My Sister

My sister turned 20 a little bit ago. She is a wonderful person. She is extremely smart and very beautiful. She's a very good friend and a great sibling. I am very lucky to have my sister.

Self-Fulfilling Prophesy?

Just watched the State of the Un- excuse me, Presidential Address to Congress, on The Intertubes. Funnily enough, it was playing while I was at the gym but I didn't realize it at the time. If I'd known, I'd have had some popcorn. That's a lie. I'd have had a salad. And I did have a salad anyway. It wasn't a Victory Salad, though.

Republicans continually remind us how ineffective government is. They also continually fuck things up. COINCIDENCE?!

Disinterested Party Animal

Alcohol is the best way to make regular people interesting.
If I'm the one drinking.
And they're actually hookers.

Alcohol is the best way to make ugly people pretty.
If there are no pretty people at the party.
And the theme is "Relaxed Standards."

Alcohol is the best way to make children feel grown up.
And pretty and interesting.
Especially if they're hookers.

Child prostitutes are the best way to make perverts feel good.
And pretty and interesting.
But also old in a sad kind of way.

People are the best way to make alcohol feel digested.
And regurgitated on the cat.
Then digested again, by the cat.

Domestic abuse is the best way to make alcoholics interesting.
And their wives and children ugly.
And later, alcoholic.

Sex is still the best way to make babies.
But not with child prostitutes.
They are too young.

And, of course, alcohol is the best way to have sex.
With regular people,
Interesting people,
Ugly people,
Pretty people,
Children,
Perverts,
Victims of domestic abuse,
And cats.

Apple

This week, we have another fictitious installment in my fictitious newspaper column.

In The Knew
Observations for the young and the young at heart
By S.T. Peterson

"Apple"

A long time ago in a gated community far, far away, a very plausible naked girl, on the advice of a very persuasive snake, partook of some mind-altering, modesty-enhancing fruit, in commemoration of which, to this day, apples are customarily made a tasty reminder to educators that they traffic in original sin.

I, for one, approve of Eve's taste in verboten vegetation. Were it not for her "bite heard 'round creation," you and I would probably be chilling in paradise right now, fucking each other. No thank you. I can have nudity, organic food and casual sex any Tuesday of the week. But there is one necessity paradise cannot provide: my newspaper column. Without it, I am just some pathetic no-newspaper-column-having loser. Like you. Unless you are Garrison Keillor. Hi Garrison!

Which brings me to the topic of today's column: Love. I get mail all the time, let me tell you, all the time, asking for advice on love. Whom to love. When to love them. When to stop loving them. And I have these answers. Oh yes, I do. What I do not have is time enough to tell you all each individually what the blind baby has in store. As a compromise, I am going to reveal the single most important secret in the Book of Love. I am violating a number of Non-Disclosure Agreements to bring you this wisdom so if anyone asks, you heard it from a snake.

Whoever you are, whatever the circumstance, no matter the details, the following Truth supersedes all else: there is one and only one true love of your life. That love is New York City. You may think some boy or girl means more to you than the Big Apple. You may even leave Manhattan and chase this person around the world, dreaming of happily-ever-afters. WRONG! You have stupidly forgot the Golden Rule: "I ♥ NY."

Rule #2: New York does not love you back. It is a harsh mistress. It will toy with, tease, and use you up only to leave your half-conscious ass on the mutherfucking F train to Queens in a puddle of unfamiliar vomit. And for this, you will love it all the more. You cannot escape. You cannot forget. You do, have always, and always will, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, 'till death do you die, love the Big Apple. And now you are...

In The Knew!

Run, Run, As Fast As You Can

I have this recurring theme in my dreams where I am running really slowly. I'm trying to run faster but the harder I try, the slower I move. This has been a feature in my dreams for about a year now.

All of my childhood forays into sports ended disastrously. It was never my idea, of course, to play soccer or join a little league baseball team or sign up for track & field. I caught a baseball with my eye socket on the first day of practice. I chased butterflies across the soccer field. But sports are compulsory for sons, apparently. Like, you have this kid and then you feel obligated to provide them with the Comprehensive American Childhood Experience. Because TV will rot their brains and free-range Finch children end up on a John Walsh special. So you have these little people whom you don't really know all that well (and they're changing all the time) and so you just kind of stick them in any old age/gender-appropriate activity. My sister did figure skating and ballet. I did karate and baseball. My folks eventually caught on and put me in ballet too.

I mention all of this because during my first track & field competition, I was coming in last and deliberately fell down before the finish line to get the sympathy "you fell down but you finished the race anyway GOOD FOR YOU!" effect. And now I run all the time. So Dr. Freud, put that up your nose and snort it.

Monday

• Really sunny today.
• Digging Infected Mushroom.
• Had a nice time at the gym.
• Did not watch the Oscars.
  
• Still need to find a job.

Youth is now!

Saturday

• I've had the same salad the last three meals. Lox can do no wrong. If smoked salmon were to beat up an old woman and steal her wig, I would still love it.
• Helped bake a cake. Also helped eat it.
• Watched Hellboy
• Watched Hellboy II
• Summer is coming to a close...

There's only one way to go from here: old.

Cock Culture

My new favorite art/culture/softcore pornography blog: East Village Boys. Hey, I used to be one of those!

Wednesday

• Felt really good yesterday about getting stuff done.
• Went to Piha with my new Auckland buddy Piotr. Beautiful beach.
• Did some work and laundry.
• Had another in a long line of 3am omelets.
• Didn't go to the gym, but I'm OK with that. Really. I am.

Vanity is its own reward.

Tuesday

Hi friend.

• Work is being done on the roof of the house and it makes it difficult for me to sleep from 8am to 4pm. But I manage anyhow.
• It wasn't supposed to be beautiful today, but it was. I'm not complaining.
• Watched Dollhouse last night. Tell me when you've seen it and then we can talk.
• Made one of my favorite salads: spinach, avocados, smoked salmon and feta cheese with a lemon dressing. So delicious.
• Made some bread. It turned out OK.
• Yeah, just thought I'd check in.

"Let's face it buddy boy, there's two kinds of people in the world: there's you and there's everybody else, and never the twain shall meet." - Nathan Fisher Sr.

Milk

The days of my boyhood were simple and care-free: there was one and only one kind of milk. Skim. Better known to Good Christians everywhere as, simply, "milk." Upon moving to the Big City, my delicate Midwestern certitudes were unprepared for the new and exotic milks on offer. I did a lot of experimenting which lead to a quagmire of amorality and indecision. Until now. I have finally seen the light. I have found my milk: "Xtra Calcium Boost." It's 99.8% fat free but doesn't taste like dirty dishwater. It has both "HIGH PROTEIN" and "VITAMIN D," which is, like, my favorite vitamin. It has a yellow cap, as if to say, "I am the sun, dawning on a new day of dairy beverages; I am the flower, blossoming for the prevention of osteoporosis." I just hope they have this stuff in The States.

You just got INFORMED, son!

Thursday

• Got up at like 4pm
• Took a shower
  
• Said goodbye to Kris and Jess - they are traveling and I won't see them again maybe ever. BYE GUYS!
• Had a lamb kabab. That's a NZ style kabab, which is like a wrap.
• Got some work done because I'm super-responsible
• Went to the gym. It is my precious.
• Took another shower.
• Some of these bullet points have punctuations and others do not. Sorry about that.
• Now I'm doing a salmon recipe that Michael gave me.

I feel that this post fails to capture how awesome I feel right now. I don't know if that's a failure of my communication skills or because I'm feeling good for no reason and therefore the format of the post (what I did today) under-serves the topic. This annotation clears things up a bit, but its formal tone is also largely inexpressive of my giddiness.

The geek shall inherit the earth

Yes I do, I LOVE SHAMU!

Sophisticated Side Ponytail, by Natalie Portman's Shaved Head. Their album is very Scissor Sisters meets The Lonely Island.

Good Weather

The last three days have been excellent weather. Not a cloud in the sky and 28C. I've been steeping in my glory by the pool. And going to the gym, except for that it was surprise-closed yesterday (BOOOO!). And writing code, which is good and fun.

I don't love you, but I really like your shoes.

Feb Six

• Made some bread today. My standard recipe does two loaves. The problem is, I always end up eating one of them right away. Nothing gives you that "beached whale" afterglow quite like a whole loaf of piping hot carbs.
• I'm doing some work right now with people in London, Boston, and Brazil. This means I'm generally staying up 'til 5:5omething in the morning. Exempli gratia: it's is 5:28 am right now.
• I love getting things done.
• I also love this new vanilla flavored whey protein stuff I put in my milk.
• I didn't make it to the gym today, but that's OK because it closed at 6 (on account of it's Waitangi Day) and if I have to get my ass out of the house while the sun is still up, you can count me out!
• Also, I love This American Life. In fact, I fucking love it. It belongs in my series.

Promise me you'll never die.

Feb Five

It's like the Fab Five, only more "brewery."

• Made myself a delicious fluffy omelet (see below poem) and ate it in the sun with my book.
• Took a swim in the house pool for the first time ever.
• Read more of my book.
• Had a beef wrap, which is just so much fun to say. I suggest you try it: "beef wrap." Go on. Say it out loud. And say it like it's a double-entendre. Lower your voice and cock an eyebrow. "Beef wrap..." Then wink. Do that to the next person you meet. I task you!
• Went to the gym. It is my Final Solution.
• Masturbated in the shower. Some of my more elaborate rituals are yielding a rather poor return on investment of late. I blame the flaccid economy.
  
• Had some fish and apple sauce. I'll probably make myself some pasta in a bit. I'm a-hungered.

I say "tomato," you say "beef wrap," LET'S CALL THE WHOLE THING OFF!

Fluffy Omelet

Fluffy Omelet tastes the best,
Fluffy Omelet we'll digest.
Fluffy Omelet knows no shame,
Fluffy Omelet? I just came.

The First of February

• Just returned from my latest Glorious Return To The Gym. It is my Beloved Leader.
  
• This is my first Super Bowl in a while where I haven't gotten piss drunk at Julia's apartment and screamed like a wild person. GO PATS!
• Kris just brought me three, I repeat, THREE 2-litre (yes, 'r' before the 'e') things of milk. Kris is a milk man. He is a good friend to have.
• And the other day, he brought by two movies on flash drive: Benjamin Button and Rock 'n Rolla. What I'm saying is, Kris is my Santa Clause.
• Benjamin Button had my crying like a fool. Not like that's hard. It was the most sobbing I've done since watching the end of Six Feet Under.
• The Rock 'n Rolla file was slightly corrupt and had some playback issues, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's very Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
• I'm all of a sudden digging MGMT. Am I, like, way behind on that?

Who knows what regular people see in each other.

This Week

• A lot of work on the computer
• Not eating very well
• Not going to the gym
• Getting up and going to bed late

The 2nd Theorem of Destruction
As love and effort increase, the probability of self destruction approaches 1
-Kyle Gabler

FOR WHOM THE MEME TOLLS, or, YOU HOLD HER DOWN AND I'LL SCOOP HER BRAINS OUT THROUGH HER NOSE

If I could resurrect one fad, it would be mummification. You could keep grandma in her easy chair next to Mr. Kibbles III. She gets to be in all the family photos. It would be good for the kids.

The next best thing is the topic of today's post: Memeification (meem-ih-fih-kay-shun). If you don't already know, the theory of memes was discovered by evolutionary biologists and subsequently weaponized by the Internet. Memes are like in-jokes where everyone is "in." They are also highly dangerous.

Internet memes function like a kind of mystical incantations. When they are perpetrated upon a person, the victim become memeified. They are transformed from a living, breathing, human being into a walking parody of themselves. Neither alive nor dead. Damned to roam the purgatorial wastelands of their former life, unable to be taken seriously by anyone, moaning ironically with outstretched arms. Or so we imagine. Best examples of memeies (mee-mees, similar to mummies; singular memey) include Chuck Norris and Rick Astley. When memeies are unaware that they have been memeified (as when Chuck Norris suffers from the misapprehension that other people care what he thinks), it is almost too sad to be funny. Almost.

Now we arrive at the call to action: I propose that we memeify Sarah Palin.

This is a tall order to fill. Never before has the internet successfully memeified anyone who is already such a complete self-parody. We are also competing with Tina Fey's extremely dominant direct-parody. The challenge is to engineer a single meme capable of overwhelming all other Palin-related signals, until the woman is wholly and completely memefied from hair to heal-spike.

So what is the ultimate Sarah Palin meme? For that we turn to the evolutionary biological procedure of knock-down-drag-out Natural Selection. A bloody competition for resources and mates. And you can play too! May the best meme win.

The playing field is broad. You can use any part of the Internet to propagate your meme. YouTube, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, blogs, podcasts, IM, IRC, Facebook. Anything. The pallet is equally broad: the accent, the turkeys, the unwed pregnant teenage daughter whose baby-daddy's mom could host the reality-show-takeoff of Weeds (when she gets out of jail, that is). No holds are barred in this mad race to become Internet's Next Top Meme.

Victory belongs to the first meme which is referenced by the New York Times.

With the election over, one might wonder at the timing and utility of such an exercise in memetic engineering. I could say that we are immunizing ourselves against Palin '12, but the truth of the matter is, she just fucking deserves it.

GO!