I have all of three stairs in my apartment. They separate the living room/dining room area from the sleeping area. Believe me, there’s a story behind it, but basically I fell on my ass damn hard down each step almost a week ago.

As I am internationally famed for being the palest non-albino around, you may not be surprised to learn that there is very little pigment on my ass. The largest single bruise I think I’ve ever actually seen in my life started forming back there.

The first morning it was just a large blue bruise. I jokingly referred to it as my “smurf ass.”

By day two, it had become the shape of Alaska.

It’s now morphed into Kazakhstan. No seriously. Kazakhstan. All over me.

On last week’s Gilmore Girls, Luke and Lorelai went car hunting — in Burbank, or Glendale’s Brand Boulevard of Cars, etc. The production wasn’t even trying to pretend they were still in Connecticut. There were palm trees in the front of the shot. Way to go, team Rosenthal.

One of the places that I did get to hike all around was the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, pictured here.

I’m going to Yosemite on mini-vay tomorrow, back sometime on Sunday. There’s very little planned for this trip. I have somewhere to stay, but otherwise I haven’t worked out any of the details. I really know very little about the park, and, at this point, I err on the side of figuring it out when I get there.

I finished a long-term project around lunchtime. I cleaned. my. desk.

I switched cell phone providers over the weekend after breaking my contract with no early termination fee (Thanks Consumerist!). Rather than messing around with number porting, I just got a new number. If you didn’t hear from me yet and still need the new number, please let me know.

In related news, I have signal at my apartment. Unless you’ve been to the black hole that is my apartment on my former network, you probably have no idea how exciting this is, but seriously, it’s like I’m living in 1999! It’s amazing! Also really amazing: corporate discounts. So hot.

bandanna face-off

I’ve been kinda keeping an eye on Year Zero, the Nine Inch Nails ARG/experience/not totally shady and fairly organic marketing campaign. Yesterday evening, there was a live event in Los Angeles, not too far down the street from my office. So off I went.

The gist of the event was that Steve Peters from 42 gave out 1″ buttons to players when they showed up. There’s a large Year Zero mural on Melrose at Ogden. We were to meet under the pig on the mural, and follow the aim of the revolver across the street to an unmarked van when it arrived. The van arrived around 7, and we completely stopped traffic on Melrose in order to cross the street to get to the van. Good times.

The van contained heavy kits for each participant. Most of the kits were identical, but a few boxes marked with a red star contained cell phones for further gameplay next week. Yeah, I didn’t get a cool box. I’m pretty sure that the few people to whom Steve gave yellow pins got the red boxes.

One of the things inside the box is a bandanna with the Art Is Resistance flag on it. The photo here shows the Anti-Robot Militia bandanna that I got at a live event for The Beast in New York way back in 2001.

Other pictures from the event are on Flickr here.

If you’re interested in the game, as always, check out Unfiction.

After all that, I went out to a gig last night. It was disappointing, but this is now.