I went up to Sacramento last night to visit Kizzy and see this. Alas, we didn't make it through all four films, but we saw the unforgettable Shanty Tramp and part of the utterly forgettable She-Devils on Wheels. I did want to see The Day The Lord Got Busted (aka Soul Hustler) with Fabian, but no dice.

Today is Bring Your Heathen Spawn Who Will Consume More and Send the Earth to Its Fiery Doom Kids to Work Day at the office. Don't get me wrong, I love kids, especially when they're someone else's and they're brought around in small doses. But get a passel of them together, and it's like Night of the Living Dead, only the zombies are smaller, louder, more tightly-wound, and they don't have an appetite for human brains. Well, at least they're bringing the In-N-Out catering truck for lunch, so who the hell am I to gripe?

Damn. John Entwistle died. I can't think of any other rock song that had a tasty bass solo like "My Generation". What a bummer.

I've heard of fetishism, but this is ridiculous.

Note to self: avoid Asian food at all costs. The Thai lunch tasted great but... ay yi yi. I'll expound no further.

The Balto trip has been cleared and booked. Awww yeah. The trip happens to coincide with the Oakland A's playing the Orioles at Camden Yards, so I think I'll need to drag one or both of my hosts to the ballpark. One of my intentions is to have some stuff written for Scarlet Letters before I get there, so Hanne can critique/edit my work. I have a standing offer to be an Artist in Residence at SL, but of course I need to write in order to reside. I know, trifling details.

It's official: the Links bar in IE 6.0 is fucked. So I grouped some links together in folders in the Links bar. I spawned a new browser window to go to a link while trying to keep the content of my original window (in window 1, I had my blogger posting UI). So I clicked on a link in a folder on my Links bar on browser window 2. What happens? The link loads up not on window 2, but in window 1, thus wiping out the blogger entry I was in the middle of composing. Fuckity fuck fuck fuck. Like most everything MS does, that functionality makes less than no sense.

Perhaps the mediocre Chinese food I had for dinner is making me ill-tempered, too. Note to self: there's a reason you hardly eat Chinese food anymore. By and large, it sucks. At least I know I'll be enjoying Thai tomorrow.

Justice Shirked Deferred Update: Jury summons has been postponed till early October, thus freeing me up for summer travel. Provided I can get the days I want off next month, I'll be visiting Hanne and Malcolm after all. In mid-August I'll be braving Disneyland and Universal Studios for the sake of my nephew on the occasion of his 10th birthday. (It really wasn't that long ago when me and my family caravaned up to Port Townsend, WA to be there for his birth. Ten years? Oy gevalt, I'm an alter kocker.) I'm also scheming to get myself to other places, like Boston. Trying to do all this on the cheap will be tough, but not impossible. Perhaps getting on another game show could help subsidize these peripatetic plans.

So last night I dreamt that Dan and I had moved to New York City for some reason, and that I started attending an aerobics class organized (but not taught) by Warren Beatty. Um, okay.

Perhaps it was induced by the hellacious niacin flush that hit me at around 4 a.m. I've been taking prescription niacin to help raise my HDL ("good") cholesterol level, which was pretty low not too long ago. It's helped – at last check, it's been raised about 30% – but those goddamn flushes kill me sometimes. Imagine a hot burning sensation under your skin, on your face, your arms, your legs, that wakes you up. I even took the niacin on a full stomach, I didn't drink booze with it (which would have made the flushing that much worse), I don't know what caused such an acute reaction. Ugh. I finally stumbled around in the dark and popped a couple of low-dose aspirin, which helped, thank God. If my HDL is elevated some more when I see the doctor next, I may just eschew the Rx and take no-flush niacin instead.

This whole Southwest Airlines seating enforcement policy for fat people just pisses me off. So arbitrary, so capricious, so symptomatic of how fucked up the airline industry has become since deregulation. When the dimensions of your average airplane seat have become so cramped that it's hard for a person of "average" size to be comfortable, shouldn't the airline consider widening the seat, lengthening the pitch (the space between rows), even at the expense of raising fares to compensate for the steerage lost when seats would be removed by such renovations? Of course not! The correct answer is: try to turn passengers against one another by saying that they take up too much real estate, and if you can't fit in the Liliputian seat you bought, you must buy another one, and shut your cake hole and place your seat up and your tray table in the upright and locked position. And consider the fact that Southwest is one of the few profitable airlines out there – their business has hardly been damaged at all from Sept. 11 and the economic downturn, especially when compared to the huge airlines like United and the just plain incompetent airlines like America West (now partially owned by the U.S. Government – next time you fly them to Vegas, just remember, your tax dollars at work!).This is really the last airline that needs to do this. What a bunch of fucking greedheads. I stopped flying SWA a while ago, when I found I could get on other airlines to the same destinations at comparable prices without the insane cattle-call boarding. Now I know I won't be flying them for a good long time. Who knows, I might actually pen an angry letter, in the spirit of my favorite crank, Lazlo Toth.

Enjoy your favorite music webcasts today – come Sept. 1, there may not be a lot of them left. The Librarian of Congress has made a final determination on webcasting royalty rates today. .07 cents per song doesn't sound like a hell of a lot, but multiply that by the number of songs and the number of streams, and it adds up appreciably, to the point where there's no way your average schmendrick on Live365.com would be able to pay up, much less some of the more well-established webcasts, like Net Music Countdown. Not only will these rates kick in on 9/1, but webcasters will have to pay retroactive for the last 4 years. Forget about it. This is fucking grim.

My lucky streak continues... just got a jury summons in the mail. For right around the time I was thinking of visiting Hanne in Baltimore. Lovely.

No need to be insecure about the love life. Because I definitively got dumped today. No love life to be insecure about. At least none in the immediate vicinity. And the last couple of responses to my personals ads have been from a married grandmother whose visage could injure Big Ben, and a Ukrainian mail-order bride. I shit you not. Dating is like baseball – when you've made 3 good matches out of 10, it's an MVP year. The rest you have to shake off.

At least I got my new computer today. By end of week, I hope to have Linux on it, so I can delve into geekdom a little further at home. And then perhaps I can get a cable modem to replace the tin-can-and-string dial-up modem I have with my stalwart old Mac clone. So I can get dumped online at a much faster clip. Wheeeeeee!

P.S. I'm registered at Crate and Barrel for my current pity party. Send gravy boats ASAP!

Egads, I've been a whiny, insecure bundle of neuroses lately. Tonight I'll get to subject my shrink to it, rather than my friends and family, who've taken the brunt of it lately.

I think I've hit my "what the hell am I doing with my life?" rut again. It's becoming about a quarterly occurrence. Fretting over money, insecure about the love life, pessimistic about the voiceover / acting career, questioning if I'll ever be able to afford a place of my own in the area I've lived my entire life... just generally angsty things that feed on each other.

When I consider the big picture and everything that's happening and what I'd like to do, I get so scatterbrained. Organization has never been my strong suit, but I need to sit down and ruminate and break things down into bite-sized chunks. Perhaps over an ice-cold Frappuccino, perfect for jangling my nerves and making me more insufferable and bitchy. Yup, I think I've got my evening planned.

Thanks to Josh for setting this up: now for your convenience, an easier URL to get to here: http://weblog.kipilman.com/

Went to Stinson Beach with my department from work yesterday. It was an official offsite fun day. So after I had chips and dip, sausage and chicken, and one big-ass can of Sapporo, they put up volleyball nets. I like volleyball, but after being wracked with soreness and pain for 24 hours, I think I like watching volleyball better. Doing aerobics 3x/week has not prepared me for something more rigorous. Ooof. From now on, I'll be sticking to bowling and karaoke as my competitive sports of choice.

Once the tendinitis in my arms go away, I'll be sewing together my new superhero / Mexican lucha libre wrestler outfit. Call me... El Sedentaro! Who can change the size of his bank account by sitting on his ass 12 hours a day? You got it... El Sedentaro!

Today I travel to Berkeley to pick up my new spiffy guitar custom-built by Fat Dog. Then, if I'm foolhardy enough, I might saunter over to Ikea to look for a cart for my new TV. Pray for me as I claw my way through the Swedish Disneyland of cheap furniture.

Enjoy the little things, my friends. I got a fan email from a complete stranger yesterday. Whoo hoo!

Moxie found the natural sequel to Falling in Love with Jesus. I think she's onto something here.

And to think Kevin Smith wasn't only creating satire with Buddy Christ in Dogma. He was a trendsetter in state-of-the-art religious kitsch. For more lovely objets d'Jesus like these, check out New Times' Jesus of the Week site.

This is too damn funny. Look at the pictures and just remember: Jesus died for your high sticking. Eternity in the fiery brimstone of Lucifer's Penalty Box. (He's a Red Wings fan, naturally.)

Am I the only one who finds the commoditization of religion to be so unbelievably whacked? I remember seeing one of the sample copies our books merchandiser received: Falling in Love with Jesus, complete with soft focus single-rose photo on the cover. You don't see Moses: A Friend with Benefits or An Awkward First Date with Buddha on the bookshelves. In-fucking-sane.

Shameless plug alert: Hear me on national radio waxing rhapsodic on the Vegas trip. Go here, look for the 6/3 show, and listen to the segments of hour 3.

Working on minimal sleep, I am back from Vegas and in the office right now, catching up on emails and such. I ended up winning about $125, which covered the first-class upgrades I bought on my flights both to and from Vegas. On both flights, I was the only one in first class. Granted, it's only about a 90-minute flight tops from SFO, but it was sweet to have so much real estate, drinking free booze and not having to hear screaming and whiny kids. I'm a bourgeois whore now, no doubt about it.

I was in Vegas – as if I need a reason, but still – to hang out with a couple of virtual pals who produce quality, informative, entertaining radio. David Lawrence hosts, at last count, 3 separate radio shows – OnLine Tonight, Net Music Countdown, and the East Coast morning drive show for CNET Radio. Lili VonSchtupp produces OLT, is David's de facto aide-de-camp (can I possibly string any more foreign phrases together?) and babe Friday, and is a wonderfully sweet and deliciously bent woman. I got to rap it down a little with David, a guy I listen to almost every one of the six nights he's on the air in S.F. Also got to meet Lili's family, in town from Florida and Iowa, and she kept me up late and dragged me kicking and screaming – oh, believe you me, I protested vociferously (ahem) – to a few of the gentleman's clubs of the topless persuasion. Too bad the dancers there were so goddamn lame. Here's a helpful tip that I thought they covered in stripper school – when a customer at the tip rail has a gratuity for you, by all means take it. I swear, there were a number of dancers who didn't take the money from me, Lili, or Michael (another nifty OLT listener who flew in from St. Louis). We weren't being rude or demeaning or salacious (well, overly salacious, anyway). Really weird. Lots of incriminating photos were taken – I expect they'll be up on the OLT fan site in the near future.

I also was a party to remote-control Third Millennium Quality Virtual Yenta machinations, courtesy of the ever-splendiferous Hanne. A virtual friend of hers from Boston was in Vegas on vacation at the same time I was there, so she sent us an email and said that perhaps we should meet, as she thought we were both quality folks. Having done far stranger things on a whim, I was game. So I got to hang out with and make friends with the vivacious, funny, and attractive Aimee. We talked, drank Starbucks and ate food court pizza, talked some more, and she let me lead her aimlessly around the MGM Grand (I swear, when GPS implants for the human skull are perfected, I'm first in line). It was a very pleasant and totally unexpected diversion. Thank you, Aimee. And as always, bless you, Hanne.