You Know Cyndi Lauper Still Tours?

It’s a strange thing when rock stars get old.

One day Mos Def will be old. One day JayZ will be old, just like Whodini and Slick Rick.


I remember when the Rolling Stones got back together for their Steel Wheels tour. Why would people pay solid money to watch a group of old men gyrate to old music. I still feel that way about them.

I got a glimpse of our future a while back when I caught Cut Chemist performing at the Disney Concert Hall. In the audience no one danced, rather they sat in their chairs and clapped, much like they do with Beethoven.


I hate to watch my music idols become old men. As they grow old I grow old.

Seeing Debbie Gibson sing Electric Youth at the tender age of 40 is somewhat of an oxymoron.


A few years ago I watched Joan Jett sing “I Love Rock and Roll” and Juan pointed out we just saw an icon performing an iconic song, live.

More and more I find that I go to the Hollywood Bowl for concerts, and less and less to the Forum, Staples Center or Dodger Stadium. My next concert is also at the Bowl, after that it’s to the Cerritos Center for Performing Arts.


Depeche Mode had to cancel several tour dates for reasons of old age, and Robert Smith of the Cure looks ridiculous in makeup these days. Even so, both bands are still amazing live.


I’ve been going to Depeche Mode concerts for 19 years, and this was my first Cure concert.


Life is long enough that I’ve met Dave Gahan, Martin Gore and Andy Fletcher once. I almost met Martin Gore again last week. Man that would have been sweet!

A Whale's Tail

The best time to go whale watching is usually in the summer. The whales get tired of their lousy local weather and come to Los Angeles for some fun in the sun. It’s kinda like spring break: the whales cruise around the ocean boulevards getting drunk, picking up on whale chicks (which whale biologists call Marys). As you can see from these pictures, we decided to go whale watching in late July, the late July of 1992 to be precise. Sure enough, thousands of whales came to have a gander at our red and green party boat. The Marys even flashed us their breasts in return for sea beads, those photos were too scandalous for my family spun blog here. But we did decide to feed them.

Now whales typically eat between 4-5 thousand chickens a day, but they will gladly substitute poultry for some pork chops, as long as they’re fresh. We had brought neither, woefully unprepared, luckily the boat sold CornNuts by the barrel and so we fed them that. It turns out whales LOVE CornNuts! Especially the sour cream and onion kind! We fed them for about an hour speaking to them in their native tongue: Portuguese which is close enough to Swahili that Danny could translate. As the sun went down we harpooned a couple of them and ate whale-burgers which surprisingly taste like jelly donuts.

What a day!

A Civil Service

So here I am in court, and I’m looking around at my fellow traffic criminals as we wait in the gallery for the judge, and I do a little counting. As it turns out, in a room of about 50 people, about 22 were black, 18 Latino, about 8 were various other minorities, and just 2 people in that whole big ol’ room were white.

I have to believe that white people forget or don’t care to fix their fix-it tickets at the same rate as all other races. We’re all human! We all hate having to deal with stupid shit like driving with one headlight. I also have to believe that all drivers, regardless of race or color, break these minor traffic laws with the same frequency. If both these things are true then the obvious conclusion is African Americans get pulled over and cited the most for the routine traffic violations we all commit, then it’s the Latinos, then the“others” and lastly Caucasians.

Why?

No one wants to believe in racial profiling, but then again we all know it happens. If you knew me as a teenager you would know that there was never a reason for a police officer to push me onto the hood of his patrol car and search my pockets because he got a report that some Mexicans were throwing water balloons at cars. Yet there I was.

Hell, not more than three weeks ago Henry Louis Gates Jr., was arrested for breaking into his own home. And Obama was right, Cambridge police acted stupidly. I don’t care what color a suspect is, if you arrest a man breaking into his own home you acted stupidly.

We would like to think that racism doesn’t exist especially in our great city of Los Angeles, that we’re too metropolitan and sophisticated. Well we’re not. I envy my friends of European descent who can look at the police and feel safe, and I hate the fact that when I see a cop I eye him with the same suspicion that he eyes me. It sucks. But when you realize that half the people getting pulled over for the same crime that everyone is committing are one minority closely followed by a second minority, well then I think the suspicion is deserved, especially when you belong to the latter.

But firemen are cool. Props yo!

The Gorgeous Girl

For more than two and a half years I’ve had the privilege to love and to be loved by this most wonderful of women.


She’s my soul and my reason for breathing. I am truly the luckiest man in the world.