No one can be sure if the Modern Lovers were right or not when they made this claim back in 1972, but the song sure is catchy.

Regardless, the sculpture above can be found at Daley Plaza. And in a way this unmovable, unavoidable, 162 ton, 50ft baboon-looking steel behemoth is a fitting sculpture for the plaza that bears Boss Daley’s name. Pablo Picasso may have never been called an asshole, but I think its safe to say that Dick Daley has been called an asshole more than a few times.

clovis has no shortage of really great things.

i think my favorite thing he’s got is this lamp, though. it would take you a while to notice it, too, amongst all the perfectly placed artifacts and art pieces in his very neat, always tidy professionally designed super modern loft in wicker park.

bastard.

if you were thrown overboard while on a honeymoon cruise or an afternoon deep sea fishing tourist trip, then this will serve as a re-creation of the last thing that you saw.

if, on the other hand, you are thinking about throwing someone overboard while on a ferry ride to a nearby island or a glass-bottomed boat sealife tour, this is an example the last thing that person might see. as you can tell from this example its pretty scary. so if you’re shooting for scary this is definitely the way to go.

i stayed up all night finishing up the video for work. evidently it was absolutely necessary for a meeting the next morning. so from 6pm to 4am i stared blankly at this laptop, trying to figure out how to get the file to dvd, and how to get the menu right and all the other things i didn’t know how to do. finally finished, i got in the car and drove to work at 4:30 in the morning so that i could stand around a wait for a while until someone showed up to take the dvd off my hands.

she: you look like shit.

me: well i didn’t sleep last night so i could get this finished on time.

she: see ya.

and after the violent, violent rage passed i had a cigarette and caught the eastern beams of morning sunlight as they poured over lake michigan and up randolph street. then i went home and slept all day.

the beatles - here comes the sun

ralph nader would shit his pants over this airplane.

getting to st thomas was simple. a large commercial flight from chicago to miami, then one down to st thomas. easy breezy. getting home was sort of different.

i arrived at the airport expecting to find a big, safe looking newish jet and instead was led onto the tarmac to board this korean war era twin propeller island hopper. the staircase was wheeled over to the back of the plane and after an trying twenty minute wait, we were led up up up the stairs and past the charming, stained, fraying no-nonsense army-style upholstery and into our jumpseats, two on each side, for a total of 14 rows.

it sputtered to life, limped down the runway and took to flight as reluctantly as anything possibly could and remain in the air. the next half hour was a blur of violent intermittent turbulence, waiting for a soda that never came, and blinding fear. before i knew it the plane was “landing” in san juan, which is a step closer to the real america than st thomas is, which in turn is one step closer to america than guam is, which is a step above samoa, which is a step above iraq.* those quote marks around the word landing back there means that the landing was less of a gentle re-connection with the earth and more of what its probably like to land on an air craft carrier, in the rain, under fire.

the point is this: the airlines should tell you if the airplane you’re booked to fly in can remember brown vs. the board.

*all of which are america, but an america thats spelled with a lowercase a. mainland, real-deal straight talk America is with a capital A. everybody knows that. and if you don’t maybe you should go live in iran or north korea and think about why it is that you hate our freedom.

dear universe,

i finally beat metroid, so you can stop with those snarky emails and the phone calls in the middle of the night reminding me how everyone else beat it when they were ten or eleven. that shit’s just mean.

thanks,

ned

the word of the day is gross. as in, this is the grossest thing i can possibly imagine.

i’m not really into cake. it makes me thirsty, its full of belly-ache inducing levels of sugar and the icing doesn’t taste like anything from the natural world.

and i know this anti-cake sentiment isn’t a popular one. but i don’t think i’m alone in concluding that “burger cake” is perhaps the nastiest dessert imaginable. strack and van till, you should be ashamed.

i’m assuming the “buns” here are really “cake”. this is not so much gross in that the cake is gross (which it almost assuredly is) but gross because IT LOOKS LIKE A BURGER AND ITS REALLY A CAKE. oh man. its like taking a huge drink of something thinking its milk and it turns out to be whiskey! imagine that! that is gross but not as gross as this cake! also, the “fixins” are all icing, and there’s a TON of “fixins”, meaning a ton of icing, meaning gross. looking at it again just now, i think the beef patty is cake, too. beefcake? gross, again! oh, and there’s some buttery mayonnaise spread on top thats just really more icing.

i think about regular cake and get a sick feeling in my stomach. i think about cake that looks like a greasy gross burger and i want to start vomiting and never, ever stop.

gross.

I’m pretty certain that this is a paint-by-numbers piece, but surprisingly enough someone thought it was worth about $60 in a shop. When looking at the content, it’s a fair guess that this piece was likely painted by someones grandfather having entered into retirement. Perhaps after a Louis L’Amour marathon or a weekend run of Bonanza inspired this old and broken sheet metal worker to express his inner cowboy. Maybe he sat before his dusty typewriter, staring blankly, growing more frustrated with each passing moment and wondering why he didn’t take the time to read and write more when he was a youth. And he sits in his favorite chair at night, rolling his glenlivet between his fingers, looking at the dark corner. His wife peering in the doorway, unsure of how to handle this new reflective and sensitive side of her partner. So the next day, on an outing with Ethel, she stumbles across an aisle at Michaels and catches from the corner of her eye the image of a lone cowboy with two mammal companions. She sets it on the kitchen table and leaves it at that. And he finds it, this grandpa, and with nothing else to do, takes it out back and makes his first painting. And somehow, long after he is gone, it ends up in a yard sale or at a thrift store, and a vintage dealer finds it piled with miles of frames and mirrors and paintings, and thinks to himself “I could get sixty bucks outta this.”

dear gross couch,

you weren’t all that nice when i got you from the salvation army, and you know it. i mean, i liked the way you looked but i knew that you weren’t a quality furniture investment. but i took you home anyhow and put you in my favorite room. then bettie the dog lived on you for most of a year, and then cronin lived on you for a summer. and then christy lived on you for six months. gross couch, your cushions are black holes, capable of trapping light and gravity, but also capable of trapping eight bic pens and more than two dollars in pennies. and now the time has come to say goodbye to you, gross couch. i have to hand it to you, though, you’re good at what you do: being something to sit comfortably on, to sleep uncomfortably on, and to soak up bettie’s nighttime accidents. i hope someone else out there is willing to overlook your many, many imperfections in lieu of your smart pattern and classic 70s color scheme.

and as for you, early 80s wood grain zenith television, i don’t really care if anyone likes the way you look, because your attitude really stinks.

best of luck (really, i’m serious),

ned

according to the IRS, i started working on my fifteenth birthday. i was a grocery bagger at h.g.hills food store, the one in green hills that doesn’t exist anymore. what should have been a routine, character building but rather boring summer/weekend gig turned into a playground of mischief when a few of my friends got grocery bagging jobs there, too. the following is a short and quite incomplete list of the important questions that were answered those couple of years before the last of us got fired:

1) can you get away with sleeping in public view while on the job? depending on conditions, you can get around twelve minutes of sleep in the grassy island next to the shopping cart return before you have to start apologizing to someone. usually that person was brenda. we thought that brenda secretly thought we were hilarious. brenda hated us.

2)  a) is there a DIY solution to pavement? yes, three litres of “orange drink” and a bag of cat litter WILL pave most of aisle four.

b) if so, is this solution roadworthy? no, soda/catlitter paving does not hold up to grocery shopping traffic conditions.

3) will justin get fired if he “shows it” to that nice cashier who’s only mistake was allowing him to talk to her in the first place? yes, justin will get fired for “showing it” to that girl.

4) will anyone find it suspicious if the same jerky teenagers keep asking to re-stock only the cartons of cigarettes and nothing else? apparently not.

5) can anyone successfully push fifty carts into the store without causing damage said store and/or customers’ cars? no. they cannot