UNIVERSAL DONOR: MA VIE EN CROUTE
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Universal Donor
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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 Ratatat: LP3 Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes Band of Horses: Cease to Begin Krauss & Plant: Raising Sand Death Cab for Cutie: Narrow Stairs 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 hospitality on parade OMG WEIRD LOVE dead amusement pks craters! all content © 2002-2007 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 
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Thursday, December 30, 2004
All right. This was the post where I asked people for New Year's parties and people failed me hardcore. Now this is the post where I tell you that I'm on vacation in sunny New England until next week and y'all can suck it until then, unless of course you feel like voting for me for "best snarkiest blog" (whatever) at the link listed in the comments to this post. In which case, don't suck anything. You rock. Smooches!
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
I totally had a dream two nights ago in which my Stepfather asked me If I could get him one single joint. I told him I could do better than that, and he said, no, thank you, one joint will be fine. He said this with a sad finality, a regretful shake of the head. One joint. And I was thinking to myself "do I actually know where to get weed anymore? And am I going to have to roll the joint myself? What will I do with the rest of the bag of weed? Will he pay for the whole bag or only the joint?" And now as I sit here writing this, I'm becoming less sure that it was a dream. Then again, I tend to be pretty businesslike and pedestrian in my dreams, always asking for insurance or putting on seatbelts. I have never fucked a unicorn, or chopped the head off of a bully from grade school, or married a weightlifter, or dug my hands deep into a blue tiger's fur. I have probably retained counsel in case a sexual harassment suit was brought against me for telling a cowoker that I liked her pants. My dreams are stupid.
I became a big hulking fattypants over the vacation of fatty foods. I am, like, Farley-fat. Candy-fat. Gleason-ated. Orcacular. Least I feel this way because my belly looks like it does after a large meal -- when I wake up! Eww! I did some math while reading people magazine and figured something out. Okay, Kirstie Allie is really fat right now, right? Right. Like, unhealthy fat, swollen ankle fat. The kind of fat I was humorously pretending to be myself several sentences ago. So People magazine (which you will find at my mother's house in large architectural stockpiles) says she's 195 pounds right now. Big fat Kirstie is 195 pounds? Well so am I, and despite my roly-poly hokey-pokery of almost a paragraph ago, I am not a flabster. Therefore Kirstie Allie is a midget. Q.E.D. She must be 4'10" or something. Just yiny. I can't even remember her character's name on Cheers. That's how short and fat she is. She's off my pop culture trivia radar, close to the ground like a foothill. A belly full of Christmas food is what I blame for my grossest holiday misjudgment. Charlie Munger is this investment banker who gave an awesome speech that I love in which he identifies the 24 most common Causes of Human Misjudgment. Well he didn't mention Yorkshire Pudding and Ginger Cookies, but they stole enough blood from my head that I fell for the Ronco pitch and bought some TV knives. Sure, there are 25 of them, but I think we all know that my buyer's remorse for this will be a epic, tangible, Claudia's-head-on-Saturday-Morning-style whopper. I'll have to use them all the time for everything. Like if you come over to my house, instead of a hug and a hello at the door, I'll cut you. I'll use the paring knife to press buttons on the remote, and I'll use the cleaver to wash my face. I'll use the six steak knives in lieu of a belt to hold up my pants! Wednesday, December 22, 2004
It's hard to believe that Dirt McGirt is dead, right? One minute, the Dirty Bastard is rapping about zoos and hos and petty crimes, and probably swords and zombies, too, and then he has some kind of death-related incident which kills him. Baby, I've got your money.
This morning I saw this girl and I almost had one of those subway in-your-head love affairs that lasts as long as a train ride, but something went wrong. First of all she was cute as houses, with a loose-weave cableknit sweater that poked out and cuffed her belted suede hip-length jacket. Her hair was all hacky layers that looked like they hadn't been washed in almost a week, which was great, and made up for the fact that the hair was too long. She looked kind of like Liv Tyler, except dirtier, and with normal teeth instead of Liv's round little chipmunkery choppers. Green wool skirt, big backpack filled with all the clothes she'd need for the trip back to mom's for the holidays. Aww, she was so sweet that I actually got all self-conscious about whether or not my mouth was hanging open Cletus-style. But then she ruined it all, she did. Ruined it by opening a copy of the fucking' New York Post. Eat crappy dicks. What a fucking disappointment. I had to switch my morning's amorous ADD attentions to the girl sitting across for me who was reading the real newspaper. She was plainer, but she was tall. That's always nice. I emailed the following story to the Metropolitan Diary section of the real newspaper. It's a cutesy slice-o-life column that runs once a week and is so disgustingly Upper West Side that at least one of the stories always involves Zabar's. If you don't know what Zabar's is, consider yourself lucky, if left out. Here goes. STORY START Last night, I'm in the back of a cab crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. We're trying to get into the right lane, but nobody will let us over, so I roll down my window and stick out my hand, palm facing backwards in a "please stay back a moment and let us in" gesture. A white minivan drops back, giving us enough room to move over, but wait a minute, this motorcycle is still in the way, and it's coming towards us instead of making way. It's a sporty Japanese bike, not a big flatulent American monster, but still, it's getting closer, and closer, and closer -- what is he thinking? Can he even see me? Am I in his blind spot? It seems like a collision is imminent, but somehow I can't move my arm out of the way. This is gonna hurt! Then the motorcyclist pulls neatly alongside, and matching our speed, reaches out his hand and touches mine. After thus making contact, he accelerates away along the dashed white line, and my cab pulls into the empty space in the right lane. STORY END Anyway, this morning when I walked out of the deli with my artery-clogging b'fast sandwich, I held the door for and smiled at this girl who I've seen a million times -- she works in my building. But I'd never smiled at her before, and, well: WOW. She smiled back and her normally pretty face lit up like a sun. She looked fucking amazing. What a smile. It's kept me feeling good all day. Mmph! Friday, December 17, 2004
Hello again; apparently I still have posting access, so perhaps I'll find a good way to abuse that priviledge before UD decides to kick me off. Til then, I'm here to fulfill a quest bestowed upon me by Claude, to repost a reply I wrote to her Live Journal.
It seems Claude's Mom had a monkey in the '70s whose name has been lost to the ages. Apparently that is a shame, so Claude has elected to throw a contest to retroactively name this monkey, who enjoyed grapes and occasionally challenging authority. Naturally, this reminded me of the story of Monkey Boy and his sidekick Monkey Boy #2. Here goes my reply: Story of the Oberlin Monkeys Two trust-fund boys go off to Peru for their Winter Term project (the month of January is given to Oberlin students to 'work independently' on their own projects), researching Pygmie Marmosets, the world's smallest monkeys. Said boys spend entire time blowing off trust funds on cheap South American cocaine and strong hallucinogens. On the last day in the country, they visit a market where, for sale, are two pygmie marmosets. Perhaps still under the influence of hallucinogens, they decide it would be a great way to fulfill their winter term obligations, and buy both of them, planning to smuggle them into the country in their overcoats.In order to keep them quiet, they drug them with Valium. The monkeys start regaining consciousness as the plane nears Cleveland, and so they re-drug them. When the boys get back to the dorm, they discover the monkeys have died from valium overdoses. They show the corpses to some friends, then throw out the bodies in the trash can at the end of the hall. The bodies are discovered in the morning by a cleaning woman who absolutely flips out, thinking that perhaps the dorm is becoming infested with monkeys. The situation is reported to the administration, who quarantine the dorm. The blame never quite finds its ways back to the two boys, who several weeks later sell $3000 worth of fake ecstacy and flee to Kenya. The end. Due to my habit of projecting my own word-associations upon others, I suggested she name her mother's dead monkey Benzie. What are YOUR suggestions? Thursday, December 16, 2004
Don't we have foresight anymore? I know that end-of-the-worlders, doom-sayers, chicken-littles, and john-the-revelators are out of fashion in every walk of American life except in the White House (which is actively engaged in an attempt to bring about the apocalypse as predicted by Mimi Rogers in The Rapture -- read this horrifying article and the try not to flop helplessly onto the floor in fear and disgust), but I keep seeing signs, mostly involving robots.
Bill Joy predicted that nanobots -- small enough to be inhaled -- might be the death of us at some point. That was some scary shit, because Bill Joy is a smart dude. Well now my friend Saps the Clown sends me this article about Science's latest Good Idea That Upon a Moment's Reflection is Clearly a Horrendously Bad Idea: Robots that Eat Stuff. It would be cool to create a robot that ate, say, spent plutonium fuel rods from nuclear reactors and pooped out, say, pistachio ice cream in marzipan bowls. But robots that eat dead flies sound very zombie-ish, and as such make me nervous because I have no idea how to kill a robot zombie. Regular zombies, easy enough: go for the head, duh (thanks to L.Knell for the design). But until someone designs me a nanobat or nanocrowbar with which to smash a nanozombot's nanohead, I'm not leaving my hermetic compound. (Actually, every science lab in this country should have a science-fiction writer on its staff who would review all projects and proposals and submit a short story (or novella, for particularly ominous projects) examining the worst-case scenarios that might result from each one. If your thesis project is to design robotic laser knives with eyes, brains, and wheels, you would very likely get shut down after the head of the department read the story submitted by the lab's SciFiGuy. You would, however, be entitled to 40% of the movie rights to the story based on your project, DeathBlade.com.) To make matters worse, robots might not need to find a way to self replicate, because first of all Exhibit A [extremely not worksafe, by the way] -- boy robots are figuring out how to mate with and possibly impregnate our women, and second of all, human males are fantasizing en masse about having sex with sexy female robots. THE SKY IS FALLING. But every cloud has a shiny metallic lining! Because here's a term I just coined and like very much, to describe the clothes worn by microscopic zombie robots: nanopants. Yay! Tuesday, December 14, 2004
Who buys frozen shrimp at the dollar store? The Wall Street Journal just told me that dollar stores are expanding their inventories to include things other than the shit that sat on Rite-Aid's shelves too long. But frozen shrimp? How double-digit do you have to be to think it's okay to buy seafood at the dollar store? Egad. Here are some other things I wouldn't buy from the dollar store: birth control pills; insulin; mayonnaise; pufferfish sushi. I've got like five dollar stores in spitting distance from my house, which maybe is a sign that your hood isn't so great, but I prefer to think of my neighborhood as "bargain-conscious" or "wealth-avoidant."
Girls, I've said it before, and I warned you in the Fear Not Guide to Life, but certain things bear repeating: DO NOT carry your cell phone in your back pocket because it will fall in the toilet when you slip down your hip huggers for a pee. The likelihood of this happening increases in direct proportion with your blood alcohol level, and most phone-dunkings happen in bars. But it can happen in your home, too. How sad is that? My old darling roommate and co-blogger Pussy Willow was often drunk and could not live without her phone, like many good-time girls you know. But she was also utterly petrified when confronted with germs. She would visibly flinch if you even suggested that she clean the bathroom, because the common household bathroom, as we all know, is more crawlingly biohazardous that the outflow pipe of a slaughterhouse in July. So I imagine this very David Foster Wallace moment where PW (for example, but it could be anybody) becomes paralyzed, trapped between two all-encompassing psychoses at once, the moment the phone falls in the toilet -- which may only have urine in it -- and she's standing utterly still, unable to retrieve the (now probably useless) phone but unable to imagine life without it, even for a minute. Somebody would have to come in and rescue her with a finger-snap in the face. Also, because I never get any hate mail, I thought I'd say something that is bound to piss somebody off. Does anybody else think it's weird to refer to people who died in the world trade towers on na-na-la-la as "Heroes"? I'm not talking about firemen who rushed into save lives in spite of obvious, pants-shitting danger. That's heroic enough. I mean the use of the word Hero to mean people who died. What could be less heroic than dying? Heroic is staying alive while doing deadly shit. In fact, I'm pretty sure heroism requires conscious action on the part of the hero, yeah? A passive death in tragic circumstances does not a hero make. THIS IS BASIC, DICTIONARY LEVEL STUFF. YOU CANNOT GET MAD AT ME FOR SAYING THIS. Although I haven't actually checked the dictionary. I just feel that I'm right on this, because I have a very sensitive ear when it comes to language. A VERY SENSITIVE EAR. Saturday, December 11, 2004
Memoranda TO: Disposable Tupperware containers of various size RE: Validity Thanks for holding Thanksgiving leftovers, and for doing it well enough that the mince pie tastes as good as it ever did. You are "disposable," but you are so great that I would love to put leftovers in you and let my friends bring home some of my cooking. Unfortch, I don't cook. Big guy: I am tempted to use you as a soup bowl since my last non-disposable soup bowl broke. But you're Tupperware, and probably not valid to use as dishes. "Crockery" is a funny word. Small guy: you are so small and cute, but I don't foresee myself needing to en-Tupper a tablespoon of Crisco or whatever. My point: the honeymoon is over. You're going to dish purgatory: on top of the cabinets! TO: Claudia RE: Your style May I cop it for a while? Yeah? Seeing as you have Cholera or the Buboes or Dropsy or whatever? I'm gonna borrow the "memo" format again. Don't ask why. TO: Claudia RE: Why? Because, in terms of my creativity, I am a cold dry husk of a man. Poke me with a twig and the fibrous strands that keep me upright will snap, and I will collapse into a loose pile of dusty husk fibers. My gauge is tickling the E. TO: New roommate who moved in November 1 RE: Your blog nickname Howsabout "Flaketard"? Or maybe "Fly-by-night"? Umm... "Letdowny VonLeavenstein"? I understand that seven-month cat-sitting gigs that allow you to live rent-free on the Lower East Side don't come along every day. But we had an agreement! Six months verbal, and you signed another agreement for three months! Okay, fine, whatever. I understand that you couldn't pass it up. But you didn't have to leave in the middle of the day without saying goodbye or even LEAVING A LITTLE NOTE. Now I have to go through the whole Craigslist process again, and my readers are getting really bored reading about roommate searches. At least apologize to them. New Third Roommate Without Nickname (NTR) and I liked you. That's the saddest part of all. We should have had a farewell pie together. TO: You, the reader RE: "Merch" Bowing to public pressure from my creditors, I have been forced to seek supplementary revenue streams to buttress my Salary. For starters, I'm tutoring these two guys on how to use Reason, the unbelievably awesome synth- sampler-beats-sequencing-mixing program I use to make all my music. I'm blackmailing my dermatologist, because during my last visit I noticed that his pupils were huge and he was grinding his teeth and he had a glow-stick in his pocket -- I figured the AMA would from upon a tweaked-out extasy-gobbling raver dermatologist. So that's good money there. And I'm looking into what would end up being the most profitable endeavor of all, but it's... well, let's just say the even considering it merits an entire post of its own: Trivia Emcee for the Uptown Bar/Bat Mitzvah Circuit. But in the meantime, I'm trying to create merchandise for the Universal Donor Store at Cafe Press. Kinda ghetto, I know, but maybe I'll be able to afford a new lightbulb for my hovel if I only sell enough Universal Donor Teakettle Cozies or Fear Not lip balm! TO: You, the reader RE: But Seriously. If you can think of any products you'd like to see in the CafePress store, leave a comment about it or send me an email. Are there any quotes of mine that deserve the comparative immortalization of a tank top or lapel button? Any humorous concepts or images that I could draw pictures of and slap on a coaster? Help me out so I can help you out. TO: Blogger RE: You are dumb It's useful to have a spellchecker built right in to the interface, and it spares the world of millions of typos a day -- thanks for that. But it always asks me if I want to correct the word "blog" by changing it to "blob." That means you are dumb. Wednesday, December 08, 2004
Yesterday while showing this here blog to a new reader, I chuckled at something I read over his shoulder. Incredulously, he's all: "you laugh at your own blog?" like I'm some kind of literary baby-raper. But shit, dog, I wouldn't write this thing if it didn't make me laugh. I record music that I like to listen to, and I'm lucky as hell that other people happen to like it too. It's sort of the same thing here, except that I don't consciously write things I think I'd like to read. The reason I can laugh at my prose -- even very recent prose -- is that I forget what I've written as soon as I write it. In order to chug out my posts, I pick some topics, beer-bong a gallon of piping-hot Irish Breakfast tea, chew a couple of Ritalin, and have my assistant tape my wrists to the edge of my desk so I can't do anything but type. I then enter a fugue-state, accessing the part of my subconscious in charge of run-on sentences, shameless embellishment, and profanity. Hallelujah! If I'm lucky, half an hour later -- when I've sweated the tape off -- there's a postable clump of words staring back at me. As long as I haven't insulted anybody who could reasonably be expected to kill me for it, it's copy, paste, post!
Speaking of Ritalin, I swapped some of mine for this new pill Concerta, because that's the way I do, yo. My friend said "it's like Ritalin," which was good enough for me. But I looked it up this morning and indeed, it is exactly like Ritalin in that in contains the same active ingredient, but released over time, unlike my immediate release generics. But if you'll forgive a little bit of drug geekery, I'm gonna paste a rather large chunk of the patient info here, because this pill is totally magical. The various emphases are mine: CONCERTA™ uses osmotic pressure to deliver methylphenidate HCl at a controlled rate. The system, which resembles a conventional tablet in appearance, comprises an osmotically active trilayer core surrounded by a semipermeable membrane with an immediate-release drug overcoat. The trilayer core is composed of two drug layers containing the drug and excipients, and a push layer containing osmotically active components. There is a precision-laser drilled orifice on the drug-layer end of the tablet. In an aqueous environment, such as the gastrointestinal tract, the drug overcoat dissolves within one hour, providing an initial dose of methylphenidate. Water permeates through the membrane into the tablet core. As the osmotically active polymer excipients expand, methylphenidate is released through the orifice. The membrane controls the rate at which water enters the tablet core, which in turn controls drug delivery. The biologically inert components of the tablet remain intact during gastrointestinal transit and are eliminated in the stool as a tablet shell along with insoluble core components.Okay. First of all, congratulations and kudos to the people at Alza for bringing us the term "drug overcoat," which just sounds really nice and warm to me. But they deserve a prize for the real trick of Concerta, which is this: it is not a pill -- it is a gun that shoots Ritalin. If your eyes glaze over when they encounter indented chunks of barely technical text and you skipped down here, here's the scoop: you take this thing that looks like a pill but is actually a biochemical machine, a pharmacological Maxwell's Demon. The outer coating dissolves and shoots you a blast of Ritalin to get you started (that's the overcoat). Then your tummy juices osmose into the core of the pill, forcing the drug in the core out of the muzzle of the drug gun and into your tummy, but slowly, gently, like the soft bullets in that awesome Flaming Lips song that I can never get out of my head. Then the gun, empty of its medicinal bullets, travels down your intestines to sneak away with your poop. Magic! The crazy part is that nobody reads these things but me, and I'm sure doctors that prescribe this aren't saying to their patients "oh by the way this isn't a traditional pill, it's an osmotic drug gun. Merry Christmas!" You know? Then again, who cares? Thursday, December 02, 2004
I know I've been gone, my pretties, but I'm back. I spent the last two days at home, under the weather, and on top of the terlet. Ah, winter's here! The trees are bare, the wind kisses the tip of your nose through the thin, cheap wool of your scarf; gastrointestinal bugs attack your tract (could it be from the stuffing? I know she cooked it inside the bird. Ooogle.), the sky turns purple as an alcoholic bruise, the stanking muddles of slush soak your shoes, and the stray kittens in the alley are one cold night away from their icy concrete graves. Boo winter!
A new Subway sandwich joint opened near my office, and I have a complaint about some bullshit. The Subway people are olfactory liars: they use a hidden exhaust fan to blow the smell of their "fresh cooked bread" into the path of hungry pedestrians. But it's big fat stupidheaded lies. The smell is amazing, wonderful, and obviously a concoction of a group of highly skilled and compensated chemists (probably Germans); it is most definitely not the result of the process by which they bake their hideous lumps of bread-like caca. It reminds me of the street carts that sell hot nuts (yes I said hott nutts) which smell like god's apple pie but when you eat them they taste like nuts with sugar on them. It is cruel, misleading advertising that ingeniously circumvents all existing false advertising and fraud legislation. Too clever. Now to update you on my opinion of that U2 song from the iPod or iTunes commercial. My coworker has the album and insists on playing it, so I've heard the song in its hacky entirety. To translate my comment into Eurotrash, in which the song itself is written: "The song, she is awful like poop." I'd gladly cheesegrate my nutsack if you promised me that I'd never again have to hear these lyrics, which can't even pretend to have any depth or meaning, no matter how loud Bono shrieks them into his Jameson-soaked microphone, or how much he bends his knees and looks like the champ of the Chateau Marmont limbo contest:"Hello, Hello (Hola!)/ I'm at a place called vertigo/ It's everything I wish I didn't know/ but you give me something i can feel/feee-eee-eel/yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah /yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah/" I MEAN COME ON PEOPLE. "It's everything I wish I didn't know" could be an interesting idea coming out of the mouth of somebody interesting, but everything that follows it makes puke climb my esophagus in an eager attempt at egress. Gang, this is hideous, lazy, and stupid songwriting. I hate the people at Apple for legitimizing it while at the same time besmirching the entire iPod campaign. The song is a balloon filled halfway with pus and left on your doorstep because they are too lazy to throw it. This is worse than phoning it in: this is having your personal assistant text-message it in. And finally today, just a horrifying piece from Democracy Now! this morning: Abstinence-Only Programs Spread Misinformation About AIDS & Abortion -- A new Congressional report has found that many students participating in federally funded abstinence-only programs have been taught misleading and inaccurate information about abortion, homosexuality and AIDS. Students have been taught that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for AIDS, and that touching a person's genitals can "result in pregnancy." This according to a report in the Washington Post. The Congressional report found that for the past three years, the Bush administration has been strongly promoting these abstinence programs even though they frequently relied on medically inaccurate or misleading information, often in direct contradiction to the findings of government scientists. The Congressional report examined the 13 most widely used abstinence-only curricula; only two of the program were deemed to be accurate. |
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" |