Don't expect me to be eating cucumbers anytime soon.
posted by wil forbis 1/31/2001 12:04:06 AM

Friday, January 26, 2001
I'm currently listening to the whole of the new Geddy Lee album off mp3.com. Not bad, I may take the trouble to record it onto my hard drive or something. One thing I don't get is how they seem to be pushing Geddy as some sort of skate punk; they've got him dressed up in baggy clothes lying around like a teenager. They can outfit him however they want, but he'll still be the guy who dressed up in silk pajamas on the back cover of 2112.

2112... man, that was over 20 years ago...

I guess that sentence doesn't make much sense to anyone who doesn't know 2112 was an album by Rush. Or that Geddy Lee was in Rush. Or that that I'm in a rush to geddy up out of here!

That reminds me of a strange coicidence in my past. I was watching MTV and they played a video from the soundtrack to the film "Rush", then they played a video from a Richard Marx album called "Rush Street", then they played a video from the band "Rush". Makes ya think, don't it?
posted by wil forbis 1/26/2001 08:53:01 PM

This has got to be one of the funniest hyperlinks I've seen in a long time. (Not the link itself, but the call text that points to the page.)

Click here for a rather revolting explanation of how the epidemic started and why it jumped from Britain to the continent. Warning: includes bovine cannibalism.

It's from an article about Mad Cow Disease, and if you're dying to read it (no pun intended) Click here.


posted by wil forbis 1/26/2001 09:38:35 AM

Thursday, January 25, 2001
ACID LOGIC GOES BUST

Redherring.com, January 26, 2001

Popular web zine, Acid Logic (Nasdaq: ACLG) annouced that it is feeling the bite of the internet decline and is laying off 237 workers, or 45% of its work force. Long rumored to be the one web site that could handle the internet crash, the humor/entertainment portal's announcement that it may not be able to keep the rest of its worker's employed sent the NasDaq crashing down for a third day in a row.

Of the 237 employees laid off, 236 were a series of ghost writers who write collectively under the pen name "Wil Forbis." One such writer, Brenda Chavez, expressed her anger, saying "This sucks, I dropped out of journalism school because of the stock options management promised me and now it's all gone down the pooter! Maybe if they didn't spend our second round of financing following KISS around for the farewell tour we could've had a chance." The sole non-ghost writer, John Saleeby whimpered, "This was my last shot... the dream is over..."

MInutes after the annoucement of the layoffs, The Society For The Defense Of Jason Becker announced "We see this as a good thing. Those dudes need to seriously shut up." Their stock value then tripled.

posted by wil forbis 1/25/2001 10:23:37 PM

Tuesday, January 23, 2001
Well, I had shark for dinner. I shit you not. I bought it about a week ago at Safeway. They had it on sale, so I figured I'd pick up a slab. I asked the woman who worked there the best way to cook it and she said something to the effect of "I don't know" in her best "Don't ask me, I just work here" voice. So I just looked down with a wounded expression on my face that said, "I know it's not your job to know how to cook shark, but couldn't you, as a fellow human just tell me how to cook the DAMN SHARK!!" She got all repentent and said, "Maybe you can grill it?"

I ended up baking it, for about 40 minutes, the same amount of time I use for salmon. It's not bad, sort of a white meat. I put seasoned salt on it
posted by wil forbis 1/23/2001 10:18:53 PM

Damn... pretty interesting night. I drove down to a club called the Blue Lamp (reportedly it used to be a strip bar) and did a blues open mike. Most of the acts were average, my set was okay (I did a Tom Waits song and some other stuff) but towards the end, this kind of chubby, 40ish black guy gets up and gives one of the best performances I've seen in a long time. His guitar playing was mediocre, his vocals projected natural, but untrained talent... but there was something about the guy... somehow he really tapped into something few musicians pull off. It was like John Steinbeck playing acoustic blues... he really got the human condition. Anyway, I tip my hat to the motherfucker.
posted by wil forbis 1/23/2001 12:39:43 AM

Thursday, January 18, 2001
Heh, well turns out Saleeb saw me on the news. As my pal, Chuck Swaim would say "Kickass!"

I was hanging out by the coffee machine at work and some woman came around and we started discussing trampolines. Turns out, she used to work for a guy name Jack O'neil, who made those O'neil wetsuits, and he had a trampoline in his house he'd use to leap up to the second floor. That really is a great idea! He also lost an eye in a surfing accident. That's not a great idea.
posted by wil forbis 1/18/2001 11:11:12 PM

Tuesday, January 16, 2001
Death at 75 MPH!

DIS-AMN!!! Let me tell you about a hot time in the old city tonight. I was at the gym and heard the first reports of a truck driving into the California State Capitol and bursting into flames. So I drove over there with the video camera (I live in Sacramento, don'tcha know...) and tried to scope out the action. Unfortunately they'd pretty much put out the flames and the cops had sealed of the area so I took a few crappy shots and then went into this bar right down the street from the Capitol. I start talking to the head guy and it turns out he's seen everything: he tell me how he saw the guy drive past his bar twice and that it was obviously some weird suicide attempt. (Or actually: suicide sucess!) Then the news fuckers start filtering in and interviewing this guy. In fact, I'm pretty sure I'm the main backdrop for an interview done with that guy by a national ABC correspondent! Crazy ain't it. You always wonder about those people in the background, and I'm here to tell you: I'm one of them! One day I may publish a book called "Memoirs of the guy who was in the background when ABC news interviewed that Mexican guy about the motherfucker who drove his truck into the California State Capitol." Or I may call it "Wil Forbis: Chick Magnet!" I'm undecided.

I gotta say, that was a great bar. I had one of the better Margeritas of my life there served to me by the lovely barmaid who grew up in Brazil. I can't help but think that at least this fellow who drove the truck didn't die in vain. Because of his actions, I discovered a great bar! I'm sure as he revved that engine up to 70 mph and prepared for a firey doom he at least thought "If, because of my actions Wil Forbis finds a neat bar, it will all be worth it!"

It was, my friend. It was.
posted by wil forbis 1/16/2001 11:20:57 PM

Monday, January 15, 2001
I gotta tell ya, I think one of the best artists online is this guy. His name's Tony Webb and he's a thoroughly great bass player in the Stanley Clarke, Jaco vein. I used to listened to his stuff at work until I got tired of the songs he had posted on mp3.com but he recently posted a bunch of new stuff and per usual, it kicks ass. If you haven't checked it out, you really should (using the link above). Unless you're some sort of punk minimalist who only likes non musicians like Patti Smith and Velvet Underground. In that case you should choke on bat-vomit.

I suppose it's a little too late to chime in on the Linda Chavez situation but I gotta say this: I thought it was ridiculous bullshit when they blocked the Zoe Baird nomination eight years ago and I think it's ridiculous bullshit they did the same thing to Linda Chavez recently. Course, I also think Linda Chavez was full of shit to criticize Zoe Baird. What amazes me most of all is that no one cries out the hypocrisy of the whole thing. The same democrats who decried the Republican attempt to block Zoe are now sitting around saying "I think we need to take a long hard look at these allegations against Chavez and see if we want the woman to be secretary of whatever the fuck she's been nominated to be secretary of..."

Ahh, well... I guess I'm just kind of pissed off. Perhaps the soothing sounds of Tony Webb can calm me down.
posted by wil forbis 1/15/2001 06:26:27 PM

Sunday, January 14, 2001
Saw the rerelease of "A Hard Days Night" last night. Learned several things:

Those limey accents might as well be a foriegn language, cuz I can't understand a word said with them.

John Lennon was kind of an asshole.

George Harrison had really fucked up teeth.

But that guy who played Paul's grandfather... he was priceless
posted by wil forbis 1/14/2001 09:00:02 PM

Thursday, January 11, 2001
A guy I work with saw some sort of PBS special on ants last night and was telling me all sorts of interesting things about ants today. Did you know ants raise other bugs the way we raise cattle? They "herd" them to flowers and these bugs dine on the flowers and then secrete something the ants eat. Ants also have various militaristic wars with one another and will try and save their wounded comrades. And get this; ants have been around pretty much throughout Earth's history.

Other Interesting Ant Facts

• The Rhesus Ant of northern Algeria can shoot lasers from its eyes which it uses to stun baby tigers.
  
  
• 42% of ants are gay, as opposed to 35% of millipedes.
  
  
• "Arthur" a famous ant who was raised by humans in the fifties graduated from Oxford and became a successful gynecologist.
  
  
• The "Penis Eating" Ant of northern African will often swoop down on tribesmen, devouring their member!
  

Tuesday, January 09, 2001
For a long time, I considered Nuno Bettencourt's (of Extreme) solo album, "Schizophonic", the worst rock album of all time. But slowly, I find it growing on me. I generally hate it when rock acts try and go alternative, and this cd is definately guilty of that, but there's a few gems underneath the gloom.

Another underrated album is KISS's "Unmasked." While I've never found KISS to be great songwriters, there's always something dependable about their music. It will consistantly rock, refer to women as objects, and have the buzzsaw tones of Marshalls. Not a bad combo.
posted by wil forbis 1/9/2001 10:59:11 PM

Sunday, January 07, 2001
What a dismal Saturday night. I went down to San Jose try and catch this guy I know who was playing a show there, but apparently he wasn't, so I drove around mindlessly for a while, and ended up in some bar in Tracy, CA. It was an abomidable scene, a bunch of yuppies flopping around on a dance floor to some band with a drum machine. Then I got a Motel 6 and watched HBO. At two in the morning, Clint Eastwood's "True Crimes" so I watched that while downing a bottle of Boone's wine.



posted by wil forbis 1/7/2001 10:29:53 PM

Saturday, January 06, 2001
Well, the lovely and talented Michelle sent me several stills from the Charlie's Angel film and Cleopatra 2525 TV show after reading my piece on Charlie's Angels. It really reminded me that there are a lot of good T&A type television shows on now (though Cleo just got cancelled.) There's that "Dark Angel" show, and I've especially been getting into "Relic Hunter" with Tia Ciarra (I'm not going to make any effort to check the spelling of her name.) Round my parts it comes on after "Saturday Night Live", and is the perfect way to finish off the 22 of Old E I'm usually working on before drifting on off to slumberland.
posted by wil forbis 1/6/2001 03:50:30 PM

It's sort of strange, becuase there's this guy at work who keeps lending me all this christian rock. For instance, he gave me a copy of a cd by an eighties metal group called the X-Sinners. They weren't too bad, sort of a AC/DC, AutoGraph type band, their lyrics hardly distinguishable from Iron Maiden (who spent a lot of time talking about hellfire and such.) Then he loaned me The NewsBoys, an extremely bad alternative band who's Godly lyrics only heightened their lameness. Now I'm listening to a CD who's name I don't recall, but it's not bad, sort of U2 with more distortion.

He doesn't really seem like he's trying to convert me, just genuinely thinks I might enjoy these bands. One of these days I'll have loan him my Mr. Bungle tape in thanks for the music he's given to me.


posted by wil forbis 1/6/2001 02:12:35 PM

Friday, January 05, 2001
Thought I'd take these new blogger servers for a test drive. The rowdy Acid Logic boys have been particulary rambunctious lately, saying blogging's slowed down to a crawl. Since I'm so lackadaisical about posting things, I hadn't really noticed.

Well, I'm revving her up, and it doesn't seem too bad. Slipped in to second quite nicely and now I'm passing a few Corvettes on the Autobahn.

posted by wil forbis 1/5/2001 11:32:38 PM

Tuesday, January 02, 2001
Well, I guess all of you know by now, that the world did indeed end with the arrival of 2001. I'm watching the television news right now, and all I'm seeing is a devestated earth, populated by savage mutants and bronzed warriors who must fight for their very survival.

Oh, waitasecond... this is "Zardoz" starring Sean Connery.
posted by wil forbis 1/2/2001 10:59:58 PM

Monday, January 01, 2001
Well, "Motel Hell" turned out to be pretty good. The female lead had some sort of father figure complex and all her boyfriends were old guys. Unfortunately she ends up falling for an older guy who wears a severed pig's head and chainsaws people to death. That's not a good trait in any boyfriend, regardless of age.

I was coming back from my New Year's Eve trip to Nevada and while getting on a freeway on ramp, I saw a bicyclist get hit by the car ahead of me. He sort of flipped up and landed on the ground, and I pulled over to check him out. Several other automobiles stopped, including the guy who hit him (that's always nice) and we waited for the authorities to arrive. The bicyclist was able to move but the ambulance came and took him away. I gave a statement to the cops and left. Then I had a fish and chips lunch at a nearby T.G.I.F's.

I should note that it was pretty clearly the bicyclist's fault, though that fact will probably be discussed in lawsuits for years to come.
posted by wil forbis 1/1/2001 06:01:08 PM