Dear Sick Dude on Muni

It's true that at the time, you and I may have failed to notice one another, there on that train last Friday or thereabouts, but your cold germs definitely found me, SDoM, as surely you knew was likely to happen, and I just thought I'd follow up here on the internet to let you know that your decision to ride a crowded Muni train last week while in the throes of a contagious illness was definitely appreciated by me, here in day six of sinus hell. You were so contagious in fact that you sickened both me AND my pal Scott, each of us missing a day of work with our respective corporate employers in two different states, and have further caused at least one of us to experience the dreaded Sudafed-induced "cotton head" at a much-anticipated metal show.

I am sure that whatever you did that day instead of staying home on your couch was worth the wrecked metal shows, missed workdays, and inflamed nostrils endured by your victims and I don't want you to lose any sleep thinking you made the wrong choice by passing up that sick day to ride around San Francisco on a crowded bus while wheezing virulent viral particles onto innocent healthy citizens. It was ultimately the right choice considering all the things you accomplished that day instead of resting.

I ripped up a $20 bill

This evening, something possessed me to rip up a $20 dollar bill, one of those nice new sherbet-colored ones where Andrew Jackson looks like a blow-dried romantic poet*.

Now this was done, of course, in error-- I'm not Paul Allen, for christ's sake. This stray twenty happened to fall out of my wallet and into a rat's nest of gas station receipts, which tend to collect like hare-brained schemes in a gummy, unused corner of my purse until I decide that it is time to rip them up all at once, in an attempt to foil would-be identity thieves from seeing the highly classified number of gallons it takes to fill up my car. This woeful twenty, which had probably avoided being turned into coffee for weeks by this point, was rewarded for its cleverness by being ripped into 8 pieces of approximately equal size and then dumped into the downstairs trash.

From the bottom of the garbage I saw the mournful left eye of our 7th president looking reproachfully up at me from a nest of shredded Shell receipts, and I uttered some sort of expletive before dumpster diving for all 8 pieces of the shredded bill.

Taping money is no cakewalk. It rips all cattywampus. There are tiny subliminal pictures of stonemason handshakes and stuff on the back that are impossible to perfectly align with Scotch tape. When you are done, it looks like you are about to commit a crime if you turn around and spend it.

I replaced the twenty, now resembling Bree Walker's face, back into my wallet, ruminating over the most clueless cashiers with whom I regularly transact. Stay tuned for a report of my success in fobbing this off on the public... or being detained in the breakroom of Starbucks or "What the Pho" in plastic handcuffs while the shift manager calls the police.

*It was a clever Seattle PI journalist, I think, who used this phrase

Palazzo pants?

That I was even reading this shows you the airless depths to which one can quickly descend when loitering around on the internet ("they have the internet on computers now?") but when I saw this matter of the "palazzo pants" and the un-ironic suggestion that these were some kind of fashion "do" for the style-conscious college co-ed, paired with pumps, no less, I had to speak out.

Culottes, as everyone knows, are what those certain girls wear in gym class, the ones who are in that religion where they aren't allowed to cut their hair, wear pants, or acknowledge government holidays. This is the ONLY reasonable application of culottes: as a workaround for prudish religious observations. This will always be true. Unflatteringly tight pants, currently in fashion again with the ladies although they make 98% of women look like old Ikea couch cushions, may go in and out of fashion a squillion google times, but culottes will never, ever be "in," paired with any shoe, at any time, in any context, other than in gym class, if you are the member of a weird religion that needs to evolve.

Have I made myself clear?

update: So it's true. I saw a girl, one of those loud-talking stocky softball team types with a lank blond ponytail and flip-flops, wearing culottes in the Sacramento Metro airport.

How to short-circuit a Starbucks barista

Before I begin this dissertation on liquid math, let's be clear: I technically flunked algebra twice in high school (along with Spanish 1 and crafts). I am the kind of person that makes men feel secure in their smug assumptions about the spatial aptitude of the fairer sex. I used to cry during timed math tests. I had to be taught to tie my shoes in a special way even, tying two loops together, because I couldn't grasp the spatial mechanics of the traditional way. I am proud of none of these facts, but they are true.

I do know one thing, however, and that is the approximate fluid ounce volume of your traditional series of food service paper coffee cups. They are sized thusly. Starbucks baristas, take note: 8 oz. 12 oz. 16 oz. There is also one that apparently tops out at 20-something oz. You probably know this as a "Venti," inexplicably popular with teenaged girls (whose stomach capacity probably remains under 20 oz when empty. Where do they put the rest of it?).

Starbucks, as everyone knows, has done away with the fuzzy math, and given friendly if optimistic names to the traditional coffee cup sizes, legendarily upsizing a regular 12-oz to a "tall," in a leap of logic that puzzles most people not in the slightest. But before I dissolve into an Andy Rooney style dissertation about corporate logic, let me return to my point about the baristas, and how you can easily short circuit one by knowing the hidden mathematical mechanics behind the friendly cup size names.

Several times in recent years, I have, while at Starbucks, ordered an 8-oz coffee, rudely referred to as a "short," and not appearing even as an option on the menu board. It is possible that many baristas may not even know this elusive size by its condescending handle, so rare is it that anyone orders one. But taking this further, try ordering one by its fluid ounce volume. You are likely to enjoy the following exchange.

You: "I'll have an 8 oz drip."
Bright-faced young person in green apron: "Um. You mean a tall?"
You: "Uh, no, an 8 oz. That cup right there."
BFYPiGA: "Oh, well, uh, you mean a... [wracking brain for term] a short? Right, that's 6 ounces."
You: "That would be one small cup of coffee."
BFYPiGA: "So you want a 6 oz."
You: "Well, the short... it's... it's 8 ounces."
BFYPiGA: "Are you serious? [turns to co-worker]. Kyra did you know that it was 8 ounces? I've worked here for like a year and I totally didn't know that."

I have had some version of this conversation with more than one barista, leading me to believe that Starbucks deliberately endeavors to divorce all association between liquid volume and friendly cup names in its paid workforce, and maybe the public at large. I would go on but I realize that this is so much like something Andy Rooney would discuss on 60 Minutes, that it is time to stop now.

Mystery Sponge

I have recently been informed that I have not updated tiny dog in approximately 1,000 years. Please stand by while I take the freight elevator to the basement to investigate why the monkeys have stopped typing.

In the meantime I suggest you read Gattaca Sponge and the Magic Egg.

Update: I have rebooted the monkeys.

Diminishing returns

There is only one thing worth saying about the premiere of The O.C., Season 3, and that is, do we really need yet another permutation of the iPod? We've got shuffles. We've got minis. We've got nanos. We've got iPhones. Let it alone, apple, for the love of Christ. Also: why does Mark Ruffalo feel the need to whore himself out to mainstream Hollywood romantic comedies? Anyway, haven't we seen this movie before, and wasn't it called Ghost? Or was it Truly Madly Deeply? Or was it All of Me?

Oh, was I discussing the commercials just now? Right, yes I was. Yes, indeed. Because that is all there is to say about the O.C. Season 3 premiere. And in fact, the show itself. Which, as of this episode, I no longer watch.

Bumbershoot: the reckoning

It's Labor Day, the fourth and final day of Bumbershoot, Seattle's annual summer-end buffet of arbitrary musical acts, mostly local and more often than not described in the media as being "thoughtful bedroom pop." Tiny dog is on the scene to bring you the people's eye-view of events.

First stop, The Decemberists, high noon, main stage. The tiny dog contingent fails to show, however, waylaid by Tasha dog bladder capacity concerns, as our trio agrees that we refuse to miss Tegan & Sara, slated to go on at the ungodly hour of 8:45 pm. (Regrettably, it appears that The Decemberists were as cute as a basket of kittens during their performance.)

Metro bus #16 dumps us outside of the Seattle center around 2:30, where we then join our original itinerary in progress: Aqueduct is up, at a venue succinctly known as "The 107.7 The End What's Next Stage sponsored by Xbox at the Exhibition Hall." It's a dark, gymlike venue with Disneylandian lines peopled by teenagers inexplicably coiffed in mohawks: is there an 80's throwback hair booth nearby?

The ladies line up

Inside, Aqueduct's lead man David Terry bursts onstage in Izod polo. Clearly, he is from the Jack Black school of sweaty zaftig frontmen in need of a haircut, with all of the infectious irreverence there implied, as he launches into the opening song, first verse of which bullishly proclaims: "the ladies line up / for Aqueduct."

"It's sort of, well, 'They Might Be Guided By Flaming Lips,'" sums up a member of our group most familiar with the band. Aqueduct definitely has the ragamuffin Seattle teens waving their cell phones to their rendition of the Geto Boy's "Damn It Feels Good to be a Gangster." Hell, yeah.

Boyfriend

Turns out that the next show in our plans will be here in this same auditorium, from which we are unceremoniously ejected after Aqueduct, necessitating another wait in line with the mohawks.

We enter the show late due to the mandatory strip search of all stadium entrants packing Aquafina water bottles. Safely relieved of all hydration, we arrive to the sensitive sounds of Earlimart, a band that, through an accident of mis-heard sentence construction, suddenly becomes inagurated as a member of a just-invented genre: "Boyfriend." Although there appears to be two women in the band, Earlimart is squarely Boyfriend, offering up a dreamy and slightly aging indie front-dude with bed hair and a button down shirt. From limited personal experience, we know Earlimart is far too exquisitely Boyfriend for the conch shell acoustics and jittery teen gangs of the What's Next stage, but they give it their all, even breaking out a song that we tentatively identify as "their big KEXP hit single."

Toast

Now, I'm kind of wanting to follow this with the next act playing here in this venue, Ted Leo + Pharmacists, a band who wins tiny dog's official lyric-of-last-year award with "I'm a ghost, and I wanted you to know / that it's taking all my strength to make this toast," but I can no longer tolerate the dark school-dance atmosphere, with its slack-jawed teensters in Tigger backpacks camped out in packs on the concrete floor, and so I agree to accompany my companions to see Kinski at EMP's Sky Church.

On the way we stop to ponder a spray-painted performance artist in angel wings and white sheets, doing the statuette-for-cash routine. "Is it a woman?" I ask, unsure. "Both of us got the guy vibe," I am told definitively by my two male companions.

The Kinski line is forboding, approaching EMP like a row of ants headed for an aluminum recycling plant. While waiting amidst the Fun Forest midway attractions, we watch The Twirl and Hurl spin screaming, regretful passengers backwards at mach speeds, 100 feet into the air. Suddenly in the distance, someone brandishes a VENUE AT CAPACITY sign, dashing the hopes of those lined up for lyric-free nu-hippie rock. Whatever, Kinski. All their songs sound like Spinal Tap's jazz odyssey anyway, the one they did at the theme park after Nigel ditched the band.

The Clownge

Nothing to do now but eat. I've never had a piroshky, and I now realize why. They are giant doughnuts, full of shredded foodstuff remainders. We then set up camp inside the beer garden at "The Sound Transit Backyard Stage on the Broad Street Lawn" to kill time before Tegan & Sara. The beer garden is immediately deemed The Clownge, due to the presence of two 10-foot fiberglass clowns at the entrance.

Momentarily crowd-barriered from packs of teens in studded belts and black halter tops, we are surrounded instead by our own kind, vaguely worn-out early middle agers in non-statement-making Eddie Bauer fashions, guzzling $6 northwestern microbrews. Okkervil River emotes onstage nearby in unstable, wavering tones, a sort of edgy Boyfriend on meth. As soon as they clear away we geekishly set up camp in the grass below the Space Needle to await Tegan & Sara.

There's something happening somewhere

While waiting for T+S, festival denizens repeatedly puzzle over signs for one of the Backyard Stage sponsors, No Depression magazine. Is it some sort of feel good affirmation sponsored by the band(s), they repeatedly ask one another?

Tegan & Sara eventually launch into a song, after meticulously tuning their guitars and sound checking for 30 minutes (TeganTeganTegan Checkcheckcheckcheck). T+S are definitely not Boyfriend. They don't even have boyfriends. They are awesome Canadian twins who sing in strange strangled harmonies and play giant shiny guitars with capos on the fifth fret, and tell affable, rambling anecdotes between songs ("I kind of get along with our mom better than Sara, cause Sara's the bitchy one. I'm more of the geeky, awkward one... Sara is secretly paranoid, like all cool people are, that suddenly, she won't be cool anymore"). Their melodies are clear and unambiguous and non-tentative, and make you want to hop around. After playing most of their latest album, So Jealous, along with a few older songs, they pull out a lovely and non-sneering cover of Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark."

Step off, boyfriend.