'Bred Crumbs

The Serendipity of Shuffle

Lest you don't think coincidence is the most powerful force in the universe, consider the wonders that can happen when you idly load up a CD changer (or, for that matter, a PC song playlist) and set it to shuffle.

Yesterday, I replaced one of the CDs in the five-disc changer with the latest Ben Folds album. One of the discs I left in was the first Counting Crows album*.

As a result, "Annie Waits" was followed, two songs later, by "Anna Begins."

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* Don't worry, I'm going to Amoeba today to buy cooler things.

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Boss Boom Bash

We partied like it was 1999.

The New Year's bash I went to was in a newly opened office, the loft of a software company in downtown San Francisco. Between this and a friend's great new job at a hot, employee-focused Web business, things are suddenly harkening back to a more prosperous time.

The beginning of the evening – tiki-licious drinks at Trad'r Sam, then enchiladas and margaritas at the popular and delicious Tommy's – was for me a nod to the past before ringing in more new, since both stops were in my old nabe on the ocean-side of town. From there, we bused to the loft. Between some already-toasted people in my group and some rowdies in the back, the 38 Geary downtown was a party unto itself. By 10:30, we'd already seen a man drop trou.

At the party, the space sprawled and the music grooved (mostly '80s before midnight, then a DJ mixing some very hard house in the new year). People were eminently watchable, including the requisite drag queen, a cute boy who tried way too hard to impress every woman he chatted up, and a chick in an orange-and-white-diagonal-striped dress who at one point was dancing with a speaker – two feet from it, full attention toward it, like some demented Gen-Z version of the RCA Victor dog. After that, she slept a lot.

And folks were smoking inside the building, about the most shocking thing you can see in California.

But the best attribute of the party: big, cheap drinks heavy on the alcohol. I had three big plastic cups of rum "and Coke," three dollars each. Though alcohol is a depressant, my mind thinks it's a stimulant. So by the time most of my posse wanted to veg on couches, I had to be back on the dance floor. This made me feel superior and young. Until this morning, when I woke up with sore thighs.

Around 1:30, I hit that point of being drunk at which you more actively notice the surreal. Such as the couple I could see outside while I was standing in the loooooong line for the single bathroom. The office was on an alley, not an actual street, so it was hard to imagine why these two were hanging out on the curb – they weren't smoking, and they couldn't have been waiting for a cab. But there they stood, her in a long white coat that beckoned like Glenn Close in The Natural, him in all black, writing at length in a little book-type notepad. Hippest ... surveillance ... ever.

Above them, in a brightly lit, cozy-looking apartment, a man sat at a dining table leisurely eating food off a plate, as if he were enjoying dinner. At 1:30 a.m.

When I finally got to the bathroom, a copy of Wired sat on the back of the toilet, taunting me with the typo on its cover. That's how little even its publishers care about the magazine anymore; there's a frickin' typo on the cover.

After all that, the make-out room (advertised as a "chill" room, but it reverted to its true nature fairly instantly) with its air mattress and omnisexual cavorting, was more appealing, and there we lolled until around 3, when it was time to brave the rain and head home.

Now it's the morning/early afternoon after, the torrential gray dawn of a shiny new year, and I'm at that point of being hungover at which you more actively notice the surreal. Such as my grocery list, magnetized to the fridge door. The list, in its entirety, contains the following items:

• Swiss cheese
• Advil

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Also at the party, we decided that in 2004, things will not be cool. They will be boss. You have been notified.

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The Web Equivalent of Painting the Baseboards

I've done some minor tinkering with the site the last day or so. That's why you may have hit minor weirdness from Sunday afternoon to this morning. Here's what's new:

• The layout of elements in the left-hand margin. I wanted to call more attention to the Hit Lists on the home page (even though I hadn't updated them in two weeks before today) while giving the cornmeal rail a little more consistency and a little less clunkiness. Maybe.
• The effects of the new-window option on internal navigation.* Before, if you chose (via the buttons in the upper right corner of the site) to open links in a new window, it opened everything there, which could muck things up if you mainly just wanted to go from one 'Bred Crumbs page to another. Now, the new-window setting does not apply to internal links. Even if you've chosen to open a new window for links, internal links will stay in the original window. As before, choosing the same-window setting keeps everything in the same place. (Unless, like me, you have a right-click habit.)
• More explanation of the Crumbtrols – the aforementioned buttons in the upper right corner of the site. In case what they do isn't readily gettable, you can get much more info by hovering over them. Go on, hover. It's fun.

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* Isn't that a Castaneda novel?

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