A rare late night post from me. After a tiring day going from doctor to doctor to urgent care with the Grandmother (she’s fine — she just has an infection in her elbow that is okay now) went over to Daniel’s to have an impromptu pizza party with Staci. To show you how wild we were, we also went and got gelato at Pazzo, then went back to his place to watch an old episode of the 1950s and 60s game show “I’ve Got a Secret.” Now I am just beat.

By the way, this image is a emoji thingee Yobo made of himself that were going around the texting the last couple of days. I just stole this one to serve as an image placeholder since we didn’t take an pictures of our way too exciting evening.

We may be a little high maintenance, but we’re worth the extra cost.

Over the last month or so while people here in Southern California are almost dying over anticipation of the predicted coming El Niño, I’ve slowly been more and more doubtful that it will bring us all the rain people think it will.

The last several years have featured a a ridge of high pressure during the winters that refuses to budge. Nicknamed by meteorologists as the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge, the RRR blocked all storms from coming into California which is what led us to the historic drought we find ourselves in.

Looking at the sea surface temperature anomolies shows that we are in an El Niño pattern and that it is the strongest one measured yet:

What is not part of the El Niño pattern, however, are the warm waters off the US and Canadian Pacific coast known as “The Blob”. That is global warming, and what is not known is what effect it will have to El Niño. And that is what has tempered my enthusiasm. Will the RRR beat El Niño and further exacerbate the drought? Is The Blob off our coast causing the RRR or did the RRR cause The Blob?

Yobo posted this post on Facebook that hypothesizes the RRR was actually caused by warm waters in the Western tropical Pacific and that El Niño has killed that off.

…there is considerable evidence that a fundamental driver of the Triple R’s longevity was the persistent warmth of the western tropical Pacific ocean (mentioned in the first section of this article). And that warmth is rapidly disappearing as El Niño strengthens rapidly. The take-home message here: a primary cause of the Triple R is no longer in place, and so it’s unlikely that we’ll see yet another winter of persistent anomalous ridging over the northeastern Pacific Ocean.

So I guess I’m a little less pessimistic, but I guess we’ll see what happens. I know in the near future, there is a ridge of high pressure that will set up over the West next week. The return of the RRR?

And if El Niño happens, what then? With the subtropical jet blasting towards Southern California, sure we get the rain, the mudslides. But all of that is tropical moisture meaning snow levels will probably be over 7,000 feet meaning the snowpack won’t be helped that much. But considering where our snowpack was this past April, it can’t be that much worse. I certainly hope that local water districts will have a better way of capturing the rain that might come down.

Just some thoughts I’ve had.

Because I find it hard to be transfixed by a baseball game, I was flipping through the channels while the Dodger game was on Monday night. FX was airing the Seth Rogen classic This Is the End. I loved it when I first watched it, and upon second viewing I just thought it was all right. However the movie reinforced just how adorable I find Jay Baruchel to be.

Despite being such a bottom queen, I’ve always found the slight skinny guys attractive. Sure the burly men are also great, but the skinny boys tend to bring out my mothering side.

Yesterday I saw the Nina Hagen lookalike homeless girl walking closer to my neck of the woods while driving around. I wonder if she has even listened to Nina Hagen.

Last night’s Dodgers-Giants game went 14 innings and became almost as insufferable as Yankees-Red Sox games. The time-of-game was 5:29 which meant the game ended at 12:39 am when Adrian Gonzalez hit a single to the left field wall that scored AJ Ellis for the 5-4 win.

One thing that had me transfixed in that 14th inning was the Giants’ relief pitcher Mike Broadway. Well, specifically, his ass. Look at it!

It makes me want to go in there and motorboat ’em.

I remember sitting in the right field pavilion for the lone playoff game at Dodger Stadium in 2006 and felt just as hypnotized by Mets rightfielder Moises Alou’s ass. It also helped that Alou is a piss queen, too.

Fans tend to me annoying and stupid in general, and of course there were tons of social media lobs hurled at Dodger fans for not packing the stadium and not sticking it out through all 14 innings. It amazes me that people will use the level of one’s masochism as a measure of fandom. “I’m a bigger fan because I stuck it out in 10-degree cold wearing only nipple pasties and a thong.” “I’m a REAL fan because I sat through 12 hours of a game while hung over for the last 8 hours because they stopped serving beer and food.”

Even the mentally differently abled (is this the safe term for them?) are too smart for that retarded bullshit.

When news emerged last night that Wes Craven died, is it wrong that the first thought I had was, “This is the guy responsible for Scream 2 and Scream 3? I can’t be the only person, right?

Lately the Grandmother has made a very uncomfortable habit of asking me what day it is. “It’s Monday,” I tell her, but she’s hard of hearing. “What did you say,” she asks. “IT’S MONDAY,” I scream.

She’s quiet for a second. “You don’t have to yell at me,” she says sounding a bit butt-hurt.

“I’m not yelling at you,” I tell her. “You can’t hear shit, so I have to yell.”

This is a bit that happens daily.

I went on a jaunt today that had me circle the Trump golf course while listening to the latest Buddyhead mix tape.

I was out and about this afternoon, and there was a homeless teenage girl walking around who bore a striking resemblance to Nina Hagen. “Hey,” she yelled out to me. “I really love your hair.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“No really. I love your hair. Really.”

And then I took off for my next errand stop.

I wanted to talk to her a little and see if she really was a reincarnation of Nina Hagen, but seeing how I am so strapped for cash myself I feel bad for engaging and not have a little something to give.

It really was nice of her to like my hair even though I really hate it. Actually I really hate my overall appearance, but it felt nice to hear her say it. It makes me wish that more boys would say something to assuage my ego. It also makes me wonder why I don’t get more nude shots of boys. Maybe I need to put myself out there more?

I spent most of the weekend adding posts from 2005-2007 on here, posts I thought were lost when the entire site when into the shithole and weren’t crossposted to LiveJournal. But thanks to the Internet Wayback Machine, most of them survive much to my astonishment/horror/surprise. So they’re here.

Saturday night I watched the series finale of Hannibal, the first time I ever watched the show live on television. I finally caught up with the series a couple of days ago, so it seemed like a good time to actually watch the show when it aired. I haven’t liked this Red Dragon arc, so I gotta say…

Thanks to Archive.org, I found an old Tripod version of this website that looks a little like this:

It is embarrassing to see the pretension of the 21-year old version of myself (look at the nom de plume!!!!!), how I was trying to cultivate my own identity and just how derivative and poorly executed it was. 15 years later, it’s nice to see my execution skills are still lacking. No, I’m not going to bother linking to that archived site. It’s embarrassing enough that I have imported the blog posts over here. You know, for the sake of posterity. Or hilarity.

The scary thing is reading back on these posts, I remember exactly what was going on with me at the time. I remember what I was into, what I was exploring, what I was feeling. So while the outside person might read these and just think they’re bad and nothing more, I read them and am transported to being 21 in Santa Barbara again.

One thing I am curious about is seeing older versions of websites I made. I think the first ones I made date back to February 1998. So that’s two years of pretentious bullshit that have disappeared. And I’m supposing they were especially pretentious since I was still going through by goth phase at that point. Hell, the first internet nickname I made came from a Bauhaus song: “Who Killed Mr. Moonlight.”

I decided a hike at Forrestal was in order on this first day of the heatwave. Smart, I know. I didn’t make it a long jaunt — I made sure to get through the elevations, hence the sweaty mess you see above. It’s been nice to get back out on the trails the last couple of weeks now that things with The Grandmother have stabilized somewhat.

The new episode of the podcast is up and running now. I really hated Walter White and thought Breaking Bad let him off the hook in the finale.

The best question I was asked today: have you ever pissed in a diaper? I think I’m erect.

I want to go storm chasing. Anyone want to come with?

It only took several hours to get through the 317 pages of Pedro Martinez’s simply titled memoir Pedro, and it was really fun to read. Take for instance:

I knew [Don] Baylor didn’t know anything about pitching when I heard him speak. He should have known that [Andrés] Galarraga had an open stance that he closed up as he stepped into his swing — he stepped into plenty of pitches and the fact that he wore those pussy pads on his elbows only made it easier for a pitcher like me to locate in the inner half of the plate when he was up to bat. [emphasis mine] p. 100

But as with any other ghostwritten memoir comes the same dilemma: how much of the book is the subject and how much is it the ghostwriter? Pedro may have read through Michael Silverman’s copy thoroughly before approving it and sending it off to the printers, but that gnawing question never goes away. And I’m not saying that to denigrate Pedro. I thought the same thing while reading Joe Torre’s The Yankee Years back in 2009 which was ghostwritten by Tom Verducci.

The same thing crept into my mind earlier this year when I read 1Q84. How much the of gorgeous prose was Murakami and how much was the translators?