'Bred Crumbs

05:29 PM After a prolonged (pardon the pun) absence, my friendly neighborhood stroker man is back in business. It seemed to take him a couple of days to get back into his routine. Now though, perhaps emboldened by National Masturbation Month, he's extending his audacity. This morning, he moved out to his balcony for his performance, eventually arching his back and grimacing as if Something Were About To Happen. But he can go on like that for a while, and I've got pages to code and couldn't wait around all day. (Though I have found that I can work the spectacle into my more mundane morning routine by, for example, wandering over to the window to take a gander between tooth-brushing spits.)

This phenomenon continues to fascinate, and not just for the obvious reasons. The questions this guy raises are endless. Why does he do it? Is he just that bored, and if so, what happens when he gets to the point that it's "lost its fun"? Is he just trying to get caught -- indeed, is he doing anything he can "get caught" at, meaning is what he does illegal? Has he invoked the ire of any of my older, stodgier condomates, such as the ones who are aghast at even the possibility that one of their neighbors might want to put an "unsightly" personal satellite dish on the building? And if I were to become a more daring audience, bringing binoculars into the picture or staking out a spot on the lawn with numbered rating cards at the ready, would it change the way this unfolds? Would he stop, or would things get all Tales of the City and spiral farcically out of control?

Or will it soon fall off from overuse like his mother probably told him it would?

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10:04 PM Correction: when I wrote yesterday of finding a replacement radio station, my memory combined two stations into one. Though that "listen-at-work" Star thing did provide slight diversion, it was an previous unknown and hard-to-receive "new rock alternative" (and how many of those are there?) around 104 that was really more enjoyable than I expected. Still, the common ground was enough that the two stations blurred. Guess that's just how homogenous radio is.

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What's that I see below Will & Grace? Could it be ... a shark?

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12:07 PM On my way to work yesterday, the radio station I listen to most lately, the current-hits station Z95.7, played six songs in a row without interruption by commercials or morning-zoo prattle. Quite enjoyable, especially given that four of the songs I really like. But it seemed too good to be true. I first assumed the station was having some kind of technical difficulty. But then a realization of another possibility slapped me like a Melrose Place resident -- a premonition in three chilling words:

Imminent format change.

Sure enough, when I got back in the car that evening and turned on the radio, still set on what had been Z, out of the speakers came ... "The Devil Went Down to Georgia." After that, a sleepy-voice announcer never before heard on the station informed me that I was listening to "Drive 95."

Once again, a corporate radio monolith pulls the rug out from under listeners. I haven't been so rattled by a format change since Live 105 convulsed a few years back and threw out anything that didn't have a screaming 20-year-old male on lead mic.

I know what Chris would say: I should avoid all the corporate-radio evilness and listen to KALX, the Berkeley student station. And I do, increasingly. But though KALX plays many cool things no one else will (the obscure DJ dance-mix of "Sunglasses at Night" I hard a few weeks ago leaps to mind), it still hits about the same 80-percent crap-to-gold ratio every other station does. I need an assortment. And one of my prime alternatives -- as far as I knew, the only station playing my beloved "Hella Good" -- had vanished. (Drive 95, by the way, is an oldies station. Like the Bay Area needed another one.)

I began searching for a replacement. I finally found two candidates that combined should fill the hits gap. One of them is Star some-number, which used to be one of the 472 local '80s station. Now it plays what it calls "listen-at-work" music -- thankfully, the song selection itself is better than that suggests. (Including No Doubt's perfect driving song mentioned above.) So even though its clearly conglomerate nature is right up the alley of the brilliant fake radio stations in Grand Theft Auto 3 ("making sure every radio station in every city in the country sounds exactly the same ... with a greater variety of weird noises between songs"); even though its commercials feature Leeza Gibbons -- as if she's ever heard the station in her life; and even though it plays Dave Matthews, Star earns a radio button. Drive 95, you shall never cross my aural path again.

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07:52 AM I woke up this morning with the song "Convoy" inexplicably stuck in my head.* Why lord, why?

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"You don't call something the Death Star strategy if you think it's a positive thing."

Newly revealed Enron memos show the degree to which soulless corporate thugs fucked with us during the energy "crisis." The quote above is a California Public Utilities Commission attorney's response to a clearly in-over-his-head energy trade-group spokesman who tried to spin Enron's blatant shafting schemes as the ordinary conducting of business. (Or maybe it is, and that's the problem.)

* And now it's in yours. Bwahahaetc.

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10:19 PM We went Hollywood this weekend. We set out on Saturday to attempt to see Spider-Man, with the likely backup plan that it was sold out we'd take in The Scorpion King. But by the time we got to the counter, we'd decided that rather than just hang around the user-unfriendly, money-losing halls of the Metreon, we'd go ahead and see Scorp -- and we went ahead and bought tickets for the next Spider-Man after SK. Decadent.

The Scorpion King was OK but forgettable. What struck me most about it was how despite its hammy hero, its action, and its lightweight story, it managed to be almost no fun. The ploddingly dramatic soundtrack alone sucked out at least 60 percent of the movie's energy. The flick also showed a very timid sense of humor. There was in particular one hugely missed opportunity for what could have the best bit of adventure-movie comedy since Indy shot the whirling-blade showoff in his first movie. At one point in The Scorpion King, our hero (who, showing his growing acting range, arched an eyebrow but once the whole film) and a female companion escape a palace via a deep well. Cut to the outer city, where a boy is making a wish and tossing a coin in a fountain. Yes, we all see the yuk coming: a nearly nude woman surges out of the fountain. But wouldn't it have been great if there had been two boys, and only one of them reacted when the moistened bink emerged, but then when the dripping-wet muscle mass of The Rock rent the surface, the second boy smiled real big? Golden.

Spider-Man, on the other hand, was wholly entertaining, pretty much erasing the memory of what we'd just seen. Spidey was a nice mix of storytelling, action, heart and light chuckles. Bring on the sequel, and don't let Schumacher anywhere near this franchise.

And while we all ponder the chunk of wealth the movie piled up this weekend, it's a good time to put the ever-increasing grosses into perspective, and a cool tool for doing that is Box Office Mojo's all-time moneymakers' list adjusted for inflation. So nice to see Star Wars Crapisode I trumped by The Graduate -- and barely edging Fantasia.

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Two oddities from Friday night:

-- A lottery scratchers machine went berzerk while we were in line at Safeway. It just started emitting this loud, piercing, randomly oscillating whine. Workers gathered round, but no one seemed to have a clue how to stop it. Have the mechanical gaming servants grown weary of their subjugation? If I were the woman who pulls out the Lotto balls, I'd start wearing some Kevlar.

-- In the bathroom at Cafe Du Nord, I took my place at a urinal, minding my very specific routine business. Soon after, another guy walked in and had this two-line conversation with the guy at the other urinal:
Newcomer: That's some sweet dick!
Guy at Urinal (sighing and bored): Yeah.

I'm pretty sure I was not the subject of this discussion.

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Is this Legendary Sunken Cities Week and nobody told me? Tonight, both Discovery and A&E are showing Atlantis-oriented documentaries. Stranger still, A&E's is hosted by noted archaeologist Ted Danson. Hmm, maybe I should break out that worn old copy of The Silmarillion. (Like I've got time.)

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According to the Battleground God test, my beliefs about a diety or lack of are extremely consistent, even more so than I would have expected. Like Using Bees (constant provider of great, swipable links), I took no hits in this test of rational thinking and got the "medal of honour." Wonder what score God would get? Or Pat Robertson?

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A recently promised link.

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It's been a long time since I've enjoyed a song as much as I do No Doubt's (warning: dreaded RealPlayer link) "Hella Good." Thanks, kids.

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