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 |
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Before leaving you postless for at least 10 days, I thought I'd give you something to do. A project. I made a MySpace page that features four of my songs. I know some of you out there are totally gay for MySpace, so go to the page and make me your friend. I won't refuse. Then tell influential trendsetting street-teamers to spread the fucking gospel of John Barleycorn's MySpace page. Oh and after this post has fallen below the fold, you can find the link over on the left, there. Please drink responsibly in my absence.
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
I'm leaving for Maine on Thursday night and I'll be gone for over a week. I'll be going to Zorgot's wedding, my second of the season. Weddings often make me tired, but this one will be awesome. Heh. What doesn't make me tired? I get tired taking a shower. All that scrubbing wears me the fuck out.
Parties wear me out too. Here's something that's messing with my head: part of this wedding situation involves a bachelor party. Buh-buh-bachelor Party. I want to vomit just typing the words. I've never been to an actual bachelor party, and the one that I'm attending this weekend will not resemble a typical BP in any way, except in the even ratio of X to Y chromosomes among the attendees and the consumption of inadvisable amounts of alcohol. My friends couldn't throw a real BP if they tried, which is of course why I love them. Because without having ever been to a real BP, I know that I hate everything about them. Just like I know that I don't want to camp out in a rainforest. Or eat scrapple. Or go to Las Vegas. Or get a sloppy drunken lapdance from a goddamn stripper. Fuck! I've avoided bachelor parties thus far for a number of reasons: 1) most of my friends are girls, so when I go to their weddings, I don't get invited out by their grooms; 2) my friends haven't gotten all that married yet; 3) as I said, the kind of people I hang out with wouldn't have a bachelor party anyhoo. Does this mean that I think you're lame if you've attended, enjoyed, or thrown a bachelor party? Yep. I sure do. I hate the entire concept. I hate the idea that someone who is about to get married agrees with the notion that the eve of his wedding is his "last night of freedom" -- why the fuck are you getting married, Chachi? Tax Purposes? Sheesh. I tend to avoid situations where there are no women present, because boys can be fucking disgusting when there are no chicks around. Not me, of course -- I'm exactly the same no matter what. I enjoyed The 40-Year-Old Virgin but found many of the characters repulsive and I was glad that they resembled nobody I knew. If anyone ever pointed at a girl and asked me if I intended to "hit that shit" I think I would blush, mumble something noncommittal, and vow silent vengeance. That's right. Silent vengeance, muhfucker! All right. I could go on about that but I actually find it really boring to explain why bachelor parties are lame. If you have to ask, you'll never know. Um. Did you know I was really good at pinball? It's true. My two favorite tables are the Indiana Jones trilogy table and The Creature from the Black Lagoon table. I was giddily ecstatic to see the latter machine in Lars von Trier's living room while watching The Five Obstructions. All geeked out. Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Know this, ye bloggers and livejournalers¹ and movable-typists and diarylanders: your words are public. Some useful tips if you're new at the game:
My landlord is not a big management company, a faceless corporation, or a government entity. He's just a regular guy from the neighborhood, who, after he retired, bought some property and started living the American Dream (at least, the version described in Monopoly). As far as I can tell, he owns two properties: the two-apartment building in which I live and the building in which he lives. Right across the street from me. Oh did I mention that before he retired, he was a cop? A detective, apparently, though none of my roommates seem to know what division he worked, you know -- Homicide? Vice? Internal Affairs? Anyway, this datum would not in itself have bothered me overmuch. In theory, I think detectives are cool. It turns out that in practice they can be creepy. When he wants to talk to any of us, he doesn't call us on the phone. Instead, he usually materializes from behind a van or something in front of the house just as we're leaving or approaching the building. It's unnerving as hell. My theory is that he prefers to talk to people in person -- so he can tell if they're lying. It's obviously hard for Detective Landlord to turn off his powers of observation and deduction. As a result, I keep the blinds in my room closed at almost all times. This may seem a little paranoid -- surely he's got better things to do than gaze out his window at his tenants, right? You might think so, but listen to this little tale: It was wicked hot for the last couple of days, so I finally dragged my sorry, ragged little air conditioning unit out from under the table in the corner of my room and stuck it in the window. Sweet motherfucking relief. But my roommate Jewelly took one look at the unit and said "Detective Landlord isn't gonna like that. He has those air-conditioner sleeves installed in the walls and I bet he won't like you using a window unit instead." I said "but I can't put mine in the sleeve because it vents to the side instead of the back, and I can't afford a special $700 AC unit just bec--" "It doesn't matter. I'm just saying that he's gonna bother me about it. You'll see. I can almost guarantee that as I leave the house to go to work tomorrow, he'll appear and talk to me about it." "Nah," I said, "that would be crazy. If he has a problem he'll call me. If he even notices the AC." "Oh he noticed all right. Just wait. You'll see," she said. At 9am this morning she called my cell. "UD. I told you. I told you. He saw the AC and he wants you to move it. He wants you to call him. I told you he'd stop me. God." I could hear her shudder. "Think about what this means, the fact that he was able to catch me leaving the house. I left at like 7:30, which is earlier than usual. He was RIGHT THERE." "Damn," I said."That means he must have been... like... waiting? Awake? Staring out the window?" "Standing in the vestibule, maybe?" "Or watching your window for the first sign of light from within? Oh my god." "Maybe he waited up all night just to be sure he wouldn't miss me. He was on a civilian stakeout. This is scary. My window is in the back; he couldn't have been waiting for lights." "I fucking hope he doesn't have cameras... oh god." "Waaaaah!" "Waaaaaah!" ....aaaaand Scene! Thanks very much. Help. -------- ¹ I actually prefer the term "livejournlings" for LJ users -- it feels like a combination of yearnings (such as the desires for attention and for a community of people who understand you) and yearlings (which here serves as a synonym for juveniles). Journlings. Heh. Never give the naïve a pen. Always give the naïve a pen! ² BIGOTED PSEUDONYM GENERATOR -- Take a first name from column A and a last name from column B:
Friday, June 16, 2006
Okay, before I post anything else, here's the long promised NHL Team Name Tournament.
Everything takes so stupidly long to complete. I want to complete team name tournaments for every major (and some minor) sports leagues in the country, so that I can then have a super super team name tournament of all the winners of the earlier ones. That would be a serious clash of titans, yeah. But I think it would get ridiculous or impossible at a certain point. As I mentioned in the notes for the NHL tourney, I've identified six unbeatable team names, instant winners of any team name tournaments: Gravity, Chaos, Time, Energy, Infinity, the Void. Before you argue with me about them, I want to head off some obvious criticisms at the pass: • I'm not saying these are the only six. • A lot of other big candidate concepts are synonyms, subsets, or siblings of the ones I've got (e.g. Heat doesn't need to be there because Energy kind of encompasses it). • I can see how you could argue that Infinity and the Void are opposite sides of the same coin and maybe should only count as one concept, in which case I'd rather go with Infinity. • I know I didn't include Mass in the list. Partly I left it off because Energy is there, and E=mc². I realize that by this logic I shouldn't include Time on the list, as I also left off any expression of the concept of Distance (Dimension, Space, etc.); and some would say that Time is just another dimension, another measure of distance. Hey, and Chaos, when considered as a synonym for Change, is a time-based phenomenon, so what gives, right? Fuck, I don't know. • I'm willing to listen to arguments in favor of things like Life, Sentience, Intelligence, or even Art. But for the moment they seem less universal than terrestrial, and hence not as powerful. But I'm listening. A reader asked for my views on "the recent tourist-stabbings here in our fair city," and I'm all too happy to oblige, in a babbly, barely-coherent, late-night fashion. I don't actually pay attention to hysterical disaster tabloid news, because it's bad for your brain, bad for your heart, and bad for mankind -- I'll get back to that in a second. But I saw a local news program while I was eating at the diner the other night, so I caught some details of this case. Also I looked up a few other facts on the web, and here's a summary: A homeless man with two first names stabbed four people over the course of two days before being apprehended. Victims included two Canadians, a Texan, and a Brooklyn man. The stabbings happened in the subway and in Times square. Okay. My commentary has more to do with the coverage than the event. I don't like to get my news from local TV news programs or tabloid newspapers, nor do most of the people I know. But a lot of people only get their news from such sources. I don't know the demographics for the NY Post's readership, but I'm betting that the poor, the undereducated, and the stupid are heavily represented. Seriously, that paper is for shit, and it shares several characteristics with the local news show I caught that night. Not to mention that every other story on the TV news show was about death, crime, or something burning, the angles on the stabbing story were perverse. The points they kept on hitting: A homeless man. Random, senseless attacks. Tourists attacked. Young women tourists, from Canada. Also a Texan, whose uncle made a point of saying to the press that he had forgiven the attacker. Um. The stabber had been arrested many times in the past for various things and GASP let back on the street. Brave people chased the attacker down after witnessing the Times Square attack. Blah blah fucking blah. (In an obvious attempt to keep the story from damaging tourism, several news organizations included NYC Police Commissioner Ray Kelly's comments that a) the attacks did not seem to be intentionally targeted at tourists, and b) violent crime in the city has gone down blah percent and crime in the subway has gone down blah percent.) Basically, the entire broadcast was saying: you're not safe. Fear strangers. The system is broken. Cars move fast and kill your babies. People lose their homes in fires. Drug arrest! Random violence is out to get you. Stay at home. Trust only your family, and maybe not even them. And oh yeah: buy lottery tickets! Fuck, I don't know. This is such well-tread ground. Local news sucks, smart people have always known that. But real journalism isn't sexy, and it isn't scary, and it doesn't make good TV. It doesn't make judgments, and one of the main thrills of exploitative sensationalist journalism seems to be the way that it allows its consumers to feel morally superior to other people. All right, I'm getting sleepy now. But how do we solve this shitty "news" problem? That documentary about the Fox News Channel mentioned a study that showed that Fox viewers knew demonstrably less about the news, and believed things that were wrong. I'm not stating that as impressively as I could; the results were truly shocking. But I think this happens all the time. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that certain news sources -- or even certain types of news source -- cause actual damage to their consumers. Should there be laws about what can be called news? Fuck, maybe not. But if an organization purporting to present "news" can be shown to be an instrument of control or repression, a source of misinformation, or just the propaganda arm of a corporation or political organization, shouldn't they be called some thing else? I'm so sleepy. Bad journalism is anti-American. Bad journalists, tabloid papers, and local news programs are this close to committing treason. Then again, trying to curb free speech is un-American too. Somebody help me out here? Can somebody explain to me how to save the country from rabid, unchecked, unregulated free-market capitalism? I don't understand anything anymore. I can't think anymore. Too much Murdoch. Thursday, June 08, 2006
I'm glad that people dug the NBA Team Name Tourney (that's TNT for you kids at home) because maybe by the time I'm done with this post I'll have the next one done -- you'll know if the following acronym is hotlinked: NHL. Whoops, doesn't look like it. But I'll give you a preview for quicksies: the NHL features some of the least intimidating team names I've seen in pro sports, including but not limited to these doozies: The Capitals. The MightyDucks. The Maple Leafs. That's right I said "leafs," bitches.
Don't you hate it hate when you have a whole bag of pickles but every time you reach in at random you only get the sour when you're craving the half-sour action? It's like, okay, yeah, I can roll with this full flava for another pickle or two, but if I don't get some halfsies up in this piece I'm'a pickle somebody's muhfuckin' face, knaamean? (And don't come up in here suggesting that I segregate my pickles, aight? Not gonna happen.) Ahem. Last Friday was my birthday and I marked it peacefully with four family members. (Last year's three-parties-in-one extravaganzago was great, but cellularly exhausting; a once-a-decade kinda deal, mos def.) Here's an anecdotal example of why my family is so awesome: First of all, I've got them trained so that unbidden, unreminded, uncoached, and uninstructed, they go straight for my Amazon Wishlist, read my notes and priorities, and order accordingly, from Amazon. When I get to my mom's house for dinner, I can see several unopened Amazon UPS boxes, and that they had arrived hours before. She unpacks them and wraps their contents despite my protestations that my pals and I routinely exchange gifts in unopened Amazon boxes, and it's totally cool. After eating cake I open a gift from my mom, and it's this wicked awesome illustrated step-by-step book called The Directory of Knots. It's got a spiral spine, so its stays flat while you manipulate ropes. My Mom enjoys watching me drink in its awesomeness, and she's like "Ohh, when I saw that book I knew I had to get it for you, but it's so cool that I'm gonna have to buy myself a copy." My Aunt, her sister, replies "No you won't. I saw the book in the store too and bought him a copy for Christmas, so I'll just give it to you instead." Wah-ha! Perfect! 1) They both know how much I love knots and knot books, and despite a glut of awful knot books in print, they independently spotted the truly interesting one and bought it instantly; 2) deep down, they both want the book too. That anecdote also serves as a pretty strong argument for the preservation of the traditional "Brick & Mortar" bookstore. Or, at least, a VR emulation of the pedestrian browsing experience, with current book covers piped right in to the environment. Hmm. And maybe you could design your own store, maybe by picking "curators," bookstore display veterans who could design island or endcap-style displays with various topical or genre themes (or whatever!) and everybody would hear about the coolest displays and download them into their personal VR Bookstores, and the best designers would get really well-paid and the art of display design would go international, upping everyone's game until the Personal VR Bookstore™* becomes the kernel of the world's first real, workable, and goddamnit profitable Gibsonian cyberspace FOR REAL, chumps! YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST. Give me my money. --------- *PVRB™, then obviously "P-VeRB™," as in: "Where's Jacob5000?" "Over there in the corner, sculpting his P-VeRB for his date tonight, gonna go book shopping with his gurl." |
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" |
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