You’ll either love it or hate it. If you love it, download his album, it’s awesome.

These are always his best entries:

Finally we’re in Manhattan itself, and the subway starts to feel like an elevator, shuttling up and down the thin “skyscraper” of the island. Now it’s a world city. There are rich people in camelhair coats, elderly Jews who look like New Yorker cartoons, rotund Mexicans, slim black career women, Japanese with faces of utter neutrality, avoiding all contact, red-faced Bridge and Tunnel people. The adverts are about learning English, or getting plastic surgery, or getting arrested and calling a lawyer…

(# via ClickOpera)

Coppers spitting to sirens @ underage fest.

I love reading the L.A. Times’ Daily Mirror blog, which looks back on vintage news stories as covered by Southern California newspapers. Not only is it a look back into a bygone era, but the way the news (and even advertising) was presented is fascinating.

Check out this front page. I wonder if the photo run was intentional or mere overlooked coincidence? Seems like a great trick to sell papers. I love the screaming headlines of those days, too:

(via The Daily Mirror)

God, I could just listen to the audio from this on loop all day and slowly lose my mind.

In October, Gu Gu bit a teen intruder. And in 2007, he bit a drunken tourist who jumped into his pen and tried to hug him. The tourist retaliated by biting the bear in the back.

# (via MSNBC)

I smelled it in 2005, but I didn’t smell it last night. Or maybe I did. I recall now mentioning to my roommate a sickly sweet smell in the kitchen last evening, but it wasn’t as close to the maple syrupy goodness of ‘05. I had thought they resolved this, though, tracing it back to a sugar refinery in New Jersey. The mystery continues…

i will be in tokyo from thursday until the new year. whilst there, i’d like to have some fugu, or poison blowfish. i’m not really sure of the allure; the taste is nominal and it seems most of the enthusiasm for this particular variety comes from the fact that it’s: a) really expensive and b) creates a slight numbing feeling on your lips and tongue after eating–not unlike really good szechuan cuisine.

unfortunately if you’re one of the two dozen or so people in japan each year that encounter improperly prepared fugu, you die a slow horrible death, completely paralyzed for about 20 hours until your lungs slowly give way and you asphyxiate. so, uh… let’s hope that doesn’t happen!

see you all in 2009. one of my resolutions is to post more. we’ll see!