DOWN WITH PANTS!

Larry Hankin: University of Southern California Campus - We went to see our friend's screening of his excellent short film 1-900-DRINKING-BUDDY at the USC film school tonight. Three other short films were shown as part of the screening and the first film, Nebraska, featured character actor Larry Hankin, probably best known for his role as Tom Pepper, the actor Seinfeld hired to play Kramer in "The Pilot". So it shouldn't have surprised me to see him grabbing a bite to eat and a drink at the reception out front of the Eileen Norris Cinema Theater. As a huge Seinfeld fan, I was very excited to see Tom Pepper in person. Nevermind that he was only in one episode, he's still a star to me.

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Past super exciting D-Listers spotted...

Brian Bosworth: LAX Airport - My first celebrity sighting came while standing in line at LAX. I was flying home to Seattle after a weekend of apartment hunting down here and he was standing in front of me in the Alaska Airlines check-in line talking very loudly and forcefully to someone about a real estate deal. It was a great thrill for a long-time Seattle Seahawks fan, even if he was a huge bust. I couldn't be happier that my first celebrity sighting was of the star of Stone Cold and One Tough Bastard.

David Spade: The Avalon Hollywood - David Spade is even shorter than you would ever imagine. We saw him chatting with some friends in the parking lot next to The Avalon Hollywood following a Dan Band show about a year ago. We weren't sure if he was leaving from the show or if he was just showing up for something else. Nonetheless, he was there, on the corner of Hollywood and Vine, a place that we read that we would never, ever see celebrities. It's too touristy.

Mike Farrell: Ca Del Sole Italian Restaurant - We went to this restaurant expecting laid back Italian food. Wrong. It was uppity and fancy, but the food was pretty darn good. Anyway, Mike Farrell of M*A*S*H came into the restaurant with a large group of people. I always loved M*A*S*H and Captain BJ Hunnicut so I recognized him immediately even without his mustache. After reading about all the liberal activism he has undertaken over the past 25 years, I am now an even bigger fan. And I like to think that he was as put off by the snootiness of the waitstaff as we were.

Wilson Cruz: Hollywood & Highland Center - I first spotted Wilson Cruz of My So Called Life and Tick...Tick...Boom! (an amazing play we saw him in earlier this year) fame while another fan was chatting him up late Saturday evening at Hollywood & Highland. I was impressed because he genuinely looked like he was happy to have a fan stop and talk to him. I got Death? all confused because I said that he played Angel in the movie Rent when, in fact, that's Wilson Jermaine Heredia. I always thought it was Cruz that played that part in the movie and when we saw Rent on Broadway. It's easy to understand my confusion, Cruz has played Angel before and both guys look very similar and they're both named Wilson. Oh well, I was still excited see Wilson Cruz. I told you you'd never guess.

On my way home from the mall today there was a woman walking a few feet up ahead of me. As she passed by one of the trees that line the sidewalk, she gave a casual little toss of something into one of the planter boxes. Noticing this, as I passed by the tree I bent down to see what it was. No surprise there, it was a wadded up receipt. So I picked it up, and yelled at her "Hey! You dropped something!" To which she turned her head around at me a little bit, and just kept on walking.

That's right bitch, I caught you littering!

So for the next almost two blocks, I kept yelling "Excuse me, ma'am, you dropped your receipt..." and so on. Her pace quickened, and since I had Addie in a stroller, I couldn't scream the obscenities that I wanted to or run up to her and smash it all up in her face, so I just had to let it go.

Ahhhh...I caught the fucking cunt littering and she didn't even get punished!

Willful and wanton littering is something that I just can't abide. I don't know how people do it. All my life I was raised not to litter. In school, on TV, at home, everywhere, you were told that littering is something you don't do. I never litter, at least on purpose. I suppose I've done it on accident once in a while. I thought that it was something that we had gotten past as a society.

So when I see people drop a receipt in a planter box, open up their car door and put their soda bottle down on the the street, let trash go flying out of the backs of their pickup trucks on the freeway...etc. etc. - it pisses me off so much. Finding a garbage can is not that fucking hard. Putting the receipt in your pocket and throwing it away at home isn't going to kill you.

So to all you litterers out there, especially you you nasty bitch walking home from the mall that wouldn't even acknowledge that I caught your dumb ass littering, just fuck the fuck off already. Ok? Thanks.

Anybody care to guess what the hell this picture that I found on my cell phone is? I know, but then again I took the picture, do you?

While I'm posting cell phone pictures...


Mmm...Korean food - a big stone bowl full of rice and beef and egg and veggies and hot sauce. Now that's a good Mother's Day dinner. And if you ask me, I've bumped up from novice chopsticks handler to expert after this meal.

These are awesome! I have to have them. Walter comes with Donny's Folger's can and a dog. Not just any dog either, it's a fucking show dog with fucking papers. Don't worry though, he's not gonna take your fucking turn, Dude.

These are available all over the place, including here.

The week before Death? went into the hospital to have Addie, we got the movie Galaxy Quest in the mail from Netflix. In the excitement and the shuffle, it went missing. We searched high and low all over the house but we couldn't find it anywhere. A couple months ago, we gave up. We figured we'd either find it when we moved out in July or we accidentally threw it away and it was gone forever.

But today I found it, right in the place that I originally figured it must be. That figures, right? I don't know how we ever missed it, it was right there, hardly hidden at all. Somebody must be fucking with us. Stupid movie stealing goblins.

Anyway, Galaxy Quest was well worth the wait. It was a movie that looked so stupid when it came out and I totally dismissed it as another silly Tim Allen vehicle, but it turned out to be great. That's about as fun a movie as I've seen in a long time.

And what a killer cast. I'm not usually a big fan of Tim Allen, but he was really good and Sigourney Weaver was good as well. But the rest of the cast is what makes it so great. Alan Rickman? Sam Rockwell? Tony Shalhoub? Enrico Colantoni? Justin Long? A line or two from Rainn Wilson and even Corbin Bleu of High School Musical fame plays young Tommy.

I highly recommend Galaxy Quest for those of you that haven't seen it, but I have this feeling that I'm one of the few since I'm pretty sure it was bloggers that convinced me that it wasn't a stupid movie. But if you dismissed it like I did, you should definitely add it to your Netflix queue especially now that they finally have it back and in their rotation.

The nerve of some people keeping their movies for months and months and months!

21. I was thinking the other day that I don't blog nearly enough about pizza. I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE pizza. It's easily my favorite food. To quote Mike Birbiglia, "I love pizza so much, I would marry pizza, but it would just be an elaborate ploy to eat her whole family at the reception." Seriously, I should really be known as the blogger that loves pizza much like Dustin is known for his love of tater tots.

So, since pizza is such a big part of my life, I can easily devote ten of my 100 Things About Me to it. Heck, I might have to go ten more tomorrow.

22. I think that even shitty pizza is superior to most every other food. Case in point - I had Sbarro for lunch today.

23. The first three years of college I worked for the greatest pizza place in both pizza and creative name - The Pizza Place. If I wouldn't have moved to Texas to work in baseball, I would probably be running and more than likely own The Pizza Place right now. The place went tits up while me and my buddy were gone and there was nobody to save it. So sad.

24. My dream is to one day bring The Pizza Place back, and I'm not the only one. Everybody I talk to that worked there wants to bring it back. For now, though, and probably forever, I don't want to invest and risk my own capital into a restaurant. I need an investor, anybody know anybody that loves pizza and has some extra cash lying around?

25. While at Bowling Green, I worked for two more pizza places. The first one was Campus Pollyeyes, I worked for two days and hated it so much that I didn't show up for my third day. All I did for hours upon hours was make these awesome stuffed breadsticks. They're delicious and I still make them at home and if I ever open a pizza place I will steal the idea for my restaurant, but they were miserable to make and I was working until 3:00 AM on school nights. That didn't work for me.

26. My second job at BG was delivering pizza for Myle's Pizza. I liked it, it was fun, but I only lasted about a month. They wouldn't give me a weekend off to visit Death? at her college in Ithaca, New York so I arranged my own replacement. They didn't like that and I never came back. I also delivered pizza for Brewery City in Lacey, Washington.

27. Favorite pizza toppings: The Bon's Favorite - Canadian bacon, pepperoni, pineapple, sausage and cashews. Too bad most pizza places don't offer cashews, they are amazing on pizza.

28. Favorite pizza places other than The Pizza Place: Me-n-Ed's in Camarillo, Boccali's in Ojai, Myle's in Bowling Green, and this Chicago style place in Chicago. Sadly, I don't know the name of it or where it was other than it was a little storefront place in a residential neighborhood in somewhere around Wrigleyville.

29. My pizza restaurant would be a little quirky. One feature would be the Wheel O' Pizza. For $5 you would get a large pizza but you would have to eat whatever pizza the Wheel O' Pizza landed on. Some combos would be amazing, some would be kind of gross. Don't know if anybody would ever do it, but it would be fun to have at the counter nonetheless.

30. As someone that thinks they make good pizza, when I have trouble stretching, tossing or rolling dough at home, it really, really pisses me off. Some of my biggest tantrums, cooking or otherwise, have come because I fucked up the dough.

This is another retread of a previous post, but I've been reading all of these TequilaCon recaps and have read a lot about extroverts and introverts and whatnot and it just reminded me of this I, Anonymous.

Now, I'm not saying anything about any of you or how I would act at TequilaCon - I'm definitely going next year and will be as social as possible - it just reminded me of it. Don't read any more than that into it...

I've been wanting to get this on my blog for a while now. It appeared in the Stranger's feature I, Anonymous a couple of years ago and it's been hanging around my room. It's about time us shy people stand up for ourselves! I might not be as angry as this writer, but I know where he's coming from.

"A tip for all you annoying, sunshiny extroverts who seem to think shyness is a form of mental retardation. My personality is not a goddamn handicap that I need to overcome. Leave me in peace and quit acting like it's your personal mission to take us shy people on like we're some kind of 'project'. Operation 'Bring You Out Of Your Shell.' Not only is it arrogant and maddening that you assume we want to be like you, but hey, you know what - I really don't want your hugs either. And it's not because I can't bring myself to 'open up' and 'get comfortable.' It's because I think you are full of bullshit and have deluded ideas about socializing. I don't want help! I like my personality. And I like the fact that I don't fucking chitchat or try to make new friends, like some kind of dog sniffing every bitch ass that walks by. I'm not a charity case. You are a freak. Stop trying to fix me and please just let me enjoy the melancholic alienation that I've come to so glamorize." - Anonymous

This week I'm going to continue the 100 things about me that I started way back in 2005. I got 20 things into it and never kept going, that's par for the course for this blog.

Since it's been so damn long, here are the first 20 things about me with updates to reflect all that has happened in the last three years.

1. I love sports. Sometimes that means I can sound a little bit like a meathead.

2. I hate meatheads.

3. I can be hypocritical at times.

4. I believe in and love capitalism.

5. I believe in and love socialism (please see #3).

6. I have had a grand total of 3 girlfriends in my lifetime. The first was named Holly in middle school. That lasted about a month. The second was named Shannon my junior year of high school. That lasted about three months. The third is Death? and we have been together for almost 10 years. I plan on never having a fourth girlfriend. (update: we are now married and I haven't had any other girlfriends.)

7. Some people (mainly guys) may think that having had only two other girlfriends before getting married is weird or even sad. Not me. I believe that everybody has someone that is their perfect match and that I happened to get lucky and find mine nice and early saving me from all the girlfriend horror stories I have heard from friends.

8. I love (update: loved) the Gilmore Girls (I think this proves that I'm not really a meathead).

9. I hate onions passionately.

10. Ok, my passionate hatred of onions has subsided a bit. I've recently realized that some onions are pretty good. But for the most part I still hate them. Especially red ones and especially raw.

11. I went to college for six years at two different schools and somehow managed to not earn a degree. I think that was harder work than actually graduating.

12. I have moved to two different cities without ever seeing either of them first hand. I moved to Bowling Green, Ohio for college and Harlingen, Texas for a job. I will be moving to Ventura, California and I may not get to see that city before heading down there. However, I think Ventura will turn out much better than BG or Harlingen. (update: I did see Ventura before moving here and it has been so much better than BG or Harlingen. And I forgot about Richmond, Indiana. I hadn't seen that shithole either.)

13. When I get drunk I start confessing to people about things. Usually what I confess is totally harmless on it's own but I sound so guilty about what I'm saying that it turns into a much bigger deal than it should have been.

14. I'm awful about keeping in touch with people, even really close friends.

15. I don't particularly care to talk on the phone. I prefer email or in person. This contributes to me not keeping in touch with friends. A lot of my friends are not in Seattle and almost all of them don't use email or the internet often.

16. I don't consider myself racist or classist or anything like that. However, I hate trash of all kinds. White, black, yellow, purple. Rich or poor. Trashy people come in all races, shapes and sizes, and I don't particularly like any of them.

17. I played rugby at Bowling Green for a couple of months. It was really, really hard so I used a bunch of excuses to stop playing. They were pretty good excuses that were true, but if I would have worked harder I could have continued playing.

18. My favorite color as a child: Yellow

19. My favorite color as an adult: Navy Blue - proof positive that I am getting old.

20. I gained a few unwanted nicknames in college: The Gadfly (I had an opinion on everything, usually different than the guys I lived with), Boss Hog (they said I always managed to have the largest girl in the club hit on me), The Big Suck (I never did understand this one, I don't think it was complimentary) and one I gave myself, Big Pimp El (my rap name, read it fast if you can't figure it out).

Today I took Addie to her first baseball game, an afternoon contest at Jackie Robinson Stadium in Los Angeles between UCLA and Arizona State.

You should know by now that I love baseball. Baseball is a big part of my life and will always be, especially if I can get back into working in the game when I move back to Washington. Even if I don't, when we move to Edmonds, we'll be sandwiched between the Seattle Mariners and the Everett Aquasox so we'll probably be at a ballgame quite often.

Point is, Addie better get used to it. Today she scared me because she definitely did not enjoy her first baseball game. She was fussy and cranky the whole time and never really settled down enough to let me pay attention or let me tell her about the game. In fact, I finally gave up and we left after the sixth inning. I haven't left a sporting event early in, well, almost never. And of course, as soon as we left and got on the road, she fell right to sleep and slept for the next couple hours.

Ok, I know that the baseball wasn't what made her upset today, it was probably a combination of a lot of different things that all add up to she's only three months old. Perhaps it was a little bit early for her first baseball game and since she's still so little, I shouldn't have expected much more out of her.

But still, what if she doesn't like baseball? What the heck am I going to do? it's going to be a tough time in the Down With Pants! household if baseball isn't part of the scene.

Eh, she's going to be a daddy's girl, I can already tell. She's going to like just about anything that I like. I have a feeling we'll be going to ballgames all the time.

About the picture above: Don't we look hard together? And how much do we look alike? And yes, I need a shave.

I did this a couple years ago and I'm not totally sure why I stopped. So today I bring back Lebowski Friday with my favorite edited-for-TV dub ever...


"See what happens Larry when you find a stranger in the alps?!"

Watch for more Lebowski videos, artwork, essays, links, etc. each and every Friday.