Here's some pointless babble for you right here

Oh God, once again the MSM examines Twitter and finds it lacking:

Study: 40 percent of Twitter is "pointless
babble''

Twitter critics complain the microblogging network is filled with time-wasting chatter. Twitter evangelists, however, say it's an indispensable tool for social conversation and news.

A new study by Pear Analytics of San Antonio, Texas, gives both camps something to chew on, although the largest portion of tweets was, sure enough, "pointless babble."

The marketing and business intelligence firm recently sampled the Twitter stream every 30 minutes from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. for 10 days. From the resulting sample of 2,000 tweets, Pear Analytics found:

- 40.55 percent were "pointless babble," which Pear defined as the "I am eating a sandwich now" tweets."

-37.55 percent were "conversational," or "tweets that go back and forth between folks, almost in an instant message fashion, as well as tweets that try to engage followers in conversation, such as questions or polls."

-8.7 percent had "pass along value," the tweets that are re-tweets passed along from member to member.

- 5.85 percent were "self promotion," messages about companies, products or services.

- 3.75 percent were spam, the "See how I got 3,000 followers in one day" tweets.

- 3.60 percent were news from mainstream national media outlets such as
CNN or Fox.

The report recommends the use of Twitter filtering tools such as Philtro to weed out the babble. It also concludes that "as Twitter continues to evolve, not only as a brand, but from a user's perspective, it is likely that the usage patterns will change."

So wait a minute. That means that, by definition, every Twitter update that isn't conversational, a retweet, self-promotion, spam, or a link to national news is "pointless babble"? Well, fuck you very much, "Pear Analytics." My fucking bon mots are little nuggets of joy and wisdom. Maybe Pear Analytics' stupid updates are pointless babble, but I've got something to say.

In all seriousness, I resisted Twitter for a long time because, like pretty much everyone who doesn't use it, I didn't see the point. (Check out the SFGate Comments, BTW, if you want to see what the mouth-breathing point-missing crowd really thinks.) But now I like it a lot. It's a snapshot of what people are doing and thinking. Some of the updates are really funny. Some of them provide valuable information. So I guess calling everything that doesn't fit into one of your little categories "pointless babble," Pear Analytics, just rubbed me the wrong way.

If I ever need something analyzed, you're the last people I'm gonna call.

It's a living, right?

There's a woman near my office who I see every morning on the way in and every evening on the way out, standing on the sidewalk, selling Street Sheets and doing her best to look pitiful, I guess, which is kind of tough because she is always clean, wearing nice clothes, and generally looks to me like she could have just stepped out of a minivan.

[Ed. note - in case you're not familiar, Street Sheet is a newspaper thing that anyone can go pick up for free and then sell on the street. It's designed, I think, to minimize the weirdness on both sides that can happen when you hand someone money, because if you're buying a Street Sheet it's a business transaction instead of simply giving money to someone.]

Now, I'm not saying that you have to be dirty and scabbed over to be a legit panhandler, but it does make one go "Huh" when you see the same person every day in the same spot, but wearing different clothes every day and generally looking not all that different from the person behind you in line at Out the Door.

So I wonder, what's up here? How did this become her best option? She's not there in the middle of the day, only during commute times, so I wonder what she does all day. Some kind of addict, maybe? She never appears to be intoxicated. She doesn't look mentally ill, either, and appears to be having pleasant and normal conversation with the people who stop and give her money. Hey, maybe it's just the job she's picked.

There are around 6400 homeless in San Francisco (according to a 2007 count, the most recent I could find after 35 seconds of Googling) and we spend, as a city, 190 million fucking dollars on the homeless every year, or almost 30 grand per homeless person. Something is seriously fucked up here, because it sure doesn't seem like we're getting our money's worth. I bet it costs a lot less than $30 K to put someone up in an SRO for a year. I know that a lot of the homeless are mentally ill, and a lot are addicts of one kind or another, but it seems like we could be doing something to address those problems instead of just throwing money at them.

Look, if I knew how to fix the homeless problem, I'd be elected mayor or maybe even Emperor Norton II. And what the woman on my way to work is doing is perfectly legal. I just can't figure out why people keep giving her money.

Let's get stalky with the San Francisco Giants

The Wife's birthday was last Wednesday, and as part of her ongoing birthday celebration, she asked for really good seats at a Giants game. I found some front-rowers, right behind the Giants' dugout, on StubHub. Paid about 20% over face, which doesn't seem ridiculous.

To give you an idea, this is what the end of every inning looked like for us (every inning Zito pitched, anyway):

Yeah, freaky, huh? We were like right on top of them.

Not sure who Freddy Sanchez was talking to here, but let's hope it involved either fish or how far out of the strike zone that pitch was.

The Wife has a little thing for Ryan Garko, I think because he sort of looks like Mark Ruffalo. Sorry for the sideways picture; she couldn't get him to turn around and look at her. I guess lifting your shirt doesn't have the same effect it used to. KIDDING.

Anyway, great game, beautiful day, Giants won 4-2. How fucking lucky am I to have a wife that asks for front row tickets to a baseball game for her birthday?

Lyric Deconstruction: Take the Money and Run

Steve Miller Band, 1976

This here's a story about Billy Joe and Bobbie Sue
Two young lovers with nothin' better to do
Than sit around the house, get high, and watch the tube
And here is what happened when they decided to cut loose

Oh, good, a story song! I like story songs. Now, the names "Billy Joe" and "Bobbie Sue" indicate to me that this story probably takes place in the South. You never hear a grownup with two names anywhere else. What if your orthopedic surgeon was named "Jimmy Ray"? Would that freak you out?

Also, who hasn't had that period in your life when all you did was sit around the house, get high, and watch TV? For me, it was called "college." KIDDING. Sort of.

They headed down to, ooh, old El Paso
That's where they ran into a great big hassle
Billy Joe shot a man while robbing his castle
Bobbie Sue took the money and run

Yeah, I knew it was going to be in the South somewhere. Although Texas isn't really the South. Texas is kind of its own thing. When I think "South," I think Alabama, not Texas.

Anyway, back to our story. WHOA, didn't see that coming! They're a crime team. "Hassle" is putting it mildly, isn't it?

Go on take the money and run
Go on take the money and run
Go on take the money and run
Go on take the money and run

Right, the chorus. Not much going on here lyrically.

Billy Mack is a detective down in Texas
You know he knows just exactly what the facts is
He ain't gonna let those two escape justice
He makes his livin' off of the people's taxes

A new character, Billy Mack! He knows "what the facts is"? Steve Miller, please. There's no real rhyme scheme at all in any verse in this song, so would it have killed you to say "what the facts are"?

I love the last line in this verse for a couple of reasons: (1) Steve obviously was trying to think of words that rhymed with "Texas," and you can just see that he went "Oh, taxes, yeah!" and then had to think of some way to make the word "taxes" work in the song, so (2) It's so wonderfully irrelevant. It's like Dirty Harry stopping in the middle of the movie and looking at the camera and saying "You know, it's your tax dollars that pay for necessary police services like the type I provide"; and (3) You have to think that if Steve wrote this in 1996 instead of 1976 it would be something like "He gets his secretary to send his faxes".

Bobbie Sue, whoa, whoa, she slipped away
Billy Joe caught up to her the very next day
They got the money, hey You know they got away
They headed down south and they're still running today

Slipped away from what? Steve left the best part of the story out of the song!! I guess we're supposed to imagine that Billy Mack caught up with them and there was some sort of confrontation, but that's the money shot! C'mon, Steve! That's like not ever seeing the shark in "Jaws," but just having a lot of people talk about how someone got eaten. Not the same effect.

Singin' go on take the money and run
Go on take the money and run
Go on take the money and run
Go on take the money and run
Go on take the money and run
Go on take the money and run
Go on take the money and run
Go on take the money and run

I don't want to step on your songwriting or anything, Steve, but it's a little repetitive at this point.

UPDATE: In response to Burrito Justice's request, I have managed to locate the missing verse! Here it is:

Bobbie Sue put the money in derivatives
Sold exotic securities like chopped-up mortgages
Billy Mack lost the house where he used to live
Bobbie Sue took a bailout and run

Huh. So that's how they eluded Billy Mack. Weird.

Are you shitting me, Outside Lands festival?

There was no way I was going to go to the Outside Lands festival anyway, after hearing the horror stories from last year about the crowds and hour-long waits for beers and not being able to see anything. It sounded like a nightmare clusterfuck and I wouldn't have any part in it.

Then they announced this year's lineup, and it was so laughably bad that I thought "There's no way they could fuck this up any worse." The headliners were Pearl Jam, the Dave Matthews Band, and the Beastie Boys. Like, what the fuck is this, 1995?

(DISCLAIMER - Admittedly, some of the other acts on the bill I wouldn't mind seeing, like TV on the Radio, Deerhunter, M.I.A., and Calexico, but I'd much rather see all of them in a club or small venue somewhere.)

Oh, and you know who else is on the bill on Saturday, the night that fucking DMB is headlining? The BLACK EYED PEAS. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA YOU SUCK AT MUSIC OUTSIDE LANDS.

Anyway, then Adam Yauch from the Beastie Boys caught the cancer and they had to back out and so Outside Lands had to go find another headliner. Here's a chance to really score a great band and make the festival worth seeing, right?

Wrong. They booked Tenacious D.

Say what you will about Tenacious D's joke-rock. It's fine for what it is. What it ISN'T is something that's going to make people go "Oh wow, I totally have to go to Outside Lands now! Tenacious D! That's a festival headliner, for sure!"

I realize that summer's almost over and most artists are already booked and it's a last-minute thing, but c'mon.

Breithla Shona Dhuit!

29 years ago today, The Wife was born in a small, one-room cottage in Ireland, lit by a smoldering peat fire.


Or maybe she was born in a hospital; I'm not clear on this part.

Anyway, she was born an orphan and eked out a hardscrabble existence on the dirty, dangerous streets of Limerick, accompanied only by her dog, Brigadoon.

She was determined to make a better life for herself, and just like Leo DeCaprio in Titanic, she resolved to go to America to become a professional gambler in Las Vegas, or something. I don't really remember the plot. As far as I know, she never posed naked in a used car on the way.

She quickly found work in a garment factory on the Lower East Side. Or something like that. And then blah blah blah all kinds of other stuff happened and she made her way to the Greater Bay Area and that's where I came across her.

I was instantly charmed by her plucky, can-do spirit and radiant good looks. So I dumped that other chick like a bad habit and hooked up with her pronto. The rest is the story of our love, which will be written in the stars, etc.

ANYWAY, join me in wishing The Wife a happy birthday. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, THE WIFE!!!

P.S. Title of the post is "Happy Birthday" in Gaelic, at least according to a refrigerator magnet, which is where I usually turn for my translating needs.

Guess what? There's a baseball game happening down there.

I'm sorry in advance if you're not interested in baseball, but this is baseball season and baseball is a metaphor for life and blahhdeddy blah blah it's just what's on my mind today and so that's it.

I know that a baseball game is an outdoor sporting event and I don't expect hushed, reverential, churchlike silence from those in attendance (although that would be pretty awesome), but for the love of God, can you just SHUT THE FUCK UP for two fucking consecutive minutes?

Yesterday The Wife and I are at Ye Olde Ballyarde watching the Giants surprisingly get some hits and beat the Phills 7-3 and it was a great game and nice weather and everything but there are these 2 chicks and 1 guy behind us (along with another guy who might have been a mute because never said a fucking word, God bless him) and they spent the whole game in an endless, loud, criminally boring conversation about the weather in San Jose this time of year and some kind of patent litigation (which is, if you know anything about law, maybe the MOST BORING kind of litigation at all, like basically Paint Drying, Inc. v. Grass Growing Ltd.) and all the LATEST JUICY GOSSIP from their old company, which gossip was not juicy at all but more along the lines of who got who's parking space JESUS just shoot me now.

So this kept up the WHOLE game. With brief pauses to breathe and whenever something exciting happened, which was not nearly enough. Finally some seats opened up a few rows down and we mercifully got the fuck out of there.

Listen, I know that it's a public space and it's nice to catch up with your friends or coworkers or whatever, but seriously, if your voice is loud and grating enough to be heard by everyone in a 10 foot radius, how about shutting your fucking trap once in a while, just in case people around you are maybe more interested in the game they came to see than in your inane musings on what kind of wedding your friend had, including your discomfort at the fact that she had two maids of honor. Personally, two maids of honor sounds a little excessive to me too, but I don't go around forcing other people to hear about it. Shut up.

Also - lots of Phillies fans there yesterday, but no problems between them and Giants fans, as far as I could see. You certainly see a lot more shit at Giants-A's games, mostly because there are people from Oakland there.

Also - How cute! Jon Carroll gets into the recycling poacher debate and shows mad love for the poachers, who he christens with the cutesy-poo title "gleaners" and says "Hey big deal, they're just scrappy underdogs trying to make it in this world. Let's all hold hands with the gleaners and sing songs to the Recycle Goddess and dance off into the meadow." My guess is that around Jon Carroll's house in the Oakland hills, "gleaners" don't show up outside his window at 1 am and start smashing bottles and flattening cans and then leaving the lids open so paper blows up and down the street.

Also - Christ, I sound angry today. I'm fine. Shit just gets to me is all.