APRIL 30

TODAY smashed all my personal records for getting to work late. Thanks to a fatal crash on the 710 north, I got to the office three hours after I left the flat. I took some pics with the moby for something to do, and here they are.

You know you're in the shit when it's 1.37pm and the traffic's stopped. At this point I had no idea I wouldn't get above 5mph for another three hours - if I did, I'd have headed home and rung in sick.

Here's my view for the next 20 or so minutes.

The traffic's already backing up.

Nice Corvette!

At this point I'm bored off my tits and taking pics of just about anything.

More traffic - it must have been backed up for miles. One saving grace was that it wasn't a particularly hot day - only about 76 degrees.

Christ, I must have been bored.

It's 3.09pm and I'm going nuts. Ev called and told me what was going on up ahead - apparently a truck on the southbound side went through the central reservation and crushed a car coming the other way. A couple of other trucks and cars were also involved.

For those of you who've always wondered, here's the floor of the Mini. As you can tell I keep it as tidy as any other car I've owned.

I'm about 200 yards from the crash at this point. Shortly before I took this a coroner's van went past so I knew it must be bad.

One of the crashed trucks spilled its cargo across three lanes. Up ahead you can see some police officers waving traffic through.

We ended up having to drive along the shoulder to get past the wreck.

Firemen and a coroner's van - never a good sign. Two women were killed in the crash, apparently caused by a truck swerving to avoid some dickhead speeders.

APRIL 29

THE Great Trip Home 2007 is finally on, meaning I only have to wait til June 2 to get some proper fish 'n' chips and June 4 to go to the pub. Luvvly!

APRIL 25

SO THERE I was sitting in the office in my usual mid-Wednesday-afternoon stupor when one of the advertising girls comes up to editorial to tell us something's going on outside our office. About six of us headed down the stairs and out the door to discover there's been a diamond heist - four guys smashed the windows of a car belonging to someone who works at the jewellery mart across the road, grabbed a bag of diamonds and legged it.

Luckily I'd taken the camera to work for some reason so I got some shots.

Here's the car with the windows smashed and the rear tyre slashed. The bloke at the back is the one who was attacked.

Another shot of the car from the other side.

The obligatory police helicopter - there were about three flying around searching for the suspects. They were still in the air a couple of hours later.

More police arriving on the scene.

The victim explaining what happened to police. What basically happened was this: he comes out of the jewellery place with a bag of diamonds and gets in his car. Two blokes come up, one smashes his windows and the other slashes his tyre. They grab the diamonds, run to a waiting car and drive off. A passing copper follows them, they drive into a car park, crash their car and leg it. The odd thing is that none of the four were caught but the diamonds - about $300,000 worth - were recovered. Still, it made for a slightly more interesting Wednesday afternoon.

APRIL 23

EV'S back safe from Las Vegas, although it remains to be seen if the Celine Dion concert did her any lasting damage. In the meantime here's some pics she took, starting with the view from her room in the Excalibur:

This is a pic of the Excalibur hotel. Flynn, if you're reading this you can start laughing whenever you want.

Note the authentic Olde Worlde Aire Conditioninge Ventes, as well as the equally realistic Steppe Laddere and Trolleye Thingye.

The New York New York casino, where I managed to find bloody good fish and chips and introduced Ev to the delights of malt vinegar. On her chips, you dirty-minded sods.

The Treasure Island casino, which is now going by the name of "ti" for today's ADD-addled clientele.

Times are hard for leprechauns, so this one's turned to pimping. Note that the spine of the woman on the right appears to be trying to break out of her coat.

I'm guessing she was in the Luxor at this point as the Blue Man Group has a residency there. They're pretty good.

I don't know where this was taken but I've got a tenner that says these flowers are fake.

APRIL 22

APART from taking the scariest pic of Emric in existence, I have done nothing this weekend. Ev flew to Vegas early on Saturday morning to see a Celine Dion show with a friend. Luckily I was born with musical taste and politely declined to go, as to me "seeing Celine Dion" is on a par with "being force-fed dogshit and then burned alive in a furnace powered by burning dogshit". So I've had the flat to myself for two days and what have I done? Sod all.

Here are a few of the things I wanted to do this weekend:

Do the old newspaper/graffiti pages; update the dictionary; feed the cats; get some prints done; tidy up the living room; go to the bookstore; shower; buy fags; change underwear; burn a Ride CD for Matt; make the bed; tidy up book/DVD shelves; do the dishes; watch Children of Men; shave; do a page of UK photos.

This is what I actually got done:

Fed the cats; cleaned Emric's puke off the carpet; cleaned Emric's crap off the bathroom sink; burned a Ride CD for Matt; played Quake II; played Quake III; watched four hours of back-to-back Futurama episodes on Adult Swim; watched Children of Men; watched Casino Royale; watched some episodes of Porridge; slept; took pic of Emric.

In other words, I completely pissed the weekend down the drain.

APRIL 17

I GOT this email at work today:

Matt got the same email, only he bothered to run it through Babelfish:

"Beginning, it is Miki. Seeing with the bulletin board, hobby it is agreeable serving, thinking, the mail it did and the [chi] [ya] was. Although with [ikinari] [gomen] do m (__) you can know each other with m such feeling, yearning, the [te] you challenged for the first time and the [chi] [ya] were. When the reply you can receive, simple oneself [ne] which is introduced (^_-) -* If such an air it is not, if so it can have saying, because you abandon. However the one which is accustomed of course chummily is more delightful. The reply waiting patiently, the [ma] ~ it does, (the ^_^) the/~"

I think we can all agree that there's a lesson to be learned here. Buggered if I know what it is, though.

APRIL 14

NEVER ever drink this stuff if you're in the office. Our features editor received four bottles of Blue Cow as a freebie yesterday and doled them out to the production desk as we're usually stressed within 42.6 seconds of getting to work. I stupidly swigged mine all in one go and spent the next three hours fighting off the overwhelming urge to go to sleep (not that being at work has ever stopped me from taking a nap). Seriously, I was yawning every 20 seconds or so and almost dozed off while on a fag break.

The label states it's non-drowsy, which is bollocks. As for drinking it while driving, at four in the afternoon I was wondering if I'd be OK driving home at midnight. Note the usual disclaimer at the bottom, which is basic legalese for "we pulled the above statements out of our marketing guy's arse". Still, the rest of the office had a good laugh at my expense.

APRIL 12

I SPOTTED this gorgeous 1956 Corvette during a fag break today:

Thanks to Dan for lending me about $6,000 worth of camera, lens and flash to take these pics.

APRIL 10

MY "WONDERFUL" Razr mobile phone packed up last week. The battery was dead so I stupidly plugged it in to the wall, only for it to start resetting itself every 30 seconds, beeping a lot and finally locking the buttons and flashing the screen. "Oh bugger," I thought, "I do believe my phone's died." Luckily me and Ev took out insurance on our Razrs (and what twat came up with that spelling?) so today Ev took mine in to get it seen to.

Amazingly, the bloke in the Verizon store took one look at the phone, one look at the insurance policy and handed a new one over. I did want one in black (to match the Mini, obviously) but apparently he could only give me the exact same model so I ended up with one in a colour best described as "a Welsh November sky, only metallic".

Now Verizon - who, as I've said before, seem to have adopted the "sucking arse" business model - have very kindly disabled the Razr's ability to receive files via USB connection. They do this because otherwise people would be able to put ringtones and background pictures on their phones and transfer pics taken with the phone for free, and God forbid should they be allowed to do this when they could be paying Verizon $3-$4 a time for the privilege. But there is a way around Verizon's wankery in the form of a program called Motorola Phone Tools. Me and Ev decided to shell out $20 on this last year as we realised it would pay for itself within a couple of weeks, which it did in the form of letting us put our own ringtones and pics on our own phones without being ripped off by Verizon. Although the software is really good at what it does, I had to reinstall it and update it tonight and I was so amused by MPT's attempts to be trendy tossers that I decided to take some screen grabs and put them up here.

This is not what you want to see when you're installing the software.

Here's the screen you're subjected to when you first connect your phone. You can just hear the marketing men:

"We need a model for the MPT connection screen. I need someone bland but trendy, the sort of person who looks like he just missed out on appearing in an iPod commercial."

"I know just the person - he's young, trendy, blander than plain yoghurt and totally non-threatening. And he really did just miss out on a part in an iPod commercial. I'll give him a bell."

"Great. And good call on the non-threatening part - we don't want to scare people off when they see technical terms like 'cable' and 'infra-red'."

I mean, what did the photographer tell the model? "OK, mate, just hold the phone up but don't actually look at it and adopt a quizzical expression and the stance of someone who's about to piss himself. Hold it... No, wait - could you let your belt hang down a bit? Wonderful. What's that you say? You're an iPod user? I'd never have guessed."

Vague ethnic stereotypes! The Razr is perfect for you!

Holy shit, it's Bridgette Nielson's sister.

APRIL 9

WE HEADED down to San Diego on the weekend for Easter. Usually a trip down south fills me with utter dread at the though of taking the 405 but Ev booked us on the Amtrak train. Although a lot of Yanks think public transport should be made illegal as it's a pinko-Commie plan to get God-fearing Americans out of their God-fearing SUVs and force them to sit in close proximity to each other, the train trip was comfortable, quick and a sodding sight less stressful than sitting on the freeway. Anyway without further ado here's some random pics from the trip...

TOMORROW is the big day for Burbank - the City Council elections. Well it's big for the 12% or so of people who'll bother to get off their arses and vote. We've been assured that the election results will be in by 9pm, thus saving us the nightmare of a 1am finish like we had last week when Glendale went to the polls. Speaking of the Glendale elections, I had to do a map today showing how each precinct voted. This meant I got to use the Fisher-Price computer iMac that's been gathering dust since the company bought it for me over a year ago. Why has it been gathering dust? Well the IT dept only got around to wiring it up to the network when we moved into the new building in January; before that I could do all the logos, graphics and maps I wanted - I just had no way of getting them onto the picture server. Not even the sodding email worked. Oh, and thanks to IT's paranoia at people buggering up "their" precious computers, the toy PC iMac says it's Saturday January 15, 2005, and there's no way I can change it.

AND another thing - thanks must go to whichever moron decided to put up big signs saying the offramp to the 2 was closed tonight, even though it bloody well wasn't. Of course I didn't realise this until it was too late to veer across three lanes of traffic onto the ramp, so I ended up pissing around on the 134 east/west on yet another detour from hell. Sod this, I'm off to bed.

APRIL 5

SO THERE I am sitting at my desk in the office this afternoon when all of a sudden half of one of my bloody teeth falls out. I mean really, how inconsiderate - I was just about to eat an apple. Still, being a Brit I'm used to this kind of thing happening so I kept a stiff upper lip and went for a fag. While outside I got the bit of tooth and surreptitiously gave it a decent burial in the earth surrounding one of the trees by the car park. I'd love to be around in a thousand years when some archaeologist digs it up; at least they'll know it's a proper British tooth by the colour.

APRIL 4

IT's 1.51am and thanks to the Glendale City Council election I've just got home from the office. Election nights have two speeds when you're on a newspaper - "stop" and "warp nine". Naturally the paper was 20 minutes late going to the press even though the deadline was extended to midnight, but we didn't want to break our long-standing tradition of keeping the press guys hanging around. At least the free pizza was good. And we have to do it all over again next week when Burbank goes to the polls. The bastards.

APRIL 1

SOME random pics from our trip to Running Springs yesterday: