This is Chris dot com

* * * * * * *

Saturday morning we all awoke rather early (around 9:00 I believe) and walked down to Noah's New York Bagels on Broadway for breakfast. I had a heap of pastrami in my bagel. So that's three meals in a row I ate out. Woo! We then walked around the Broadway area for a while and looked at a couple shops here and there.

On the way back to the apartment we passed a garage sale being thrown by a drag queen (who was not currently in drag, but he had a large assortment of women's clothes for sale marked "Drag"). He had a big box o' vinyl that he just wanted to get rid of, so it was all free. Mathias picked up some stuff he actually thought would be good, whereas I picked up a couple of records that I thought would make hilarious Fools Play Prizes. Oh, and a Bert Bacharach record for Neighbor Gary.

We listened to music back at the apartment for a while before walking out again to Half-Priced Books 'cause Sandy wanted a copy of Animal Farm. I picked up The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for about six bucks, which is a pretty good find. Didn't find any books, though. Sandy ended up getting the same edition of Animal Farm that I'd had in High School way back when.

Sandy got some Bubble Tea and Mathias got some Coffee as we headed back to the apartment. The Bubble Tea was really good. I drank a lot of it.

After a while we all piled in the car and drove back down to Mathias's folks' house. But before I drove home in my car (which was there, remember?) Sandy and I drove to a Federal Way thrift store, where I found a couple of funny shirts for cheap. Then we hit Goodwill, where I found a really awesome shirt that has an explanation of energy/power (in scientific terms) on it, with graphs and charts and stuff. Nerdy and cool!

There's a discount grocery type of place where Value Village used to be, and Sandy was curious so we hit that as well. I got a piece of smoked Gouda for less than a buck fifty. Sandy loaded up on about six bucks of stuff, including some mint-ice-cream-on-a-brownie-dipped-in-chocolate dessert things. We each ate one in the car ride back to Mathias's folks' place.

Then I got in my car and headed down. Traffic was absolutely miserable, and just kept getting worse. I eventually made it home and went to take a shower, but had to make a stop on the toilet first. My belly is acting up again, did I mention that? What we in the biz call a "flare." This isn't a very bad one (so far), but is still rather annoying, in that after I had showered and eaten the other half of my dagwood and gotten ready to go to Fools Play, I had to stop on the toilet again for a good while.

I got to Fools Play rather late a lot, and was surprised to see Brandy there. It was a small audience of only die-hard regulars, but after the show I got a kiss from every single female in that audience. That was nice. Then I came home where I was alone. That was not so nice. I didn't hang out afterwards 'cause I had to get up early to get all these BF Fashion Show handouts done. But Carrie comes home tonight, so that'll be a good thing, as recently-released Martha would say.

Whew! Quite a weekend!

• Article: What If I Were Oscar?
• Review: Be Cool

Anyway, Neighbor Gary came over last night for the first time in like over a month. We watched Porco Rosso, and Gary proclaimed the pig to be his new hero.

• Porco Rosso
• Donnie Darko: Director's Cut
• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
• Napoleon Dynamite

Then it was a stop-off at Chez Target for some makeup for Carrie before stopping off at home really quickly (just to drop off all the schtuff we'd bought) and then heading to the AMC Tacoma Narrows to see Be Cool.

I WILL WRITE A REVIEW OF THAT MOVIE... TODAY!

By the time we got home it was almost 1:00 in the AM.

Link of the Month:
The Drawing Board
My new favorite online community message board! Set up by the inimitible Shane Glanes, this is where aspiring artists and cartoonists can go and share their work with other artists for feedback, comments, praise, or just to put it out there. Look for posts by ANGRY BEEF and you'll know that's me!

DVD of the Month:
Napoleon Dynamite
This film is sweet. It's got numchuck skillz... bo-staff skillz. God! You haven't seen it? Idiot. Can you bring me my chap stick? But my lips really hurt!

Book of the Month:
For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs by Robert A. Heinlein
This is Heinlein's first and never-before-published "novel." It's really just a Utopian essay with some characters and, well, not really any plot thrown in. But it's a fascinating look at the proto-Heinlein. This is the first thing he ever wrote, and if you read his entire body of work (like I have) you can see how he extracted all the ideas in this book and put small pieces here and there in his other stories—but executed them better. It's like this book is a rough draft for everything he would ever later write. It isn't very good as a straight literary read, but it's fascinating as a monumentally important piece of Heinlein (and SF) history.