westcoastchoppers Friday, October 15 Don’t know if you noticed, but I didn’t write Vector Control last week because—hello?—I do have a life, a life that includes many passions and interests, most of which revolve around purebred naked mole rats which, yes, sounds fabulous but requires a lot of time and patience and Armor All, especially when Miss Thing thinks she’s too good to have her undercarriage thoroughly burnished. Anyway, I missed a lot of stuff last week, what with the election coming up and the further collapse of our economy and a palpable loss of hope in the country that is manifesting itself in awful ways that make you anxious for the future of this once great land. Yeah, there is a lot to talk about. Let me sum it all up by saying that those dicks who pulled their bus across the Hollywood Freeway and got on top of it and starting singing, holding up traffic for hours? Those guys were dicks.

Saturday, October 16 Tell you one thing: those guys weren’t from Downey (shazam!)

Sunday, October 17You know Southerners, those people from the area of the country that is ruining the country, and at one time didn’t even want to be part of the country, and now a lot of us wonder why we wasted a lot of good men and boot leather making them be part of the country? Them. You know how nuts Southerners are about stuff like religion and not liking gay people? Well, another thing they really believe in is that the best way to deal with teen birth control has nothing to do with education and modern medicine, but through good, old-fashioned abstinence—because that was good enough for ‘Ol Granny and her 23 kids, 14 of which survived. But according to the Centers forDisease Control, those southerners have made the south into the region with the highest teen birthrate in the country. Obviously, this is alarming. I just don’t get how you can have more than one center. I mean, shouldn’t it be called the Center for Disease Control? Isn’t it understood that a center is singular. If you have many centers then there is no center, that’s just a mall, right? Goddamn South.

Monday, October 18 Reading a story today that the Bell Eight will be back in court on Thursday. The story was in the Los Angeles Times, and when that newspaper publishes stories about these wads, the copy is often accompanied by mug shots of all eight  former city officials who are accused of using their positions to enrich themselves at residents’ expense. Now, I know there’s a temptation to say the pictures present a rogues gallery. But to me, the term “rogue” denotes a bit of style andspirit. If you take the two ladies out of the equation, I swear those dudes look like the kind of guys you eventually discover together in the same house in your neighborhood, and then you find out their arrangement is not by choice—it’s been court-ordered—and pretty soon Nancy Grace is walking on your lawn, scaring children and not being able to see herself in a mirror.

Tuesday, October 19 Goddamn South.

Wednesday, October 20 Celebrity motorcycle builder/Teutonic history
buff Jesse James reportedly will close down his West Coast Choppers
shop on Long Beach’s west side and focus his efforts on his operations
in Texas, a state much more in line political views, especially when
it comes to making the trains run on time. It’s been quite a year for
James, who went from having the city name a street after him, to being the husband of an Academy Award-winning
actress, to being revealed as an adulterer, to being revealed to be an
adulterer who likes to dress up as a Nazi. It’s Kathie Lee Gifford all
over again. Anyway, James seems to be headed to Texas and Long Beach is looking
to change that street back to its original name: Hermann Goering Blvd.

Thursday, October 21 Accused lardo Robert Rizzo, the former city manager who was allegedly the mastermind behind the Bell scandal, shows up at court today with all of his embezzle-buddies and found that prosecutors had filed two new charges against him, bringing his total to 55—55 also being the answer to how many lumps of sugar he likes in his coffee tartar. Apparently, if Rizzo is convicted of one particular count of those 55 he would be required to give a DNA sample. Just where does it end? I mean, hasn’t Robert Rizzo degraded us enough? Now, someone is gonna
have to get all near his business? I mean, how many hazmat suits dipped in how many layers of latex would you demand to wear before you got anywhere near Robert Rizzo’s DNA? Dude looks like a walking
tar pit. Well, actually, I’ve never actually seen him walk.