The Pineapple - You're welcome!

The pineapple is the international symbol of hospitality. Crown your centerpiece with one at your next formal dinner. Do not leave the mahogany dining table bare the next morning; put a fine porcelain pineapple on it and one in the foyer too. Pineapple wallpaper for guestrooms seems appropriate, perhaps with a rich brown background. Delight visitors with a pineapple robe in their closet and pineapple-shaped guest soaps. If you have not used pineapple finials on your exterior, I suggest you hop to it at once - very New Orleans.

Dressing for the opera? Wow the crowd with a pineapple vest and drawers. Speaking of exteriors (wasn’t that a Woody Allen movie?) we all fly activity flags from our front porches these days whether it be a pumpkin, shamrock or crossed knitting-needles. Fly a pineapple! You will soon have unexpected guests. Until then, aloha and mahalo.

Chateau Marmont

It's no Alpine Village, but Chateau Marmont, this is their video.

Sue Mutant Reacts to Jello Biafra

To negotiate doing Cuckoo clock set designs for Vogue, I visited Conde Nast in San Francisco. I bring this up because you may think the blond singing in this soft rock video is Meryl Streep (Streep does sing these days, mostly Abba); however, it's actually Sue Mutant of the Mutants (San Francisco mutation). I have used parenthesis twice! As the great typographer Tschichold said (I paraphrase here) parenthesis disrupt both the reader and the graphic design. The authority on grammar, Fowler, has nothing against the twin moons as long as they are used correctly. His stand on exclamation points is much different, but he was not the person who said they should only be used by schoolgirls passing notes.

Mardi Gras

I was rototilling the terraces of my garden when it began to rain so I hid in the barn. To kill time I decided to use the Julian calendar nailed to the wall to figure out when Easter falls this year. It has been falling earlier and earlier each year, in fact this year it falls before last year's Easter so I missed Mardi Gras! I attribute this back luck time warp to a float of a Toby Mug in the 2007 Mardi Gras. Toby Mugs are one of my top ten phobias, in fact they are No. 2., right after piano scarves. However, if any readers of this blog own a piano keyboard scarf you are granted a plenary indulgence.

Many photos by doctorwho on flick creative commons. Photo of basset hound by Bryce Digdug (c) 2007.

Circus Finelli is Back!!!!

Don't miss these girls, girl.
Stage Werx533 Sutter StreetFebruary 20, 21, 22 and 27, 28 and March 1at 8 pm
Click to buy tickets at brownpapertickets

Smack Dab World Premiere

Kirk Read and Larry-Bob Roberts originated the roles of Tiny and the Gunslinger in my new play the E______ of C_______. They were marvelous. We split our gloves applauding. This was followed by improvised A Capella singing by a strangely untroubled Norwegian youth formerly of Vancouver. You could feel all those good negative ions radiating from him from being up there with the trees. I pray he doesn't become jaded.

Smack Dab is a reading featuring a featured reader and then open mic sign-ups the third Wednesday of every month. Near Walgreen's.

Avanti in the arts

Now that the ICMDB, the Internet Car Movie Database (see previous) has taken off, did you that the Avanti was in Karate Kid?

Rushmore

Fabulous new discovery: the Internet Movie Car Database. Par example: it lists all of the cars in North by Northwest including Eve's with the famous slanted headlights. Remember? Remeber when Eve (Eva Marie Saint) fired blanks into Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) in the Mount Rushmore cafeteria? She drives her white 1958 Lincoln Continental Mark III convertible through a Freudian birch tree forest for a final farewell with Roger because the spies she is counter-spying on are going to fly in a small plane to the "other side" (some pre-glasnost Eastern European country) from South Dakota. "Why Leonard, I think you're jealous." Remember this trick if you're ever trapped upstairs in a pseudo Frank Lloyd Wright House. Have a matchbook handy. Write a message on it with a tiny, expensive pen and toss it over the interior balcony onto the high-shag carpet below. Leonard, being fastidious, will pick up the book off the carpet and drop it on the coffee table in front of Eva Marie Saint. James Mason will bite his fist.

Removes plaque

This morning I was keynote speaker at an on-site retreat for a toy company here in San Francisco. It was just a steep stairway walk down from my Telegraph Hill place. Perfect weather. I carried a cuckoo clock with me and in the spirit of How Things Work I expounded on the physics of the clock on the sporty dais. Remember: the shorter the dog's tail, the faster it waves.

The retreat food look like the usual congealed gravy type so I skipped it. Before I climbed the steep hill back home I stopped by The Fog City Diner for an early dinner and was immediately seated in my regular booth. There were the brass plaques of the booth's regulars: Norm Sobel, John Folan, that Republican creep Hal "Morning in America" Riney, strawberry-haired Sandy Dalis and rubber heiress Elsa Trexler. Mine was stolen!

Stanley Kubrick and Milk Chan

This is a montage with Joy Division playing in the background. I just realized how much the pods resemble Tetsuko in Super Milk Chan from our previous blog.