I’m strongly considering an educational protest directed at the incompetent parents who drive their kids to the school near my condo each morning.  I’m sick of starting my commute by waiting in a huge line of confused people who treat an empty crosswalk as a stop sign.  Do you think this is too much for a picket sign?

“This is a crosswalk.  You only have to stop when children are crossing the road.  The person turning left does not have the right of way.  Go.”

Perhaps I could just hand out Colorado driver’s manuals like flyers.

Another problem is that these same drivers suddenly start hating their brakes the second someone actually does step foot in the street.  The students, fully aware of this fact and rightly scared for their lives, end up carefully gauging the situation for several seconds before ever deciding to cross.  By the time they do, some asshole SUV mom will surely get tired of waiting and cut off the pedestrian (which starts the whole tiresome social stall all over again).

Autumn and I recently got an XBox 360, by the way, so if any of the visitors out there happen to play Grand Theft Auto IV, Rock Band 2 or Aegis Wing…feel free to say, “Hi,” on Live.  Gamertag:  Everythings OK

(The real motivation for this post?  I had to get the old “Beard Watch” post off the main page because it was clashing with the “most recent beard” image.  Sadly, this was all I could think to say tonight…)

Here’s the starting picture:

I know that I suggested that Beard Watch would be starting on the 1st, but the amount of Rock Band 2 in my life recently has distracted me from filming some un-bearded scenes I need for a movie.  This means that the new date will be…um…the 9th?  Yeah, that sounds good.

The other day, while flipping through the channels, I stumbled across this clip from an old Beverly Hills, 90210 episode.  For some reason, I felt it was important to memorialize this travesty of cinema.  So, here it is, where it belongs…on YouTube:

Last night I discovered that my crappy old cover of Nothing Compares 2 U (from my first album…available free/now/here!) had somehow ended up on a “blog” post celebrating the 50th birthdays of Madonna, Michael Jackson and Prince.  I have no idea where these people found my version, but they jammed it straight into a list of 49 other Prince covers.  The part that sucks?  The list is full of well-produced, nice-sounding songs by actual accomplished artists:  Damien Rice, Sex Mob, Foo Fighters, Beck, etc…and then “cutaia.”

Interestingly enough, the out of place lack of capitalization in my name indicates that they at least spent a little time at my site, so it seems that they would have noticed that I’m not famous enough for their readers to care about.  In a way, it’s slightly embarrassing.  I imagine people going through the list, rocking out and such, only to suddenly find themselves in a full on lo-fi assault by one of the first songs I ever recorded.  Actually, now that I think about it, this isn’t embarrassing at all…it’s hilarious!

It does warrant mentioning, though, that technically my version of the song can’t really be called a “Prince cover,” as I specifically covered Sinéad O’Connor’s cover of the song…even keeping her changes to the lyrics to prove it.

Oh well.  What can you do?

Last Saturday at 3:00 am, Autumn and I decided to visit someone we know who works as a dancer at Centerfolds Show Club.  Autumn has known this girl for awhile, but I had really only met her once or twice.  Halfway through an awesome lapdance, this friend of ours was rubbing her breasts all over my face when I (in a moment of drunken, turned-on decision making) decided to lick her.  Honestly, I’m not entirely sure she even noticed, but I still feel kind of bad about it in retrospect.  I was just a disrespectful thing to do, wasn’t it?  I shouldn’t be licking strippers, whether I’ve met them a few times or not.  She was just there trying to do her job, and I had to go and break the cardinal rule of strip club patronage:  Keep your hands (and assumably tongue) to yourself.

Maybe I should apologize…

I rarely visit my MySpace page (member since 12.20.03), but after doing so today I decided to delete one of my random “friends” for posting this crazy shit in one of her 50 bulletins:

I’m gonna go with “useless.”

For the past few months cnn.com has been offering t-shirts with genuine CNN headlines printed on them.  Due to their complete removal from any kind of context, the results usually range from slightly funny (”Tasing ‘not a pleasurable experience’“) to completely irrelevent (”Mrs. Edwards slams McCain’s health plan“) to potentially creepy enough to get you beat up by mobs of strangers (”Teen too young for ‘come hither’ pose?“).  Essentially, though, they all have one important thing in common:  They allow you to tell the world that you existed when something happened.  (The biggest question I have?  Why didn’t CNN think to trademark these shirts as Chestlines?  Too late now, CNN…it’s mine!)

If I had to pick a favorite, it would be this Blort’s™ namesake CNN shirt:

Obviously, CNN has chosen to limit the stories that become Chestlines™.  After all, the fashion world probably isn’t ready for t-shirts emblazoned with slogans like:

• Gays in Iraq terrorized by threats, rape, murder
• Beheaded Hitler waxwork will be restored
• Army suicides highest in nearly 2 decades, study finds
• Cells, texting give predators secret path to kids
• Child rapists can’t be executed, Supreme Court rules

Edit: I cut 24-hour help for gay youth from my selection of joke Chestlines™ while trimming down my initial list.  However, I thought it was worth mentioning that this story, which is about a “crisis and suicide prevention number for gay and questioning youth,” was found in the “entertainment” section of CNN.