Sunday, April 22, 2012

Yeung Lap Ming Has a BIZ To Do...With Me!


3AM on a Saturday morning can't sleep so I check my email, sitting on the side of the bed in the cell phone light, my baby gently snoring beside me. And there, in my mail queue, I see it: From Yeung Lap Ming RE:". I eagerly click it open, and it says, in no uncertain terms: "I have a biz to do with you". Cryptic, yes. But clear as day. Yeung Lap Ming has A BIZ to do, with ME!


Even at 3:15AM on a Saturday morning, the implications of none other than Yeung Lap Ming having A BIZ to do with ME are profound. I'm excited, nervous, expectorant. Surely this isn't any run-of-the-Asian-mill "biz" Yeung the Hung is talking about here. First, it's "A" biz. Not "some" biz, or "the" biz (though the prospect of the Lapper having "the biz" to do with me kinda makes my sphincter quiver, and not in a good way). No the old Lap Doggy clearly has "a biz to do" and THAT, my friends, is serious shit! I can only imagine what "a biz" might be!? Perhaps something involving rocket technology, guns, nuclear secrets, the reflections of colored streetlamps on a wet Hong Kong backstreet where ladies of the night peek from behind darkened doorways, their pimps smoking and playing FarmVille on their cell phones. THIS is probably exactly what the Youthful Lap Mingler is proposing: the BIZ, and he plans to do it with ME!


I do in fact have an inkling about the biz the Lap Dancer is involved in, though I am rather surprised that he is proposing to do his biz with me! I am pretty sure it is not the same biz that our dog Boo does at various places around the house - where Boo got the idea that dog turds are like Easter eggs is a little vague, but I'm not worried for I doubt the Lap Daddy celebrates Easter. It is also rather curious that after investigating my digisociety I can find not one family member, friend, acquaintance, groupie, heckler or f-buddy that the Lap Mingler has biz for. It seems I alone am worthy of the undoubtedly important and sensitive biz that Young Lapper has in mind. What could be more intellectually titillating?

But for now all I can do is sit and wait for further instructions. Will the stark reality of Yeung the Hung's cryptic email be followed with more concrete details about the "biz"? Or will the mysterious touch of an inscrutable email evolve into a fantastic flight of imagination that rockets across the Pacific Rim, then works its way in the mountains of Tajikistan to a dirty Moscow side street where "a biz" becomes a life or death proposition for millions of unwitting souls. Ultimately all we really know is this:

THINGS ARE HEATING UP IN LIMBOLAND! STAY TUNED! (Follow for "convenient" email updates!)

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Limboland: FEATURE ATTRACTION!



Yes I know Limboland kinda snuck up on y'all. Or y'all snuck up on Limboland! Here's one way you can quickly, safely and easily enter Limboland, Bwana style:

AND NOW FOR A LIMBOLAND FEATURE ATTRACTION!





 Limboland explained in earthly terms (aka in 3 dimensions, with gravity):

Re"branding" my blog from "various and sundry", which sounds like the name of a 19th century dry goods store, to "Adventures in Limboland" is really an aspirational attempt at keeping the right perspective, maintaining the proper attitude and recognizing that when you're talking on the phone to folks in India you might hear a monkey in the background.

NO NO NO Not all nattering nabobs of negativism! Glass of fuck, indeed! (Didja notice the woman in this picture is really a man? Possibly Dennis Quaid? Wait!! Davey Jones isn't dead!). Limboland says NO to the whirling vortex of pain and confusion. Limboland says YES to beautiful rivers with big silvery fish!

Limboland harkens back to a musical collaboration I had with filmmaker and Wisconsinologist Frank Anderson a while back. To say Frank's a fan of kitsch and camp wouldn't do justice to the breadth of his twisted sensibilities.We wrote a couple of songs with "limbo" in them in the eighties, blatantly gentrifying Caribbean rhythms, so "Limboland" is at least partially Frank's fault, and the “Viva Las Vegas” video is all Frank’s invention (aside from the shameless bastardization of the song, which was the doing of Call Me Bwana!)

Stick around kids! When Melanie Mills gets out of the slammer we'll bring her down for an interview!

Meanwhile visit www.facebook.com/hacknovel and sign up. Followers get special treats when the book is published in June!


Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Really?



"Really?" It is the expression du jour, is it not? Quick wits have it at the ready for any occasion:

"Four score and twenty years ago, our fathers put forth..." Really?
"We the people, in order to form a more perfect union..." Really?
"Welcome to Adventures in Limboland!" Really?

(or maybe the comeback du jour is "seriously?" Leave it to me to not know exactly what it is, then base a copy platform on it.)

Adventures in Limboland. Seriously?

Don't you wish? Don't I wish?? Just to have every day offer up an adventure of some sort would be a dream literally come true, wouldn't it? I suppose with the right attitude, and altitude, it already is, (does it matter if the attitude or altitude is also a product of the imagination?)

This is why I suppose we write fiction. Should there not be a real adventure every day, we can always make one up! (Oh come on let's not get into the "what's real" business. We can go down that syntactical rat hole another day!)

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Just the other morning I received a copy of "The Weekend China Daily", nestled next to the NYT on my driveway, pretending to be the San Francisco Comicle or the Marin Independent Urinal. It wasn't until I had it out of the bag that I realized what it was, at which point I quickly shoved it back in the bag, laid it gently back on the driveway, slid the NYT out of it's bag to make sure it was okay, closed my eyes, shook my head violently from side to side, and started back up the drive. The China Daily? I thought. There must be some mistake. Slowly I turned, convinced that I must have imagined the presence of propaganda from the PRC on my driveway, and gasped, for now there were TWO copies of The Weekend China Daily on my driveway. There they sat, goading me into saying something inappropriate!

Perhaps I had house guests that I was not aware of? Both kids had slowly started to venture further and further from the mother ship, and on this particular weekend were both off on spacewalks of their own, so I couldn't just chalk it off to weird kid shit like "hey Dad I my Chinese girlfriend is going to be sleeping over tonight and she's really into the news do you mind if she forwarded her subscription to The Weekend China Daily to our house?" No, there were only two possibilities as far as I could tell. One was that we did have a Chinese house guest that I didn't know about, which, even without the weird kid shit factor at play, was entirely a possibility because things like that had been happening in my house for years - exchange students coming out of the woodwork,  au pairs, pet sitters, live-in house cleaners, eldercare specialists for Mom and Dad, tai chi instructors - anything was possible. The chances of my not knowing anything about it were even greater, not that I wasn't paying attention, I just wasn't paying attention to who might be living in my house. 

As simple as this solution might have been it was unfortunately not the case, and so the presence of not one but two copies of The Weekend China Daily grew even more vexing. Another possibility was that someone down at the China Daily offices either assumed we were Chinese, OR that we were big fans of the Chinese and might like to know what was going on back in the mother country. Both of those theories were quickly dashed after I had read a few of the stories in the paper, which as you might of gathered was not in Chinese but in quite well-written English.

This is when I became aware that, for some reason, I was the target of some very slick Chinese propaganda, almost as if I were being buttered up for something up close and personal with somebody or something from China.  In truth, reading The Weekend China Daily was a strangely unsettling experience. For there, next to the standard American-type sensationalist news about bus crashes on remote stretches of Chinese highway (thanks to the editor for the photo of the charred bus. Was that a charred hand I saw hanging out the charred window frame?), to an article about the two Chinese UCLA students who were murdered in a bungled carjacking (this time that clever editor took a subtle swipe at the insensitivity and stupidity of the American spokesman who said something like "What a tragic way to wish someone a happy birthday..." Yeah right with a bullet to frontal lobe! Sweet!) to an article just a few pages away about how Chinese post grads are flocking to US universities. Uh. Okay. That's understandable. If you're tryin' to get shot! Next to all that great American sensationalism was...

(DAMN. Now I'm getting a phone call from someone with an UNCOMMON NAME! It say's right there on the caller ID I shit you not! Don't answer that!!)

Oh sorry...there was an article about the government cracking down on "illegal" websites that were publishing scurrilous lies in an effort to upset the people. I could hardly believe my eyes! Didn't the publishers of The Weekend China Daily know that such an article would not set well with those of us who still think the first amendment was a good idea? Oh well, nice try comrades! If you're lookin' for a place to stay next time y'all are in the neighborhood just let me know! In advance, if you don't mind!
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 Okay so I admit my experience with Chinese propaganda isn't exactly an Adventure in Limboland.  Not like crawlin' around the house in lizard outfit is! Did you know that Peter Frampton is the voice of the Geico lizard? As if there aren't thousands of Brits out there that coulda done that gig. But then again, have you ever had Peter Frampton show you the way with a plastic tube crammed down his throat? Yeah baby!










Friday, April 13, 2012

Isomniacs Please Form a Line to the Left

I know no good will come of this and were I wise I would heed my little voice and get back in bed, grind my bean-stained teeth, rub my cramped toes together, scratch my mangy head and moan quietly. But this is night three and I've tried all that. I've tried it with the CPAP machine and without (being the odd duck I kinda like the full CPAP mask. It's like a security blanket, plus it reminds me that I'm still breathing which these days is step in the right direction). CPAP machines are for people with sleep apnea which unfortunately is not what's keeping me awake for if it was the CPAP would have kicked it's little sleep interrupting butt by now and I would be tiptoeing through dreamland. Witness these words, tortured reader, and be confident that sleep apnea is not behind this miserable state.

So if not sleep apnea, what? Why 3 consecutive all-nighters? Well aside from pattern repetition and the annoying tendency of the body to learn bad habits like dozing off during the day and raiding the refrigerator in the wee hours, I can't explain it. But, considering it's an election year and everybody is making shit up out of thin air to explain this or that, I say we make something up too! Something political! If every other event on the planet is caused by some force of political will, including scientifically irrefutable facts like global warming, then why not insomnia? Yes, you of furrowed brows will say it's a stretch, but can you say with confidence that a political reason for insomnia is more poppycock than say, death panels? Or Weapons of Mass Destruction? Of course not! Fine fabrications all! Are there not entire platoons of pundits employed by political candidates to create and spread rumors and lies?

Well here's a good one. Insomnia, some say, is at least partially the result of the brain not being able to attain a state of sleep. Obviously. Sleep requires the brain to relax, to be at least temporarily worry-free so it can slip into it's jammies without fear of some peeping Tom across the alley with one hand on the binoculars and the other in his pants. Unfortunately for the line that's forming on the left, with some drifting closer to the center and others perhaps out of bounds, there's a lot to worry about this election year. Santorum, that vile compound that is purportedly the result of illegal coupling has been wiped out of the race (please pardon the metaphor but I will dearly miss that pathetic asshat). Had he by some miracle defeated the Oven Mitt we would have been saved, for the fiscal conservatives - those that are Republican for the purposes of greed and greed alone, the real Romney Rats, couldn't have possibly gotten behind such a dangerous brewer of church and state like Preparation Rick.

Not that mitigating Mitt will be a stroll through Michelle's veggie garden, but unlike the Americans who vote for the sole purpose of retaining their "freedoms" to rape and pillage the land while ruining the lives of the less aggressive and bloodthirsty individuals in the name of "competition" and "free enterprise", folks that have drifted into the line that's forming on the left, the insomniacs, are there because clearly, we have a lot to worry about. If I were a dedicated insomniac, or even a dedicated democrat, I would make a list of all things there are to worry about. Things that we, as insomniac worriers, have to be concerned with because if we aren't, we'll have to leave it to those folks that are getting a good night's sleep, and, bless their socially conscious hearts, I'm worried that they're just not worried enough.

Obviously, as you of furrowed brows predicted back in paragraph two, this line of reasoning - or this theory (yes let's call it a theory! We're so scientific!) that donkeys are more likely to be insomniacs than elephants, stands on the feeble legs of someone who is not getting enough sleep. Fortunately it is almost time to get dressed, have a cup of coffee and a conference call with Hoang Qu'nen. I'm crosseyed just thinking about it. Maybe I'll take a nap instead!

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Last Train to FarmVille



Oooh I need to blow off some steam think I'll head down to Farmville lord knows I got plenty of INVITATIONS to get my ass down there! My good buddy Andrew Land has invited me down there 4 or 5 times this week and I feel so terrible I just haven't had the bandwidth to go milk the cows and feed the chickens. Even Buddy Owen, that great local bluesman, has invited me down to his farm in Farmville - shit who knows maybe we'll break out a jug o' moonshine and jam on some Willie Dixon - after we plow the back 40, of course.

Actually, I'm scared to death of Farmville. I get multiple invitations a week from full grown men to meet them down on the farm and I'm thinking no good can come of this, what with all those sheep scampering about. I know my fear is unfounded because I've never been to Farmville so how could I know what really goes on there?

To tell you the truth, I did go to Farmville, just long enough to know that I really didn't want to spend a lot of time there. But Andrew Land seemed like a pretty normal guy, and I'll admit I admired his tenacity. Oh look, here's another invitation from Andrew Land. He's got a request. From FARMVILLE! Well fuck me! Oh my God here comes another one. Andrew Land and Buddy Owen both have requests from Farmville! 




 Really, how could I NOT go check it out! So, I hitched up my overalls, pulled on my big rubber boots, popped a big wad of chaw in my mouth and set out.

As soon as I got there my jaw dropped in alarm. These guys REALLY NEEDED MY HELP!! Buddy was trying to build his Island Livestock and need a Wire! Then he needed a buoy for his aquarium. A hay bundle for his island pasture. And here I thought Buddy had it bad. Andrew was building a market stall and really needed my help! He needed a price card. Holy shit, a price card, I thought!And then he needed dark plywood for his animal master billboard! Jesus! I might as well just send Andrew a gram of China White and a new kit! Buddy too!


You can see why I've stayed away from FarmVille. Obviously there's way more to it than sloppin' the pigs, feedin' the chickens and milkin' the cows - there's some crazy stressful shit going on down there on the Farm! But I've decided to take the upper hand. Sure these guys need my help but so do the starving children in Darfur and the oppressed women in the entire Eastern Hemisphere. I'm sorry Andrew. Buddy, I love ya but I just can't get that buoy for your aquarium.

I am now going to IGNORE ALL REQUESTS FOR THIS APP.

Good luck, fellas!


PS: Like to laugh? Follow along...click that button. Yeah that one right there that says "follow". Good. You're in the club.

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Do You Want My Job? Pt. 1




Lately I have been having trouble concentrating, or even staying awake. I have found that about an hour after beginning my work day I am ready to go back to bed, feeling not only a general lack of enthusiasm for my well-paying high-powered job, but a certain physical revulsion when I hear the voices of the ninnies and cretins that populate my work day and the unquestionably soporific topics at hand. 

Today is Saturday and, in keeping with this concept we've all come to accept called the calendar, yesterday was Friday. On Friday, it almost never fails that the boss drops a few items in the inbox for discussion Monday, which in most countries is the day that follows Sunday. Suffice to say that few weekends go by without something urgent work item to "execute" (which is starting to take on a whole new meaning for me).

Today being Saturday I thought I would conduct a little experiment to see if the sudden torpor seizures I generally have during work hours had anything to do with the soporific topics I mentioned earlier. This weekend, my task is to write a brief, the kind that people used to carry around in brief cases. No I'm not a lawyer but my Dad was and he had one badass honey badger big fat mofo briefcase that he used to smack me upside the head with when he got home from work, that musky pipe smoke wafting off the suit coat he wrapped around my head to staunch the bleeding and avoid staining the carpet. Dear old Dad!
Well I farted around for several hours, played chuck it n' fuck it with the dog, did the usual Facebook prowl, took a little nap, went to the Hoary Turd (Jack's name for the Good Earth - though some of the people at the old store were a little hoary I'm not sure where the turd reference comes in, except if you're talking about the gluten-sugar-dairy-free chocolate tapioca) for a little wheat-gluten-dairy-sugar-caffiene-soy-heroin-free lunch, which was anything but FREE. (Nothing costs more than something it seems). Came home played a little more chuck n' fuck and then finally sat down to my work work. Usually late afternoon is when I get my surge but, after fifteen minutes of writing about objectives (make money), strategies (tell everybody how great it is), and tactics (like it on Facebook) I was in a swoon so wicked I could barely walk to my bed. I had memories of that bad ass honey badger briefcase smacking into my temple so hard as to knock me out of my super-natural-scandinavian remote control desk chair. Even now, just thinking about this ultra strategic best practice brief I have the privilege of writing I feel a little wobbly, my lids are drooping, head lolling forward, the first drops of drool forming at the corner of my lizard lips...

Anybody want my job?