Twitter plus Google Maps...

= me staring slack jawed at the world we have wrought.

Oh My.

I'm working on a story this week about anti-drug PSAs. And I found this one. It features LaToya Jackson, Nancy Reagan, Patrick Swayze, Boogaloo Shrimp, Tootie, and scary living posters of David Hasselhoff and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

It's called "Stop the Madness". But the madness is just beginning.

Rocky Roll!

Come on down to the Seattle Drum School's LAB (Little Auditorium in the Back...12510 15th Ave NE in Seattle) tonight and enjoy some good old fashioned Birthday Party music with your old friends Chicken Starship! It's Paige Chicken's birthday (she's Scott Chicken's wife) and all she wanted for her birthday was a concert with her two favorite bands, us and the Sacred Truths. And for once her husband didn't let her down!

The show starts at 7...there was supposed to be a third band on the bill, but they have since bailed. The Drum School is trying to round up a replacement, but it's quite possible that they won't be able to. In which case the show will still start at 7, with the Truths getting the joint jumping. We will then hop on stage some time around 8 and shut down the joint.

Tickets are $5 at the door. It's all-ages, so no booze, but we will have various liquid refreshments available for a minor donation, and plenty of free birthday cake. So come help Paige Chicken whoop it up!


Chicken Starship
www.chickenstarship.com
www.myspace.com/chickenstarship

A Conversation with Charlie (Age 6) About Love

ME: So who was that girl at soccer practice?
HIM: Oh, that was (x).
ME: She seems to really, ah, like you.
HIM: She loves me! And whenever it's time to pick partners she just grabs me!
ME: Yeah, I noti--
HIM: And kisses me! She just loves me so much! She loves me so much that I just have to love her too. She kind of made me love her by loving me so much.
ME: Well, that'll happen sometimes.
HIM: It's like she wants to marry me but I'm just a kid!

Soul of Starbucks

By now, you've heard all about this memo Howard Schultz sent around about Starbucks losing its soul. I'm doing a story on it for this weekend's show. Going to a Starbucks with a pastor and a soul singer to talk about the idea of soul. On Seattlest, I found this clip:



and sent it to my editor in LA. His response after watching it: "I'm going to punch you the next time I see you."

Kate (Age 4) and Charlie (Age 6) try to make sense of Ozzy's bat eating, John Bonham's death, and the overall behavior of Motley Crue

Fortunately, the lead singers of Skid Row and Quiet Riot provide counsel. Here. I don't ordinarily plug my own stories, mostly cause there's too many of them. But I really love this story a lot.

Where the hell have I been?

Yeah, you see this is what happens when you start a new job. So I've been out of KUOW for a month now and working on Weekend America. I've been down to LA five times in the past six weeks, burning through one season of The Wire on DVD and almost two seasons of 24. I've hosted that show (Weekend America, not 24) three times. Meanwhile I've been trying to learn a new sound editing program and on top of that finding a new workspace (I am the Seattle bureau of the show), renting it, furnishing it, getting internet and phone hooked up, and trying to remember to occasionally shower and shave. So updates have been sparse on this blog. Sorry. Fans of Charlie and Kate will hear them on this weekend's show on a story I've been doing about how to teach your kids about heavy metal. I interviewed Kevin DuBrow of Quiet Riot and Sebastian Bach from Skid Row. And Charlie and Kate. Also had an interesting chat with Charlie about the ethnicity of Santa and Jesus which I'll post later.

Oh! And I'm officially going to be on a Starbucks cup. 5 million of them, actually, where my quotation will be covered by a cardboard sleeve and then the cup tossed without a thought. Coming in the fall just in time for the paperback. Have I mentioned I wrote a book?

Holy God do I miss college sometimes

A Conversation with Charlie (Age 6) About Artistic Intent

HIM: Dad, when they sing "You Got Another Thing Comin'", I think I know what they're talking about.
ME: Who? Judas Priest?
HIM: Yeah. It's Star Wars.
ME: How do you figure?
HIM: What?
ME: What do you mean?
HIM: I think it's about Luke. He blew up the Death Star but he's got more bad guys coming. He's got more empire stuff and the emperor.
ME: Out there is a fortune waiting to be had. Maybe that fortune is peace across the galaxy.
HIM: Yeeeeeah.

Goldilocks and the Three Bears (by Charlie, Age 6, part three of a three-part series)

Author's note: for older kids over the age when Goldilocks runs away from the three bears. In this one they eat her.

Once there was a little girl named Goldilocks.
Her house was horrible!
The roof wasn't on right and it let all the air blow in.
It didn't have anything, just walls and a window.

One day after school Goldilocks went outside to play.

After she got out of school, she saw some construction workers making her house better than before. Thye put furniture in and everything.

She walked and walked in the forest until she came to a cabin. It was so cool. She walked inside.

She found three balls of deer meat and there was cups of deer blood. And a decoration of deer horns. Suddenly the three bears stormed in.

They quickly divided her into six pieces and ate her all up.

"For Christmas, I wished for a bunch more Goldilocks," the bears said.

The End!
Burp!

If only presidential elections were this meta

So I'm in this tournament of blogs, right? Innocent fun. It turns out Not Martha, my opponent, posted something on her blog about wanting people to vote in the competition and especially urging them to vote for me. Obviously, people started voting in droves...for her.

I'm past the point of keeping up with this contest in terms of intent or even understanding what victory would mean.

Kate (Age 4) Employs the Schizophrenia Defense

ME: Kate, I found an empty box of Christmas chocolates and wrappers all over your bedroom floor. Did you eat them?
HER:...uh...well...daddy...the care bears wanted me to eat them...
ME: The Care Bears?
HER:...it was...um...Lock Bear and Sunshine Bear's birthday...and they had a party...and Lock Bear turned...twenty six...and Sunshine Bear...is... twenty eleven...
ME: So why did they want you to eat candy?
HER: ...they can't eat and they want me to be happy...

Badness Continues

After years of opposing "Martha", I finally get a new challenger.

Barack Obama might talk a good game but can he build a flying saucer?

Been doing some research today on candidates that are further down the list. This guy is a real actual declared candidate for President, filed the papers and everything, Democrat:

I am President Warren Roderick Ashe. I was born in Whitakers, North Carolina on January 20th, 1957. I am married with 5 children, Alexander, Maurice, Apollo, Vermond, and Nikki. Alex and Maurice are now in college. My wife Corether and I live in Newsome Park community in Newport News.
I am the United States President Auxiliary since 1981. I am also the Founder, Owner, President of my company Jyperonix Astrophysics. Which is a Fortune 500 company at the top of the list. I am involved with time travel communications that are real. And capable of time travel contact throughout history itself.
The transmissions involves White House, Congress, Air Force, department of FCC, and the DOD-SBIR/STTR program for submission proposals. I also build flying saucers that are capable of going to another solar system at high warp speed.
I started this program of time travel communications in the Ronald Reagan administration in 1981. The time travel transmissions have communicated at least and no less than 500 years into the future. I have used my saucers built by hand at Edgecombe Community College in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. That has already since 1983 taken sperm and DNA into the future. Into the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th centuries. The methods I used are through flux capacitation and wormhole technology.

Can You Feel the Badness?

Then it must be Blarch! (apparently there is voting going on)

A Conversation with Charlie (Age 6)

HIM: Dad, what are zombies?
ME: Well, zombies are these made up creatures and they're supposed to be dead people who come back to life and they walk around trying to eat brains.
HIM: Yeah. We play zombie tag at school sometimes.
ME: How does that work?
HIM: Well one person is it and they're a zombie and if they catch you you're a zombie.
ME: But aren't they always slow?
HIM: Yeah. It's hard for the zombie.
ME: It always is.
HIM: So zombies are just pretend monsters?
ME: Yep. They're make believe people who die and then come back to life.
HIM: SO JESUS WAS A ZOMBIE?!
ME: What? Uh...
HIM: He died and came back to life! DID JESUS EAT BRAINS, DAD?!
ME: Well...
JILL: It does sound a lot like what you said about Jesus, except for the brains part.
ME: Well...uh...
HIM: I'm just kidding, Dad. I'm pretty sure Jesus was just made up.

Goldilocks and the Three Tigers (by Charlie, Age 6, part two of a three-part series)

Once there was a little girl named Goldilocks. Her house was so boring so she went for a walk out in the woods. There was not many trees in the forest so she thought it would be safe.

It was very dark in teh forest. She was frightened.

She came to a cottage. It was very fancy. She walked inside.

Goldilocks found three bowls of meat. When she was about to eat them three tigers walked in.

They quickly divided her into seven pieces. And they ate her all up.

The end.

(coming soon: the final story, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, which, I am advised, is for older kids)

Goldilocks and the 3 Lions by Charlie (age 6) (part one of a series)

Once there was a little girl named Goldilocks. Her house only had one thing: a fireplace that only lit up for one second. It was very boring.

She walked and walked until she got to Africa. She found two of the biggest trees to rest under. She rested for hours and hours.

She found herself on a table on a plate. She had a feeling she was being watched.

She was being watched by 3 lions. It was very frightening. The rope was so tight she couldn't even move a millimeter.

They quickly divided her into 11 pieces and put them on the the table and ate her all up.

The end! (gulp!)


Coming soon: Goldilocks and the 3 Tigers!

How You Know When You Took The Right Job

So I start Monday at my new job. I was down in Los Angeles on Monday for a meeting and saw the big board of possible stories. One of them was "Van Halen 3rd Singer".
"You're interviewing Gary Cherone?!" I asked.
"We want to," my new boss told me.
I've come to the right place.

I'm On The Radio!

Yeah, I know but this is slightly different. If you missed any of my readings for the book I wrote (did I mention I wrote a book?), you can hear the Elliott Bay reading tonight at 10 on KUOW here in Seattle. Or on kuow.org on the Interwebs. I'll post a permalink for it when I get one. I've had nothing to do with the editing aside from providing the weird picture posted here.