It isn’t what you think.

    In Detroit there is a popular Greek restaurant named ‘Little Mamma’s Parthenon’ where I like to lunch occasionally. They make an absolutely orgasmic moussaka, but they’re more famous for their well-earned nick-name, “The Screaming Greek Restaurant.”

    This is because anyone patronizing this particular establishment is expected to communicate by yelling as loudly as possible, including your dining companions and wait staff.

    Originally, the screaming started during a lunch shift in the summer of 1999*. Due to a heated discussion between an intoxicated accountant and a group of excited cheerleaders, the ambient volume had gotten so loud that customers found it impossible to be heard without raising their voices. It quickly became louder, so that newly arrived patrons had to scream at the top of their lungs in order to order their food and engage in idle chit-chat.

    If everyone would just shut up for a moment and start over with lowered voices, the vicious cycle probably could have been broken. But by the time this had occurred to anyone, it had already become customary to yell and scream constantly. Now it is expected that a guest will holler at the top of their lungs, even if they are the only customer in the entire restaurant.
    ”HOW MANY, SIR?!?”
    ”JUST ME!!!!”
    ”SMOKING OR NON-SMOKING?!?!?!?”
    ”NON!!! THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!”
    ”RIGHT THIS WAY, SIR!!!”

    An interesting side effect of all this is that it becomes very difficult to determine if one is engaging in an argument or not.
    For this reason Little Mamma’s has become a popular break-up date location. Most Friday and Saturday nights you can usually pick out a few tell-tale phrases in the passing din. Phrases like,

• IT’S NOT YOU! IT’S ME!!
• CAN I AT LEAST HAVE MY RING BACK?!?
• I’LL F*&KING KILL YOU, YOU B*&CH!!”
• THE TEST CAME BACK POSITIVE!!!
  • this last phrase enjoys extra popularity due to its many applications

    As a Greek restaurant, they are often called upon to serve a certain dish of flaming cheese known as “Saganaki,” for which it is customary that the server yells “Opa!” when igniting the payload of fuel the cheese is inundated with upon arriving at your table.
    This is a tradition, and not to be dismissed lightly. But since the entire room is already filled with a deafening cacophony of screaming, eating, breaking-up patrons, the servers have taken to using bullhorns and small explosives to announce the ignition of the flaming fromage.

*Also known as “The Summer of the Unfortunately Limited Two Digit Field Contents” in most history texts. This was not universal, however; in Laos, for instance, this was known as the “Summer I Found A Turtle Under My Deck Which Made a Good Stew”.

Please listen to the new SafeT’unes.
I recorded two of them tonight. Click on the titles to go visit them at SafeT’unes.

    The Surface is the first non-improvised piece I’ve recorded in a long time. This one is composed, as opposed to made-up-on-the-spot. At less than three minutes, you have no reason not to listen.

    The Surface, Improvised is an extended improv set based on the themes from The Surface. I recommend you use it as background music whilst browsing, reading, working, whatever. It is low-key, but travels quite a bit within the theme.

    I have begun the final segment of the Second City writing program at the Detroit Second City (actually in Novi).

    This segment will culminate in a run of two to four live shows made up of scenes written by myself and five mates from my group.

    Late in December we held auditions for the cast and chose five men and two women from a population of about thirty hopefuls. THe auditioning process was quite interesting, and really a hoot. Short segments of proposed scenes from the show were acted out, and the outstanding performers were cast

    This past Monday we got acqainted with the ensemble we selected, and had them perform table readings of scenes we intend to put on. Several of the performers are awesome beyond our wildest hopes, and that will help make even slightly weak pieces passable.

    Of my scenes we read ‘Left Out,’ ‘Sam the Fish,’ and ‘WTF.’ ‘WTF’ tanked, and I’ve mercifully slain it with the jawbone of an ox. Think no more about it, as it is in a better place than that which you or I currently inhabit in our crude shells of matter.

    ’Sam the Fish’ killed, and ‘Left Out’ went pretty well.

    Next week we’ll read the balance of scenes and figure out what needs to be changed, what we need to add, and what additional cuts we need to make.

    One thing is certain: There will be at least two shows.
    Tuesday the seventh of March and Tuesday the fourteenth of March. If you’re in the Detroit area I encourage you to come and see the show. If you are not in the Detroit area I encourage you to take one of these dates as a vacation or sabbatical and fly the airline of your choice to Detroit and see the show.

    If you can’t do either, you have no choice but to send me money in the amount of ten percent of your after-tax income for the month of March. You can base the contribution on estimated income, if you’d like to make your payment early.

    If you have no money, then you’re in the wrong society. Here we don’t value you unless you have material wealth. You might as well go freeze yourself in a block of ice and hope you’ll get thawed out when socialism comes back in style. Until then, toast me some hydrocarbons and call me a commuter!

If you head on over to SafeTscenes, you will see the new, simplified, one-dimensional SafeTselector I hooked up to the Scene blog.
Honestly, its very much dumbed down compared to the fancy one here, but there you go.
Nighty night, people.

    Mondays I arrive at Second City in Novi around 7 o’clock-ish. We enter through the business office entrance, as the writing rooms are deep in the bowels of the facility–as far from the dining customers and the stage as possible.

    Every time I walk through that entrance I am nearly incapacitated by the intense smell of soap. It is as if someone has ritually slaughtered a bar of Irish Spring.
    By the time I leave (around 10:00PM on average) the smell has dissipated.

    So Monday I decided that it was time to learn more about this phenomenon. I endured the smell for a good three minutes as I carefully examined the two story atrium, the elevator, and even the tennant mailboxes for good measure. I found no spot in which the smell intensified or weakened. I found no soap residue. I found no occult accoutrements indicative of the aforementioned ritual slaughter. I gave up and left.

    The only lasting effect of my ordeal was the incredulous glances sent my way by passersby for the next hour or so. Their eyes widened in shock and dismay as the horrible truth sunk in that I was the source of the intense soapy smell assaulting their olfactory senses. I apologized, and assured a few of them that I wasn’t all that clean, really.

    Next week I will go early. I will find the answer to the Mystery of the Soap Stink.

    I guess this writing whatever-the-hell comes to mind is a pretty tough gig. It drains you like a vampire packing a sharpened crazy straw, and it leaves your soul raw and malleable like so much fresh hamburger meat. I should know that feeling well. After all, when I was a small child I used to hide fresh hamburger meat under my tricycle seat while gallavanting up and down my block.
    I quit after the neghborhood dog, Mr Bently, bit my ass clean off. It was eventually replaced with a pneumatic prosthesis, which was fairly lifelike and convincing to see. At least, it was convincing until I attempted to use it to write my name or to shake someone’s hand, at which point I would often catch people staring at me. I am a person! I am not a cripple! Treat me like a man. A man shaking your hand with his prosthetic ass, but a man nonetheless. With real warmth, and real feelings, and real love to share with the world through his pneumatically inflated butt.
    I’ve since transferred portions of my thighs to my ass region to more perfectly mimic that which was taken from me so cruelly by that dog so long ago. Now I’m known as sexy, or bloated, by several close friends. No one else dare insult the Thighs-for-Ass man! They all quiver in fear, for they know that these were thunder thighs before the transplant and in their new and fundamental home they mean much malice to the masses.
    So eventually people stop posting to their blogs because they can’t stop thinking about my thighs/ass. I can’t blame them, but I can salute them.

Blogs that evaporated:

I don’t know where he’s gone, but this dude was a singular personality.     His last blog was Mental Skidmark, and he seems to have gone without warning.     He left a forwarding address on his previous, equally fascinating, blog named Stuck in My Head, but this time there is no forwarding address.     He’s gone, but read a few of his old posts. Especially “Crack Kills.” It’s like a car wreck you can’t take your eyes off of on account of the naked stripper inexplicably administering CPR by the side of the road.

Another missing blogger I knew is the City Fist. Fist had a couple blogs, my favorite being Finnegans Fisted which was distiguishable by its singular obsession with righting the world’s wrongs; at least, those wrongs dealing with erroneously including an apostrophe in James Joyce’s seminal work, “Finnegans Wake.”     He put some stuff on Opera for a wee bit longer and then…poof. Someone mentioned something about Oxford, but I was confused by the terms in which the mentioning was mentioned. Anything that confuses me must be wrong, so I discard this information as meaningless. In fact, I shouldn’t have passed it along to you. I order you to forget!

Arthur Deco is another one what done gone and vanished. An skillful writer, his last post was a short vignette concerning a man deciding never to speak again. Most readers enjoyed the story, but had no idea he was posting a literal truth. Or…I guess he was. Hard to tell, really, what with all the not-talking he’s doing. Dumb or enigmatic?

So….which bloggers went missing that YOU liked?

Completely Safe!
Violent, science fictiony, funny as I can make it. You won’t regret reading it, I am probabilistically certain!
Excerpt:

JAZLINSKI

(backing onto stage. There is now blood on his lab coat and his hair is messy)

You can leave if you want to, but you’re going to have to take a personal day, Johnson.

Why don’t you just stick around? You can get some work done, and maybe we’ll find that hand of yours. C’mon, what do you say?

Click Here For the Rest of the Story!

    There was a day last week in which I was compelled to travel into down-town Detroit.
    On this occasion I was accosted, as I often am, by a less-fortunate soul with no home of his own to speak of. He said that all he had on him was a bit of JavaScript code, and would I be willing to spare him some food?
    It just so happened that I was carrying a bit more tuna than usual in my shirt pocket, so I doled out a pungent handful of ocean chicken and he furtively handed me a crumpled page upon which was a grease-pencil flow-chart detailing a navigation system.
    ”This is just a flowchart,” I screamed falsetto upon him, “dude, you said it was JavaScript!“
    Around a mouthful of tuna he replied, “wook ah ee uvver hide!”
    ”Talk sense, man.” I mean, really, piscomastication* is no excuse for indistinct gibberish.
    He swallowed hard and smiled a scraggly, unemployed programmer grin at me; at once buxom and gap-toothed.
    ”Turn it over.”
    I looked on the other side of the grease-pencil streaked diagram and saw that which he had originally promised to me. A small, passable JavaScript code snippet that would allow a web site visitor to navigate archives easier and more effectively. It was written with a manual typewriter, and all the letter f’s were crooked by at least thirty degrees. A fact which I would later come to regret, but I digress.
    I rushed hurriedly away, redundantly adverbed, towards my destination; I tried my best to ignore his ominous cackling from behind me.
    Later I was forced to wash my shirt and replenish its supply of Tuna, but that is a story for another time.

    You may have already guessed that the JavaScript, purchased with precious fish meats straight from my personal stash/wardrobe, was the basis upon which the SafeTselector, nestled above in the SafeTinspector blog header, is built upon. I feel no guilt in not attributing this construct to my benefactor, as he specifically neglected to exclude intellectual property rights from our original transaction.
    So it is mine.
    But, and this is key, I am willing to give it to you without any expectation of remuneration or reciprocal seafood gifts.

    Right click on the rotated F, or here and save the file to your computer. Read through the comments and you, too, can have the SafeTselector navigation tool.

* pis·co·mas·ti·cate: to chew upon a fish

    The redesign part one is completed. Sorry I’ve been so quiet, this was quite a bit of work for me, as I am not actually a programmer by profession, and knew next-to-nothing about Javascript. Every minute of free time for the last four days was spent programming and debugging the SafeTselector.

    Basically, I’ve developed the archive navigation system you see in the header above. It replaces the static blog article “SafePicks,” and is far easier to update and maintain.

    Go ahead, play with it! Select a category and go “Wooo!” as the helmet guy morphs. Select an article from the resulting category and go “Wooo!” as the article thumbnail appears.

    If you want, you can do this just to look at the pictures and customize your SafeTinspector experience by setting the graphic in the header to your favorite while you read.

    But….if you hit the “Inspect” button, you will be whisked away to the article selected.

    Please let me know if it don’t work, and help yourself to my listed articles! I’ve only put the stuff I thought was worth reading into these lists. I’ll probably add and shuffle categories around…

    Lastly, tomorrow I will provide a link where you can download the SafeSelector javascript. (you can view source on my blog to see it, but it might be confusing as its mixed in with blogger crap) After reading my comments in the source-code, you will realize it is a simple to maintain and use system for providing dynamic access to a series of links.

    Oh, and by the way, this was my 200th posting!!!