Nobody Panic.

Shaved Head.
Originally uploaded by todd.burbo.

If my apartment had a security camera, it would show some interesting things from last night. For instance, 2 a.m. found me running around in the dark, wielding my laptop as a flashlight, frantically throwing clothes and blankets around my bedroom.

It's sort of a long story, but it involves a recurring nightmare featuring a large spider, and a newfound (or newly discovered) tendency to sleepwalk. An ex-girlfriend once woke to find me frantically pulling her out of bed, away from that fucking spider. Usually it takes about a minute for me to realize that I'm dreaming, even if I'm running through the house. To any aspiring therapists: please tell me what it means.

Oh yeah, and last week I got drunk and buzzed all of my hair off. This is what I looked like by the time I realized what I was doing. That's even a decent re-enactment of the face I made.

Anal Disembowelment, Chinese Opera

Gross

Everyone thinks I'm making it up, so thank God CNN covered this story about the 6-year-old girl who got her intestines sucked out through her asshole by the drain of a public kiddie pool. Yes, you read that right. Disemboweled via her rectum. And fuck you guys for thinking I would make something like that up.


Beautiful
I consider myself a fan of everything Damon Albarn does, and by that logic I now consider myself a fan of Chinese Opera. Mr. Albarn, of Blur and Gorillaz, is composing the music for Monkey: Journey to the West, an opera based on a 16th-century Chinese fable and a 70's Japanese TV show. For the show, he invented an instrument that uses a keyboard of arcade-style buttons to control a 24-note scale of car horns that he recorded in China. God damnit, I love this man. Image and details from Wired.

For the ladies... and soccer fans, I guess.

Check out this stud! Liverpool have finally signed an A-list striker, for a club-record 26.5 million pounds. That's, like... $476 million dollars. Roughly.

His name is Fernando Torres, he's Spanish, and until now he scored goals for Atletico Madrid and Spain. A YouTube search of his name will yield a few highlight reels, and more than a few photo montages of his abs. Dreamy.

I won't lie: I'm glad to finally have some glamour at Anfield (sorry Crouch and Bellamy, but... yeah), but this dude had better unleash a flood of goals to justify the loss of my current favorite Spaniard, the Five-foot-Seven Slice-of-Heaven, Luis Garcia. My little buddy went back to Madrid to help ease the pain of a $476 million-dollar bill. Roughly.

While on the soccer tip, the next reported target for Liverpool is Man United defender Gabriel Heinze. I'm not particularly optimistic about it, as Premiership rivals aren't in the habit of selling each other quality players.

Also, Arsenal snagged a new striker out of the blue yesterday: The Brazilian by-way-of Croatia, Eduardo Da Silva. I don't know much about him, as he was playing in the nether-regions of Eastern Europe, but I think it's safe to say that he'll have a hard time filling the stylish shoes of Thierry Henry.

A New Era

The Process
Originally uploaded by todd.burbo.

1310 N. Leavitt is down to two occupants, and one less mongoloid means much less crap. To date, our place has pretty much been a clutter factory, but those days are done. This weekend, Chris and I began a modest cleaning spree that gathered steam as it went, and ended with us tossing about half of our furniture- pretty much anything with a surface to collect the afore-mentioned clutter. Now the place is super sparse. There's even a bit of an echo. I love it so much that I stand around with my hands on my hips, just admiring it.

Things that make me sad

1. Thierry Henry's Premiership Departure
I'm not an Arsenal fan, but I was depressed to hear that he would be leaving for Barcelona. The man was pure charisma on and off the pitch, and the English Season will be less exciting without him. As an homage, here is Henry, single-handedly shredding my boys. I remember cowering in shame as I watched this play.


2. The Demise of Punk Planet
A Chicago-based bastion of political, artistic, and journalistic integrity. Home to some of the finest writing that no one ever read. I was sad when Dan Sinker's other mag, BAIL, went under a couple of years ago, but I thought PP was his rock. It says a lot about the state of indie press when a book like this can't survive.




3. Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra in The Golden Compass
Okay, maybe this isn't her fault (it's probably the producer or director's), but Lyra is supposed to be a sassy little dirty butch tomboy. Not a Victorian princess. And anyway, do we really need another creepy child actress named "Dakota"? Seriously, Dakota Fanning is probably like, WTF.

I need more buckets.

I need more buckets.
Originally uploaded by todd.burbo.

Is there anything more satisfying than discovering a new purpose for and ordinary household object? It makes me feel like MacGyver. This breakthrough is especially nice, because when all is said and done, I just can't fit a dumpster in my apartment.

In other news, I think the sentence should be a bit longer than 2 years for tearing off someone's testicle and trying to eat it. I've heard that Liverpool girls are rough, but damn.

She is in your extended network. (They all are).

A few weeks ago, my friend Luc was telling me these great stories about meeting crazy girls from The Onion Personals. The stories were so funny, in fact, that I decided to sign up, and did so immediately.

Five minutes later, I was bored with the site and forgot completely about it.

That is, until a couple of weeks later, when I received an official Onion email, promising new matches to my profile! I clicked the link to check out these fatties, and was surprised to find that a handful of cute girls had "winked" at me on the site. One of these girls seemed particulary attractive (and possibly even smart), so I replied to her wink. Chalk one up for the internet.

I was a bit skeptical about The Onion's message system though, because it kept referring me to the "account upgrade" page on the site, which I of course refused to do. Signing up was funny; paying $100 for it, sad.

So, in a somewhat dubious move, I did a quick myspace search for the girl's name. Surprise, surprise, she popped right up. At this point, she had contacted me twice on The Onion's page, and was looking gorgeous as well, so I went for broke and sent her a myspace message.

About an hour later, I was woken up by my phone. It's Luc.

Luc: Hey, did you send a message to a girl named **** on myspace?
Me: Huh, wha-um, yeah, I think so.
Luc: (Laughing) She's a friend of mine. She just called me, asking if you were some kind of stalker.
Me: Um.
Luc: But don't worry man, I told her you were normal.
Me: Thanks Luc, goodnight.
Luc: See you tomorrow, stalker.

So yeah, after getting turned onto the damn site by Luc, the first girl I message there is an acquaintance of his. They even dated for a bit.

Fucking Chicago.