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 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 
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Wednesday, December 28, 2005
All right, I'm way behind on any kind of end-of-the-year feature, here. No index, summary, or anything. But here's a core dump to tide you over until I cobble together something that exhibits appropriate levels of annual closure.
Oh my sweet Jesus fuck, there are a lot of people on the streets of Manhattan right now! I went out for lunch and had to punch my way through a rather larger than usual number of ovine obstacles. Tourists especially love to gather on midtown street corners in confused, upward-staring knots, and for some reason, every vacationing schoolchild in THE WORLD is out there too, either dangling frustratedly from some parental limb or bounding around like a pinball in the jet bumpers, screaming "kidnap me!" to any psychos in the area. Seriously, it's a pedophile's paradise out there. I wonder if I could clear the streets by going out there and saying something like "some one just stole a baby! Protect your children! Run!" or like "I heard someone's jabbing tourists with AIDS needles! Run back to your hotels! Baaaaa!" Whoops. Maybe not with the sheep sound at the end. Might discredit me a bit as a doomsayer. But so even though the streets are littered with human detritus, guess where I went that was completely empty? A bookstore! Best Buy's registers looked like they were hosting a "imitate a breadline" contest, but over at Coliseum Books, If you closed your eyes, spun around, and hurled a knife at random, it probably would have hit... a book. No joke. Then I guess you would have to buy the book, because of their policy: "You throw a knife into it, you bought it, you sociopathic knife-throwing goon." Seriously, why are all these people here? Christmas shopping should be over by now. Maybe they're staking out Times Square territory for the New Year's Rockin' Eve? Oooh, that police barricade looks better than the rest for getting crushed against! Let's get trampled in front of the Marriott Marquis! Or is it Marquee? Fuck it! Trample me NOW!!!! Friday, December 23, 2005
Somebody sent me this link the other day and I almost lost my shit right then -- here, my friends, is fame: not self-promotion, not self-publishing, just straight up WIKIFUCKINGPEDIA. Boo-yaa! And I'm telling ya: not only didn't I write it, but I have no idea who did! If anybody feels like taking credit, I'd love to know who you are: comment if you're proud, email if you're shy.
* * * It's time for resolutions, time for housecleaning. It's time to reaffirm my commitments to projects I care about (i.e., UDvCLM, recording music, socializing) and time to reduce the amount of time I spend doing things to which I am not really committed in the long term (my job, bathing, laundry, literal housecleaning). Ha ha. I'm kidding about that last group there. I've seen mice in the kitchen, so I'd better pursue at least that aspect of housecleaning. Gotta put into effect a plan to eradicate those cute-ass motherfucking rodents. Oh, and I am reaffirming my commitment to swearing, cocksuckers. (I was gonna tell a short version of a cute mouse story, but as usual it swelled out of control. Since it's not essential to this post, if you're interested, see the footnote below.**) If I didn't recognize it for the procrastinatory diversion it is, I might even consider a site redesign (but I do, so I won't). But maybe it's time for a Harper's-style index or summary -- it beats having to write new content! (My webhost provides a bunch of statistics which are mostly boring, but also misleading; the list of top "referrers" is supposed to show how most people get to my site, but most of the sites that make the list are totally bogus, not things people came from. Robot or crawler programs are somehow to blame (e.g., I'm pretty sure that 3,044 of December's hits were not the result of my readers clicking a link over at good old www.virgin-daughter-rape.incest-family.net), so I've been tediously looking up and disallowing entry to the IP addresses of the worst offenders. More distraction, it's true, but it will save bandwidth and make my stats a little more accurate) So the kind of statistics I'm actually I'm curious about are things like: UD Statistical Index
Now here's a chance for some reader participation. I need help with some things, and you guys were so helpful when I asked for trivia questions last week (a big thanks to all who helped -- each of you is individually the bomb, and put together you make a modest cluster of bombs. I got email from people I'd never even seen a comment from, which is always a treat. Your typical Lurker is fun to interact with, if you can coax him from his fetid hermitage.) AHEM! The things I need/want help with:
**OPTIONAL CUTE MOUSE STORY about an encounter I had with a widdle baby mouse a week or two ago. This mouse, he was so small and young that he wasn't mouse-shaped yet -- he was the approximate shape of a cartoon teardrop, tapering to a mousy little point. I interrupted him in the kitchen sink, and since he was tiny and the sink was large and all of the sudden the light was on and a huge human was standing over him, he couldn't jump out of the sink to escape, so he just vibrated with abject fear. It was cute and heartbreaking. I promised myself that I would help him out of the sink if he couldn't do it within five minutes, because although there was enough food and water to sustain him for a couple of days, it was a cold night, and the sink stainless steel. I'll put out mousetraps, but I'm not about to kill any mammals with my bare hands (look out, koala bears) or let them freeze to death in my sink. I stood very still and eventually he stopped vibrating and resumed his search for a way out of the sink. He climbed very cutely atop a coffee mug, ran around its rim a few times, and nonchalantly perched atop the handle of the spoon sticking out of the mug -- the little showoff had some balance skills. But as that mug sat in the middle of the sink, I was like: "there's no way out from there, little fella. You should climb up the inverted glass I moved closer to the edge of the sink, you can reach the counter from there." As if I had been issuing him a challenge instead of advice, he leaped from the rim of the mug to the counter, like a bird, cat, or one of those jumping spiders. He dashed along the counter back to wherever it is they live, leaving me stunned. I had to update my mental encyclopedia entry about mouse abilities. Little fuckers can fly, even baby ones that look like furry tadpoles. Wednesday, December 14, 2005
I'm not sure I'll get to making you a shiny new post this week because I'm hosting the Quizz-Off Finals tomorrow night, and I'm basically having ten kinds of panic attack about it. My co-host, the estimable Ghastlymess, is, despite his handle, calm as a cuke, but even his soothing, suicide-hotline voice on the other end of the telephone isn't keeping me from freaking the fuck out a little bit. So I'm feeling like we'll never be ready, while at the same time knowing that these things always work themselves out.
Hmm.... You all feel like helping? Feel like giving a little back to the community? Doing your part for the war effort? Since I know you're all nerds out there, I bet you have your favorite bits of trivia at your mental fingertips (eww, mental fingers). Here's your chance at the most fleeting kind of fame: email us your absolute best question or bit of trivia (use jeremybroomfield@yahoo.com ). If we use it in the quiz, we'll give you credit. Thursday, December 08, 2005
From today's Times, file under "things that make you want to barf":
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she can give no guarantee that terrorism detainees won't be abused again despite what she called the United States' clear rules against torture.Huk! -- Gak! -- Huk-HUAAAALLLLLP!! Barfffffflefrowlf! Which brings me to today's theme: counterfactuals. Which before nuncstans gets frisky, let me quickly point out that I am not actually discussing logic, semantics, or if-then statements, but just a more folksy, literal interpretation of the word "counterfactuals," which I take to mean "shit that ain't true." FUCK IT we'll just call it the "What Ifs"! Also, miz jaxxon if you're nasty, you all can watch my commas dance in and out of my quotation marks like girls doing double dutch, because the UD style guide doesn't get specific on this issue. This is clearly a major failing of the style guide, which I wrote. Um, or which I wrote a third of and then saw something shiny. (In practice, I'd always put my commas inside my quotes until a) I did some programming in a language where what's in quotes matters a lot and more importantly b) some anglophile reader whose opinion I trust on many issues grammatical scolded the bewhoompus outta me when I let a homeless question mark find comfort and shelter inside a quotation -- in the comments section, even. So now I sometimes move punctuation to the right of a quotation mark just as a twitchy defense mechanism even when it's clearly wrong to do so. What can I say, I'm only human.) Oh, speaking of shiny distractions, did you know that in addition to the hilarious term "full stop" which the Brits use to refer to the punctuation mark we Murrakins call a "period," they also UPROARIOUSLY refer to their quotation marks as "inverted commas"? Wa ha ha! Don't get me started on "fanny." Damn, dawg! It's the WHAT IFs! Which I can already tell are going to be an unsuccessful humor experiment which I will abort after, oh, let's say four items: • What if "speed skating" meant something dirty? Like "I heard Paris Hilton (for example) went speed skating all over his Runson." • Oh yeah, I forgot to mention: what if "Runson," "Bunsen," and "Junson" all became popular slang terms for male sex parts? Replacing "pecker," "cornhole," and "sackdoodle," respectively? • Heh. What if I actually thought "sackdoodle" were a widely used term for the nutsack? • What if the deli across the street -- where I get my breakfast and lunch every weekday -- didn't outrageously inflate their prices, underpay and verbally abuse their staff (which consists completely of undocumented immigrant workers who have little recourse), or routinely fail health inspections for (I'm guessing here) unacceptable amounts of rat feces in their prepared food (which in New York the standard for "acceptable" is necessarily pretty lax, and over the years we've come to expect a certain amount of ratshit in our food; it may not be a good thing, but it's our thing. Know what I mean? Heey, fuhgeddaboudit.)? All right, that's it for the stupid What Ifs. In closing, here's a scene from my ongoing campaign to mess with the office building's doorman ahem concierge: KEVIN: Damn, it's 2:30 already? Where does the day go? UD: Who you callin' a dago, you fucking Irish piece of shit? ---- Oh and here's the picture of the mustache. Monday, December 05, 2005
All right, I'm jonesing for a song, and Limewire is no help, no help at all. It's not even that great a song, but I have a deep cellular craving to hear the bridge from "Little Lord Fontleroy" [sic] by Quasi. It's buggin' me so much that I'm twitching. Of course, that could be the Adderall, hup! Anyway. If you've got the song, please email it to me quick like a bunny and stop the madness (see address at left; I'm too lazy to write a goddamn mailto link, even though this parenthetical note is much longer than a mailto link, I know, shut up). I actually feel like I cannot do any work, not a lick, until I hear this bridge. I'm like a robot stuck in a recursive loop of instructions, or paralyzed by a paradox. Except I'M NOT A FUCKING ROBOT.
In related news, I noticed while not working that Tai Chi is a spoonerism of chai tea. Big whoop. Thursday, December 01, 2005
This may come as a shock to some of my newer readers, but I am a deeply vain person. Most of my friends let me slide on this account because I have a charming tendency to combine my vanity with a towering immodesty, so, you know. It's all good. But so here's the thing about my the zits that have colonized my head/neck/face area: I don't like them. They make me feel blemished and unclean... which, of course, I am. As you know, I never used to wash my hair, and I've never been a daily face-wash, scrub, or toner kind of dude -- metrosexuality is just too much damn work. But here I am, with hair all clean and poofy after god knows how many days of consecutive shampooing, and my face has seen soap at least once a day for the same amount of time. Worst part: a well-meaning friend bought me some witch hazel-impregnated cleansing and toning wipes to help with the face oil at work, where we have no hot water. Which means that I have something called "wipes" on my desk. Wipes. Fucking... WIPES! What's that on your desk, buddy? What these? Oh they're just my WIPES. Glaargle! I do not think of myself as the kind of person who needs "wipes." But there's no getting around the fact that at present, I am.
(Digression:I maybe be especially oversensitive to this word because of a product called Kandoo, which if you don't know is a flushable moistened paper towel thing for kids who are toilet training. It's basically a baby wipe repackaged to appeal to the actual baby, like: Baby's First Toilet Paper, or Toilet paper with training wheels. For no single reason I can pinpoint, the very existence of this product skeeves me the fuck out. Maybe it's the fact that it's moist. Maybe it's the way that some overly literal marketing fucktard suggested putting "doo" in its name, presumably so that consumers wouldn't forget its purpose. Maybe it's the fact that, for the sake of a stupid pun, it takes a perfectly serviceable (if old-fashioned) figure of speech that seemed to signify a particularly American type of eagerness -- (dictionary.com:"a willingness to tackle a job and get it done") -- and threatens to associate it forever with ASS-WIPING (like if this product gets really popular, who would want to be described as having a "can-do attitude" anymore? I know that at best it's a minor linguistic tragedy, but still -- who do they think they are?) Maybe it's the vomity purple/green color scheme of the brand, or JUST MAYBE it's the goofy frog spokesanimal who is depicted on the packaging WIPING HIS FROG ASS, oh mah gah.) Yeah. But so! About my zits: I have a theory. When your body perceives an attack, as from an infection or a foreign object, it usually sends white blood cells* in great quantity to deal with the situation. I think something similar has happened to me. I think my body believes that my face is being attacked by my beard (here's the picture of the beard, sorry for the delay), that my face has in fact been besieged for almost a month by objects that my body has misconstrued to be foreign -- my own goddamn whiskers. I think that in response to this perceived threat, my body has instructed every inch of skin north of my collarbone to pump out as much oil as possible. Now, I'm glad that my body is aware of and responsive to threats -- that's a reassuring sign that my immune system is still online (which will be handy when the bird flu metastasizes into a lethal pandemic, hits New York, and wipes away half its population like god's own sheet of Kandoo). But I guess I'm a little confused about the strategy. Is the oil supposed to make my skin so slippery that my beard is supposed to, like, lose its grip and fall off? I guess that might work if my face were being attacked by a squid. Well, whatever. The point is that despite the fact that I really kind of like the beard, it's going to come off very very soon. I know that some of you will be disappointed.** Hell, I'm disappointed. I was so proud of myself for making it through the itchy week two without caving in. (Yes, I know it is fucking lame that this is what passes for a proud achievement in my life. Fuck off.) But since the oil production shows no sign of abating, and since I can't keep my stupid dirty fingers away from my face, it's got to go. At the suggestion/request of Sars, I will shave my jowls, neck and chin first, leaving a Fu Manchu/thigh-tickler style mustache for a week or so. But then it's back to smoothness, and hopefully I won't have to shampoo until 2006. If you want to run your fingers through my greasy beard before it's gone, I will host an open house this Saturday at the Socrates Diner in Greenpoint between 11am and 1pm. Your hands might get greasy, though, so don't forget your wipes. ----- * Awesome fact from Wikipedia: "The name "white blood cells" [is derived] from the fact that after centrifugation of a blood sample, the white cells are found in the Buffy coat, a small fraction between the hematocrit and the blood plasma, which is white in color." Heh! This is totally random, but the term "Buffy Coat" makes a nerd like me think of this yellow thing. ** When I told a friend of mine in California that I had a beard, she actually yelped with irrepressible (and kind of freakish) delight, as if I'd told her I was having a baby. |
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" |
