California is Sinking

"The Promoter" debuts on Howard TV

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Road Rage

Nothing in this world captures the hypocrisy and self-absorption that classifies mankind as road rage. The competitive nature that has driven our species forward, ensuring that we stayed fed through the lean years, and clothed through the cold ones, is still alive and well. Let’s face it; everyone who is on the planet right now is here because all of his ancestors—humans, monkeys, four-legged fish, amoebas, whatever—were pretty damn good at survival. That pressing need to go after a precious resource, to take what’s yours, is part of our genetic code.

So road rage is only natural. You can see an advantage, an edge in the grand struggle to exist: an opening two lanes over, a light that has yet to turn red, an emergency vehicle with sirens blaring you can draft behind, but there’s some idiotic old lady, who has the nerve to be driving only five miles over the speed limit, in your way. And you’re in a rush—you’re trying to get to your fantasy baseball draft or some one day sale at Nordstrom, or whatever else you’re into, and that’s what’s really important and this lady is ruining everything.

And who cares if there’s another hundred cars ahead of her, and she hasn’t yet had a safe opening to make her left turn, and she is waving apologetically out the window, and she has a bumper sticker that says “Practice Random Acts of Kindness”?

Learn to drive, grandma.

And then there’s the total opposite: when you’re fat and happy. Day off. Sun shining. Basking in satisfaction like a lion chewing on a wildebeest thigh bone. And someone is coming up from behind real fast. Something about their fast pace, the way they seem to feel entitled to the road you’re cruising on, just rubs you the wrong way. So you slow down a little bit more, maybe block them just a little from a newly forming lane. Just to show them how uptight they are, and how smooth you are. How you take life as it comes, and they are a spaz.

There is no one truly immune. The same self-righteous, do-gooders who are so quick to point out how they wake up at sunrise like a farmer (the uncontested, most virtuous of lifestyles), listen to public radio, and never watch reality TV, will claim to be above the fray. But road rage exists even in the most noble of places: church, library, and farmer’s market parking lots.

There will be no reprieve from the fight until we are all self-replicating, artificially-sustained, brain-based organisms. Then none of us will be in a rush, and we can share the road like the gentlemen that we pretend we are.

History of the Future (hybrid technology)

In the year 2008 it became apparent to the majority of Urban Americans that their lifestlyes were unsustainable.

In a halfhearted attempt to save the planet, the people turned towards what is now known as“band-aid” technology .

Rather than addressing the near irreversible damage they had inflicted on the planet and making any meaningful changes; the peopletook to labelling incremental improvements with feel-good terms like green and hybrid.

The phenomena began with automobiles (the primary transportation of the era), but soon spread to encompass all sorts of products and services.

Studies show that, although the new technologydid nothing to slow down their inevitable demise, the new labels helped the people feel less guilt, and eased their minds as they endured obliteration.

Here are a few examples from the height of the "band aid" technology era:

A Short History of the California Housing Crisis

The Tourist Junk Market (down at the boardwalk)

There is a bizarre phenomenon that causes a person’s consumptive discretion to decrease in direct proportion to the distance he is from his home. It’s a condition that afflicts all travelers, from young Euro hipsters to fanny-pack-wearing-red-staters.

We’ve all been guilty of haggling some poor third worlder out of an extra dollar or two, only to walk away with a tacky necklace that will be instantly forgotten and spend the rest of its life in the bottom of a knick knack drawer.

Whether you’re walking through a Tijuana marketplace, or cruising the Venice Beach boardwalk, you see the same junk market spring up wherever the hoards of tourists are.

Take the t-shirt stands. It’s like they went slogan hunting in the Appalachians armed with a bottle of Wild Turkey and a digital voice recorder.

“Here have a few drinks, kind sir. Now tell me about your attitude towards women, and how you might express that in a crude statement, five words or less.”

What a fantastic way to commemorate your trip to Los Angeles — T-shirt designed by drunken redneck. There aren’t enough hipsters in LA and New York to absorb all the irony in those shirts.

Or how about the Your Name on a Grain of Rice craze?

Click here for the "Definitive Guide to Buying Name-on-Rice Jewelry" (you won't be sorry)

Who cares if the target market is kids? It’s still lame. When I was ten I wanted a Rickey Henderson card not the smallest grain-based reproduction of my name humanly possible.

Has this become a skill, handed down from generation to generation? How does the rice-writer make enough money to buy his own rice for dinner? Does she survive by eating the un-inked rice at the end of the day? Just another mystery of the tourist junk market.

Another, apparently popular, Venice Beach travel purchase is a henna tattoo. I suppose this fills the same niche as getting your hair braided in the Caribbean; a harmless, mildly-titillating form of body transformation.

But walk down the Venice boardwalk and you’ll see these stalls everywhere and they’re almost always empty. Is there a group of people who keep coming back to get their henna tats redone? Or is it a craze that has run its course, doomed to disappear when the last hippie checks out? Will their stalls be taken over by people writing on rice, or something even more useless? Even a seasoned economist would have trouble predicting the direction of the tourist junk market.

I envision a future in which tourists no longer feel the need to purchase something…anything…to feel that their trip is complete. Or, at the very least, the offerings available to the traveler are environmentally responsible products, not landfill-bound junk. Perhaps commemorative carbon credits, or reusable shopping bags. At least then we'd be killing two birds with one stone.

How Ikeas Are Made

Beach Bums

Not all bums are created equal.

For every ten hyper-agressive zombies begging for spare change, there is usually one free-spirited, feel good, seemingly-wise street dweller. His never ending smile is infectious. He’ll make the nine to fiver question his commitment. A life without worries, without routine —the ticking clock is his alone.

He works his smile up and down the boardwalk, making a quarter here, a dollar there. This is his world. He owns the sunshine and the palm trees, the burning edge of the Pacific.

But when the sun drops, so does the high. The next 12 hours are going to be cold. The rats come out at night. Only the strong survive for another day in the sun.

The Promoter (Episode 2)

The second episode of our web series has arrived! Enjoy...

Star Alert!!

While I acknowledge that this website gets less traffic than any given side street in Santa Monica (which is where I saw this van parked), I thought it would be nice to help this guy out...

Calling all industry personnel…somehow every single one of you has missed Shawn De Vorse!

How could you fail to recognize the undiluted essence of star power? Have none of you found yourselves stuck in traffic on the Sunset Strip with this man’s head shot creating a blinding glare in your windshield—like light from heaven itself? How has this classic-featured, highly-refined thespian escaped your notice? Did you let the van that looks like it was previously owned by Ted Bundy cloud your judgment?

Next time you’re casting for “Limo Driver” or “Doorman #1” do yourself a favor and give Mr. De Vorse a call. He is also available as a Colin Quinn body double if the real thing gets too drunk. Of course Shawn will probably be drunk as well, but he works cheaper than Colin.

Smug Portland

Fellow Californian, if you like people thinking you’re an asshole, head north. And make sure you tell them where you came from.

I spent the last week in Portland, Oregon, and was shocked at how much cooler everyone is there than down here in California.

“California is everything that is wrong with the world today,” said some guy I met in a bar; right after I told him I live in LA. Then he tricked me into buying him a drink. The exact sequence of events is a little bit hazy, but it involved him promising to buy the second round and then promptly disappearing into the crowd.

But I’m not complaining. As a dickhead Californian, I deserved it. Thanks for setting me straight, dude.

Then there was the elderly security guard in the airport who studied the Georgia driver’s license in front of me for three minutes engaging in friendly small talk with its owner. He took one look at me and my California ID, and said “Now this one I see too many of. You guys steal all our water.”

I could also mention the pale and flabby girl sitting alone at a bar, who pointed out to me and my friends that we “aren’t even from around here.”

We accidentally mentioned to her that we had just come from Cabaret, a local gentlemen’s club. “That’s the worst strip club in Portland.” She said. Fair enough, it was really narrow and dark, with two tiny stages pushed up against the wall and only three girls on the job. But we had enjoyed ourselves there.

“Where should we go then? What’s the best strip club in Portland?” We asked, wanting to take advantage of her wisdom.

“The Magic Garden.” She said confidently. So we went to the Magic Garden. It was darker, dirtier, and had one stage and two girls working. I had the feeling that if we had gone to the Magic Garden first, that would have been the worst strip club in Portland.

Don’t get me wrong. I actually fell in love with the town. The drinks are cheap, the mountains on the horizon beautiful. It reportedly has the nation’s highest number of brew pubs and strip clubs per capita. There is a vibrant local music scene. But I didn’t like the smug attitude towards its neighbors to the south.

Sure there are problems here in California—overcrowding, excessive materialism, hour long commutes, and so on. That’s what this blog is supposed to be about after all. But, Portland certainly isn’t immune from modern ills like the locals seem to think. The streets are filled with young runaways and drug addicts. Smugness and self-satisfaction are running rampant. And, let’s face it, the weather sucks. Really, Portland is a haven for people who can’t hack it in other, more fast-paced (and relevant) parts of the country.

So if those guys up there in the woods are going to be hating on California we are going to have to take action and defend ourselves. Let’s start with an embargo on Oregon’s main exports. That would include beer, Nikes, and, ummmm….more beer?

I think we can do just fine without them.

The Promoter (Episode 1)

The team behind California is Sinking has created a Youtube Series. Follow along as we put together shows for the Killers of Comedy, a group of travelling misfits from the Howard Stern Show, and film the madness.

Bitch or Black Man?

With the Republican Party’s Presidential hopes sinking to the bottom of the Mariana’s Trench, weighed down by a war that no one can justify or explain and an economy in constant peril, the Oval Office seems bound for a Democratic occupant.

So the real drama is being played out in the Democratic Primaries where, like two expansion teams meeting in the World Series, two heretofore downtrodden demographics are slugging it out for their chance to be the first first. Will it be the women or the blacks?

Although the official campaign buzzwords talk about Hillary’s “30 years of experience” and Obama “representing change” the fight at street level is far baser - do we want a bitch or a black man?

Through the eyes of the mainstream, most of the crude attacks seem to be directed at Hillary – her cankles, her shrill voice, her manly intensity. The media gets away with reporting on these sexist attacks because, as one feminist whines, there is a far lower standard in the public’s acceptance of woman bashing:

“Goodbye to the (Hillary Clinton) nutcracker with metal spikes between splayed thighs. If it was a tap-dancing blackface doll, we would be righteously outraged—and they would not be selling it in airports. Shame.”

There is some truth to the fact that we feel more comfortable bashing a gender than a race or ethnicity. I certainly felt a lot more at ease putting Bitch in my title than Negro (which I eventually changed to the less abrasive “Black Man”).

But, as I don’t have to tell you, the racism (true discrimination) is out there. Not on the nightly news—you have to dig a little deeper to find it (but not too deep – I simply googled “Obama n**ger). And it is far more vicious, more dangerous, than the woman-bashing that the Hillary-backers cry about.

In a few minutes on one message board, I came up with eloquent gems like these:

“One only has to look at what happened to Zimbabwe to see what America will become if Obama gets elected. Or just look at any African country that doesn't have white goverment. We'll be the laughing stock of the world. Support Obama? Flush twice, its a long way to Washington!!”

“Notice that the one and ONLY reason that the White shit for brains Liberals are voting for a n**ger is because he is a shit colored n**ger. According to them, its time for America to have a shitskin for president, no other reason. Imagine how these mindless assholes would squeal and scream 'racist' if anyone were to say 'vote for the White guy because he's White'.”

“Nigbama may be the final nail in the US coffin we need, so we can take this country back. Maybe not such a bad thing.”

With extreme racial tension like this bubbling under the surface it’s clear that the country is far more ready to paint the walls of the Oval Office pink than cover the couches in plastic. Personally I don’t care too much which victim of society wins, either would be better than a half-wit.

$ports Betting 101

Breaking News…Natalee Holloway Alive! Cheerleaders Dead!

I’m still holding out hope that Natalee Holloway will be found alive, quivering in the corner of a dark room in a dirty whorehouse in South America after her third round of sex with a Venezuelan businessman in one night; a victim of the white slave trade rather than murder. Certainly that’s what Greta Van Susteren, and the other media leeches who are still trying to suck blood out of the story over two years after the fact, are hoping.

Perhaps Geraldo Rivera can pose as a john, infiltrate said brothel, throw the pretty young blonde white woman over his shoulders, and deliver her back to her media savvy mom. Just think of the ratings. It could run during the Super Bowl halftime and upstage the game.

By this point everyone is aware of and pretends to be disgusted by “Missing White Woman Syndrome”. One flooded Pi Phi sorority house would easily attract more news cameras than New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward. When an attractive white woman meets her demise the media provides us with an endless feed of stale “breaking” news. We, the audience, condemn the obvious pandering for ratings and then, evidently, misplace the remote control.

One of my personal favorite examples of the shallowness of modern news (and the news devouring public) was the story of five high school cheerleaders from upstate New York who died in a fiery auto crash last year. Teen drivers die in crashes with an alarming frequency (almost ten a day in 2003), but these girls and their headshots were featured as the main news story on CNN.com for at least two days.

Contrast that with this accident in Alabama, which I didn't come across until researching this article. It made the national news sites because people will always click on a link that says “dead cheerleader”, but it didn’t have the legs of the original cheerleader death story. I can’t help noticing that the Alabama girls are a tad bit chubbier, less photogenic, than their New York counterparts.

I’m not upset that the media plays to this lowest common denominator. They are businesses with bottom lines. If the public wanted to read about poor people in the inner city getting murdered, and fat, unattractive people dying prematurely in car wrecks, then CNN would gladly give it to us. What I do mind is the hypocritical, holier-than-thou attitude of the people who try to denounce what they eagerly consume — like rubberneckers who bitch about the traffic jam they are causing.

Let’s just stop the charade. CNN and Fox News can start running a regular feature called “Premature Deaths of Good Looking Women”. It will feel good for all of us to come clean.

Is Hannah Montana the Antichrist?

Back in the old days (before say…1990), little girls were like miniature adults, taken to societal role-playing to have their fun, things like sitting down to mini grownup tea parties and nurturing baby dolls, while little boys spent their time killing small animals and playing video games.

They were the unspoiled demographic - mostly ignored by Madison Avenue, Hollywood, and the other assorted taste makers who define exactly what it is we want and need.

Back in those more innocent times, you would often hear that the women could be our salvation:

If women ran the world there would be no war. If women were in charge we would all eat three square meals a day, no one would spit or fart, and toilet seats would always be left down.

Now after almost two decades of bombardment from the heaviest artillery in MTV, E! Television, and US Weekly’s arsenals, that innocent little girl has been obliterated. A line that stretched from Laura Ingalls Wilder in her Little House on the Prairie…through “baby talk” Cindy Brady…all the way down to Drew Barrymore in ET, has been broken. Looking back Barrymore’s performance might have been the high watermark for pig-tailed innocence. When she fell, dramatically and publicly, she pulled all of our little girls down with her.

What has followed has been a steady stream of hyper-sexualized female role models; Lady Feminism has gone macho, like she took a shot of testosterone to the buttocks, grabbed her crotch, and took a seat on a bar stool in Reno, Nevada.

First there was Pam Anderson becoming the world’s most famous woman. Her constantly inflating and deflating breasts, questionable relationship choices, and public sexual escapades were an inspiration to a generation. Then came Christina, Paris, Lindsay, and Britney…

You would hope that the cautionary tale told by these new faces of feminism would scare the tweens currently coming of age. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be working like that. The genie is out of the bottle (thanks Xtina for the metaphor). Today’s little girl knows that sex sells, that sex equals power, and she knows it before she can handle it.

The queen apparent of this new generation, Hannah Montana, the girl who came out of nowhere to suddenly be everywhere, appears to be mobilizing her army. Her minions are gearing up at your local mall, buying ever shorter skirts, and trading secrets on effective hand job techniques.

It would appear that tomorrow’s little boys don’t stand a chance, what with their raging hormones and all. The new girl-next-door, 10 years old and equipped with plastic C-cups, is far too formidable an opponent. I guess we’ll soon be seeing what the world would be like with women in charge. I, for one, will be making sure to put the toilet seat down.

To Win the War… Buy the Bonds

To help finance the enormous costs of World War II, the United States government issued war bonds to the American public. The various releases of these patriotic bonds were accompanied by “Bond Tours” – traveling pep rallies that featured politicians and celebrities waving flags to help sell them.

The largest of these affairs, the Seventh Bond Tour of 1945, raised over $26 billion. To help put that number in perspective, consider that there were 160 million people in the US at the time. That means the dollar investment per US citizen was roughly $162, or about $1800 dollars in modern day spending power! Do you suppose those people had a clear idea about what they were fighting (and paying) for?

In a capitalist society, the mandate for war should only come from the people and their voting dollars. The process is unbelievably simple, capitalism at it's most basic: the public sees a real and coherent threat (in this case Hitler and the Japanese) and they pay to have it eliminated. It wasn’t America’s uncommon valor, or God’s will that won World War II. It was American investment backed wholeheartedly by the American people.

What does a government do to raise money for a war if there is no clear public backing? When the true reasons for letting bullets fly are obscure, based more on special interests than national security?

They don’t ask us for it directly, that’s for sure. They take it after conferring amongst themselves. They use their incumbency to justify their actions. Since the Iraq war started in 2003, Congress has allocated somewhere in the neighborhood of $470 billion to the effort. Every one of these dollars has been reluctantly squeezed out of the nation’s coffers by oil-based special interest groups who wrap themselves in the American flag and use convenient terms like “spreading democracy”.

Perhaps there could be an American victory in Iraq (which, I suppose, would mean the elimination of every single insurgent and the building of a Starbucks on every other street corner). But it would take the true financial backing of the American people. The Average Joe would have to be willing to pledge a large chunk of his monthly income to see the Stars and Stripes flying over Baghdad. And unless we clearly understand why we’re fighting, that’s never going to happen.

How many of you would show up at an Iraq War Bond Tour (without a basket of rotten tomatoes)?

Death of the American Dream

As the world flocks to Southern California, lured by vague promises of the glamorous lifestyles lived by the citizens of Beverly Hills - 90210, Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County, Three’s Company, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, the demand for a physical piece of the pie keeps going up. A little chunk of uneven land in the right zip code, with barely enough space to fit a cramped two bedroom house and squeeze an Escalade and BMW 3 Series in the garage, can easily cost well in excess of one million dollars.

The people who were here before the latest land rush sit back and watch the annual rise in equity, using the money to buy newer BMWs, while the poor middle class schlubs struggling to make ends meet (realistically anyone making less than $150k per year), either become lifetime renters, shoehorn their wives and kids into little condos, or move their family to the distant land of Riverside County where they might be lucky to spend as many hours with their kids as they do in their daily commute.

In much of California, the American Dream of home ownership is dead. Even with the housing boom finally leveling off, the situation is too out of whack to be rectified. Say you’re a middle manager at a decent company making $80,000 a year; you’re college educated, you followed the prescribed formula for attaining the Dream, and you’re getting what many would consider a decent salary. The problem is, at best, you can maybe afford a $2500 monthly mortgage, which will get you a one bedroom condo (as long as it’s not too near the beach). Or maybe you can move to the ghetto and buy a run-down house (not a very popular choice). Most likely, you will keep renting, living like a little hamster on a wheel.

Now add some kids to that mix. What are your options now? Pack your things and say hello to the Inland Empire and a lifetime of traffic jams.

What happens when the majority of a populace becomes disenfranchised? When the people no longer have a stake in the society they live in? History tells us they revolt. How much further can we continue down this path before landlords’ heads begin to roll?