My buddy Dave's final piece for his Columbia Journalism Masters pretty much explains it all.

So, the annual talent show came again, and I reached into my bag of tricks and pulled out another performance piece. It was well-received. Matt Barry (local skate video superstar and all around quality kid) said I won the contest, but it wasn't a contest, and anyway I think his talent of shotgunning five beers gives me a serious run for my money.

Getting up and doing the thing felt good though. The piece had a bit of my own meta bullshit in it; doubt anyone really picked up on the "head-fake towards sex-piece" inside joke in the opening, but that's ok. It's really just a meditation on fear of success vis-a-vis the Black President, internet dating, becoming a boss, and popular self-help quotations, wrapped with a couple choice musical cuts. A good pep-talk.

Full text is here: It's our turn

The upshot is it makes me think I can do this more often, and gives me some internal steam to push ahead on the video idea. While hot gossip and unicorns help keep things rolling along, the most popular posts of mine over time (top of the pops) are the noodly think-pieces. If I can stand to look at my face enough to convert these into video form, it might actually get some people jazzed. That'd be fun.

Christmas party went off good. Gift exchange. Talent show. Funtime. My performance/pep-talk went over well; I'll post the text for the archive in a bit.

Number one quote of the night: "Motherfuckers try to front, but the Greatful Dead were hard as fuck."

In the meantime, here's something sure to make you smile:

2008 is winding down. Quite a busy year. I've fallen a bit under the weather -- plague running rampant at the office -- and am generally feeling the decompression beginning. It's been cold at night up here, good for making fires and nice and contrast-y with the hot tub. Moon is almost full, and tonight we took a quick little night mission down to one of the overlooks by Luffenholtz beach where you can walk all the way out to the jutting end of a rock outcrop and watch the waves crash in on all sides.

It reminded me of when I first came out here, going camping with a girl up in the Redwoods north of Orick and walking/sliding down what turned out not to be a real trail, or at least not one made or typically used by humans, ending up on a coarse-grained sandy beach miles from the usual access road. We came for an adventure, and to carry salt-water back for cooking, and to make out a little bit. Something about the way the froth of the waves catches light in the night... connected those two moments for me. Made me feel like a page is turning.

Imagine a Department of Energy run by... A SCIENTIST! Chu is his name, and Nobel Prizes (and the Berkeley Livermore Lab) are his game. This is the first appointment by Obama I think qualifies as "kick ass."

Applause broke out when he described how companies, after claiming efficiency gains and lowered costs were impossible, “miraculously” achieved them once they “had to assign the jobs from the lobbyists to the engineers.”

Background courtesy Brad, everyone's favorite revolutionary plant in the DC establishment:

The memes is mutating. Watch out LOLcats.

LGD reminded me this morning of one of the top 10 rock performances of all time:

The White Wizard plays keyboard, sax, drums and then does crazy experimental sound shit. That's what I call talent.

And remembering this got me organized enough to resurrect one of the greatest web-properties of all time: VAGABENDER.COM RETURNS, BITCHES! I was specifically thinking of East Nashville, which is where Travis introduced us to that video, and the glory that was The Old Grey Whistle Test.

Um yeah. Ultra-cheezy title. Ultra-questionable premise.

Ultra-awesome show.

See, you get good actors and a decent budget, and give the creative types (writers, directors, etc) enough room to be dangerous, all of a sudden something worthwhile might happen. It won't likely be a mega hit, but it will likely be good. And that should recoup a decent budget. And then you make money and produce quality culture. Win!

(Also, wikipedia informs us that the original working title was Forever Sam Crow, further confirming that marketing douchebags are generally worthless; had they stuck with that I'd have had to come up with a different counter-positive to lead off my post.)

You know who's dangerous out there on the road? The "Intelligent Transportation" bus-limo motherfucker. That guy drives a decked-out short-bus, but handles it like a NYC taxi cab. The extra-wide side mirrors are just about at head-height for me on the Cobra. But I appreciate a good adversary.

What I really want to do though is get a little odometer/spedometer so I can start taking some data from my rides. I was in rare form along the Embarcaderro tonight, but i wonder just how much faster that means I went. Might be fun to graph!

In general news it's been a solid week of 10 hour days in the office, with after-hours wheeling and dealing to follow. End of the year means it's time to Glen Garry up; Always Be Closing, sucka.

Next week it'll be back up to the HC for the week, xmas party (gotta work on my talent show piece), and then things should start to decompress. I'm not sure yet what the plan is for the holidays. New Years in Portland seems like the default, but maybe a wild hare will strike. I feel like getting off the grid a bit, but really that just means ditching my laptop for a week.

I also want to get myself a camera for christmas and start fooling around w/that too.

Here comes the train.

Zack just alerted me to the mission bicycle photostream. He's got our shop geniuses taking pretty nice mugshots of all the new rigs before they go out the door:

Pretty neat!