I have just discovered the adult equivalent. I saw one of the Amigo’s bartenders drinking shots at La Fiesta Grande.

This is my favorite beer; it tastes like Fruit Loops.

Now, I know there will be many who disagree with this assessment (or the conclusion), so allow me to seal the deal by offering up a concrete example grounded in objectivity that will surely convince even the most fervorous of dissenters: Elliott Smith v. The Village People.

As long as nobody brings up Belle and Sebastian, I think we’ve got that all settled.

Christ, you know it ain’t easy:
too many people to greet.
We should have secretly eloped
Like you in Code Davinci.

Shabbat we had on Friday at dusk
having just settled into our yurt.
We stand in the cold
with friends young and old
The wine made everybody go “yurt!”

Oy, this wouldn’t be easy,
for him who parted the sea.
And Moses he never saw such
long lasting high revelry.

On Saturday we finally had time
to frolic in the sun and relax
We slipped and we slid,
and saw dudes wet and naked.
This Doe Bay policy is sure lax.

Heck, now this is real easy
right here just resting our feet.
Nobody making us think now
(’till Nava wanted to meet).

Mingling at the party on this sunny day
Love Cannon and the Bro having fun
Last night to be free
Ever then to be
a troth built up from chocolate and yum (Think!).

Sunday afternoon we were wed
chuppah over us and the fam.
We stomped on the glass and
made off through the grass and
we finally ran and hid on the lam!

Oh, our life it ain’t easy,
but at least it’s a blast.
This weekend is good fun,
now let’s go see that it lasts.

We dined with our family and friends.
They laughed a good laugh at our expense.
But the beer how it flowed!
The musicians they crowed!
(in their outfits bought that day for two pence)!

They say marriage ain’t easy,
but we’re as pleased as can be.
The way things are going
we’ll ever after happy be.
The way things are going
we’ll ever after happy be.

A man was shouting these words at Broad over and over again with an odd accent. I believed it to be Middle Eastern.

cal polY
SHAME on you
DON’T
CHEAT
the PEOple

I have tried to capture the rhythm of his chant by denoting the accented syllables with capital letters.

I walked by him, not really catching the words he was saying, and ran into Will. Will told me what the lone protestor was yelling and asked, “Do you think it’d be appropriate to tell him this is Caltech?” I smiled and said, “sure”. We walked over to him and he and Will exchanged the following words.

Will: Excuse me?
Protestor: Yes? (with polite anticipation)
Will: This is Caltech, not Cal Poly
Protester: Thanks! Cal Poly has a better rhyme (very kindly and thankfully, and with no trace whatsoever of any accent)

We walked away and exchanged amusement. Right before we parted ways, we heard the guy start to mix it up: “Caltech, shame on you. Don’t cheat the people! Caltech poly, shame on you. Don’t cheat the people!” and so on.

I have no idea what issue the guy was airing. It was just a great way to start the day hearing some dude shouting at Broad caring more about how his chant sounded than to whom he was actually directing it.

On the abstract level, dressing up to go out to a club in LA sounds really lame. But in practice, Bar Sinister was a wholly unlame experience in part because the dress is themed and not just ‘typical LA trendy’ but mostly because the venue is just plain awesome.

The evening started with the nails. Michelle kindly offered to paint mine black, so there they were. Black fingernails. I still have them painted right now, and, let me tell you, they’re pretty distracting as I type. Little scarabs dancing around my keyboard. I then donned all my black non-t-shirt clothing (sans the trench coat and cum the dragon shirt of Paul.za’s (I’ll totally wash it, Paul.za, before you get back)), slicked back my hair with a pint of gel and at least an acre foot of hairspray, pulled it back into a pony tail (which Michelle and I dubbed “the Westley”) and stepped out into the bleak and Stygian night, lady in hand.

I considered wearing the red High-Life hat, but figured my first gothic bar experience should be as “traditional” as possible. Maybe next time.

After meeting up with our fellow night crawlers, we drove to the club, payed our blood dues and walked in. The inside was divided into four main sections. You enter into the stage area. There were a couple bands of good quality playing, though not receiving too much energy from the crowd. Perhaps that’s what it is to be playing at a goth bar: wailing away while the crowd amorally considers some fathomless eschaton, watches the original Nosferatu being projected above the stage, and drinks Newcastle of all things.

As you enter deeper into the club, you encounter the main bar and the dance floor (complete with hired dancing girls on platforms). The decor is exactly what you’d expect: dark, riddled with iconography and polka dotted with stone fountains, fog-machined, candle lit (even real ones in places). It is also quite pleasant. Cushy red benches and good ambiance lighting that manages to be quite subtle relative to the physical decorations.

All the people with whom I interacted were highly accepting and most downright nice (don’t tell anyone though, it might damage their image). The music, being spun from a balcony above, was rave-ish and loud (I am incredibly ignorant about different styles of techno and its otherwise electronica brethren). I found it fun to listen to, but difficult to dance to for the first half of the evening. Whether my eventual change of heart was due to a DJ change or my white boy self finally loosening up a bit as the night crept on, I don’t know.

Speaking of dancing, I managed to get a little freaky with the club-goer-of-honor (don’t tell Michelle). I mean, a birthday’s a birthday.

The final area of the club is the infamous and, to some, lascivious upstairs. From incomplete descriptions, I had expected to see various acts of oral sex and bondage with a healthy mix of heroin shootings once I ventured upstairs. And maybe some kinky, post-industrial futuristic themed twister. Wanting to see just how weird of an experience it would be, I walked upstairs but encountered a very different atmosphere than the one I had hypothesized: no oral sex, no drugs. No genitals or illegal activities at all, in fact. And the closest thing to goth twister was a kinky video along the lines of a powers of ten style view of some hot girls.

There was some bondage, though; thank goodness. I was beginning to think there wasn’t anything kinky enough to make the trip upstairs truly unique.

A happy dominatrix strapped in a willing “victim” to some sort of wooden S&M contraption and started whipping her with a leather, multi-tailed flogger. Afterwards they laughed and hugged and continued their respective evenings: the victim to the pleasures of the night, the dominatrix to the next client. Oh, and there was a pleasant transsexual couple engaged in some pretty intense spanking exercise.

Our party declined to participate directly, but we watched and filed the experience away under the “something to tell your grandkids” heading. Of course, to our grandkids the story may well seem staid and prudish.

All and all, Bar Sinister was a pretty happening place. I’d definitely go back.

I do still, however, make a few common typos; I’ll sometimes mix up the following pairs of letters: a and o, e and o, k and x, m and w, and l and s (each pair has adjacent constituents). I’ll also sometimes type characters out of order (presumably because the Dvorak “rhythm” is somewhat different than that at the QWERTY layout).

But I always made lots of typos. It seems, however, that more typos slip through my pinky’s erstwhile diligence at backspace patrol. I believe there are several factors at play here.

1. I make more typos than before. This explanation is extremely dull. Let us never speak of it again.
2. I don’t make more typos, I just catch more; I’ve become better at proofing my writing. This explanation I’ve included only for the sake of completeness. I can’t imagine I’m actually any better at proof reading now than a year ago, say.
3. I don’t yet feel the typos when typing on a Dvorak keyboard (as I do on QWERTY) and so must depend on my eyes to catch them. This would be related to my relative lack of comfort with Dvorak’s “rhythm”.
4. And finally, I treat vowels and consonants differently. Most of the single character typos I make swap two vowels. When proof reading, it seems harder for me to catch the difference between “color” and “coler” than between “color” and “colwr”. This is interesting. Two possibilities come to mind. To work backward, the second possibility is that the letters a o and e, in their respective lower case forms, look somewhat similar: round (as opposed to the letters o and w). Indeed, the consonants I swap most often also have some sort of “shape similarity”: w and m, and k and x. I don’t think this can be the whole story, though. Continuing backward, the first possibility is that I only read the consonants and that the vowels act mostly as placeholders (and as the occasional disambiguators). This possibility I called “first” because I am irrationally attached to it and proclaim it to be “likely” without any data to back me up. Since all the vowels are grouped together on the Dvorak layout, vowel swaps may be more common and (given this “likely” possibility) cause commensurate unnoticed typos. Perhaps Dr. Language person can comment on the merit of this “I don’t read vowels” possibility.

In any case, I’m not that good at typing, but I never have been. Don’t blame Dvorak.

Most people who’ve lived in the area for more than a few months dislike driving the freeways in the rain. There’s two main reasons for this. First, since it rains so seldom here, the water brings up a lot of oil from the roads when it actually does precipitate. Second, and for the same reason of frequency, LA drivers aren’t any good at driving in the rain; they go too fast, think they can stop faster than the conditions allow, and can’t control their cars when they skid out.

Having lived in Pasadena for well over the specified time interval, I count myself both among the people who dislike driving LA highways in the rain, and now among the people who cause chaos when they try.

We were driving down the 110 and had to stop short. My wheels locked, and (close your eyes, Mom) the car skidded across two of three lanes of traffic (thank the Lord there wasn’t anyone in the next lane). I got back control of the car and managed to avoid hitting anything: both cars and walls. Everyone was fine. We went on our merry way (after being stuck in traffic for thirty minutes or so).

Personally, the worst part of the whole experience was that I had a passenger with me; though she was able to help calm me down afterward, I don’t think I’d have been as freaked if Michelle hadn’t been sitting in the passenger seat. The best part (if there is one) is that I humbly believe my reaction times will be significantly faster if anything like that happens again (though I pray nothing will). There’s at least that to be said for honest to God experience.