Tues | Jan 1 Happy New Year! Let’s hope 2008 is as great and enlightened and peaceful as 2007 . . . wait . . . Anyway, I changed my usual routine for ringing in the New Year—equal parts Gatorade and crème de menthe—and instead chaperoned my son’s first boy/girl shindig, or, as he proudly put it, “My first bisexual party.” You learn such amazing things at bisexual parties. Bi-curious? Well, today, my son told me this party tidbit:
Him: Dad, did you know there was a man who was pregnant?
Me: What?
There was this guy and he got pregnant.
Oh yeah. There’s a name for people like that. Women.
No, Jared told me. There was this guy who got pregnant and his penis exploded.
Why would his penis explode?
Because when he tried to give birth the baby tried to come out of his penis and it exploded. It was on The Learning Channel.

Wed | Jan 2 Well, the holidays are officially over and I have to say they were sweet—and not just because I got the Lee Van Cleef box set I’d been asking for all year. No, because the malls seemed a lot less crowded, as did the parking lots. It got me to thinking about what kind of Christmas this had been for retailers. I did a quick check of some stories on the web and they used words like “disappointing” but I wanted something a little more tangible. I called a friend of mine, a woman who works for a MAJOR retailer—you have bought stuff from this place. She loves selling stuff so much that even though she’s in upper management she always treats herself to working the floor during the holidays. (She also loves her job a lot, too, so she told me not to use her name.) I gave her a call and asked her how things had gone this year:
Her: It was the worst, the absolute worst. You know I like to work the holidays, right? Well, it was embarrassing this year. Usually, I’m running around trying to plug holes wherever I can. This year people were looking at me like ‘What are you doing here? Don’t you have something useful to do?’”
Me: Did you see this coming?
No. I’ve worked other years when the economy was bad and things were jumping, so that doesn’t always go together. I noticed that the people who were shopping seemed to take more time. . . . That says to me that people are a little scared. That they’re not comfortable about things. It may not be that they’re hurting [financially] right now, but they’re wondering about what’s going to happen.
You have any opinions what’s coming next?
Well, I don’t think stuff like this works itself out overnight.
So I can expect continued excellent parking?
Yes, I may be out of a job and my kids will starve, but you’ll be able to park, Steve.
Sweet.

Thurs | Jan 3 Long Beach police raid a North Long Beach house and seize more than 200 marijuana plants. Neighbors had complained about the house—the complaints ranging from “it attracts the wrong element” to “they never, ever share”—and police needed a battering ram to knock down the iron security gate over the front door. They eventually arrested Mikael Kirk Narveson, who originally fled the scene but doubled back for Cool Ranch Doritos and cheese sauce and toffee peanuts and Nacho Cheese Doritos and picante sauce and Slim Jims and Sour Cream and Onion Pringles, oh yeah, those are great, get a whole bunch of those what? Anyway, neighbors thanked the police for taking the plants away, though doing so did significantly drop local property values.

Fri | Jan 4 Oh, and get some of them peanut M&Ms.

Sat | Jan 5 A fire at the AThrone portable restroom storage yard on 33rd Street destroys more than 300 portable toilets and melts two giant holding tanks holding hundreds of gallons of chemically treated human waste. There was crap everywhere. Now, you would think that an item about a poop-strewn mess, port-a-potties and a port-a-potty company called AThrone would be a no-brainer for satirical fun but, I gotta be honest with you, I got nothing. I know, I know, I’m just as surprised as you are. (Heheheh. Poop.)

Sun | Jan 6 Speaking of human waste, have you dug all the sacks of rotting flesh trying to get right with God these days now that it appears this Britney Spears thing is not going to be the neverending, fun-filled laugh riot we were all promised. Turns out that a woman who was pimped out by her parents and then tries to find some comfort in lame men, drugs and alcohol and polishes it all off by having some kids of her own to neglect is now a “sad” thing. At least that’s what all our celebrity “journalists” are telling us as they quickly attempt to pretend they played no part in this tragic little exercise in inevitability. I’ve heard a lot of these roaches defend themselves by suggesting that Spears was complicit in her own destruction by courting the celebrity press (drug dealers are very interested in seeing how well this defense works). Now, who knows what did or didn’t happen in the lives of our celebrity “press” to make them the “people” they are today, the point is most of us wish them death. Of course, they already are.