Zach Selwyn & Ron Jeremy Short Films

Porno Fireplace - Parts I, II, III

My buddy Zach (and his wife, and yes, Ron Jeremy) stars in this hilarious series of shorts by Zach's brother Jesse. They used their own home for the location. Note from the set: Zach told me at one point, Ron was on his sofa, wearing nothing but a towel and scratching at himself. Now that's entertainment.

Eleven Signs You're No Longer a Hard-Core Gamer

11 signs you're no longer a hard-core gamer. And that middle-age is fast setting in . . .

You've pre-ordered GTA IV but don't mind if it doesn't turn up on launch day

"Wednesday's just fine. Really. You're a bit busy at the moment, anyway. In fact, you probably won't get a chance to play GTA IV until the weekend. You're also not bothered by the prospect of downloading the DLC for GTA IV either. You'll never finish the main game anyway."

So true. So true.

Ron Jeremy at the Beldings.

Beldings Award winners get some loving from [aging] porn star Ron Jeremy. He hung around (hung, get it?) for the after-party that Yahoo! sponsored (which one of the partners of David & Goliath referred to as "Yoo-hoo"). He's as foul looking as the last time I saw him in the flesh (in the flesh, get it?) at the Houston's at Century City.

The Saddest Dead Pinata in All the World.

We had a party for Caro's birthday along with our friends, Zach and Wendy, for their son's second birthday. Seeing that it was around Cinco de Mayo (the party was on the 3rd and Caro's birthday really is 5/5) we decided to throw in a pinata. The good news was, that unlike Steve Martin in Parenthood who had to resort to sawing through the unforgiving paper-mache, the young kids were able to smash open the donkey with a plastic baseball bat. One family had to leave when they're young son didn't take the paper animal annihilation very well. Drifting out of the party late at night, after one Coors Light too many, I found this sad view before me. I snapped the photo just before getting the creepy feeling that the pinata might actually come to life and attack me. So I ran, ran away from the dead pinata.

No Comments on this Japanese Food Product

Picked up at the Mitsuwa grocery by a work colleague. Makes you want to visit Engrish.com, doesn't it?

Sweet Goodbye

It's always tough leaving home in the morning when working crazy hours. I've been working on a new business pitch that has sent me into the office early and home late, so when I saw Henry looking sad-eyed at me from the window, I had to snap this from the front porch.

Yeah, he's chewing on the paint and kind of looks like a refugee. Or a lead poisoning case.

Then We Came to the End.

If you are reading Joshua Ferris's book, you'll get why this pencil sharpener label is funny. People in ad agencies are possessive about electric pencil sharpeners and other mechanical tools of the trade. For my part, I hide a heavy duty stapler in my office; it can stapler over sixty pages. It rules.

Chicago! Yeah, Lake View.

I'm at a work training session in Chicago and the office got me a sick rate at the Four Seasons. I don't know what kind of corporate hoo-haw is going on here, but I can tell you that I'm paying less per night to stay in the Four Seasons than I was to stay a night at the Comfort Inn in New Bern, North Carolina. Go figure.

Tonight we had dinner at Gibson's, where I narrowly avoided going into diabetic shock after eating a pound of blue cheese dressing (on a salad), followed by a twice-baked franken-potato and a side of grilled cow. Then we had a gallon of ice cream. for dessert. On the walk home my heart was racing in an attempt to both burn off some of the 5,000 calories I must have consumed whilst pumping the cholesterol laden blood through my choked arteries. The temperature had fallen into the low 40s, but I couldn't tell since my body had become a heat-laden engine in its attempt to shed the caloric intake. Don't get me wrong; I loved every second of it. Croaking from a heart attack in front of my corporate colleagues would be a pathetic way to go, and I'm guessing it wouldn't even make a sidebar in AdWeek.

That's the John Hancock Center taking up the view in the right side of the window. Not sure what that building directly across the street is.

Y2K, Me and The American Dialect Society

The Y2K

This came up in a recent Google Alerts I have set to see when something with my name is published (okay, I know it sounds vain, but it's really so I can figure out where people might be back-linking or posting about my blog). A recent Alert included this post about the name of a drink in the cocktail calendar I published at the end of the last millenium (sounds impressive, huh?). The American Dialect Society, as part of their ongoing work, is perhaps looking to seek out how terms like "Y2K" entered the American vernacular.

Coincidentally - given the years I spent doing my small part to help undermine the American economy by advertising subprime mortgages - the word subprime is the Society's 2007 word of the year.

My Alien Lovechild

Henry having fun with Caro and the new iMac.

Victoria's Secret Hilarity

I forgot I snapped this while shopping with Caro at The Grove. No, I wasn't chasing girls through a lingerie shop, Caro was exchanging a very nice gift I got her. That's right, I'm that guy.

Anyway, the twin girls lounging on the same sofa as a mannequin, and the pinkness of it all, made a great shot. One of them turned to the other as Caro and I passed and said, "What is a boy doing in a girl's store?!"

My sentiments, exactly.

Greatest Christmas Card Ever

I think the look on their faces says it all. From our friends, The Bells, in Athens, Georgia.

Where's my Bro?

So T.R. has been sailing around somewhere, and I hadn't heard from him in a while. I got an email out of nowhere yesterday, not expecting he was anywhere with a PC or Internet access.

So I wrote and in typical yachtsman fashion, he sends me his longitude and latitude in degrees and minutes, north and west. I couldn't figure out how to search Google Maps without converting the degrees to decimal, but a quick search in Google found a conversion calculator. Then using the Help section of Google Maps, I figured out how to map the coordinates. What was interesting is that you can insert text in parentheses in the search box, along with the coordinates, and the resulting url will allow you to include your own text in the mapping result. Which has the potential for fun, and a personal message for my brother, given that his sun drenched ass is boating around:

Click here to locate Tommy, and the special greeting tailored just for him.

Fidel Castro Video Game Review

Henry Practices Walking

This video may be private, so if you can't view, log in to YouTube to see if you are on my Friends & Family list, or send me an email and I'll add you to my YouTube contacts.

Stinky Latte

I forgot why I took this picture, although I think it had something to do with th smell. Yeah, it smelled like the sewer system at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on Sepulveda & Palms had backed up into the shop. The odd thing about it - other than the odor - was that the employees seemed immune or were pretending nothing was wrong.

Health Alert! E.T.C.S.

Don't let the nightmare of E.T.C.S. happen to your family. Extreme Toy Choice Syndrome can leave a once happy child confused, upset and roiling in fits of angst and torment. Cake pan? Wooden Spoon? Firehouse Mouse? Teething Rings 1, 2, 3 or 4? Soccer Ball? My First Briefcase including My First Mobile Phone, My First Calculator, My First Wristwatch? Caterpillar thingy that Dad likes more than Baby?

All of this choice can only lead to one thing: E.T.C.S. Faced with so many options (not to mention: Xbox controllers, Wii remotes, mobile phones, home telephones, DVD remote, DirecTV remote, HDTV remote, extension cords, computer cords, USB cords, Ethernet cables, and Baby Einstein DVD cases - five of them) babies around the country are looking up at their parents with faces twisted with anguish that say, "Why,Daddy? Why is this consumer electronics and toy manufacturing baby entertainment, distraction and sedation system - this E.T.C.S. hell now part of my young life?" They scream for help, but they fall on ears muffled with Xbox Live headsets, bluetooth earbuds, and iPod earphones. Don't let your child face E.T.C.S. alone. Face the facts.

Don't let it happen to your baby.

Have a Sandwich Sighting

This "give her a damn sandwich" sighting occurred in Palm Springs while I was picking up some bottled water. "Desert Twiggy" wasn't hanging out at the Ralphs, but didn't seem to be buying much food. Unless you consider a liter of Smirnoff's "food." She looked like an anorexic Amy Sedaris.

We have been Wii-ing.

This is the first post I've typed out soley on the Wii. Which is part of the reason I've been pretty lax about posting to Left on Red. The Wii addiction has been sucking up some free time. At least I have a job in interactive marketing so that it qualifies as work. Sounds like something an alcoholic would say about working as a bartender.

The baby gets a littler bigger and more toddlery. The flowers in the front yard are blossoming and the warm California sun is shining. Work is going great; there should be some good news there soon, I hope.

More to come shortly on some sad notes and some funny ones.

That's life, though: a little bad with the good and in the end it all balances out.

David Sedaris, No Photography Allowed.

Caro surprised me with a trip down to Irvine to see David Sedaris read. Front and center! Photography wasn't allowed, so I got this dumb shot of the podium before he came out. He was introduced by a local teen he found at the pre-reading book signing (she was running for Secretary of her school's student council, and pronounced herself a supporter of the Newport Beach Public Library) before launching into an hour of reading. Most of it I've heard on NPR or read before in the New Yorker, but he ended the reading with recent entries from his diary, made while on a fact-finding trip to Japan. Funniest one being about a barber with crap (literally, feces) on his hand, and Sedaris's attempt to get him to reveal his poop-smeared palm.

He read his New Yorker piece about buying weed while home in Raleigh for Christmas. I think at one point, Caro and I were laughing so hard, we started yelling "oh my god! oh my god!" at him, like he was doing some sort of personal reading for us. A consequence of sitting in the front row, just facing the reader and seeing no one in the audience behind us.

Sedaris is special to me and Caro; not because he's from Raleigh, which is cool, but that we were both reading his book, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, when we met.

And a Good Morning to Ya!

My latest parenting incident included copious amounts of vomit.