Free Pager with 3-Night Stay

There's a funky old motel called the Matador in College Town. It looks like it was probably built in the '50s. It's pretty run-down now, and looks to be mostly of a residential nature. My favorite thing about it can be seen in a closer view of its sign:

"Daddy, can we stay there? They have touch-tone phones! We can play 'Mary Had a Little Lamb'!Pleeeeease?!"

I love how they are still using a technology that became the standard in the 1980s as a draw. I think it would be cooler if they went retro and installed rotary-dial phones in their unintentionally throw-back motel. They'd probably get a lot of hipster business.

Bat Country

I love a lot of things. Three of them are Halloween, Hunter S. Thompson and Frank Zappa. Fortunately for me, those three things are converging next month, and I am a happy man.

There is a local Frank Zappa tribute band called For the Love of Frank. I've been to all of their shows, except for one or two which were basically trial runs at a tiny bar in Mountain Town before I knew of the band's existence. The first time I saw them, at a funkily fantastic place called Lost on Main in downtown College Town, they were actually playing with none other than Ike Willis - long-time Zappa second banana and a man of awesome voice and guitar skills. Another time Ike and two other Zappa alumni - Ray White and Bobby Martin - played with FTLOF at the fabulous Sierra Nevada Brewing Company's Big Room - one of Northern California's premiere venues for live music. But venues big or small, and with or without Ike, when FTLOF plays, a splendid time is had by all, and especially by yours truly.

Ike is returning to play with my local musical heroes on Tuesday, October 29th, again at my newly beloved favorite priced-right downtown night club. The first time they played together, the audience was invited to "dress like a freak", but sadly, not many obliged. Now, being so close to Halloween, this is again being encouraged. I plan on attending as my favorite freak: HST, or more specifically Raoul Duke from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

This has been my default Halloween costume several years in a row (except last year when I was Bane):

But back to HST - my son thinks I'm in a rut, but I think of it as refining and perfecting the costume. Over time I've collected some exacting parts of the costume: Las Vegas visor, sunglasses, cigarette holder, etc. And this year I think I've lost enough weight that I can pull off the costume without looking more like Saul Bloom from Ocean's Eleven than Raoul Duke:

Which one's our Rimpy? Obviously not the one with Brad Pitt.

And to top it all off (in a manner of speaking), I'm going to shave the top of my head to match my literary hero's 'do (because hair with the visor just won't work and bald caps are for wimps!):

See? Lame!

Here's a preview of how that might look in progress:

A drunken dare.

So I was really looking forward to the show. Before I even knew what my work schedule would be like at the end of October (we bid for new schedules four times a year, and lower echelon guys like me can seldom be sure what we'll get), I requested (and received) October 29th and 30th as vacation days so that I wouldn't risk missing the show and so I could stay up late, have a good time (maybe a couple of drinks) and not have to worry about going to work the next day. Then I could lay low at home with my weird head for a day and then go back to work on Halloween proper, again in full regalia. One nice thing about my job is they let us drive in costume (provided it doesn't interfere with the safe operation of the coaches or cause fear and loathing in the passengers).

Then I got my new schedule, and it turned out I had been wise to choose that course of action - I now work late on Tuesday nights and have to go in agonizingly early on Wednesdays - the very night and day after the show.

Then tragedy appeared to strike: I needed to cash out my vacation pay because of an emergency bill, so I had to rescind those vacation days I had requested. I was thinking that maybe I wouldn't go to the show at all, and was feeling rather sorry for myself as a result. Then I found out that due in part to my length in service and our new union contract, I now earn a respectable 6.67 days per month of vacation pay. A quick calculation and a confirmation from the HR manager gave me the glad news that I would earn enough vacation hours by the end of October to cover the two days I had originally requested. So I requested them again and got them! Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

So everything is in place for what promises to be a high fine time of music and crazy badness, except for one desirable accessory:  anyone in my area interested in playing the attorney?

Acid and Magnum optional

To Protect and...Oh, Dear God!

Dear Penthouse;

I never thought this would happen to me, but...No, seriously, here is the story of why the police saw me naked when I was stone cold sober.

I was sitting in my living room, clad only in boxers, having breakfast preparatory to getting ready for work. It was about five in the morning. Mrs. R was awake in our bedroom at the far end of the apartment. Rimpy Jr. was awake in his bedroom, which is at the same end as our bedroom.

Suddenly two or three shots rang out, followed quickly by what sounded like a woman screaming. Now, we don't live in the greatest neighborhood, and gunfire is -sadly - common enough that we haven't before called 911, but I've always felt a little bad about that. But these shots were followed by screams, so I ran to the bedroom to find the phone. I asked my wife if she had heard anything, but she hadn't. Turns out Rimpy Jr. hadn't heard the shots or the screams either.

I called 911. From the questions the operator was asking me, I got the impression that I was not the first caller about this incident. The screams had stopped even before I called, and after I hung up all seemed quiet in the neighborhood.

My wife and I spent the next few minutes pondering the possible meaning of these sounds, until she said, "Why aren't we hearing any sirens?" A good question, I thought. I looked out the kitchen window and saw a police officer walk into our parking lot, headed for the front of our building. I thought he may wish to speak with me, so I rushed to put on a robe.

I should probably tell you a little about our building and some of our neighbors. It's a four unit building - two on the bottom, two on top. We are in one of the top units. On the other end of the distressingly small balcony are our neighbors, whom I shall call B and It. I don't want to go into too much detail about all the strange goings-on with that family (which has been reduced one way or another over the year-and-a-quarter we've lived here, to consisting of just the man and his pregnant wife, with a rotating cast of possible long-staying house guests), so just suffice it to say that they have problems. I half suspected that the shots and screams may have come from their apartment.

Underneath B and It lives a guy whose name I belatedly learned is Chuck. Before that we referred to him as Camaro Guy or Papa Bogan. Chuck's a pretty friendly guy, unless he's been drinking, which doesn't seem to have happened for quite a while now. Embarrassingly enough, I actually thought that there was a second adult male living in the apartment, possibly a brother of Chuck's. Turns out it was only ever Chuck, but sometimes he wears a baseball cap over his bald pate ringed with long, lank, greasy hair on the sides. It from upstairs seems to be on good terms with Chuck's loose-knit, ragtag family.

But back to arrival of the cop. After a few more minutes, no one had knocked. I decided I couldn't delay finishing getting ready for work, so I got in the shower. I had just finished up and was starting to dry off when the bathroom door opened up, and to my surprise I was looking at a member of College Town's Finest. I quickly hid my unmentionables behind my towel (which just had to be pink). He asked me my name, and then explained that they'd had a report of shots fired in or near the building and were checking all the units. My wife had let them in, but she probably didn't expect that they would barge into the bathroom while I was bathing.

For whatever reason, B and It wouldn't open their door to the officers' knocks. While I was hurrying to get dressed one policeman was standing in our open door, shining his super-bright flashlight on B's door, with the other hand at the ready on his holstered weapon. I couldn't get out of my apartment. I called work to tell them I might be a few minutes late, and why.

Then I heard one of the policmen say, "You have three seconds to open this door before we force it open." Three seconds later this statement was followed by the sound of the police doing just they said they would. Then there was a bit of clunking and banging around from inside the apartment.

When I made my escape, It was standing at the bottom of the stairway, Chuck was standing outside his door, and the police were still inside B and It's apartment, presumably with B.

Later I found out that Chuck also called 911 because he had heard the screams, and thought they were coming from B and It's aparment, and he had heard them arguing just before. I don't know if that was the source of the screams or not, and apparently the gun shots I heard were completely unrelated to our building.

When I got home that night, all neighbors were carrying on as if nothing had happened, and I know no more now than I did then, except that some poor cop had to see my penis.

Super Coffee?

I'm not sure where 7-Eleven is going with this "liquid Kryptonite" coffee idea. My understanding of the fictitious Kryptonite is that it makes Superman not just "normal", but unusually weak, which would in essence make anyone else more powerful than him. I guess there could be advantages to that, especially if you were a super villain. But, wouldn't you have to get Superman to drink your Kryptonite-infused coffee in order to gain this advantage? Drinking it yourself wouldn't have much effect, unless you were then to piss on Supe. Is the idea simply that this coffee is more powerful than Superman? But what can coffee do by itself?  Kryptonite's pretty useless unless it has Superman nearby to fuck up. It would be like taking poison to make yourself more powerful than other humans, because poison is more powerful than humans. The whole concept makes no sense to me.

Interestingly, this article does say this: "A forerunner of the Kryptonite concept was the unpublished 1940 story "The K-Metal from Krypton", by Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel. The K-metal in the story was a piece of Krypton which robbed Superman of his strength while giving humans superhuman powers, a plot point which decades later made its way into the TV series Smallville."

So maybe some marketers at 7-Eleven are really up on their Superman trivia, and I should just shut the heck up.

Virtual Vandalism Dept.: Tools and Fools

The sign for this nice little shop in College Town which peddles to the ardent fisherperson caught my eye. I realized that one little additional mark would create an alliterate condemnation of the sport:

Meet the New Sign, Same as the Old Sign*

I suppose this sort of thing happens all over the country, if not the world. Unfortunately, I don't get out of town that much, so I have nothing to which to compare my new town of residence. I hope this isn't just some sort of College Town thing, but come to think of it, I don't recall seeing this happening in Former Home Town.

I'm speaking of the phenomenon of new businesses coming into an existing building and not removing the signage of their predecessors. Here are three examples:

Number One: Augie's/Gogi's:

This is an old church in downtown College Town. It's on the National Register of Historic Places, and it has had quite an interesting history. Back in the early 1980s, the building was desecularized and turned into a nightclub. No shit. Later is was turned back into a church, called St. Augustine's. The church opened a coffee shop, called Augie's, in what used to be their community center or rec room or whatever they called their more-modern attachment:

Not long ago the church closed the coffee shop, and either sold, rented or leased the space to a new Indian restaurant with an oddly similar name - Gogi's. Gogi's owners put a lot of work into putting up new awnings and signs and other nice touches, but for some reason they left one Augie's sign on the gable end of the structure which overlooks the Transient Center parking lot. Maybe they took a quick eye-level glance at that end of the building and saw nothing that needed fixing or changing? Maybe it's an homage to Augie's? I don't know!

Number Two: Paradise's Place/El Taco Loco:

An interesting aside about this one: There is some kind of rule in California (and hopefully in many other states, because it seems like a good and sensible rule) against giving a business the same fictitious name as another already existing business. For example, in College Town there is a famous trio of restaurants (all under the same ownership) named Burger Hut. Once upon a time a nice man named Bo opened his own burger joint in Former Home Town. He may have meant no duplicity, but he called his place Bo's Burger Hut, perhaps thinking that the addition of his own name made it not a fictitious business name, or different enough from "Burger Hut" to fly. Well, the original Burger Hut didn't like that, and Bo was forced to change his place's name to Bo's Burger Island.

So in College Town we have a couple of same-owner restaurants called Crazy Taco. Then we (briefly - shockingly briefly) had the place seen above: El Taco Loco. Wait, doesn't that mean "crazy taco"? Why, yes, yes it does. Do the rules about same names not apply when they're in different languages? Or does that have anything to do with El Taco Loco's short life? The world may never know.

The evanescent El Taco Loco had moved into a restaurant building formerly occupied by another short-lived place by the unlikely name of Paradise's Place:

The name didn't have anything to do with a northern California retirement mountain town which may or may not be near College Town. Instead, they seemed to be trying to apply a sort of tropical vacation island ambiance to average American diner food. It didn't work, especially since other than pictures of palm trees and beaches on the menus, all the other decor was typical diner: statues of chickens scattered about and that kind of crap. The food wasn't good, either. When my great Australian friend came to visit, we had breakfast there. He wanted to try real American food, but he couldn't even touch the gelatinous hamburger gravy on his biscuits. That may have had something to do with being colossally hungover.

Anyway, the significant thing about the two preceding pictures of signs on the same building is that they were taken on the same day. El Taco Loco never bothered to replace or at least cover up Paradise's Place's sign above the front door. Do restaurant owners have stiff necks that prevent them from looking up? Do they not own ladders? Are they afraid of heights? I don't know!

Number Three: Tanning Salon/Tattoo Parlor:

This last entry isn't really a sign - more like a decoration. The building used to house a tanning salon. There is a second story or attic space that is probably used for storage. The tanning salon owners had the great idea of covering the inside of the window above the front door with a painting of two tanned, buff, sunglasses-wearing, shirtless dudes supposedly looking out of said window and "wowing", presumably about all the tanned babes going in and out of the establishment.

The tanning salon was there for several years, and I always hated that painting - partly because it's crappy, and partly for the shallow, objectifying nature of it. And couldn't help having to see it because it also overlooks the Transient Center.

A few months ago the tanning salon closed, and a dodgy-looking tattoo parlor moved into the space. I thought that at last the horrible drawing would be removed, and indeed within a few weeks someone started to scrape the paint off of the window, but stopped after a few strokes. Several weeks later, another go was had, but not to completion, as seen above. Now the crappy drawing is almost indecipherable, and it certainly doesn't have anything to do with the current business.

Is this drawing made with some kind of super paint, and even the most hardy scraper has to quit after a few strokes? Are the tattoo people too busy being dodgy to focus on a simple task? Doesn't bode well for their attention to your body art. I don't know!

Come on, College Town small business owners - you can do better than this! You don't want Former Home Town to outdo you, do you?

*(Sorry, Goodtime Charlie - I had to do it, but here's a link)

Way of the Sky

In Butt County there is a very long road called Skyway which connects College Town with the Sierra Nevada foothill communities to the east. With such a name, you might expect flying cars or suspended gondolas, but it's just a rural road, albeit with some spectacular views above College Town before you reach the timber line.

In this section of marvelous views, there are a few very expensive looking houses clinging to the narrow strip of land between the road and the cliffs of the canyon which the road skirts. One such estate recently put up metal cursive letters on their wall by their driveway reading "Camino Cielo".

It took a moment before my junior high school Spanish classes kicked in and I realized what the name meant in English. My natural response was:

Of course, it should be "Camino del Cielo", but still, not bad.