"... - and then one night, around midnight, on the corner
of Lexington and Fifty-second, when you have come really
to the point of losing faith in the existence of such a crea-
ture as you have been imagining for yourself even unto
your thirty-second year, there she is, wearing a tan pants
suit, and trying to hail a cab - lanky, with dark and abun-
dant hair, and smallish features that give her face a kind
of petulant expression, and an absolutely fantastic ass."
- Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint
Some Time This Century
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THE JO-TEL IS:
Shark
Hip E.
PETE
Johnny D
We get naked in bars way more thanyou and you know what that means ...
We read Proust.
FEATURES*:
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Slang Dictionary
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* features are shit-hot
CURRENTLY READING:
Hip E.
- Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of
Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67)
- Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
Shark
- Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
- Kevin Star, A History of California:
1840 - 1875.
- Paul Celan, Breathturn
PETE
- Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
Johnny D.
- Jean Luc d'Emo, Reel
The Quail
- Dave Eggers, What Is the What
- James Joyce, Ulysses
- Don Gifford, Ulysses Annotated
CURRENTLY LISTENING TO:
Hip E.
- Neko Case, Blacklisted (2002)
- Hip E., Pando Mix Rev. 0 (2007)
- Rock Plaza Central, Are We Not Horses? (2006)
Shark
- Richard Hell & the Voidoids, Blank
Generation (1977)
- The Kinks, The Village Green Preservation
Society (1968)
- Silver Apples, Contact (1969)
PETE
- Smashmouth, Greatest Hits vol. II (2004)
Johnny D
- Television Personalities, And Don't the Kids
Just Love it (1980)
- The Blow, Paper Television (2006)
- The Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs Vol. 1,
2, & 3 (1999)
The Quail
- Carla Bruni
- Philip Glass, Glassworks (1982)
ARCHIVES:
September 04-1
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January 05
February 05
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April 05-1
April 05-2
May 05-1
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June 05
July 05-1
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August 05
September 05
October 05
November 05 December 05
January 06
February 06
March 06
April 06
May 06
June 06
July 06
August 06
September 06
October 06
November 06
December 06-1
December 06-2
January 07
MEET THE JOUSE GUESTS*:
JohnPatsy
Linda
Jay
The Puma
Liz
Gabe
Merz
Tello
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Tara
Cutler
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Pliska
Mini-Shark
The Goose (Carrie)
Bain
Fritz
Yahoo Serious
Laura-Lee
Fabulous L-Breeze
Saki
Kristin
Booby
Joe
Jonelle
Becca
Rebecca P.
Snake (slithering this way and that)
Matranga
Raphael (Little Mex)
Neva
Annie
Kathleen
Paul S.
Emily
Brew-Dogg
Reid
Reid's Girl
Downs
Some Chick who passed out
on Shark's couch
Ross
Cameron
Mary (slut)
Miklos
Romie
Simon
Kubow
Becky B.
Walloch
John the Hippie
Stickler
Anna
Andrea
Ben
Lucy (dog)
Wilson
Lauren
JohnPatsyLady A.
Lauren's B/f
Jenny B.
Paul James (infant)
Beck E.
Lisa Says
Ben
Nick Martin
Caitlin
Melissa
Sosia
Riley
Nicole
Reid's friend (chiefed heavily)
Virginia
* A Jouse-guest is someone who has
spent the night at the Jo-tel.
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SF WEATHER PIXIE*:
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Hey Crackhead
I'm on the trail of a chocolate soda for
my wife.
- Charlton Heston (1924 - )
The JO-TEL ... so little posts, so much time | Show Menu |
Stars - They're Just Like US!
Did you know?! Did you know that stars are just like us?! Because they are! Look, here's Courtney Cox-Arquette pushing a grocery cart! And here's Angelina Jolie - gasp! - HOLDING HER OWN CHILD!
In all seriousness, this is probably the dumbest page in all of "legitimate" journalism (i.e., not The Star nor The National Enquirer nor The Weekly World News). This one has to be my favorite of all time, though:
"They Listen to Voicemail!"? OMG, u guyz, I do 2!!
The icing on the cake is that she's not even listening to voicemail! Her Treo (it's not a BlackBerry, contrary to what the piece says) is pointing face-out, and it's nowhere near her ear. She's just holding it in the same hand with which she's brushing hair away from her face:
Fucking. Awesome.
Posted by The Quail 2007-02-26 16:35:42
Waiting For My Man
I'm sitting here in my office listening to "I'm Waiting For My Man" from Lou Reed's American Poet, waiting for my ride to drive me back to the city, reading random wikipedia articles. We were supposed to leave at 6. It's 7:43.
Samuel Beckett, author of Waiting For Godot:
He also started to write in English again, though he continued to do some work in French until the end of his life, during which he was next-door neighbor to the young boy who would grow up to be known as Andre the Giant. Because the school buses were too small for Andre to fit on, he needed to be driven to school every day. However his parents could not afford a car, so they relied on their trusty neighbor, Beckett to drive the young boy to school every day.OBEY!!!
Posted by Hip E. 2007-02-23 19:43:57
Sunday Parking
Something I've been meaning to rant about for a long time is Sunday Parking. Double Parking is illegal. There are all kinds of places where it is illegal to park, and San Francisco and other cities rake in millions of dollars issuing citations for illegal parking. I myself have paid at least a thousand dollars in parking tickets in my life. Because of the amount of money parking infractions bring in, the city is completely on top of the parking situation. If you park illegally for more than an hour or two in most neighborhoods, you ARE going to get a ticket.
There is one form of illegal parking, however, that you will not get a ticket for, and that is parking illegally within a block or two of any church on a Sunday. People double park, blocking an entire lane of traffic. People park on sidewalks and driveways. And none of these people get tickets. This is wrong. Churches already don't pay taxes. If they want their parishoners to drive to church on Sundays, they should use that free money to build a parking lot. The Department of Parking and Traffic is responsible for keeping the streets clear and usable for ALL the citizens of San Francisco, tourists and motorists of any kind. By looking the other way, they are degrading the services they provide to everyone else for the benefit of a tiny demographic of people who drive to church on Sundays, and the churches that benefit by their attendance. This is immoral, unconstitutional, and unamerican, and it has to stop. When I become police commissioner, I will have taskforces, committees, and paramilitary quick-response squads devoted to eradicating religion-based traffic congestion on weekends. Let's give San Francisco's streets back to San Franciscans.
Posted by Hip E. 2007-02-19 09:58:12
Update:
- There are very few photo shops in San Francisco (outside of downtown, fisherman's wharf, and the bottom of the curvy street).
- Photo shops (even in Walgreen's) don't open at 8. They open at 9.
- It is a really nice day out.
- The Peanut Butter & Jelly bagel at The Bagelry is amazing, and I have been wasting the last 4 years on Pastrami and Turkey.
- Gary at Eclipse is one of the best hair cutters in the city, and a nice guy to boot. And he is actually married - I've seen his wife.
- Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint" really deserves its spot in the Modern Library Top 100 American Novels of the 20th Century.
- If you completely relax your arm, a Hepatitis shot doesn't hurt nearly as bad.
- The Quail is Pandoing out all the Led Zeppelin albums, except the iTunes album art for all of them is the cover of Dread Zeppelin - "Un-Led-Ed"
- My contract with Crunch is up February 27. On February 28, they are going to start charging me $8 more per month, and upgrading me to All Crunch Membership. I think I had that to begin with. Fuck them. I'll call and threaten to quit and see if they'll leave it at $64. I want to join the gym at work anyway.
- If you arrive at the right time, it only takes about 20 minutes to get a tourist visa to India, but you have to come back between 4:00 and 4:45 to pick it up.
Posted by Hip E. 2007-02-16 15:09:46
Getting Back Into Blogging
I've been thinking about getting back into blogging lately, and I think I'm really making some good progress. I messed around with our menu bar, added the helpful CURRENTLY READING and CURRENTLY LISTENING TO sections, and titled that picture of PETE at Fort Mason "Pacific Rimjob." I'm also thinking of a few big ideas for posts, but what happens when I have big post ideas is when they get big enough they cross this sort of event horizon beyond which their own gravity inexorably pulls them back in, and they never get posted. (See the Pliska Wedding Post and Thrill's Thoughts on New Orleans). Kind of like one of my cheesy mix CDs for a girl, which can take 8 months to put together. So to bridge the gap I'm going to post this piece that I found in the middle of an album review, and just say that this is the type of thing I would like to be posting about sometime in the future:
In a recent episode of Extras, Ricky Gervais’ somewhat disappointing follow up to his incomparable BBC series The Office, there is a scene in which an actor bashfully admits that he sometimes has trouble figuring out "who’s speaking to whom." What he means is that he has trouble separating his character from the person he is in real life, which is an admission so fundamentally nonsensical that it takes a minute to fully absorb. ...
I’ve heard this sentiment honestly expressed only once before in my life, by a girl who claimed that she "didn’t get fiction," but such existential hemorrhaging, as ridiculous as it seems on its face, has become central to the idea of celebrity. Andy Kaufman was considered a comic genius because he never broke character. He was supposedly always doing a bit. There was no Andy Kaufman; there was only "Andy Kaufman." I’ve only ever heard Sacha Baron Cohen speak as himself three times, and I’m a pretty big fan. But these are self-evident examples whose obvious nature belies the salience of the phenomena. The glut of readily accessible information that has come to define this decade, from tabloids to reality shows, has had the near universal effect of blurring beyond recognition the conceptual line between characters and actual humans. What was once delineated is now more of a spectrum with an ever larger group amassing in the middle, straddling where the line used to be. Consider:
Question 1: Do you consider Real World cast members celebrities?
Question 2: Can you think of one of the above individuals who can’t be accurately summed up in a three-word caption?
Question 3: Do you think Paris Hilton acts that way when she’s alone?
Posted by Hip E. 2007-02-03 12:10:55
An Observation
Dudes: check out how many spam comments there are in the "InDQ" feature to the left. Now check much spam there is in the "Gay Hour" feature. Looks like phenteramine's got something against gays. Then again, there's also no spam in "PETE and Thrill's Slang Dictionary". I guess the spammers also hate nerds.
Posted by Shark 2007-02-02 17:27:17
Johnny D, We Welcome D!
I would like to welcome the newest member of the jo-tel proper: Johnny D. Beneath the fictional playland of the jo-tel.com, there is an actual, physical jo-tel: a third story flat in San Francisco with four bedrooms, two baths, and a hideous opera couch. Johnny D moves into the jo-tel replacing Reid, who has sought shelter from my acerbic wit in a one bedroom apartment across town.
Johnny D is expected to bring his own own brand of idiosyncratic behavior to the jo-tel, including: a standing computer working space (shark: what if you want to sit down?/ johnny d: I don't plan on sitting down) and an inimitable skill for comparing bands to The Fall that do not sound like The Fall.
So Johnny D we welcome you! In honor of your arrival, I will now present the following actual work-related email that I received last month:
Hi, we need to get information to Kurt and the JHL team on how to extract this ho from the litigation.
Thank you very little.
Posted by Shark 2007-02-02 14:39:08 (from Santa Rosa, CA)
January Archived, Hella Fixed
Just archived January (link below), and fixed the fucked-up HTML code so all the video links now work again. Hopefully soon someone will post something so that this isn't what people see when they happen upon our shit-hot site.
Posted by The Quail 2007-02-02 10:52:12
MORE HOT SHIT
Comments:
From Pliska in Portland [71.214.84.247] - 3/8/07 5:48 PM
From Gabbeh [65.172.33.91] - 3/8/07 9:57 AM
From Hip E. [146.23.4.23] - 2/27/07 12:57 PM
So if we are wrong more, you guys will start leaving comments?
Alas, I just don't have it in me to be wrong about stuff. I gotta be me!
From Gabbeh [65.172.33.91] - 2/27/07 11:21 AM
From Gabbeh [65.172.33.91] - 2/27/07 11:18 AM
Has The Jo-Tel Blog jumped the shark (no pun intended)? It seems that no one leaves comments anymore which may be a sign of reduced readership. Either that or phetaramine has succeeded in bringing down the creative literary machinations of the Jo-tel.
From The Big Kat [66.75.250.253] - 2/22/07 1:24 AM
From Stickler [76.167.25.183] - 2/19/07 1:30 PM
From Pliska in Portland [149.175.206.93] - 2/15/07 11:03 PM
From Ford [69.236.111.28] - 2/14/07 12:54 PM
From Pliska in Portland [149.175.206.151] - 2/5/07 4:36 PM
Johnny D, please post about headlights.
Comment on this Page
Last Modified 2/26/07 7:38 PM