alive in '05 [Liam]

so i'm back on some creativity-type shit again...
just started painting after a long break, this is what i got so far:

a little weird so far, but it at least has some point, which is more than i can say for most of what i've painted up until now.

so i'm not up to a big monologue right now, but i'm currently way glad 2004 is dead. long live 2005. at the one month mark i'm liking this year a lot better already.
(8^(|)
BAM! HOMER SMILEY!

Haiku Styles v. 1.0 [Lester]

Chinese people and
Japanese people like to
visit Araska

Coach Carter [Lester]

Buy a Ferrari
Get a PhD in a social science
Menage a trois
Physically assault a Republican
Live in a city that is violent and gang-infested enough to serve as a setting for an inspirational Stand and Deliver-style movie

Richmond, folks. Been there done that.

BTW eagerly awaiting "Coach Carter 2 - Revenge of Slamball"





*double take* and Arthur Agee?!? You mean Arthur Agee from Hoop Dreams?

Throw in the Mandingo from "The Air Up There" and you are unstoppable.

Snapped! [Lester]

Sit n' Go

Dealer: Hand #44809942
Dealer: WinonaBuck posts the small blind of 15
Dealer: RP24 posts the big blind of 30
Dealer: You have been dealt [Jc Jh]
Dealer: phil_ivey41 folds
Dealer: notoriousJIM folds
Dealer: HipKizat folds
Dealer: DMBrett folds
Dealer: NDragster214 folds
Dealer: bears826 raises to 90
Dealer: Moxie Moe folds
Dealer: WinonaBuck calls 75
Dealer: RP24 folds
Dealer: The flop is [2h 8c 2s]
Dealer: WinonaBuck checks
Dealer: bears826 bets 210
Dealer: WinonaBuck calls 210
Dealer: The turn is [Kd]
Dealer: WinonaBuck checks
Dealer: bears826 checks
Dealer: The river is [Js]
Dealer: WinonaBuck checks
Dealer: bears826 bets 630
Dealer: WinonaBuck raises to 870, and is all in
Dealer: bears826 calls 240
Dealer: WinonaBuck shows four of a kind, Twos
Dealer: bears826 mucks
Dealer: WinonaBuck wins the pot (2,370) with four of a kind, Twos
bears826: wow

clothing, other randomness [Liam]

Before I start I just wanna floss this image I put as a placeholder on the Xanga acct I registered to harass mike's livejournal(<3). I won't be posting there anytime soon unless a highschool teacher decides to seriously bust my balls, but I just didn't wanna leave the damn thing blank. This, anyway, is an alternate color version of MY TRIBUTE TO EMO-ASS XANGA IMAGERY:

(ahem)

Ok so lately I've been on kind of a clothes-buying binge, basically ever since Christmas was over and I was once again free to spend money on mAh Gr3eDy-AzZ d3lF.


First on the agenda was a Kenneth Cole jacket I was eyeing earlier when my mom sent me and my brother to grab an age-appropriate leather jacket for my dad to put under the tree. Often I have a weird hangup when it comes to dropping a three-digit amount on any single item that doesn't have any plugs or lights, but going through a dry run on my dad's jacket opened my eyes to what a painless process it can be. Swipe card, sign, congratulations. So now I have this jacket that I'm not supposed to wear in the rain, and it's been pouring like a muthafucka ever since.
When I first thought about doing this blog, I wanted to take images off the web for all of my purchases. Unfortunately it turns out Cole kills HELLA cows and like his website doesn't even know what to do with about 90% of that sheeit... so i have to pose like a wannabe rockstar in front of my bathroom mirror instead:


and then there was this black sweater and an orange beanie i got from bananarepublic.com. Being that i bought it online i DO know where to find the images, but upon closer examination... i stand to lose any remaining shred of masculinity i might have retained after that last pic if I put this up:



fortunately, photoshop always has my back.
let's see if we can make this pic a little more HARD KORE:
BOOOM!!!
Sub Zero is so hardcore in that hat he doesn't even PAY ATTENTION to you, or to correct lighting direction.
Actually, I have a confession at this point in my ramble. I did take a picture with the beanie, just I came to the realization as I was putting it on that it was the sort of ridiculous garment only a Japanese celebrity would wear.
That led to THIS photoshop crime:


I was thinking TEAM ZISSOU when i bought it, but my membership card is still in the mail and I remain loyal first and foremost to brog-unit online thuggery regardless.
There's some other crap I've picked up lately, but none of it will top the orange beanie for pure comic value so I might as well cut to the main point of this post, which was to get opinions on a pair of jeans i'm thinking about buying:

Oh, wait. Excuse me. I meant...
BOOOOOOM!
Yeah buddy.

Bored in the library [Ben]

Trying for an inky look with illustrator...

Slim to none [Lester]

With a few hours to kill and cash game boredom driving a rusty spike into my occipital bun, I registered for a $24+2 mini-tournament. Prize was a seat for a $200+16 buy in satellite tournament... the top 2% in that tournament win prize packages for the ESPN World Series of Poker circuit event at Harrah's Atlantic City worth $12,000 ($10,000 for the entry fee, $2,000 for travel and expenses).

I left the registration screen up, waiting for a few more players to fill the table before we could start... but it didn't start until a few hours later, with 40 minutes to go before Christina's birthday dinner (Happy Birthday Hon!). Basically, I'd lost my buy-in because I'd forgotten to unregister in time. These mini-tournaments usually take an hour and a half to two hours so I figured I'd just play super maniacal and bust out early.

Plan B: Run over the table with loose aggressive raises, get heads up with a 2:1 chip lead and win in 45 minutes.

Anyway, wish me luck. I have fat girl's chance in Playboy of making it to Atlantic City.

Glock sells gun to cops, psycho shoots "non-whites", Glock gets sued?? [Ben]

Browsing the news today, I noticed the following lawsuit against firearms manufacturer, Glock: Click to download a large pdf of the lawsuit, or wait and I'll paraphrase some juicy bits. More palatable SFgate story available here. Basically, Glock sold a bunch of guns to a police department in Washington. Eventually, the fuzz traded the weapon in question to a gun dealer for an updated piece. Said dealer then sold the gun to some unprincipled fuck who sold it to a psycho white supremacist at a gun show without a background check. Aforementioned psycho then uses the glock to shoot up a Jewish community center and afterwards, probably not intending any irony, kills a Filipino mail carrier. Long story short, following a criminal trial with a guilty verdict, mail carrier’s family sues Glock, among others.

Now, no one is more anti-white supremacist and pro-minority mailman than me, and in the past I've even harbored some anti-gun sympathies (my conversion to a more libertarian stance on this issue is a story for another time), but some of the shit alleged in this lawsuit is straight up laughable. Examples:

1) "They contend that Glock guns are safe and appropriate for use by well trained elite offensive police forces, but are not appropriate for civilians or unskilled users."

Hahahaha. Whaaaa? They don't get into any more detail here, but I'd guess that the arguments in court will focus on the lack of an external safety and the ease of the trigger pull. I'm sure this combination was directly responsible for the original murderous rampage, but I'm not very familiar with the criminal proceedings. Judging by the guilty verdict, if the defense of "I, an untrained civilian, was just walking along and this unsafe weapon opened fire on those kikes and killed that monkey" was used, it wasn't very convincing. How could the safety of the firearm have any bearing on whether the manufacturer assumes responsibility for its use in a murder?

2) "Plaintiffs also allege that the defendants intentionally produced more firearms than the legitimate market demands with the intent of marketing their firearms to illegal purchasers who buy guns on the secondary market... In addition, Glock and its distributors encourage police departments to make trade-ins earlier than necessary or originally planned so that they can sell more firearms to the police and sell the former police guns at a mark-up on the civilian market. Glock knows that by over-saturating the market with guns, the guns will go to the secondary markets that serve illegal purchasers."

Okay, even looking past the implication that the vagaries of supply and demand are something that can be calculated exactly before the manufacturing process, this makes no sense. While I'm sure Glock is concerned with the resale value of their product, it seems exceedingly unlikely that any illegal purchasing happens until the weapon is at least a few steps removed from Glock's hands... in which case, wtf do they have to do with it? In this instance they sold a gun to the police, who then sold it to a licensed dealer. Glock's ability to convince police departments to upgrade their armament is somehow equivalent to "marketing their firearms to illegal purchasers". Okay then. As long as all the primary purchases are legit, how can the plaintiffs accuse Glock of over-saturating the market? Obviously legal buyers exist, or Glock couldn't move their product out of the warehouse.

3) "With respect to Glock, plaintiffs specifically alleged that Glock targets its firearms to law enforcement first to gain credibility and then uses the enhanced value that comes with law enforcement use to increase gun sales in the civilian market."

For the sake of commentary, I'll assume the civilian and criminal markets are synonymous or else this revelation has no point. Now, I'm trying to imagine how this makes any difference to a murderer. Does he think to himself, "Man, it would be HELLA gangsta if I shot up this synagogue with the same pistol the cops use. That would make this way more heinous than your average hate crime."? A final tidbit on pistols and their marketability to criminals: a google search on ohhla.com (the original hip hop lyric archive) returns ~4,500 hits for "Glock". Where’s the investigation of Glock corporation's donations of cases of Crystal to major record labels?

Okay, I'll stop rambling about this, but it just astounds me how frivolous some of this shit is. I'm torn, because I'd like to see the family of the victim compensated, but we're going about it all wrong. I propose we levy a nice hefty fine against the jackass lawyers who bring frivolous suits into court. This money will then be redistributed to the families in cases like this, which would hopefully drastically reduce the number who get talked into these suits by slimeball lawyers looking for a payout. And yes, I realize that was a highly conservative sounding rant... don't worry, I'm burning an effigy of the president right now to balance things out.

In other news, my local indy theater (The Palm) is showing the director's cut of Donnie Darko for a limited time. I couldn't find any theaters in the Bay doing the same, so if anyone is interested in hanging in SLO next weekend and checking that out, I extend an open invitation. Or you could just save yourself the three hour drive and cop the DVD.

Escape from Buckley Farms [Ben]

Much like the state of my boxers after watching that Sin City trailer, the last few days around here have been, shall we say, quite moist. It appears that before the horse ranch I live on was converted to its present pastoral state, it also functioned as one of the largest standing bodies of water in San Luis Obispo. Unfortunately, my landlord neglected to inform me that the winter months would require access to a hovercraft when I signed the lease. The drainage is so bad that water on the only passage off the property was up over the door bottoms of my truck and moving so fast that it was actually pushing me off the road. But, in true brog-2 tradition, I managed to escape narrowly to bring you this documentary illustration (cloud rendering technique shamelessly stolen from LBo's Xmas card) of the experience. Careful kids, it's wet out there:

XTREME skiing: [Ben]

Over the scantily attended New Year’s trip to Tahoe, I happened to catch sight of a relic of skiing’s past while waiting in a lift line. Behold, Big Feet:

Big Feet are pretty much exactly what they look like: really shitty short skis with a horrible binding system and a clever, embarrassing graphic that appeals to all the wrong people. Unfortunately, they seem to be making a comeback in more modern form. Everyone familiar with snow sports of any kind knows that the longer your skis/board, the faster you go. Ostensibly, Big Feet (or ski boards more generically), were created for: a) people who wanted to learn how to get down the hill in one day without falling too much, and b) XGame wannabe idiots who spin 720s and then throw the fist pump while going five miles an hour (see exhibit A below).

I reserve heaping amounts of contempt for both. In the former case because I hate anyone who sucks on the ski slopes (after a reasonable learning period), and anyone who actually owns these has been wallowing in mediocrity for quite some time. I’m all for training wheels, but for fuck’s sake… grow a pair, learn to ski for real and keep the hell out of my way. I didn’t pay 50 bucks to play frogger with you and those little legomen looking kids with their gigantic crash helmets.

The second case is more disheartening. Are they under the illusion that anyone at all is impressed? Why the propensity for hats that wouldn’t even look right on circus performers? They’re all just lucky that I can’t pick up rocks while on a ski lift or I’d be treating them like Israeli tanks.

Killing time before dinner [Lester]

Dealer: Hand #42167613
Dealer: frankie001 posts the small blind of $0.25
Dealer: Fat Boy posts the big blind of $0.50
Dealer: Mike1125 posts $0.50
Dealer: You have been dealt [Ah Ac]
Dealer: money26 folds
Dealer: adaml80 calls $0.50
Dealer: bears826 raises to $1.50
Dealer: nite7678 folds
Dealer: Mike1125 calls $1
Dealer: ScReWy LeWiE folds
Dealer: frankie001 raises to $7
Dealer: Fat Boy folds
Dealer: adaml80 folds
ScReWy LeWiE: Is the sound working tonight?
Dealer: bears826 raises to $23.50
Dealer: Mike1125 folds
Dealer: Mike1125 stands up
frankie001: do you have aces?
frankie001: wouldnt suprise me
bears826: yes
Dealer: frankie001 has 15 seconds left to act
frankie001: ill pay you off
Dealer: frankie001 raises to $38.15, and is all in
Dealer: bears826 calls $14.65
Dealer: frankie001 shows [Kd Kh]
Dealer: bears826 shows [Ah Ac]
Dealer: The flop is [8h Qc As]
Dealer: The turn is [5c]
Dealer: The river is [9h]
Fat Boy: wow
Dealer: frankie001 shows a pair of Kings
Dealer: bears826 shows three of a kind, Aces
bears826: cant say i didnt warn you
Dealer: bears826 wins the pot ($75.80) with three of a kind, Aces
Dealer: frankie001 is sitting out