Hi =) Standard comment about your appearance. Follow up mildly witty comment about my comment. Self-deprecating remark.

Declaration of shared interest gleaned from your profile. In-depth comment showing I am savvy purveyor of said interest. Query as to whether you’ve also seen or done a related thing.

Small pithy anecdote about something that happened the other day. Subtle tie-in with something on your profile. Blanket philosophical statement.

Expression of anticipation for your follow up reply.

Glance.  Nine minutes.  Glance. Still nine minutes.  It was a moment where you recognized the act of waiting.  Then you thought back to all the moments where you waited.  Then you waited.  Eight minutes.  Then the train was suddenly there with a quiet roar.

We were headed into San Francisco for a party, a gathering, to a auto-da-fé of pizza, burning in a wood oven.  Happy birthdays were given, drinks were received, and conversation slathered like sauce on bread.  Red sauce on pasta, even.

The zeitgeist of the evening was Zeitgeist, where barely acceptable Damnation was shared and we waited for Godot (in the form of the Tamale Lady).  She did not show but it did not prevent us from waiting.

Afterwards, back on the BART, a ruby-faced Ruby hacker accosted us in a green cape with a butterfly on the lapel, with green eyes.  He signed to us, “Are you a group or are you just friends?”  Stumbling over his words, his sign language stuttered and started amid weirdly surreal smiles.  He came from every Dungeons and Dragons game ever known.  He wore himself like a cloak.

Once on the train again, the memory of Green Cloak fading, we spoke of stalkers and sign language.

When you are driving in the urban wilderness, what is there to hunt? The most common game is McDonalds, lurking around every corner. Occasionally you’ll stumble upon a doe-eyed Chipotle, or a furry In-n-Out, delectable game in their own right. But these meals are hardly healthy, and it’s almost impossible for our over-specialized traveling busy city on-the-go jet set selves to get a simple healthful meal quickly.

Not that healthy couldn’t be fast. Not at all.

Here’s something I would like to see:

Bob on the Go
A Healthy Fast Food Dining Establishment
(Franchises Available)

M  E  N  U

• Spicy Chicken Vindaloo with Rice and Vegetables
• Blackened Carribean Jerk Chicken Breast with Vegetable Gumbo
• Sausage and Potato soup with Spaetzle noodles
• Garden Salad with Balsamic Vinaigrette and Fresh Vegetables
• Baked Potato and Steak Salad
• Spicy Buffalo Chicken Burger

I don’t know.  None of the above items is fried but they are extremely simple to prepare.  I know tastes vary and mine do fall to the spicy side of the spectrum.  When you read the above, fast food doesn’t even enter the mind at all — and that’s true for a big reason:  fast food is fast precisely because it’s fried (with the exception of fast-mex like Chipotle or Baja Fresh).

Far from me to add my moan to the moans of many who … bemoan the fast food world we are in, I declare as of today I refuse to eat any kind of fast food for minimum one year.  This excludes sit-down restaurants that are social events.  (P.S. this includes Chipotle, which my friends know is a toughie for me.)

Come — join me in my fast food fast.

No Free lunch
There was a Chemistry professor in a large college that had some Exchange students in the class. One day while the class was in the lab the Prof noticed one young man (exchange student) who kept rubbing his back And stretching as if his back hurt.
The professor asked the young man what was the matter. The student told him he had a bullet lodged in his back. He had been shot while fighting communists in his native country who were trying to overthrow his country’s government and install a new communist government.

In the midst of his story he looked at the professor and asked a strange question. He asked, ‘Do you know how to catch wild pigs?’

The professor thought it was a joke and asked for the punch line. The young man said this was no joke.’You catch wild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground. The pigs find it and begin to come everyday to eat the free corn. When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the place where they are used to coming. When they get used to the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence. They get used to that and start to eat again. You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up with a gate in the last side. The pigs, who are used to the free corn, start to come through the gate to eat, you slam the gate on them and catch the whole herd.
Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run around and around inside the fence, but they are caught. Soon they go back to eating the free corn. They are so used to it that they have forgotten how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their captivity.

The young man then told the professor that is exactly what he sees happening to America. The government keeps pushing us toward Communism/Socialism and keeps spreading the free corn out in the form of programs such as supplemental income, tax credit for unearned income, tobacco subsidies, dairy subsidies, payments not to plant crops (CRP),welfare, medicine, drugs, etc. while we continually lose our freedoms – just a little at a time.

One should always remember ‘There is no such thing as a free Lunch!’ Also, “You can never hire someone to provide a service for you cheaper than you can do it yourself.

Also, if you see that all of this wonderful government ‘help’ is a problem confronting the future of America, you might want to send this on to your friends. If you think the subsidized “free” ride is essential to your way of life then you will probably delete this email, but God help you when the gate slams shut!

Things I Hate About My Girlfriend (Mil Millington)

Or yet otherwise known as a rousing good tale from writer-director Guillermo del Toro (of Pan’s Labryinth fame). I watched it in one gasp, while coughing from a nasty chest cold. It is a refreshing ghost story, one well suited to a hot summer’s day. It is thankfully free from cliches — the screaming babe, the hand from behind, the joke scares, the ominous camera pans, and the pointy teeth.

Instead you are treated to a clean ghost story, in an isolated school for boys in World War I-era Spain. Rent it, and treat yourself to it if you haven’t seen it!