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Updates may, maybe will, seem sporadic for the next couple of weeks. You see, I've found myself in Middle Tennessee about to get married to Super Hot Irish Girlfriend. In order to keep this blessed event more like the Day of a Lifetime that she always pictured and less like a Harold Pinter play, I have many responsibilities to discharge that will preclude regular updating for you, my loyal readership.

Couple of quick things, though - (1) Saw Eddie George yesterday at the wine store. He was wearing flip-flops and buying a case of wine. He's taller than I thought! It was funny to watch the middle-aged white guys with broad Southern accents falling over themselves to help him and calling him "Mr. George" and so forth when if any other black guy came into the store they'd probably trip the silent alarm. (2) Then we saw Randy Travis at the Nashville Airport yesterday when we went to pick up The Sister. It's funny to watch people try to not seem obvious when they stare at someone famous. Nobody even tried to do that last year when we saw Taylor Swift at the airport. Incidentally, Taylor Swift is about 8 feet tall and not as great-looking in person.

OK, off to get a marriage license. Maybe a hunting license too, as long as we're there!

There's poor taste, and there's...

This:

Letourneau hosts `Hot for Teacher' night at bar

A teacher who became notorious in the 1990s for having an affair with a sixth-grader is hosting a "Hot for Teacher" night at a Seattle bar — along with the former student, now her husband.

Bar owner Mike Morris says Mary Kay Letourneau (leh-TUR'-noh) has served her sentence and it's OK for the couple to have some fun.

The 47-year-old Letourneau served seven years in prison after pleading guilty in 1997 to raping Vili Fualaau (VEE'-lee foo-ah-LA'-oo), now 26. They met when Fualaau was in second grade and began their affair when he was 12 and she was a 34-year-old married mother of four. They were married in 2005 and have two daughters together.

Morris says Saturday's event at Fuel Sports Eats & Beats will be their third "Hot for Teacher" night. She greets people and he DJs.

Incidentally, what's with the pronounciation guides? Is that so, when you're discussing this with others, you won't say "Hey, remember that skanky pedophile teacher Mary Kay (leh-tur-NO')?" by mistake?

Also, I thought it was just SF, but I guess this proves it: EVERYBODY IS A GODDAM DJ.

Sure, Mom! Would you like to stay in our room with us too?

How can I put this delicately? My mother is...ummmm....not very normal. Yes, that'll do. Anyway, we kind of have a history and consequently we don't see each other much and, as it happens and for reasons too exhausting to detail here, she's not coming to my wedding, which is - hold the fucking phone - a week from tomorrow. Which is fine and I totally understand her reasons and whatever blah blah blah.

But here's the funny thing: she doesn't want to come to the wedding. She wants to come to the honeymoon.

Oh Christ. Here's how this went down. Super Hot Irish Girlfriend and I are getting married and then we're going to NYC for a few days and then Turks and Caicos to relax in tropical Caribbean splendor and have little men bring us fruity drinks whilst we recline under the palapa. ANYWAY, Mom calls me and says she has a delicious idea - "How about I meet you and SHIG in New York and you can tell me about the wedding?????"

Umm, how about no fucking way? Because our few days of romance and nightlife in New York would turn into a tightly-scripted Momcation with events planned to the minute and long evenings gazing into my Mother's eyes over a candlelit dinner. No. No no no no no.

So I tell her no and she's genuinely surprised and hurt. I mean, am I being crazy here? Growing up with this woman, you kind of lose your handle on what crazy is. So am I? Was it wrong of me to tell my Mom that she can't come with us on our honeymoon? It's kind of weird, isn't it, that I see her about once a year and the one time this year she wants to get together is my honeymoon?

ANYWAY.

Happy Friday, everyone!

So anyway, yeah, tonight is the bachelor party, for what's it's worth, but it's not going to be one of those crazy, limo-riding, strip-club-going kind of things. Just a nice dinner with the fellas and maybe kill a hooker hit a few bars.

British people: Are they the greatest threat to our way of life?

Yesterday morning some of Lyndon LaRouche's nutty supporters were outside the BART station handing out some literature and I took some, thinking it would be good for a laugh. Boy, was I ever right.

Lyndon doesn't like British people very much:

You look at these Brits, they're fat, sloppy and dumb. Their dietary habits stink, their conditions of life stink, their opinions stink, in general. . . . the Brits are an imperial system and they're a parasitic nation, essentially. They suck the blood out of the rest of the world. Dracula was a story written by a Brit, remember. That's not coincidental.

(Make finger-twirling-next-to-head motion here)

He also doesn't like people who Twitter. Or maybe there's some group called "Twitters" that I don't know about that he doesn't like:

Now, what you're looking at here, in the United States today, is a phenomenon typified by the Twitters. Now the Twitters are very seriously an operation of evil.

MWAHAHAHAHA!!!! NO ONE SHALL KNOW OF OUR SECRET EVIL PLANS, FELLOW TWITTERS!! But wait, there's more!

This system is not going to last. What Obama represents today will not last. It's doomed, in any case. The question is, what do you get in its place. And the Twitters are the answer. The Twitters are devotedly brainless creatures. Twitter, twitter, tweet, tweet, tweet.

Hey! I resent that! I'm not a....wait, what was I talking about?

In other news, I saw the Doves last night at the Fillmore. The Doves, as you may or may not know, are from Manchester, and their home city was amply represented in the sold-out crowd, most notably by the three chaps in front of us who fist-pumped and yelled "MAHNCHESTAHHHHHHH!!!!!!" between every song, then grabbed each other and hugged and kissed. But in a football hooligan way.

There was also the drunk girl who was being held up by 2 of her friends and who finally got escorted out by the bouncers. But I don't think she was British, just drunk.

Anyway, fun show. Except it was too crowded. I don't like crowds any more.

Our team investigates where it may have gone wrong

Champagne brunch at my house isn't where it went wrong. It was quite nice, actually. I made a tortilla espanola and some chicken-apple sausage and it was all delightful.

Beers in the backyard after brunch isn't where it went wrong, either. Beautiful day, sunny and warm, lying on a big blanket - what could be wrong about that?

The sidewalk BBQ at Lower Haters isn't where it went wrong, either, even though a cop told me to throw away my beer because I was outside and it's apparently ILLEGAL TO DRINK BEER ON THE SIDEWALK. Der.

Hanging out at Ronnie's house in the Mission isn't even where it went wrong. Although I could see it starting to go wrong.

No, it was probably hanging out until midnight at Bliss Bar. Don't get me wrong; we had a great time and Chris was DJ'ing and playing really good music (not at all because half of what he was playing came directly from my requests, no, not at all) and it's always fun hanging out with The Sister et al. But good God, I'm not a kid any more and man oh man do I feel a little rough today.

And tonight we have Doves at the Fillmore. Urp.

My semi-informed election guide

First off, the 40goingon28 Special Election Guide:

Vote no on everything.

Why? Because voting "yes" just encourages the stupid budget bullshit that's now inflicted on us annually by our state legislators. Instead of figuring out a way to make expenditures match revenue - hey, there's an idea!!! - the fucking Legislature just punted the whole thing to us and said "Vote for all these ballot props that you don't understand and bail us out for another year." Well, you know what? Fuck you. You get paid to go sit in the fancy room in Sacramento and have lunch at Frank Fat's and get your picture taken with Mrs. Pauley's second grade class and all that bullshit, so you figure it the fuck out.

There is that one measure that limits legislative pay, and that's tempting, but fuck that too. Voting yes on anything just encourages this special election bullshit. So vote no. No on everything.

Happy Friday, everyone! Oh, you can't roll a keg across the city as part of Bay to Breakers this year? Deal with it.

I would now like to draw your attention to a few blogs I've been reading/enjoying lately:

Ramona has an ongoing column at the SF Appeal which is grandly entertaining, but her blog is maybe even better.

100 Emails, 20 Dates chronicles one girl's adventures in online dating.

Everybody knows about Daisy.

If you're a high-functioning alcoholic like me, you'll enjoy Camper English's Alcademics.

In a related story, how fucking cool would it be to be named "Camper English"?

Has Texts from Last Night already jumped the shark? I'm not sure.

Have a good weekend.

She's not really a morning person

One thing I think has been kind of overlooked in the whole debate over torture is the fact that WE'RE DEBATING WHETHER OR NOT TORTURE IS OK. I mean, seriously, what the fucking fuck!?!!??! Can we all just take a deep breath and sit back and think about that for a second? Did the Bush administration fuck with our heads so fucking much that we think this is some kind of reasonable debate? Are you out of your fucking mind? I thought we settled this after the goddam Spanish Inquisition ended. Imagine me saying this with my hands cupped around my mouth: IT'S NOT OK TO TORTURE PEOPLE. Fuck, it's like everyone is 13 years old or something. Unbelievable.

Speaking of torture, I was reminded this morning that it's not a good idea to fuck with Super Hot Irish Girlfriend in the morning. She was still in bed and trying to sleep and I was joking around with her and making noise and kissing all over her face just before I left for work and she opened her eyes just a little bit and said "I will jam your nose up into your brain." So cute!

Match.com for sugar daddies

Oh yeah. Because you know there's no one this chick would rather meet than a 50-year-old middle manager.

Let's be honest. If you're a 24-year-old hottie, what's intriguing to you about an older man? I'll give you a hint. It rhymes with "honey."

I love it when sites let you enter your own security questions

- What album was playing when you lost your virginity?

- Who is your favorite Giants pitcher, all-time?

- Who's the chick Russ was dangerously obsessed with in college?

- How many people have you slept with, lifetime?

The perils of being Internet-famous. Or I guess knowing someone who's Internet-famous.

So Saturday was Super Hot Irish Girlfriend's bachelorette party thing, for lack of a better term, which consisted of her and 5 of her friends getting a limo (from "Mr. Limo," no joke) and going up to Sonoma and going to a bunch of wineries and seeing who would pass out and/or cry first. I have access to her camera and could technically post pics and in fact even said I would do so on Saturday night but I have since thought the better of it in the harsh light of day and because these girls are my friends too and I would like to keep it that way. But they were good, and you'll have to trust me on that.

So our friend Jessica is kind of Internet-famous now and has 771 followers on Twitter mostly because Adam Savage from Mythbusters is a friend of hers and has like 30,000 followers on Twitter and one day casually mentioned that Jessica is really funny and you should follow her and BLAM all of a sudden 771 followers. NOT LIKE SHE SHOULDN'T HAVE 771 FOLLOWERS ON HER OWN WITH OR WITHOUT ADAM'S HELP BECAUSE SHE TOTALLY SHOULD but I'm just saying that's how it happened.

Now, as it happens, Adam Savage was totally right and Jessica is one of the naturally funniest people I know and her Twitter stream is comic gold, with things like "Person in front of me @ Long's got plastic-bottle vodka, cat food, & adult diapers. I just got a candy bar & a free glimpse of my future."

SO, this is already too long and whatever but on Saturday, Jessica happened to post a picture of the gals on her Twitter stream which is basically like displaying it on a big screen in front of a theater full of strangers and some guy (at least I think it's a guy) who's a complete stranger to us comments on the picture: "Oh, excuse me while I wipe the drool from my mouth."

I guess it's nice to be thought of as drool-worthy, right!?

Leprechaun Man strikes again

Super Hot Irish Girlfriend says that she believes God is running out of extras to populate her life, because she sees the same people all over the place. Totally true.

The one extra in the movie of my life that is getting way too much work is this guy I call Leprechaun Man because, well, he looks like a leprechaun. He's short and has one of those chin beards with no moustache.

I see him in my work neighborhood pretty regularly, but the weird part is when he pops up unexpectedly, like once when SHIG and I were having brunch in Cole Valley and BOOM! there he was, with his kids (or at least I assumed they were his kids). Another time I was downtown on my way to the movie theater in the Westfield Center and BOOM! there's Leprechaun Man on the sidewalk going the other way.

SO TODAY, I took Leland to the beach which was awesome and fun as always. So we're driving back on Divisadero and there's this ASSHOLE trying to get over in my lane and cut me off. DON'T FUCK WITH ME IN TRAFFIC MOTHERFUCKER. I WILL CUT A BITCH.

We get up to the light at Divis and Haight and I look over and by now you can guess who it was. LEPRECHAUN MAN IS STALKING ME. It's officially weird now.

SHIG and 5 other chicks left this morning at 10 a.m. in a limo to go wine tasting in Sonoma. Any bets on whether they're lit now? It's like 1:30 p.m. No one? No takers? Smart.

Why we were an hour late to the Iron & Wine show last night

No reason. Just stupid.

Well, there is actually a reason, but it's a stupid reason. The website said "Doors 6:30/Show 7:30" but since that seems so ridiculously early, it became transmuted in my own head to "Doors 7:30/Show 8:30." I mean, I go to some shows that don't even start until 9:30, so how could I be expected to understand that this show started at 7:30? So at 7:30, we were sitting at the bar at Lucky 13. That's where we were at 8:30, too.

Anyway.

So we walked in to the Swedish-American Hall around 9:00 or so, I guess, and of course Sam Beam was already on stage and playing to a hushed, reverential crowd. Just him and an acoustic guitar. 300 people up in that bitch and you could hear a pin drop. I was scared to breathe.

The first song he played after we walked in was his cover of "Such Great Heights" by Postal Service, which is probably his best-known song since it was in the Garden State soundtrack and in an M&M's commercial. He killed it. Then he played a bunch of other songs I didn't know. He's got a really hypnotic, beautiful voice, and one thing that I think people don't appreciate about him is that he's really a pretty incredible guitar player. And he's funny. His between-song banter was hilarious. I wish I had taken notes so I could reproduce some here, but it just wouldn't be funny written down anyway.

I guess we saw like 6 songs. We agreed afterwards that more than 10 probably would have been too many.

Oh, I thought you said METH team

It's obviously empirically true that the "War on Drugs" in this country has been a miserable failure. This article, which appeared in Rolling Stone in 2007, does a fantastic job of explaining why. If you can think of any way in which it's been a success, please, do tell me. I'd like to know.

Anyway, as if you needed any more evidence, check this bullshit out.

A Northern California high school district's drug testing of students taking part in competitive, nonathletic activities - such as the chess club, math team or school band - is an unjustified invasion of privacy, a judge ruled Wednesday in the first case of its kind in the state.

Let's make sure we understand what we're talking about here. The Shasta Union High School District was drug-testing the motherfucking chess club. Nothing says chess like an 8-ball and a quart of Hennessey!

Jesus Christ. Is this what we've come to? Schools have nothing better to do than test kids in the chess club and the math team for drugs?

Another student, who was raising a hog for a competition as part of a class project, took a drug test - which was negative - after a school administrator threatened to remove him from the Future Farmers of America, the sponsoring group, the ACLU said.

Thank God the school tested this poor kid. God knows the last thing we want around our hogs are drug-addled Future Farmers.

No wonder our schools are shot to hell. They're more concerned with invading hapless students' privacy and wasting money on drug tests for the kids who are probably the least likely to be using drugs than they are with teaching fucking English and history. Think back to high school. Who was more likely to be blazing up in the parking lot at lunch, mathletes or the kids who weren't in any goddam club at all and are therefore not subject to testing? That's what I thought.

You get a lot of shit when you order from Upper Playground

I recently ordered a shirt from Upper Playground and it came today. To answer your first and most immediate question, yes, I know there's a store on Fillmore but I'm busy and I don't have the time to go browsing around while being sneered at by 20-something hipsters so I let Upper Playground just UPS the shit I need to me.


ANYWAY, when you order from Upper Playground, you don't just get a shirt. You get a veritable LIBRARY of catalogs and other gear. To wit:

The Fall/Winter 2008 catalog. 175 pages. Softcover. Approx. 6" x 8".

The Spring/Summer 2008 catalog. Also 175 pages, also softcover, also approx. 6" x 8".

Book apparently entitled "Donde Esta Mi Corazon?" Hardcover, slightly larger. Maybe 7" x 10". Not paginated, but approx. 150 pages. Contains drawings, photographs, and other artwork.

Also got a bunch of stickers, postcards, etc.

So thanks for all the stuff, Upper Playground! I wish I had gotten a Large instead of an XL, though.

UPDATE!!!!!: I just talked to a humorously-stoned-sounding guy at Upper Playground about exchanging the shirt. He said just to send it back with a note on the invoice that I need a smaller size. I told him offhandedly that I was in SF and it would be cool if I could just come by. He sorta laughed and said, "Ummmm, postal stuff is better." So there's your Official Return Policy: "POSTAL STUFF IS BETTER."

The Lieutenant of Really, You Loved That?

Whenever I encounter something that has been widely praised and I don't like it, I wonder if it's me or them that's off. In the case of movies, it's probably them. I mean, if you're a movie reviewer and you really, really loved The Stepford Wives (the 2004 version, I mean), then I happen to know that you have no idea what you're doing, because that was objectively one of the worst movies ever made. On the other hand, I can see reasonable minds differing on something like Role Models - a funny, if instantly forgettable, movie that someone could like or dislike easily.

But now we come to the play The Lieutenant of Inishmore, which I saw yesterday at the Berkeley Rep. I had been eagerly wanting to see this, based on reviews like this one in the New York Times and this one in the SF Chron. Unfortunately, at the end, I was all "Huh? Really? You loved that?"

Here's basically what you need to know: the play is shockingly gory, like violently over-the-top gory, and that's fine if it's serving a bigger message and makes sense in context but here, the takeaway message is "The Troubles in Ireland were pointless." That may be a valid message, and one certainly worth exploring, but here, there's virtually zero nuance in the way the message is delivered.

I guess I should have known. Martin McDonagh, the playwright, is the same guy who wrote In Bruges, and I thought that movie was wildly overrated too. So I don't know, maybe it's me. I mean, I admire the deftness of language that McDonagh deploys, but it seems like it's used for its own sake and just sits there and doesn't advance any larger goal w/r/t the story.

On the other hand, if you've never seen corpses dismembered onstage, you shouldn't miss this!

What else happened this weekend? Oh, went to 500 Club and Lone Palm and the Latin American Club on Saturday evening with Stephen and Jessica in our own little impromptu Mission pub crawl. We also went out to eat, but we all hated the place and I don't want to make this blog post one big hatefest. So I'll leave this crappy restaurant alone.

Why aren't you panicking? You should panic.

There's something about the Zodiac Killer what seems to bring out the batshit in people. I mean, did you really think for a second that that crazy chick who had a press conference to announce that her Dad was the Zodiac killer was on the up and up? Der, how about no fucking way.

The Zodiac is The Sister's favorite serial killer, but I haven't heard from her about any of this. Trust me, if there was anything to it, she'd be on it like fleas on a dog. Super Hot Irish Girlfriend reports that the Zodiac is now her favorite serial killer, too, but it used to be Ted Bundy. I don't know why she broke up with Ted. Mine's Jack the Ripper because I'm old skool like that.

UPDATE!!!!! SHIG explains why she switched:

I switched from Ted because there's no mystery ya know? I need a little more excitement with my serial killers. Ted was young and hot and played by Mark Harmon in the Lifetime movies. Plus he was smart. We had some good times, but the local angle with the Zodiac and Jake Gyllenhall and the mystery and all is what made me switch.

Happy Friday, everyone!

I was resolute about not saying anything else about this Swine Flu bullshit but I can no longer sit idly by while the first 10 minutes of Mornings on 2 every day is full of YOU ARE ALL GOING TO DIE and OMG OMG SAVE US and all that crap. Listen up, people. The latest info is that maybe 13 people have died so far. THIRTEEN PEOPLE. That's like the number of people who die every day from inhaling buttons they're trying to chew off their shirts. And you're wearing a fucking surgical mask? Take that shit off, you look ridiculous.

Well, at least we know who to blame. Obviously, it's the Mexicans.

I'm getting pork chow fun for lunch today and LAUGHING IN THE FACE OF DEATH.