irish flu

What's the best music to listen to when you are hung over?

This is the question I have been presented with this morning, as I am, indeed, hung over. Hung over and at work, which is not usually the case for me. I though The Salsoul Orchestra would provide some funky therapy to my barely-functional brain, but I was terribly wrong. "Tangerine" was just a little too much uppity disco and my head nearly exploded. So I thought I might ask the above question to the minions of the Internets. Then I realized I probably already knew the answers many of you would give.

htrouser: Fela!

dickumbrage: Reggae!

jason!: 1990's rave music!

So, what's your musical hair of the dog?

the dramatic conclusion

As of last night, the power is back in full! Joy. After locating the fuse box, Dick! offered to buy some fuses for me at the grocery store while I spent obligatory - ahem - quality time with my parents. He came over post-parental bonding to replace the burnt fuse, but, it turns out, none of the fuses were actually burnt or damaged. Most perplexing. After a little bit of courageous fiddling (it is the Box of Potential Electrocution, after all), Dick had the power on. What finally did it? In the line of the 3 fuses in the box was a fourth weird thing, a cylindrical metal thingy with a white knob/button in the middle. Dick! pushed the white knob/button in, and voila, power back on. What the hell that metal non-fuse thing is, I haven't a clue. Maybe an old-school fuse?

Ah, the joys of a 60-year-old electrical system.

artrant

What the fuck is up with artists charging so much damn cheddar for their mediocre works of art? Today at lunch I visited the local arts council facility to pay for access to their (mediocre, but with free chemicals) darkroom, and took a spin around their gallery. They have, usually, 3-4 artists exhibiting at once for about a month at a time. 75% of it is pretty mediocre, which is fine with me, until I see that some fucktard wants me to pay $400 for their 16"x20" piece of mediocrity. Seriously, asswipe, I don't care how much you spent on oils to paint that crap, it ain't worth it. I mean, this one woman wanted you to pay $150 for a copy of one of her abstract goauche paintings. A copy. Like, a photograph of a painting that wasn't that good to being with. And someone else was charging, ahem, $800 for an 8"x10" black and white photograph that wasn't anything special. I know how much it costs to print an black and white photo that size, and it ain't $800.


It's hard to put all of the blame on the individual artist, as there seems to be a prevading bug of idiocy infecting anyone who decides to make art of any kind at any skill level, manifesting itself generally in the following thought pattern: "I have made art, therefore it must be worth at least $150." 99% of the art for sale I've seen locally, including the stuff people put up on the walls in coffeeshops, has been at least that much. And the higher the price, the less good the art seems. "Oh, that cliched nude was almost endearing until I realized the person painting it thinks its so good that they can make some poor suck pay $300 for it."

I've had an ongoing fantasy about starting a collective of folks that sells art cheap. Like, $50 max, and it better be really big or really good to charge that much. Kind of like these people, except without the cheesy manifesto and dubious claims to inventing the Cheap Art Movement.

box found

I found the box, which turns out to be a fuse box, as Jason! suggested it might be (no thanks to the landlord, who has yet to offer any actual help). It turned out to be on the wall to the right of my oven, over (my) head-height. There are only 3 fuses, but I've never replaced one before, and, for that matter, can't even identify which one needs to be replaced. A little bit of twisting of one of them made some of the lights I had on flicker distressingly and I decided to leave the newly recoined Box of Potential Electrocution alone.

Dickumbrage, good man that he is, has offered to help out with fuse procurement and replacement.

land-mf-lord

Was it Marx who suggested that the landlords are the most heinous species in the capitalist system? Damn fucking right. Yesterday I attempted to run both a coffee maker and iron off of the power strip my computer is plugged into, and it was too much for the old, feeble electircal system to handle. Some breaker tripped and half of the power is out in my house. Which wouldn't ordinarily be a problem, except I live in crappy-ass old duplex with, apparently, the most well-hidden breaker box in the world. It being Sunday when this happened, I called the emergency maintenance number and left a message: just tell me where the fucking breaker box is and I'll be happy. I never got a call back. Today I called the landlord's office. Hm, the woman on the line wondered, is that box inside or outside? I can't remember. And all of their maintenance people are out today. And she can't quite imagine getting the landlord to fork over the $45 to send a maintenance person out just to find a breaker box anyway.

Apparently, the people I pay to maintain my property don't really feel like helping me find the fucking breaker box, or helping me get my power back on in any timely fashion. Bastards.

Where's my fucking renter's union?!

dork city

Mozilla is nice. But if you ever feel compelled to buy the Mozilla Thunderbird tshirt, you probably haven't had sex in ten years.

What's funny is that it's printed on American Apparrel tshirts. I'm surprised the internal battle between hipsterdom and geekdom in this tshirt hasn't made it explode.