Currently Listening Watch It Happen By Mazarin see related

Lately, I've been spending most of my days at work on the Kathy Griffin message boards. It used to be the Bourdain boards, but the season ended a couple weeks ago, and the people on the boards were getting sort of annoying. The D-List is more my speed. I think I've found a home there for now

Currently Listening Unrest By Erlend Oye see related

There's this new lady at the scheduling office. Her head reminds me of a tator tot.

Currently Reading Spiral By Koji Suzuki see related

j.g. ballard seems interesting enough. i'd like to check out his books. ah, check out. as in, the library system. i haven't been to lancaster library in a while. used to go like every month a couple years ago. came across a title of ballard's while sitting in a corner of my room, thumbing through the pages of the Black Album. it's this hardback by a fledgling Indo-European playwrite i'd bought at a discount bookstore two doors down from the record store where i used to work. both stores have bit the dust by now. but i still retain a few relics from those days, the Black Album being one of them. it gets its title from a Prince record, as far as i can remember. the story wasn't that great. it sort of lost me in its hazy plotline having to do with the London club scene of the late 80s, drugs, sex, love, Hindu family politics and the politics of religion in a university setting. A lot of ground to cover from cover to cover. some name-dropping brought j.g. ballard's Crash into my consciousness. and now, all these years later, i cared enough to investigate the matter, which has led to my current interest in getting my hands on a copy of this controversial and allegedly "important" piece of 1973. oddly enough, the idea of Crash in all its reckless abandon reminded me of the Cardigans' video for "My Favorite Game." of course, i'm down with that.

but until i can confirm what people have said about Crash, i'm keeping my eyes fixed to the pages of the second of the Ringu series, Spiral. Oooo can you feel the suspense?

Currently Reading Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly By Anthony Bourdain see related

The Forth Road Bridge

We drove over this bridge in Edinburgh, Scotland. T'was a very long bridge. One of the longest in the world, I think. Well, there's two bridges...one for cars, the other for trains, which is across from the Forth Road Bridge. The train bridge is called the Forth Bridge, and both extend over the Firth, which is the river below. So, one is inclined to call the whole thing the Firth of Forth.

The whole trip was good. Dave's parents really got animated when they drove us up to Scotland. It's where they're from, so they were eager to point out a lot of the sights and tell me about them. We went up on a big hill and looked down over the city and surrounding towns. That was pretty cool. I wasn't able to buy a camera until we got into the city and walked up to the castle though. We went to the National Gallery and looked at some art. Bought some books at each of the 3,000 Waterstones bookstores in town. Had a local lager back at the Woodside hotel:

...where the tiny room had a shower next to the bed. WHAT THE...

I ate a lot of sausages, slept in till 2, watched Britcoms and UKTV Food channels and enjoyed my Davey for two short weeks. I wanna go back...