Steve Huegli just called me to let me know that things are happening with the sign we all know and love (and now miss). He has what he calls a "loose coalition" of concerned people who are working to get the sign back up. I was kind of hopeless until I talked to Steve tonight.

Here's a video story from KRON today about the sign.

You can see them tearing it down and the horrible new billboard that has been put up (against the law). The thing that is different about this situation (aside from it being the best goddamn sign I know of) is that we have leverage. A fellow named Steve Parr has the sign. He recovered it from the scrap yard. It's possible to get it put back up and fully restored (possibly lighted like it originally was).

Here's an initial website with a mailing list signup.

80 percent of us voted that no new billboards could be erected in the Mission and this is illegal. The owner did not have a permit to do this. There is something we can do. There's an article coming out in the Guardian and Steve called me today to encourage me to do more and to let me know what had happened.

Most people who know about the sign going down have told me "yeah, that sucks" but now I realize that these people might be able to do something if they have more information and opportunity. That's why I'm trying to spread some info. The guy that put the billboard up has invested about 20K in the sign so he's not going to be too happy to take it down. However, the proposition he is in violation of says that he can be charged 5 thousand dollars a day for every day the sign is up.

We might be able to get donations for its restoration and support from the city and others to classify the sign as historic or something (I know little about this, but there are architects involved) and this may, in some way, remunerate the guy who's trying to make money with the top of his building.

I'm putting my 17 Reasons stickers up all over the Mission and I'm gonna give some to Steve to hand out to people he's working with. Rose and I are gonna make t-shirts tonight. (If you look closely you can see my photo in the KRON video). Yay.

To all you motherfuckas who I give my stickers to and who peep my site and never send a word, fuck all y'all. I mean, I need some something. I know you like it because you tell me when you see me. But that could be never again, right? I have given over 500 stickers away over the last year and have only gotten any kind of anything from a couple of people. Y'all like 'em when I show 'em to you. You look at this shit and you can say 'no thanks' if you want and that's cool. But it makes me think they don't do any good except for the moment when I have you there lookin over them. Whaterver. I'm a fuckin whiner.

I love handin out stickers and I aint gonna stop.

Ok. That's all.

I just wrote this to the guy organizing the follow-up to the Dice Bar from lasts year's Burning Man because I think I'm going to volunteer to help them out. This is what made a believer out of me.

Last year was my first year. I decided on Saturday to go after years of avoiding it and showed up on Tuesday. The first night we went out and my friends were interested in seeing all the theme camps that were starting to be built around the esplanade. We went from one huge dusty disco to another. Just a large scaffolded box setup and a guy in a booth spinning. No where to sit down. Nothing to drink. Nothing to look at. Just lazers shooting everywhere people waiting for the X to hit. I was disappointed. Was this all there was to do at night? I like to dance but it just seemed kinda stupid out in the desert.

So I wandered off toward Bianca’s to find my friend Adam. I found him there and told him of my disappointment and he suggested we just walk out into the playa. I said. “Well, whatever.” We walked for a little bit and we came upon Psyche’s Windows. We sat around and talked to the artist for a while and enjoyed the chorale music and the sheets blowing in the wind. It was a nice night. I said to Adam, “This is nice, but what I’d really like to do right now is just sit down somewhere indoors and have a drink. Fuckin Christ. I can’t believe there’s no where around here to get a drink. People drag all this shit out here from SF and the leave behind one of my favorite things.” Adam said, “If you could have any drink right now, what would it be?” and I said, “A martini. Yeah. A martini. Real dirty.” Adam said, “Yeah, I’d love that. Maybe we should keep walking and maybe we’ll find something.” Not a fuckin chance in hell, I thought. Maybe we’ll find someone’s water bottle that they dropped when they were tripping too hard. Adam pointed out a little light in the distance and said, “I think that’s a casino bar.” And I said, “No, I went by that casino place on the way out here and it’s the other direction. It’s on the Esplanade, right? I saw it. I’m sure they don’t have drinks. It’s just another disco.” And Adam said, “Well, let’s just walk and see what we see. I think there’s a casino over there.” He said it so lightly and carelessly that I was sure he was fucking with me. I humored him. I said “Reno’s the other direction, buddy, and I’m pretty sure that’s the closest casino.”

As we walked up to the building I saw that it was really something different. There was life shooting out of it but not like the heavily-amped stuff on the Esplanade – it was sort of glowing. As we got close, suddenly, a car came close to the building and a guy was yelling on a bullhorn and then a beautiful woman in a black dress came running out of the building and she was pissed. She leaped onto the hood of the moving car and held onto the windshield screaming as the car did donuts in the playa.

As Adam and I moved closer and it looked like some bad domestic violence situation but then the woman jumped off the car and went running back into one of the Two Big Dice. We followed her in there and found her up on stage next to the piano man crooning a lovely tune. My god, she was stunning. There were people laying on the floor and sitting on couches! I couldn’t believe it. It was dark and beautiful. Adam said, let’s go get that drink so we head around the corner and belly up to the bar and he says, “Two martinis” and the guy looks at him and says, “Waddaya got?” and Adam holds up a little poker chip and says, “I got this” and they guy says, alright for you but what about him? And points to me. I didn’t have anything and I looked at Adam, and Adam reaches into his pocket and pulls out a little red die with white dots on it and says, “Ok, what about THIS?” and the guy looks at it and says, “eh, I don’t know” and Adam points at a woman down the bar and says, “Ask her what she thinks” and he does and she checks it out and says, “Give him whatever he wants” and so we get our big beautiful cold drinks in our big beautiful plastic martini glasses and I look at Adam like he’s Obi-Wan and just sliced off some guy’s arm in the StarWars bar scene and go to melt down into the couch with our friends Dan and Helena that just happened to defect from the disco drones and stumble upon the place. I asked Adam how the fuck he knew about this and why he was being so fucking coy and he said that he’d helped them put carpet down the day before and he didn’t know what it would be like. That’s how he got our drink tokens.

My God. I couldn’t believe it. My shitty mood disappeared and that one martini was like the strongest love drug I’d ever taken. I felt incredible. I ask Dan what that woman was doing screaming and running outside and he said that before we came in she was singing and some guy with an afro started messing with the piano player and then they got in a fight and he pulled a gun and she fuckin jumped him and all hell broke loose and that’s when we showed up I guess. Then I saw the guy with the afro just sittin at a table and mindin his own business and I though something weird was going on and then it started all over again and we realized that we were in a performance and that’s when I really got down on my hands and knees and thanked god for the dice bar. I was ok with Burning Man after that and it put me in an open frame of mind to enjoy a lot of other stuff that week. I told people about the dice bar but when we tried to go back it was a total mob scene and we couldn’t even get in the door. They’d have to be happy with legends.

ESTADOS UNIDOS!!!!!!!

Here's the shit. It's worth the wait if you have to suck it through a phone line.

Flag Day 2002 :3 minutes or download 16 megs

Oh boy...and girl. These kids will not stop fuckin dancing! Must be the Coachwhips going "Baa Baa Bom Bom Baamp...Chucka Chucka Chucka" over and over. I'm told the feller with the gold fronts is Keeegan. Anyhow. this was the fashion in which they were rocking at the BART plaza on Friday. Sorry you missed it.

So many people try to type natural language queries into Google's search box. I see it in the DSR's on my site all the time. New and cool and something of a remedy for this situation in internet land is Google Answers. A paid information researching system. Some people use Google Answers to ask questions about Google but it appears that the folks at Google are trying to discourage that sort of stuff. I thought to myself, "Hmm, this is a place where there are a lot of people hanging out who know how to use Google really well and I'd like to know what they know." Maybe I need to pay for an answer because didn't find anything from browsing around. But it is entertaining. Especially the Miscellaneous section: Where are all the 420 mile markers in the continental US?

I'm looking for anybody who has some reasonable skills to join me for some fun on the table at Mission Playground (19th and Valencia) for ping pong. I am ready any time during open hours. It hurts me to see that really bitchin' expensive table go unused. They close at 10. There's also foosball. There are even lighted hoops with nets until 10. This is a standing invitation to anyone who reads this. Even if you're marginally interested, I think you'll find my love for the game infectious. me.

I'm working on a larger one, but here's the first stuff from the Coachwhips show at 16th and Mission BART plaza. They're probably on stage right now at the Hemlock. I decided to stay home and work on videos.

Ratta Tat Tat :5 seconds or download 415 kb

I was going through my contacts tonight, sending a whole bunch of people an email about the squidsheet and I came across the contact "MOM". I think I left it in there for sentimental reasons before, but this time I took one last look at the old girl's email address (she barely broke it in, to be truthful) and the phone number at her condo and deleted her. I was about to go about my work when I thought to myself, "That's fucked up when you have to delete your own mother out of your contacts list." It's so sad when people die. Everything that was associated with them crumbles. Just take a look around the room and think of all the things you've collected or made that are important to you and when you die, most of them won't mean shit to anyone and they'll just chuck 'em out. That should tell you that your attention is what's important.

"Life is long, and it's tremendous. And we're glad, that you're here with us. And since we know, and end will come, it makes our livin fun."

Man, seems like I still think about her every day. It's like, she mourned her baby that died way back in 1946 and she told me she thought about her every day and now it's like I have that also.

On my trip to the bullfights last Monday I was discussing cameras with Carlos (who posted his movies "Portuguese Bullfight" is the one to watch: http://171.64.28.102/~carlos/) and he said that they've got some super tiny little video cameras now and I said, not as good and small as my Sanyo VPC-SX550 and he said I should check it out. Well, that's what I did yesterday. I went looking on the net as I was too hung over to even stand up. I found something by Panasonic and then got really excited. It seemed that my prayers had been answered. I want a little vidcam that also plays MP3's. I don’t expect it to be a phone. Vidcam and MP3 player should go together. They're both audio and need to have some sort of removable storage. Kodak was the first one to try to do this with their MC3 but that one was too crappy. It's not that I don't like toy cameras. I love my pixelvision. It just sucked. Anyhow, I waited because I'm not so different than those geeks designing these things and they'll figure it out.

I found out that Sony's got some propreitary new mini tape format but that camera is still a pound. I need 5 ounces. Anything more and it messes up the line of my clothes! So, yesterday I found the Panasonic SV-AV10 (I'm glad they started with the number 10 because they're gonna need some room to grow) and I was about to buy it when I read what people said on CNET and decided I'd wait for different products. It really is perfect but the video is just too underpowered. It does about 350kb a second and that's half of what my Sanyo does. At 320x240 it limps along at about 10fps and that's just too jerky. Well, I'd possibly put up with that and the "artiness" it would enforce, but then I found out that because it's SD memory-based, you can't directly read and write the media in your computer. You have to go through the Real Jukebox shit they give you because of its "digital rights management". Well fuck that. I'd have to copy everything over a USB cable. No way. SD is cool and about as cheap as Flash but unless they let me have file system access to it or put it on a firewire connection I'll sick with my Sanyo. Oh, I also noticed that Xolox is back in business and they have 40x CDRs for a hundred bucks now so you can burn a CD in about 2 minutes. Damn. I guess I'm gonna have to get with it and start sucking music off the net again. Last night I found Lucinda Williams doing "Positively 4th Street" and it kills.

More hometown pride. It's the street. Lapidge. My farorite thing about this sign (and one you can't really make out in this photo) is that there's a sticker on it that says "You Must Worship Me". I'm gonna go put a sticker of this photo of the sign on the sign today.

Pill poppers, listen up!

Never take a pill that someone gives you without looking it up on the internet first.

http://www.rxlist.com/interact.htm#imprint

There is always an imprint code on prescription medicine. Sometimes it can be tough to look it up but if you have a general idea of what type of drug it is and the imprint, you can usually find the exact drug name and dosage. And, after you find it, always lookup the dosage indication. Don't kill yourself.

Punching up some of the stuff in my stash I found:

Imprint Code: M/2
Drug/Strength: Hydromorphone Hydrochloride 2mg - Dilaudid

Imprint Code: 5013V
Drug/Strength: Phenobarbital 64.8mg

Imprint Code: 51 / RP
Drug/Strength: Dextroamphelamine Sulfate 5mg - Dexadrine

Imprint Code: A5
Drug/Strength: Oxycodone HCl 5mg