and fewer words. Enjoy! Friday, September 17, 2004
Awful image of the day: Picture a skinny man with dark curly hair. He is thinning a little on top, but not much. Actually he's more receding than thinning, but he just looks a bit sparse, like you know he's so over 35 that he can never again say he's in his late twenties without people laughing directly in his face. Ok, so picture this: he also has a mullet. It's long, longer than his shoulders, and it is full, sharply contrasting the stuff on top. When he wants to demonstrate just how leonine his mane makes him feel, he actually tosses his head around like a teenage girl, or a wet dog.
Now imagine this: He is dancing around with his partner in a tacky suburban living room with lots of carpet. He is naked. NAKED. Skinny mullet man is naked, and his penis bobs flaccidly around, bouncing from hairy thigh to thigh, like a hairless vole in a thatch of pubic grass. He dances horribly, like Kermit the Frog (who had an excuse for dancing horribly, after all: he was a fucking puppet), a textbook White Man's Overbite that he only makes worse by being self-consious about his nudity while simultaneously trying to pretend that he's totally cool with it, like I loooooooove being naked in public, on TV and all, and later on I'm gonna have sex with my Disproportionately Hot Girlfriend. And thinking about his DHG makes him feel a little better, because everyone on TV can see just how hot she is, and that she's with him. But we can also see that she dances even worse, like Miss Piggy after a stroke. Except imagine now that he's a foreigner, or at least a relatively recent immigrant, and his accent is as impenetrable as Laura Bush's tight virgin asshole. (momentary digression: picture that. . . . Okay. Sorry.) Okay his accent sounds Greek or Brazilian or something. And now he's telling you about this lovemaking technique. This naked Yanni-monster is sharing his mysterious bedway with you, oh god. It involves covering the female sex organs with enough ice-cream-sundae toppings to cause the mother of all yeast infections. It's clear that he is uncomfortable with experiencing the actual, unmediated, un-topped vagina, and whether it's a visual, olfactory, or taste complaint, you can't be sure. But as his parting shot, he refers to placing a cherry on top of the "clay-ATTER-us," which you then chew on, he says. The cherry, he says, laughing at the mistake you were about make, not the clay-atter-us! Thanks for joining me for a momentary stop on our journey across the digital television landscape: HBO's Real Sex. The show is hideous. Tawdry, prurient, and vomitously banal, living up to its name by showing "real" people involved in sexual (usually read: naked) activities. The show banks on the viewer's interest in intermittent flashes of bare skin, the occasional genital, and sometimes even some sex -- all under the guise of like investigative journalism, so the viewer doesn't have to feel the guilt associated with watching actual pornography. But Real Sex makes the strongest case ever that pornography -- and perhaps even sex -- should be left to the professionals. Though it doesn't make the show worth watching, there is the occasional gem. Like the segment on the Miss Black Nude America Pageant (or something like that) contest in the Caribbean, where in between all the air-kissing, backbiting, shouts of "Girl!", and five miles of fake fingernail, one contestent finds the time to call errbody together for a Saint Loius-accented session of group "prurr." Got to thank the lord (whose name she pronounces "Jee-SUSS-ah!") before they go get completely naked, oiled-up, and wave their labia in the judges' faces. Praise God! Tuesday, September 14, 2004
I was all ready to get pissed at my office for not giving us the day off for nanalala, until I figured out that it fell on a Saturday this year. I mourned and remembered by going to the big Target mall that appeared near the trainyards at Flatbush and Atlantic. J.Ro had been intoning reverentially about the chain for hours, as if it were really as cool as its commercials. (Which it is not -- it is an important skill to be able to differentiate between products and their ads, because the map is not the territory, bwah, and a good thing because have you seen those new ads for the Hummer SUV? The kaleidoskopic ones? I'm sorry, but those ads tickle some part of my brain and make me smile in spite of myself, even as the bile rises at the thought of the chunky logo I'm about to see and the army of meatheaded pootards that buy and unironically drive the parody-of-excess that is anything made by Hummer.)
So Target was nothing special, a red K-Mart, and I tried tried tried to find some product on which to squander the $50 gift card my boss had forgotten to give me at the office holiday party last December. She found the card but what the hell, man, I think I fractured my consumerbone. Or at least sprained my buymuscle. Aisles and aisles of stuff, tantalizing endcap displays, all for prices way below what you'd expect, right? Can electronic toothbrush technology have advanced to the point where this space-age luxury can now be had for UNDER $15????? What kind of kee-razy mirror-world am I living in? Perhaps the fabled DC Comics Bizarro World? I think maybe it is, folks. Look at the stamps I bought the other day: it's Bizarro Bucky Fuller. Holy hot fuck, that's a weird-looking stamp. Friday, September 10, 2004
I was standing by the living room window, excising the little tumors of cookie dough from my pint of Häagen Dazs and performing the necessary biopsies with my tongue. (Diagnosis: delicious.) Do not ever waste your time with Ben & Jerry's pathetic excuse of an attempt at the cookie dough flavor -- the shit is barely metastatic. I swear there were only like five chunks of dough in the entire B&J pint, whereas your standard HD pint has like a 1:4 dough/ice cream ratio, and not so much chocolate that you end up in chocoshock, which is a stupid compensatory tactic employed by the dough-stingy fuckwads at B&J -- putting lots of chocolate chunks in the Cookie Dough flavor -- who are clearly more interested in alphabetizing their Phish concert bootlegs than producing quality desserts.
Anyway so by the window I heard the horrifying sound of the alleycats screaming, which always reminds me of this conversation I with the old roommate Zorgot: UD: Man, those cats are loud when they fight. ZORGOT: Um. . . they're not fighting. . . . UD: What? They sure sou— Oh! Ohhhhhhhh. Yes, that's me, the city kid, always showing off my lack of knowledge of the natural world. But once I found out that they were making sweet love, I at least knew why the lady cats cried: tomcats have barbs on their little kitty dicks. Yes that's right: barbs. Like you'd find on a fishhook. Mother Nature is a fucked-up evil hobag. I'm sorry to be so vulgar, but if you're not afraid of your eyes bleeding, check this out. And speaking of barbs, I was just thinking about Louis Braille. The story goes that he blinded himself in an accident involving an awl. This sounds like a load of shit to me. How do you accidentally stick an awl in one eye? I'm trying to picture the angles at which you'd have to be working on something with the awl that would allow for an eyeward slip, and the postures required seem frankly improbable in a leatherworking context. I'm sure a quick spin over to the Wikipedia would answer this question, but I'm feeling speculative, so don't spoil my party. Okay -- let's accept the accidental first incident as given. How do you, like, put that awl in the other eye? HOW DO YOU DO THAT? You have to be one fucktarded French attention-seeker, that's for sure. Aww, was your older frère getting all of the love? You stupid frog! Go skip some stones and buckle your breeches! Now, I can picture an angle where just one fateful slip of the awl off of a shiny leather workpiece could do damage to both eyes at once -- sort of a side-entry deal, with and impromptu crunchy piercing of the bridge of the nose -- but that kinda requires a curvy awl, and I don't remember the story specifying a curvy awl, which I don't think a detail like that would have been left out it it had been true. The story would have gone "in 18__, Louis Braille totally blinded himself in both eyes at once with a special curvy awl," and the awl would have haunted the nightmares of schoolchildren for generations, and been used as a threat against naughty French brats who didn't finish their cheese plates and expected Crème Caramel nonetheless. Wednesday, September 08, 2004
For once in my fucking life I actually get my shit together enough to get tickets to the US Open, so of course today the sky opens up, bible-style floods shut down the subway system, and then all day with the rain so hard that Flushing is living up to its name, like the tennis courts are coated with backed-up sewage. [I know you don't like tennis, and I never did either until I read Infinite Jest, which turned me into a fan because I'm suggestible as a drunken sorority girl. If you hate tennis, you can stop reading this post now.] But so all day, which I spent most of at home because of the prenominate subway troubles, I'm watching the USA Network for a sign of any kind of tennisy activity, but it's wetness all around, so they keep replaying last nights Capriati/S. Williams match, where Capriati won but there were FOUR terrible calls that went against Serena, so Al Trautwig's got his poo-stained panties up his crack about the travesty of the century.The calls were bad, but I was roooting for my hometown underdog Jenny, so I didn't particularly care.
But so I'm clutching these not inexpensive tickets to tonight's primetime match, which turns out to be Andre Agassi v. Roger Federer, who's #1 in the world, AND THE RAIN IS STILL BARFING DOWN ONTO THE CITY. Lindsay Davenport didn't play her match today, and neither could the two Russian girls from the top quarter of the draw. (Is it mean of me to point out that a lot of these Top 20, super-talented tennis women all look about one short genetic hop away from Rocky Dennis? Take a gander: Davenport, Petrova, Kuznetsova, Mauresmo. You can see why people flipped for Kournikova, even if she could barely hold her racket.) This is not fair to me. I might not get to see the match at all, and I am guaranteed to get soaked while not seeing the expensive tennis. Fucking hurricanes. I know, some people lost their homes or lives in the storms, but I'm losing my innocence. I should know better. Last Yankee game I went to, Sars and I spent two hours under my big umbrella watching tarp guys dash around like brightly lit ants, and maybe two innings of baseball occurred before 11pm. Screw it. Sports on TV or not at all from now on. Tuesday, September 07, 2004
I do not do well when Left to My Own Devices. My Own Devices are badly in need of repair or replacement. Because people were paranoid about the RNC (which I'm not even gonna get into the ridiculousness of the "fear" pose adopted disingenuously by all manner of NYers who just wanted some days off) I got the week "off" to "work from home." Wa ha. The city was near-empty during the RNC, so I guess everybody's office made the same decision as mine. NYers have a serious allergy to Republicans, especially en masse, and we just freak out FREAK OUT if a group larger than a southern football team comes to town.
But about my week of "working" from home. Here's what I worked on: • Three PS2 blisters (thumb, thumb, right palm) which eventually became • Three PS2 calluses. LAME! I also worked on my record for number of consecutive hours without leaving the house at all, which I think really got on the nerves of the Newest Roommate, who was actually working from home, and on a horrific marathon transcription of recordings from market research focus groups. They gave her a footpedal device to start and stop the tape, which clicked like an ominous arthropod from the other room, reminding me with every clacketyslick that maybe I could like get off the couch for a second and check the old email instead of mainlining HBO OnDemand like it was about to be taken away from me. I watched the televisual equivalent of Christmas Eve Dinner followed by whatever you eat on Christmas Day and then Christmas Dinner too. Imagine the pain of having eaten more rich food than your stomach can handle for four consecutive meals and that what my head felt like from watching so much Award-Winning HBO Original Programming. Fuck dude. These are my devices. I could have developed bedsores from the couch, too, because a week ago Sunday it was fucking tropical in the city so I turned on the Living Room's AC and when I got too tired to hold the remote or the PS2 controller, I just flopped the couch down into futon-mode and passed out in the chilly chill. Decadent, revolting. I think maybe some important muscle groups atrophied, too. I did eventually get out and socialize, but the damage was done. I'm got hermit marks on my love handles. Won't you come grab me and lift me from this pit? Wednesday, September 01, 2004
Supposition: Some people are just born crazy, others born cautious. Tendencies emerge in early childhood, are purified in junior high, and by mid-HS you're pretty much in the state you're gonna be for the next ten years or so.
No, that's not right. Obviously it's a continuum from crazy to cautious, and people fall wherever along it, with people on the extremes standing out as particularly wild or tight-assed, and the bell-curve's central humpers just sort of chug along, watching the show from the wild ones while relying on the cautious folks to keep shit from getting too out of hand. Everybody can remember the really crazy people from their childhood, though of course they weren't actually "crazy" in the sense of "certifiably insane" or "serious medication candidates" but more like "attenion-seeky" and "risk-takey." Maybe "expectation-subverting" or "authority-flouting." In any case, they can be very fun, these people. Okay, let's rename the continuum the Danger/Caution Axis. Stated that way, it becomes a weird societal judgment thing, because everyone is supposed to be cautious, but everyone knows that danger is sexy. Too charged. And certain behaviors I'm trying to classify don't fit, like the girl at a party who decides it would be a real hoot to discharge the nearest fire extinguisher all over her friends. God damn! Not immediately dangerous, but certainly not gonna win any merit badges. Did that example make you snicker, or cringe, or what? Where on the Snicker/Cringe axis did you fall? Is the axis of behavior really Annoying/Not Annoying? No, cuz that sucks lameballs. Maybe Spontaneous/Cautious. That's better, because both extremes are valued as good qualities, but in high concentrations can be bad. Maybe it's the old fave, Thought/Action, where the latter is good for stopping cars that are rolling downhill with babies in them, and the former is good for designing handbrakes that work in the first fucking place -- both valuable qualities. Why am I even thinking about this stuff from square one when I'm sure this is like Psych 101 and a quick google of "personality test" would allow me to test myself across thirty common, useful personality matrices? It's because I'm stupid, stupid and lazy, and a little too proud of my brain. Okay, that's why I'm not doing research. But really I'm obsessing about it because I think I used to fall on one end of the spectrum I've been trying to describe here, and that over the years I've slid speedily to the other. I think I used to do stupid shit, and be spontaneous, and take risks, flirt with danger, flout authority, act crazy. And now I am almost paralyzed by thought about the right way to proceed in any situation. It's useless to fight it, I'm pretty sure, and accepting one's destiny is a hallmark of sliding towards the cautious end anyway. One thing I fear is sliding from Acceptance to Judgment, in terms of how I see others. I can hear some of you unconsciously typing "LOL" after that last sentence, because you think I'm like Mister Judgypants or something, but really I want to make it clear that I reject that reading. I may -- do -- believe that there is a right way to do many things, and that not coincidentally that right way is also my way, but even if I think you're wrong, I usually don't think you're a bad person. What a relief, right? Of course there are bad people, like polluters, robber barons, and on a more individual scale, murderers and rapists and such. Bad people. But people who pee on stuff for fun? Just somewhere else on the spectrum. What spectrum? Fuck if I know. I used to be less cautious. I suspect that I was also more fun. I am bummed out about this. If it's just part of getting old, I guess I'll just have to suck it up. And I guess it's better than the alternative spectrum-slide, which would be to get wilder and wilder and take more risks, because you can get thrown in jail for real, or, like, overdose, or hang glide into a mountain. I don't even know. I wanted to describe a bunch of crazy behavior at the end of this post, but a survey of my friends' behavior in college just depresses me now, mostly because I thought it was all so charming at the time. |
OTHER REVIEWS: John from Cincinnati Menomena LATEST BOOK REVIEWS: The Game Moneyball One-Upsmanship Siddhartha You need the Fear Not Guide to Life. Buy it already. ($4) Now available! The Broomfield Variations CD ($10) or go to The UD Store 
MY IMAGINARY GIRLFRIENDS Chan Marshall Rotem of the IDF Eleanor Friedberger Amy Goodman Bernardine Dohrn ('69) Maya Rudolph Joanna Newsom Imogen Heap Caroline Dhavernas Shana Rae Ray DISALLOWED FOREVER "I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you!" - "from whence" - "...the exception that proves the rule" - any use of the question "spit or swallow?" - the phrase "drop trou" - fake-o reviewer verbs: "penned" for wrote "helmed" for directed "lensed" for whatever - "expat" - the euphemism "passed away" - pronouncing merci beaucoup as "mercy buckets!" (see also: "grassy-ass!") PET PEEVES "confinscated" - trying children "as adults" - "drownded" |
