katie couric controversy... settled

click image for larger size

random ham bone gnome spam

I learned a bit more in my AutoCad class last night. I'm starting to hate it less. My art class is still the same. yesterday we cut construction paper and used glue sticks... it was like 2nd grade all over again. but we're supposed to be learning about composition and the value of light and dark. theres this chick from like Russia or something that learned how to draw all Rocky IV style. she showed our teacher her work and it was really fucking good. so the teacher tried to get her to drop this class and take the advanced class but she insisted on staying. anyway.. even tho she is hella good at drawing she totally missed the point of this assignment. I laughed inside. we were supposed to cut up random shapes of black white and grey and place them in abstract compositions. she even emphasized that we werent supposed to make recognisable objects. I could have totally cut my paper stencil style and done something rad but that wasnt the assignment. this chick cut out shapes of people and faces. her composition sucked too... maybe thats why she stayed in the class. pics of my stuff when i remember to take a pic of it.

anyhoo here's some randomness from the last few days. Bridget and Sara took my phone and started getting stupid with it at Matt "count chocula" Lingo's BBQ.


it was some homecoming bash for his roomate. we didnt know anyone there and they were kind of weird. this one chick was all trying to push this corn with ranch dressing on me but i hate ranch. i think i offended her. anyway, she went upstairs and came back with a fucking yellow tutu on. (sorry for the quality, explaination in a second)

Count Chocula, we call him that because he laughs like the count from Sesame Street. the chocula just sounded better than "the count". anyway.. Matt, or 'Chocula' drives tug boats. its a pretty savage job. working one day, he managed to chop off the tip of his finger. it had all healed when we met him but I guess the bone inside was all gnarled up and was causing pain or something so he had it surgically re-chopped last week so that it will heal all even and smooth. he showed us the stitches.
sorry bout the quality, phone cam+crazy LED flash = shitty.

at work we've been having some potential clilents coming in and getting the low down on VSEP filtration... they must have liked us because they send us presents afterward. we got a big fancy wood box with brass latches full of exotic assorted dates from the Saudis that came in. we also got a fancy box of weird Japanese candy from the Japanese company.

it was like gummy molases in aluminum cubes. anyway very, Japanese and very, Saudi Arabia. The dates reminded me of that scene in Raiders of the Lost Arc... "bad dates" what a great flick. i remember seeing that as a kid in a theater in Oregon. I was just starting my "skulls are cool" phase so the end scene where the nazi's faces melt off always stuck in my head. hey George Lucas, remember when you didnt have CGI asshole!

anyhoo, i saw this at TJ Max and chuckled.

happy thursday. I have photoshop tonite. our first assignment was to make a self portrait. there werent any rules really so i did this.

also, i found out my teacher is a freako.

fibberdygibbit flipper and dee dee ramone

ok enough of that. my friend Kendra sent me this via our cool phones.

with the caption "bacon makes it better" thanks kendra!

hell fucking yea it does. I like bacon dipped in maple syrup. You know who hates bacon tho?

this guy.. he's Uncle McGruff. he hates everything. he hates fun and loud things. theres a little Uncle McGruff in all of us at one point or another.
not to be confused with McGruff the crime dog. Uncle McGruff is just a surly old indiscriminate object. when people ask him about the Crime Dog it just makes him more McGruffy.

happy Tuesday by the way. School is going pretty good. theres at least one complete moron in each of my classes. theres a few in my AutoCad class and they all seem to gang up on the teacher with their stupidness. one stupid question might get overlooked, but get a team to group up and ask the same stupid question over and over, even tho its been answered already, you'll get the teachers attention. -are you happy now assholes? now you know how to copy and paste. oh and you in the back, NO, i will not go over how to email your finshed project to yourself. that will be covered in the class "Shoe Tying 105" or maybe you should pick up the book, "Breathing for Dummies" in the studen book store.

gosh!

"rock over london, rock on chicago... Taco Bell, make a run for the border."
-wesley willis RIP

chunky dunks monkey hunks

it was a success! there was a great turnout, everyone seemed to be into my art.. a few people even bought paintings! i sold 5 pieces total. thanks to everyone that showed up to support the arts. I forgot my camera last night but a couple people took pics. I'll post them when i get em. I went down this morning and took some better pics of the artwork. here ya go.

happy friday

enjoy..




(see you at my show tonite)

art class sassafrass

ugh, i spent 3 hours learning about different pencils and shading. It was tough because i've spent the last 20 years learning how to do it my way and making it work. I understand the lesson but im not sure my 1 x 7 inch bars of shading in 7 degrees of grey will be what the teacher wants.

it's just not how i roll... I have a feeling this is how its gonna be all semester.

nice place, shitty food part II "Buffets"

you know, Chinese buffets are good, but at lunch, they are too much. I get all full and hot, then have to go back to the office.

Buffets are my best friend and worst enemy because I tend to take "all you can eat" as literal as possible. Some buffets, the food is so bad its more like "all you can stand". My dad likes buffets because its "all you can eat for $5.99! what a deal" its more of a quanitity over quality thing for him. he took us to some horrible places growing up. It can be shit, but as long as there is ALOT, then everything is fine

There are a couple stripmall wannabe upscale buffets out there. One is Fresh Choice wich we've had for a while. Its a basicly a buffet, but they make it seem all "Fresh" and stuff. Hence the name. Its more of a giant upscale salad bar with soups, baked potatoes, baked breads, pasta
Theres also Sweet Tomatoes which you might have heard of. I'd never been there but my girlfriend, Meg went there and said "its like Fresh Choice" one thing in common with most of those places and buffets usually is the soft serve at the end.

Sweet Tomatoes is Rita's favorite resturant. She says no one will go with her, mostly because she is friends with guys and all guys hate it. so she goes by herself. But is definitely a woman's restaurant. They should call it "steel magnolias" that way, we wouldnt waste our time. Its funny, you seem to see alot of "First dates" in there and the guys always look fucking miserable.
Because you arent getting full on one plate at a place like that. And you look like a pig getting up for 3rds. The whole time you're spooning through your Minestrone you begrudgingly got youre eyeballing the peperoni pizza they just brought out.

that, or pregnant women and miserable husbands picking at lettuce.

thanks Rita

nice place, shitty food.

I recently realised how much i dislike those midgrade, overly themed strip mall try-to-look-one-of-a-kind chain resturants. they always have them in all the "new" shopping center/malls and they consistently dont live up to the promise thier theme, creative menu and decor imply. its always white washed so-so versions of real food. and they charge you $10.00. for what, a fancy plate? this is basicly lean cuisine pasta in an oversized bowl with chopsticks from Cost Plus. ugh, Cost Plus, thats another story... fucking "handcrafted [in a Cost Plus sweatshop African statue factory] in Kenya".

i dont know if they have em out there but pretty much everything at the Bay St. shopping center they just put in out here. PF Changs, Buckhorn Grill, Pasa Pomodoro, ZAO, Askew, Rubios...ugh, i hate Rubios. They're all over now and they all suck but look awesome. they all have mouth watering menus of dissapointingly mediocre overpriced food. consistently wherever you go.

There's a couple that i'll let slide. California Pizza Kitchen is good, they have a unique and genuinly good menu.. plus its hard to fuck up pizza. Another one is Fuddruckers. I got used to Fuddruckers being a great local place, but when i went on tour I noticed them popping up all over, and to my dismay, they were sub par. they were like a shitty chain version of the place i grew up with at home. If you go there, ask them if they have the real Fuddruckers mustard. if they dont, leave. And a place I got to liking when i was in LA, is Baja Fresh. please dont confuse them with Rubios. Baja Fresh is actually good. and they just put one in finally up here and it lives up to my expectations.

so, dont be fooled by thier gourmet menus and gourmet prices. these places are just dressed up Dennys' with an ethnic flaire. youre paying extra for the decorations.

art show show art tart snow blow darts

its done. i hung everything thats gonna be hung. here's a ramshackle collage of horribly lit, low resolution phone cam preview of my walls. (walls, not balls.)

clicky picky for biggie

for those of you who forgetted.. its this friday

its this friday!!

why this beef pot pie tastes like fish? anyway, just finished putting up all my paintings for the show. bottles and all. i finished a couple more pieces this weekend as well. check em out.



there's a couple more but you'll have to come to see them... see you there.

Monkey That Can Play Ms.Pacman.

It would be amazing if he didnt totally suck at it. c'mon mr.pickles, everyone knows you eat the power pellets last.



yay! high five, you just got killed by a ghost one level 1. gimme a break. everyone thinks monkeys are so smart because they can do shit, like paint shitty pictures and do sign language... fuck even deaf people can do sign language.

school and art

well, I did it. I went to the first class of my 3 classes last night. The building the class was in was brand new and unfortunatly, under construction and nonexistent when they made the maps of the campus. Because of this, I got lost and was almost late. But I found it. A nice brand new building with great AC, brand new kick ass computers with wide screen flatpanel displays! the instructor said our asses were the first to sit in the new chairs! i wanted to fart so bad. I found out officially that its basicly a Photoshop class. I get get by pretty well in Photoshop but I know it all from trial and error. If there's a right way to do shit, this class will help me learn it.




Before I went to class I went to the gallery to help them hang my paintings. I brought in what i thought was a ton of art. Every painting I have. Now that its on the wall in there it looks like a spit in the ocean. I'm gonna dress it up a bit and I still have to hang my painted bottles up. It's gonna be really cool tho. I hope to see you all there!

Next week is my Art class and my AutoCad class. I'm not so worried about the Art, but AutoCad is a sonofabitch of a program. At least I'll have my friend Jer there with me.

rock sauce.

hype to live up to

So, for the heck of it I picked up the new East Bay Express and thumbed through it. To my surprise I saw one of my drawings in the "This Week" section. The blurb about my art show I posted earlier was printed in this weeks Issue. check it out.
on page 35...

effing sweet.

this is wierd tho. I had just gotten used to getting press and attention with Fingertight but this is different. There arent 3 other guys to hide behind or give credit too for the attention. It's all me.

anyway, Here we go again.

poop on a stick!

Jimbo said he is "flowing" on a new blog... damnit, i just cant find anything to write about. maybe its because all the little shit that pisses me off just doesnt seem that big of a deal when WWIII is about to happen, black box voting, clearing brush at the Crawford Ranch and all that bullshit... and even then, rants about politics get old. Everything has been said. this painting by Ryan Jacob Smith pretty much sums it up...

anyway, so... little shit eh? This surprised/pissed me of yesterday. I pull into this lot and wondered if my car got bigger all the sudden.. i felt like a giant in a tiny world. look at these god damned parking spaces.. when they say compact they mean it!

Yeah, thats right, i have a chain license plate frame. also, I burned the mix CD for my art show today. I tried to get fancy with the paint pens and they melted through the data on the CD.. eeerrp so i burned another one. I was more carefull with the decoration.

here's the tracklist

1. Jamais Vu - Dredg
2. Revolve - Melvins
3. Act Appalled - Circa Survive
4. Blood and Thunder - Mastodon
5. First It Giveth - Queens Of The Stone Age
6. Shitty Future - The Bronx
7. I'm Running My Inkpen - Wesley Willis
8. Say It Ain't So - Weezer
9. maybe - fingertight
10. Honey Bucket - Melvins
11. Oceans Of Class - The Bronx
12. Track 07 - Domeshots
13. Tangled Up In Plaid - Queens Of The Stone Age
14. A.K.A I-D-I-O-T - The Hives
15. Wish Resign - Circa Survive
16. poniesnew - The Few
17. Undone (The Sweater Song) - Weezer
18. Sweet Willy Rollbar - Melvins
19. bruised & broken (where do we go) - fingertight
20. Dine Alone - Quicksand
21. Supply And Demand - The Hives
22. No One Knows - Queens Of The Stone Age

you've probably never heard of some of this shit, but its 69 minutes of distortion guitars and thundering drums. its pretty much the rockinest shit ever*... (*of what i had in my car)

In other art news, I pooped this out of my brain last night.

Mr. Death exercises by surfing the jet pizza. He's a maniac.

neighbors suck

So the empty cublicle behind me is now occupied by an upper level engineering guy. sort of a superior to me. I have way more seniority but he was hired to run shit. anyway, I have a constant eye over my shoulder now. fucking sucks. Now I have to work harder at looking like i'm working hard.

In other news, we took the cat to the vet and for unrelated reasons we let the dog hang out in our place, which is rare because he stinks.


He wasnt a happy camper. we put his cage upside down with the door open and he was holding on for dear life... wouldnt budge. ended up dismantling the carrier crate and holding him down with a thick towel.


Meg did an art piece using scratchboard in her art class back in the day and wanted to do it again, so i researched it and got all the supplies to make some. We havent scratched them yet. I'll put pics up when we do. You know i will. If you dont know what a scratchboard is, its a board that starts out black, and you scratch the black away revealing white.. its like drawing but backwards.

One of the supples is India Ink. I'd never messed with the stuff until this weekend. Its, pretty much what it says... its ink. black ink. Its most typical use is for fountain pens. I decided to mess with it like paint. I did this little guy on gesso (white primer, surface prep stuff) and colored it with an orange Crayola marker.

speaking of markers... this also happened.

happy monday.
this is my desktop BG at the moment.

Escape from Zombie Island

hey shitties. I painted last night. I havent painted a skull in forever. I dont think I've even really done a skull since i've been painting regularly. I kinda got burnt out on them, but I got nostalgic last night and doodled this up. "Escape from Zombie Island"
Acrylic on 5x7 wood plaque. by the way, since i started painting on these plaqes i've noticed a lot of other artists doing it. fucking posers. I should start painting on petrified turds.. see how they like that!

Snakes on a Plane

Ok by now you've heard about this terror plot that was thwarted. god, they love that word, thwarted. Anyway, this gives our government fear pushers the opportunity to use the RED bar in that stupid terror alert chart. They always fucking do this. To late assholes. What it you didn't "thwart" this plot and the bombs went off.. We would have still been at yellow. Your chart is lame! It's like falling off your bike and then putting your helmet on.

Anyway, I don't belive any of it. The news makes it seem like they caught them red handed at the airport. No, they just found out about it from a little birdie and arrested some dudes. If they knew about this shit long enough to hunt down these guys why did they ban liquids and carry-on luggage just this morning? After the arrest. Also, is making a bomb like that even chemically possible? Probably, I'm no chemist. but who's to say these guys were? Apparently the 9-11 terrorists weren't even that good of flight school students, but they managed that feat.

Just the idea that something could happen is stripping away our freedom one carry-on luggage item at a time. I'm sick of being terrorized by our own government. I just don't care anymore.... I'd rather live without fear and restrictions. The odds are so low that something will happen any given day I say fuck it. I'd rather be free.

Lets all get electric cars and stop fucking around with those assholes, and be free again.

*disclaimer; I am in no way an expert on this subject and my facts may be heavily skewed by my opinions and outrage. Have a nice day... and sir, I'm going to have to confiscate that snake. Since the terror plot in Poopistan was thwarted, we don't allow snakes on the plane, as they may contain explosive materials.

God damnit!

I made it better i think

This is a painting I did back in 1999. yea, in the gay 90's. It was inspired by a story this guy told me. He was on the porch with a friend and saw a large saucer shape flying overhead.. then seconds later was followed by military jets. It was a kinda nutty story so I made this painting. I never really liked how the bottom right corner turned out but figured thats the best I could do at the time. I felt like I could do it a little bit better now, so i redid it last night and intend on having it in my art show.

the old version.

and the new one

Acylic on Canvas 28" x 22", which is pretty big for me.