The LA Weekly has a good article about recent efforts to restore the LA River (yes, LA has a river. Part of Terminator 2 was filmed there). In 1938, as part of flood-control measures, the vegetation was bulldozed and concrete was poured over the banks and riverbed. Most storm-drains empty into the river, which then carries the trash, waste, and toxic chemicals into the Pacific.

Now the city wants to restore it. They want to plant vegetation along the banks, clean the water, and remove some of the concrete. Parks and bike paths will also be built along the river. They\’re hoping this will be the start of a whole network of greenbelts and bikeways throughout the city.

I hope this plan goes through. It\’d be great to have a real river running through LA, a place where we can relax, stroll alongside, and just hang out. There aren\’t enough public spaces in LA.

God bless those Austrians: Women Rewarded for Shopping Topless

How cool, the Final Fantasy DVD will have a music video for Michael Jackson\’s Thriller starring Aki and the rest of the cast. Heh heh, check out those screenshots.

The price of a Dreamcast is now $80. At that price I\’m seriously thinking about getting one. I\’m sure there\’s a few good games for it. Sega should\’ve sold them at $80 from the beginning. Then maybe they could\’ve sold more, and made a profit, and then they wouldn\’t need to discontinue it. Or maybe not, I don\’t know much about economics.

So I went to Krispy Kreme originally intending to get 6 donuts. I chose the ones I wanted, and then the lady said for $1 more I could get a dozen donuts. So I agree cause it\’s a good deal. Then they also have this promotion where you get 3 free glazed donuts if you buy a dozen. So now I have 15 donuts sitting on my counter that I don\’t know what to do with. They\’ll probably go stale before I finish them. Well, if anybody wants some donuts, come on over!

I\’m taking a Spanish class for this summer session(my last class at UCI) and it always amuses me to death when I have a white Spanish teacher. This guy\’s actually the second one I\’ve had, the first was back in high school. I\’m sure he can teach Spanish just as well as a native speaker, but I dunno, it just seems a little odd. Kind of like if you went to a Japanese restaurant and the cooks were Italian. Anyway, I shouldn\’t complain too much. One of my aunts is white and she teachers Mandarin at USC, and she speaks it better than I do.

Yay! I now have another game to play at work: 3D Pong.
[ From Deftone ]

You can now preorder Back and Forth Volume 5, the Skinny Puppy live album, as well as the DVD versions of Ain\’t It Dead Yet? and the Video Collection. Time to spend some money.

Badass, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is playing at the University Center starting tomorrow. Now I have something to do tomorrow.

I almost forgot to mention this gem from last week\’s Onion:
Bush Finds Error in Fermilab Calculations

\”It\’s true, I dabbled in the higher maths during my Yale days,\” said Bush, who spent three semesters as an assistant to Drs. Kasha and Slaughter at Yale\’s renowned Sloane High-Energy Physics Lab. \”But I didn\’t have the true gift for what Gauss called \’the musical language in which is spoken the very universe.\’ If I have any gift at all, it\’s my instinct for process and order.\”

Continued Bush: \”As much as I enjoyed studying physics at Yale, by my junior year it became apparent that I could far better serve humanity through a career in statecraft.\”