polly want a cellphone?
this totally amazes me.
Parrots, as I said, are terrifically weird. Parrots are highly unpredictable. Parrots attach to random things and are utterly freaked out and terrified by other random things (example: Wave a big broom in front of Anaya and she just looks at you and rolls those tiny black eyes and yawns. But bring a simple toothbrush within five feet of her and she will jump and flap her wings and growl like you’re a drunken Dick Cheney carrying a shotgun), and there is little explanation for it. Telephones are, for now, just her thing.
She is amazed by them. You will be talking and laughing and muttering into the handset, and you glance over and the bird is leaning way in and cocking her head sideways and watching every … single … syllable … as it passes your lips. She is absolutely mesmerized. She is taking it all in. Recording. Studying. Analyzing.
Hence, she can now imitate, with freakish precision, the exact tone and cadence of the ring of my SO’s home phone. She will ring the phone two or three times, answer it with the exact same beep as the on button, say, “Hello, how are you?” in pitch-perfect girlfriend intonation, proceed to have a full conversation in human-pitched bird gibberish (with all appropriate pauses and cadences), say, “OK, OK, bye-bye,” and hang up with another perfect beep. She will do this over and over again. All day long.
i’ve never really been into birds as pets, but now i kind of want one for the office.
has anyone out there ever had birds that did things like this? i’m intrigued and would like to hear more examples of such intricate mimicry.
Filed in morford worship | Comments (3)digital ADD
“Are you not multitasking right now, calculating your to-do lists, answering your cell, text messaging your sister, reading this column, burning a new CD, thinking about sex, programming your Bluetooth, ordering some Astroglide online, processing 50 items at once? No? Something is wrong with you.”
–full
Filed in morford worship | Comment (1)the bohemian dream
we were hanging out with our friend Ivan, who’s in his mid-20′s and brilliant and has a high-paying job and just bought a house in west berkeley a few months ago, and we were, like many other renting DINKs in the bay area (that’s Dual Income No Kids), talking about the pros and cons of buying a ridiculously expensive house vs paying ridiculous rent.
there is no way, even if we get out of debt, that jay and i can afford a mortgage here on our salaries. not. even. possible.
and do we want to? am i interested in tying myself up in that much red tape, when my whole plan all along has been to live footloose and fancy free, travelling the world like a gypsy once i’m done paying for my education and spring break trips sponsored by Visa?
it’s a tough call. here we are, sinking thousands of dollars of year into rent with nothing to show for it. at least, nothing with equity. however, this place is nuts. it’s urban. it’s dirty. there’s crime. sure, the sun sets over the golden gate bridge and mount tam and you sometimes just can’t believe how beautiful the view is while you’re sitting almost stopped in traffic on an 80 East overpass 150 feet in the air, but is it worth a $2500/month for 30 years mortage?
with that kind of money i can buy a huge ranch in montana, right? but then what would i do on saturday nights? watch the stars come out?
morford pontificates:“Of course, the ripest bohemian dream is to have, well, both: the hip urban pad and a weekend woodsy getaway, maybe Calistoga or Occidental or Bodega or Russian River or Sebastopol, something up in the rolling pristine fogless green, a place to escape the urban grind, a writing-sex-hot-tub-meditation-bring-some-friends-up-for-the-weekend retreat where you can go and plant some lavender and work on the deck and think about the meaning of single-malt scotch.
I have visited these regions. I have felt the calm verdant hum. When there, it is impossible not to fantasize about sticking around, about buying my own private quarter acre near the organic farmlands and the neohippies and the winemakers, the artist communes and the spiritual renegades and the slightly mad alt-millionaire geniuses who live well off the grid, all while still somehow maintaining a link to the beloved city.
Is such a dual existence possible? Check that: Is such an existence possible on a columnist’s salary? Does Bush speak with nuanced polysyllabic intelligence?
Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe there is a way and I just don’t know it, a way to live the dual urban/pastoral dream without going into 30 years of runaway debt, without cashing in every nest-egg stock you ever owned and without borrowing three-quarters of a million dollars from the bank even as you stock up on tuna and water and canned beans for when the Big One hits and wipes it all off the map anyway.
This, then, is the big conundrum. Because a city like San Francisco, well, it gets in the blood. It is difficult to shake. I want to get out, but I don’t want to leave. San Francisco remains one of the most desirable places to live in the world, one of the most electric and accessible and radiant and walkable urban jungles still without a Wal-Mart in its city limits, all resulting in the eternal S.F. lament, ongoing for the past decade: Relatively young? Make a decent salary (even two, combined)? Love the city? Want to lay down some roots and maybe buy a nice house? Good for you. Now get the hell out, because you can’t possibly afford it.
So then, like countless city dwellers, I wait. I long. For the lottery win, for the market to implode (ha), for miracles and magic and time to heal all ridiculously inflated prices. I read the stories that claim the Bay Area housing market is cooling off — which, around here, is a bit like saying the sun has dropped eight degrees from its recent high of 59 billion Fahrenheit…”
–the rest Filed in culture and random linkage, morford worship | Comments (9)
feign fiend
why is everyone (those who employ her) acting so surprised that kate moss is a cokehead? how do you think she’s maintained her status as the waifiest supermodel in the land for all these years? diet and exercise? please.
i love how the designers are all “we are totally against illicit drug use and we’re firing her from our campaigns”. just like major league baseball is “totally against the use of performance enhancing drugs”.
oh, and apprently not only is supermodeling dead and boring, so is rock and roll.
“Oh yes, make no mistake, MTV is now owned by the cheeseball bling. “Diddy” hosted the VMAs and he was tedious and small trying to be mutinous and large…. There was nearly zero rock ‘n’ roll of any kind, no blues and no metal and no grunge and no hipster indie chicks, no funk and no aggro and it was left to only the aging and baffled-looking veteran pseudo-punkers Green Day and a tiny dash of the fabulous My Chemical Romance to salvage anything resembling honest musicianship. Oh, and Coldplay was there. And the Killers channeled Duran Duran for three minutes. But they both seemed more out of place than a pair of gay liberals in Utah. The hip-hop crowd merely looked on, checked their diamond-crusted Rolexes, waited for Snoop….
…Anorexia and bulimia, by the way, are still very much in. These models, they were like kindling with skin. They were like paper cuts with eyes. They were like tiny confused birds weaned on a diet of Pop-Tarts and Diet Pepsi and cigarettes and acne medication and then stretched out on racks until they reach six feet tall, at which point they have all traces of authentic femininity surgically removed and their infinitesimal bee-sting breasts sucked into their concave chests to the point where they look like their skin was one giant FoodSaver bag vacuum-sucked around their rib cages, with what appeared to be their butts replaced with these tiny little half-filled water balloons and they marched down the runways like sullen teenagers who never learned to masturbate.”
i haven’t had a good dose of hot, live rock and roll in a really long time.
Filed in morford worship | Comments (6)can i get an om?
“There is this upwelling. There is this delicious rebellion. It is not yet loud and it is not yet conventional and it is certainly not yet dominating the national political dialogue and it is not yet making the headlines and maybe it never will and this is probably a good thing.
Filed in morford worship | Comment (0)praise canada
in line with the recent comments on gay pride week here in SF, Morford commends Canada and Spain on legalizing gay marriage, nationwide. what? you didn’t hear? that’s b/c the US doesn’t want you to know that other progressive countries around the world have decided that equal and civil rights apply to EVERYONE.
“…Canada’s gay marriage bill finally made it through the contentious House of Commons and is expected to sail through the Senate almost immediately and become federal law by July, and then gay marriage will be perfectly legal across the entire country, doubtlessly and permanently and forevermore.
And Spain, oh my God Spain, Spain defied endless years of a Roman Catholic choke hold and infuriated religious conservatives and basically did the equivalent of opening a giant Starbucks in Temple Square in Salt Lake City or maybe a huge bikini warehouse in downtown Riyadh. Which is to say, they flipped a well-timed bird to the ruling dogma and voted for joy and bliss and love. Gay Spanish couples can be married as soon as the law is printed in the government registry, within two weeks. Imagine.
Surely, locusts are at hand. Surely, a rain of fire and death shall smite both countries from above, any minute now. Go outside right now and watch. You should be able to see at least some of Canada go down. It should be quite the spectacle, all bloodshed and screaming and shards of exploded hockey sticks flying through the air like toothpicks. Bring an umbrella.
…And the next generation of Canadian and Spanish kids will see homosexual couples get married and they will say to themselves, huh, look mommy, two people in love, holding hands, laughing and crying and arguing and bitching about how damned cold it is in Quebec or why the Bilbao doesn’t stay open until 6 am for all-night partying, trying to make their way in the world, paying taxes and doing the shopping and receiving free health care and arguing over carpet samples and struggling to understand a very convoluted and torturous but potentially shockingly beautiful, love-drenched world.
…Perhaps this is the good news for Canada and Spain. Now that the entirety of the two countries (Alberta happily, snarlingly excepted) are so open to godlessness and sexual deviance and raw gay love, well, it’s a virtual lock than no God-fearing conservative American will move there, much in the same way they now refuse, in their terror and misery and unhappy shoes, to move to those heathen tofu-sucking sexually open liberal American strongholds of San Francisco, or New York, or Chicago, et al.
In other words, Canada and Spain are now essentially much like any major American city that happens to be home to world-class universities and actual culture and decent bookstores and progressive ideologies, places where people seem to understand that, at least while we’re all trapped in these odd human shells for such a brief, glimmering eyeblink of time, allowing love to progress and evolve as it sees fit does not, somehow, equal epic doom, decay or moral annihilation.
In fact, the realization is now more apparent than ever that allowing such delicious evolution equals, well, the exact opposite. Wild kudos to Spain and Canada for welcoming it. And what a deep and pathetic shame that most of the U.S., despite claims of spiritual freedom and tolerance, isn’t even close.”
Filed in morford worship | Comment (0)you’ve got the wrong guy
“Did you know that Saudi Arabia treats its women one barely noticeable notch above that of the brutal Taliban? Saudi women cannot vote. They are not allowed to drive. They cannot be admitted to a hospital or examined by a doctor or travel abroad or leave the house without the express permission and/or company of an immediate male family member, and of course they must, at all times, be covered from head to toe in black sackcloth and if they dare venture outside or break the fashion code in any way they could very well be arrested and jailed indefinitely and beaten and even killed, no questions asked.
Filed in morford worship | Comment (0)NIN and Jesus
NIN, of course. they’re playing in SF tonight. i really, really wish i could go. i really could use a good bout of screaming loud head-banging right about now. or, more like – i wish i could have gotten a ticket, but they sold out in 3 minutes.
After all, Jesus was a rebel. Jesus was the Original Liberal. Jesus was a devoted pacifist and a badass egalitarian and his best friends were all whores and dissidents and freethinkers and miscreants, artists of every shape and size and haircut and of course, were he walking around today, Jesus would be pretty much loathed and ostracized if not outright hacked to bits by the Christian Right. “Goddamn hippie liberal tree hugger,” they’d sneer, waving scythes and Bibles. “What the hell?” Jesus would say.”
Filed in morford worship, music, philosophical ramblings | Comment (0)memorium
Hunter S. Thompson is dead. But what about his brand of raw, bloody, beautifully debauched journalism?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
I am not nearly stoned enough.
I should at this moment have, at the very least, roughly four Vicodin and three Valium and two giant nuggets of phenobarbital and a few whippets and a canister of ether and a tab of blotter acid and half an ounce of premium hash and a nice snifter of gin playing naked volleyball in my addled brain right now to properly pay homage to the late great Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, which is why I ain’t touching this HST legacy thing with a 10-foot line of premium Colombian blow.
I ain’t touching it because it’s sad and fraught and would probably fail to do the man and his masterfully debauched writing any sort of true and appropriately inappropriate justice, and given how the fine San Francisco Chronicle, like all respectable newspapers, generally disallows stream-of-consciousness fire hoses of frenetic Thompson-like curse words in its publications, I am, shall we say, a bit hamstrung…
–the rest Filed in morford worship | Comment (1)“do SUVs make you stupid?”
“…Irony? The SUV drips with it. Fact is, most Americans consider themselves environmentally conscious and claim to care deeply about protecting natural resources and don’t really want war and suffering or the insane BushCo-brand oil dependence that causes both.
But the truth is, if Americans really cared about energy and pollution and reducing reliance on foreign oil and getting us out from under the massive hypocritical terrorist-supportin’ Saudi thumb, they’d buy smaller or more efficient vehicles. Period. But they don’t.” –the rest
Filed in morford worship | Comment (0)
