creepy feelings | 0 replies since Aug 4, 2008, 08:11 PM
Bobbie West: Slowly, we are sinking into the quicksand. The problem is that not only is no one throwing us a rope but the people in charge of ropes are in denial that a pit even exists!. It doesn't exist?! Then what is this sticky crap leaking into my shoes? Can you feel it, or are you waiting for someone to tell you about it? How about someone yelling about it? How about some poor schnorrer screaming that he can no longer take it. That he can see the the end is near. That the mortgage and the car payments, the gas and the kids' stuff and the no more going out to a fancy restaurant on the weekends is starting to choke the life right of him. And he knows that any minute his head will be eveloped in a slippery, slimy, stinking, ooze that is filling his ears and nostrils and that his final gasp will open a gaping hole for the ooze to flood in and leave it's signature skidmark. Oh, and Beverly Hills Chihuahua!

It's Mind Blowing Time! | 0 replies since Jul 20, 2008, 03:39 AM
Bobbie West: A long time ago in a truly nice little land called Usa (pronounced "U-sah"), the people were striving and growing and believing that all mankind was basically good and God fearing and wanted to be fair and just. Not monarchical and tyrannical because they had just spent a lot of time and money to leave a place just like that. The smartest people in the land set up some "house rules" and that was good but they never suspected with their basically good and God fearing brains that any individual of their fair, just and free land would purposefully and willfully put single-minded greed before the well-being of the rest of the inhabitants let alone jeopardize the very exisistence of the land itself. But guess what? Some people did just that! Mind you, the repercussions of said act may not have been anticipated at the time but in hindsight, no one in charge even now acknowledges the act for what it was-let alone learned from the act in order to not repeat it. There lies the crux. Back then, the air was cleaner, the water was in pretty good shape and there was an expansive trolley system all over the denser populated areas such as the western village of El Lay and the bigger town to the north, Friskoburg. Out in the farmlands of Usa there were lots of crop farmers who used what they called the "horseless GO cart" since these machines replaced the horses and made the endless the piles of poop GO away. Horse poop that use to lie in the street until kicked to the "curb" by boys that had lost their can. The horse whiz was worse tho. It mixed with the dirt streets and made a peculiar smelling muddy river that constantly flowed down the sides or the middle of every street and always ended up saturating the fancy white lace that hung from the hem of the pioneer dresses so popular with the women-folk. Just so ya know. Anyway, when the trolleys were brought in, fashion designers everywhere breathed a sigh of fresh air. Back out in the "sticks" as the outer farm regions were known, the go-carts were ran on fuel like the horses but this fuel had to burn inside the machine, hotter than a habanera, for the cart to move on it's own power. The "muscle cars" (as they were later known) were built to run on a liquid known by it's chemical name, alcohol. The metal, muscle-buggy was very popular in El Lay but only rich people could afford them and most other folks in the cities used the trolley system for wherever they needed to go. Now the farmers out in the sticks had different metal wheelie-deelies because they had different needs than the city folk. They needed a big carrier thingy to truck their crops into the cities to sell. So that's what they ended up naming their metal go-carts. The "truck". The farmers would get a "fill up" of alcohol for his truck when he went the city but there were no convenience stores out in the sticks back then so he had to make his own fuel for the truck and the other machines on the farm as well. He then wrote to the Ford Motor Company and asked for the recipe for the alcohol fuel. Surprisingly they wrote back and even included a coupon for brylcreem! It took a few months but after a while, the crap the pigs wouldn't eat sat in a barrel and liquefied and got all steamy but according to the recipe that was alright. After a little filtering, the alcohol could be put right into the tractor or truck. not too long after, there was way more alcohol than the farmer needed so the farmer was happy.The pigs were happy too, except when they went for a ride in the truck and they didn't come back. Back then, traveling salesmen would come by to sell the farmer the latest farm technologies like the sod-buster and the corn-holer, and then would pretend to be too tired to "be on his way". Later that night he would sneak into the hot, farmer's daughter's room even though he promised to stay in the sitting room and sit no matter what. In the morning, of course, the daughter made hush puppies with a hickie on her neck while the salesman looked nervous, but rested. Right after the salesman picked up his teeth off the busted sod, he bought some alcohol from the farmer for a ridiculously, sky-high, gougy price but felt lucky that he had a full tank and an empty one at the same time. It got to be common all over that when anyone needed alcohol for their autogo-cart and they weren't in the city, they could buy it from any farmer. Also that if they fueled up later in the day, there was a slim chance that they would be too tired to continue their journey before dawn and decide to stay the night. Over time tho, many have learned to make that decision after dinner. Meanwhile......TO BE CONTINUED.

one for all, all 4 1 | 0 replies since Jul 9, 2008, 05:33 PM
Bobbie West: The "gap fire" in Santa Barbara has run it's main course. Mom went back to her home across the great divide and everything is copacetic. The really humongous concern that many of the online community voiced on blogs and boards was that there is no system in place for residents to access real-time upates of the fire location or other pertinent info. It's not a diffacult system to set up so let's hope someone says "yes" to using the new technologies that are now available (at a reasonable licensing fee) to build a little digital, emergency broadcast infrastructure for just this local purpose. We can't leave that task to the city gov. or any gov. agency because it won't get done. Remember our state EBS system? it barely functions right now and "everyone" knows the promised new upgrade to it isn't getting built but no one seems concerned enuf and aren't doing much of anything about it. Why wouldn't a valueable california community with so much invested in real estate and tourism and with with so much dead foliage laying about (especialy moving toward Montecito and all those vast, wooded estates) and with the hotter, dryer atmosphere upon us risk life and limb by neglecting to install a proper alert system providing real-time up to the minute targeted info at the touch of a button? It was truley a convergence moment (after the hilarity subsided) when the media outlet with the most up to date fire info turned out to be the local, independent newspaper! The local, established newspaper hasn't been able to get out of it's own way since the blond"e" took over and TV in any small market is mostly trying it's hardest to resist change. Oh, just forget local radio; it's a minimum wage job now and "let's all go snort coke instead of work" or as I've detected on more than a few occassions listening to my old market share competitors, "let's snort coke and go on the air!" (plus, not a lot of people like to work more than a few hours a day in this town, anyway). As i see it, the newspapers are in luck. This medium is accustomed to word processing and graphics manipulation and seemingly less intimidated by the digital aspect of the revolution. I suspect it is because that industry had to learn to use computers during the desktop publishing evolution so they have already experienced the terror and got over it. Now TV and Radio are on the spit..sizzle, sizzle, foshizzle! But i digrizzle. We got updated pictures of the fire itself and a detailed look around at the situation because of a single repoter from The Santa Barbara Independent who just went out and shot some stills. Video too. And thus, my convergence point. When some guy can go out with a video camera, etc. and get the best coverge in the area for a breaking local story, what does that mean? It means he's the top eyeballs and ratings getter and in this business, he is the top boadcast source. That puts the newspaper in direct competion with TV and radio but with much lower overhead and now has a chance to overtake the market and go after premium advertising dinero. There is really only one medium now; broadcast. It's all the same thing and it isn't defined by it's delivery method. Bundling be damned! Please stand by for the fallout!

God's Shoe | 0 replies since Jul 9, 2008, 02:37 PM
Bobbie West: First George Carlin then Bozo. They both recently crossed over to that great vaudeville show in the sky. Now, (as legend has it) there will be a celebrity death hat trick. That's means "3" for the non-sports jingoists. There can't really be a foothold in reality to this fallacy, can there? I look to the NYT obits and see many famous croakers all around at this particular time, so who decides who's famous enuf to be placed in the lucky trifecta? There! another word from the wide world of spectator-driven sports; a world, BTW, I purposely stay uninformed of and away from...for ethical reasons. Except for kick boxing and women's roller derby. For the sake of entertainment tho, lets assume the 3 celebrity dead rule is a real occurrence. OK, who will be next? Who's in the celebrity dead pool? I don't have the time nor the inkling to check it and get back to you. So we're waiting for the other shoe to drop. Technically that would be a third shoe so that means in my mind i think there are people out there with three feet. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Explanation: In this overly sensitive PC environment, public journalists have to post a disclaimer with each possible stereotype or special interest group mal-alignment. (I'll take my disclaimer from Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld; now to be known as (for the record) the NTTAWWT.) The only entity or figure that could possibly get along fairly well with 3 feet is God. Shut up! you don't know. and i don't know, either. I'm just saying that if anybody could do it, God could. Any argument? God's feet. Now those would be some big feet, and if I may say so, one large-ass shoe to fill.

Bozo's dead, long live Bozo | 0 replies since Jul 3, 2008, 10:33 PM updated Jul 3, 2008, 11:41 PM
Bobbie West: Bozo is dead. Rest in pieces, Larry. Like many of my brethren, I owe something to Bozo. The original Bozo on KTLA Channel 5 because there were a few imitators and the younger Bozo replacements. Perhaps, growing up in the LA and always within the broadcast reach of LA media, Bozo must have been one of my influences. I mean I went into some type of show biz. A broadcaster is a type of clown...now-a-days. I was watching the show when the famous live on camera kid "cussing incident" happened. Larry the inveterate professional followed it up with a "That's a Bozo No-No!" Anyow, I had a friend (had - no she didn't die but she is no longer my friend) who with her dada-ist attitude was influenced more by Larry Harmon than I. She called Mr. Harmon in the early 80s at his Hollywood home and spoke with him for a bit; thanking him for her wonderful memories and affirming for him that he was the original and the best at what he did. And Mr. Harmon said to her as they were saying their goodbyes, he thanked her for the call and said to her, "Thank you so much for calling. Not many people remember an old Bozo".

Where I'm from and why I suck | 0 replies since Jul 3, 2008, 07:00 PM updated Jul 3, 2008, 07:11 PM
Bobbie West: Had to take some time off after that last post. And summer's making me lazy. Hey, you get what you pay for. That is why occasionally, I'll be grammatically incorrect, my punctuation suffers unbearably and that whole first person, second person thing is out the window . But hey, you get what you pay for (dangling participle). I'll only be giving this away until someone will pay me for it and then you can say you (kinda) knew me when. I know, I suck. But I suck a whole lot less than other things! (and a whole lot more than some things, so what?) After moving to Ventura last month, it seems we just made it out of Santa Barbara in time. The whole area including Goleta was without power from 7:30 till 1:30 am last night and some evacuation is going on in the canyons because of a nasty little fire that was whooped up by the winds last night and is still threatening as of this afternoon. Threats that are made good as in remembering the Painted Cave fire of late June 1990.( I didn't live in SB at the time). That fire came the closest to town, in my memory anyway. It actually jumped US highway 101 at one small point and took out more homes around there then ever. Even that crazy Las Alturas Rd. fire. It has a different name but the freaky part was that it burned down a prominent road in the hills of SB. House by house it creeped down the street a few times miraculously completely skipping one domicile only to leave nothing but cinders on the next lot. Anyway the point is that the Painted Cave fire was just piddling away at the rim of the Camino Cielo canyon (where it just so happens to be burning again right now) and when the sundowner winds came up at the end of the day, it took only 40 minutes or so for it to roar down the canyon and do the most damage. I think it was around 350 homes all and all? I better check my facts on that. But anyway if I don't just stay with me for a sec while I go "holee crap! That's not long to get the hell outa dodge." The families were evacuated already, thank god. Not like the killer Oakland Firestorm of '91 which I could see from the base of the Golden Gate Bridge. I didn't jump down there. There's a nice little walk along the bay beach to a fort place that you can peak into where guys would sit and hide till the "enemy" ship would try to enter the SF bay from the open ocean but when they got to that certain spot under the bridge the soldiers would aim their cannons out the little square holes and blammo! So I could see the Oakland Firestorm from all that way! Actually it was just a huge, black, column puffing straight up high as all highness then the pointed top sort of drifted to one side. This, I found out was just the start of what became a drive for, then run for your life situation when a sudden evacuation came up and all the exit roads but one caught fire. It's not that hard to leave SB this time around. Far from the partying age I once was and still struggling to make my retirement nest egg goal, SB does seem to live up to it's adopted name, "The town of the newly wed and nearly dead". I kid! Nah, I love SB and always will. You know, that is how you spot a true Santa Barbarian (my phrase) they are are the ones bitching and moaning about living in a town that is clearly paradise. SB is my adopted home town in that my parents were both born there, grandparents settled and passed away there and many relatives I hardly know have no doubt continued to reproduce and carry on with the business of life, doing whatever it is they do there. I don't know. I've lived in SB five separate times. It's the kind of place you love then you get bored and move, then you miss and move back, then you hate and move away, then you buy a nice home by the mission so you move back, then you sell the home for 2 1/2 times what it cost you seven years ago (without a single upgrade!) and leave but then can't find a decent rental in your price range, get pissed off and move to Ventura!

Did James Douglas Morrison have the right idea? | 0 replies since Jun 30, 2008, 09:37 PM
Bobbie West: You can listen along to today's theme music as you read if you are registered at lastFM - highly recommended! http://www.last.fm/music/Blue+%C3%96yster+Cult/_/Before+the+Kiss%2C+a+Redcap For your consideration; please determine for yourself that if the sentence below was split in half, which half of the following Jim Morrison quote would you consider to be true? "I'm gonna get my kicks / before the whole shithouse goes up in flames". Which part of the quote is true? Which has more meaning for you? The first half, the back half, or both, or neither? The reason why this needs to be brought to your attention is so that you can prepare yourself for the latter with the wisdom of the former . The LA Times burped out the day before yesterday that the city is now planning for a world where $200 dollars is the price of a barrel oil. This is significant, you see, because the effects are starting to get people's attention. And as usual, it's too late to really address the problem properly because as Americans, we are taught to wait till the pain is so great before we do anything about a problem and then slap a band-aid (by Johnson and Johnson(tm), a really feed forward kind of company that runs their big manufacturing plant on solar power!) solution on it. Much like the effect of home foreclosures continues to ripple thru it's cycle; spinning and spitting out homeowners like a gin-soaked mortgage cyclone, the *real costs* of petrol is starting to gnaw at the tenders of certain socio-economic levels that will also ripple thru the system impacting the surrounding areas (us) in a myriad of ways. In an extreme case for one poor soul, the cost to commute to her social services job in L.A. from Palmdale, has roughly doubled in the last year from $500 per month to nearly $1,000 and so now the cost of commute gas alone is about 20% of her gross. She is 57 and is considering retirement. I say she better retire now! She's beginning to lose money on the deal because the cost of getting to her job is rising and it isn't deductible. And because of the wear and tear on her vehicle, extra maintenance and it's possible replacement cost if it wears out before she does. Lastly, more subtle and esoteric are her losses of precious time left on earth, lessened brain acuity from prolonged stress and fumes plus the ever present risk of a car accident. These are just some of the true costs of gas to consider. ..."While outside on the turnpike They got this new hit tune Where thrills become as cheap as gas And gas as cheap as thrills" Those days are long gone but we have music to help us remember the good times (cue the music track if you haven't by now) Next is the cost of transporting goods, namely food. We're headed right back to where we started 50+ years ago; the concept of local distribution. Here is a little story to help me illustrate my point-if there is one, I don't know. A long, long time ago there were little towns scattered around and most were close to some form of water.The towns that didn't settle around some type of water needn't be addressed - ever. Each little towns had some farms, a grocery store, a school house, a black smithee, a dress shop, a calaboose (jail), a bone orchard, a hotel, a bar and a whorehouse. Sometimes the last three were bundled into one establishment and described by the long archaic, real estate term; "hot "L" Baltimore." Anyway, everybody would walk or trot (and hopefully this would be done on a horse) to one place or another to pick up something they needed or to "dicker" about the price or quality of something before they bought it and took it home. Back then, everybody was brought up to know how to dicker and there was a lot of dickering going on, too. Everything was in one place or what came to called, "around the corner" (another long lost archaic term) which became known in business jargon as "local". Then progress came along and they got the iron horse then they got the horseless carriage and then, they got rid of the horses altogether! Then came Federal Express which the young'uns know only as FedEx. This FedEx had actual flying machines! Not to be confused with a Pegasus, of course. And there was one man who took these flying machines and bequeath that they should fly forth from a central hub. A big ass central hub located near the birthplace of our King! That's right, Elvis. This was a big, hot-ass hub, a hub with giant "spokes" sticking out of it in a design that the man based on the wagon wheel, by coincidence, that pointed to the little towns which by now had become large smelly, jungles of hot steel and hotter glass. Thus was born the concept of national distribution. Stuff from all over came into this one central office hub-ass thing and was placed on the "planes" (that's what they ended up naming the Pegasus's) according to their addressees, and flew them (again to be clear, on the planes) to a far away destination. And boy! The stuff got there fast too! Really fast...like, it seemed...overnight! And overnight was possible too because these planes had big souped-up turbo jet engines that burn up lots of fossil fuel but that didn't matter because gas was cheap! I guess you know where this is going. Backwards! Yes, follow the story from here backwards and you will see where the future of our physical distribution is headed. Back to local! There is a short term fiscal benefit for some of our local gyp joints and houses of ill repute and then there are others not so lucky. First, the bad news. The squeeze is always put to the lowest income families first.This is the natural law! The families that can least afford it take it in the huevos before the rest of us. Families struggling to hang on are blown outa the water before anybody that should cares does care. Sorta like following instructions to evacuate to the Kingdome and wait for help to arrive. These are our beloved menial workers. The ones that help us maintain our way of life with their blood, sweat and tears. They're the ones at the jobs we would never take. The jobs some of us will be taking when we get laid off and there will be openings for us because the laborers can't afford to live here anymore. On another economic level are the low to mid range income families who have, up until recently, patronized restaurants like the Fried Macaroni Bar and Chili-Willie's on Saturday nights as a special treat but now have to downgrade to burgers and pizza joints. The restaurants report that they are feeling the pinch already. OK, let's end this on a positive note. The good news is for some of our local entertainment destinations. Places like The Mouse Trap Kingdom Playland and it's north-eastern, sickley cousin; Six Toes over Mount Barf Bag. These places will be doing better because more of us will be staying local for our vacation time. Oh, and if anybody you know does get laid off, there is currently booming careers in the off shore oil business and that's the god's honest truth! "I ain't talkin' about no revolution. I'm talkin' about having a good time this summer". Jim Morrison

Trouble in Porn Paradise. | 0 replies since Jun 30, 2008, 09:31 PM
Bobbie West: The market driving segment leader which is also the king of new technology adoption of all time is a marketing tool. No, let me put it better by saying the best marketing tool of all time is..the Tool. Yeah that makes it clearer, right? The almighty Tool or "human horn" if you will (apologies to Futurama) has a new friend, called the 3G iPhone or what I have coined, the "PPP" for Personal Porn Player (see post below) thank you very much. This new technology joins the other friends of good old Peter Pecker; the Internet, the CD-ROM, the video tape and last but not least, the lowly skin mag at the corner liquor store. Oh yes! Now here's a little game-style I.Q. question for all you marketing whiz kids to try to answer. ok, which one of Peter Pecker's little friends listed above has a difference from the rest? Ponder the list a second. Can you see it? Hint: it has to do with blind mass-marketing. Hint 2: It has to do with the evolution of Web *and* it starts with the letter "P". If you said "free porn", you get a point! But it's in a another category called "short attention span and low tolerance for frustration". It's still a point, so don't feel bad ok? For the die hards, here's one more hint. Hint 3: the answer even has 3 P's! We are in alliteration orbit now. ok, if you said "Personal Porn Player" you get credit for retention but that's still not it. Ok, enuf with this s#&!%, you say. The correct answer to the question is Point 2 Point Peers! But what ho? The porn industry is feeling a bit blue because just as the internet has warped every kid under the age of 16 with the idea that everything media should be free, the free monster is now molesting the porn industry because of P2P sharing (eeeew!) and the motherload of all - DIY porn! I can't believe I just thought that thought. I gotta go wash off! The 3 emotional appeals that drives the porn industry; more, new, different (and now we can add the ultimate marketing four letter word-FREE) has the perfect manufacturer and delivery system with home made adults only video uploaded from joe blow and his sexy gal pal for your (and everybody else's) viewing pleasure for free. The numbers for the adult internet business is falling because of the ease of use (ewwww 2!). and the proliferation of share vids from any teen porn star wannabe with a camcorder phone and an Internet connection. Of course, I don't know first-hand of all this because I would never look for such a thing but if Mark Moreford says its true, that's good enuf for me...and it saves me time for more humble diversions such as communing with nature or selling hash oil trying to make ends meet.

Introducing the Personal Porn Player! | 0 replies since Jun 28, 2008, 04:00 PM
Bobbie West: The 3G enables the 3P: Apple's new 3G iPhone with WiFi, higher throughput and a bigger screen has enabled any common wanker to get some wherever and whenever he pleases with a little tag I call the "Personal Porn Player" or "3P" For you wise guys, let's coin the phrase, "3POh!" For the PPPorgasm or the PPP.org if you get my drift. Any one of those tags works. "Hey, Tommy's been gone from his desk 5 times today" ! ( I use the gender "he" because...well, DUH!) This silly topic leads the next post which has a more significant impact on the wetware market.