OH MY GOD. The world is full of crazy people. Crazy people. CRAZY PEOPLE. VIOLENT CRAZIES.

Just ten minutes ago Z and I were driving down Kenmore Ave, driving safe, a bit like geezers, for lo! We now have the Dorkmobile back, and it only cost a zillion dollars! But we love our little green Dorkmobile (an adorable 03 Prius we still think of as 'new', for any late comers to the story). So we are driving along, it being a quarter to midnight on a Tuesday night.

And then some assmonkey suddenly passes us. On the left. Over a double yellow line. Some giant black pickup. Now, we'd been stopped at a light, so there was the slight excuse of the concept of haziness-of-intersections, but I was taught never to change lanes at an intersection so it's pretty definitely Not The Right Thing To Do.
But, hey, people are crazy. So we continue on, though it might be said that dude who was so crazy to get by us really isn't driving any faster than we were.

For non-Buffalo peeps, Kenmore Ave is the city limit of Buffalo to the north, in this neighborhood. It's a major street, but is emphatically two lanes, and the speed limit is a stretchy 30. I do 40 on it sometimes, in a hurry, but usually there's too much traffic. Both directions.
Later on it's a lane-and-a-half, but at this point, in Kenmore, it's definitely only one lane each way. Lots of little side streets.

Anyway. Suddenly the NEXT car wants to do the same thing! He gets out in the oncoming lane and starts roaring away. Z's Jersey survival instincts kick in, so he jumps on the gas, accellerates (to, like, 40, wow) and comes up behind the crazy pickup truck, because God knows what this second car is going to do. (Oh just let him in, you might say. What if he cuts us off? He is DEMONSTRABLY CRAZY. This is KENMORE AVE. That is a DOUBLE YELLOW LINE. Oh my GOD he is crazy.) The second car, a white sedan, tries to play chicken to get us to give him room. We do not do so, Z being a veteran Jerseyite. So in a moment the white sedan slams its brakes on, as there is a stop light, and pulls in behind us.
THEN THE GUY GETS OUT OF HIS CAR. [Buffalonians, the intersection in question was Kenmore and Delaware.]
The light turns green and we take off. Unfortunately dude behind us gets back in his car rather promptly, and is behind us again. We get to Colvin. The light is red. We come up behind the black pickup. The white sedan comes up behind us. Dude opens his door again.
Z locks the doors. We sit there thinking the million-dollar question: <i>just how crazy is he?</i>

Dude is a heavyset clean-shaven white man in his forties. He is wearing a black leather jacket. On that black leather jacket is a brass badge. It closely resembles a Buffalo Police badge. He comes up and bangs on the window. Z does his best stone-face-forward look. After another bang we think the window might break, so Z rolls it down a tiny crack.
"What the fuck you doing?" the guy yells. "You like to play games? Are you high on drugs?"
"Sir," I say, "You cannot pass on a double-yellow line."
"You like to play games?" he yells.
"Sir," I persist, "you <i>cannot</i> pass on a double yellow line."
Z rolls the window back up. The guy, amazingly, goes away. The light turns green. We drive away.
After the intersection, the guy again pulls into the oncoming lane, over the double yellow line, to roar past us. Z slams the brakes on. The guy rockets past us doing at least 55, and then rockets past the black pickup that started all this (blowing my theory that he was somehow in league with the dude and this was some exaggerated macho game--- nooo, it was not).

We continue the half a block to our house, pull in the driveway. I get out my cellphone and call 911. I report that a crazy white man wearing a police badge accosted us eastbound on Kenmore Ave, driving a white four-door sedan erratically and challenging us at stoplights, and I let my voice quaver a bit and said I was scared he'd kill somebody.

Z, meanwhile, likewise calls 911 and is a bit less coherent and a bit less successful at convincing them. Apparently his 911 operator wanted him to go stand out by the side of the street to give a report to someone. My 911 operator simply said, We'll send someone out to the area to have a look. I said, "He was going eastbound at a very high rate of speed."

Now, the question is: Was he really a cop?
Obviously he was off-duty, if he was. He was not in uniform except for the badge. The car was not a police cruiser. And if he was that pissed, and had any right to be doing anything at all, he'd totally have arrested us.
But would someone who was not a cop have the fucking gall to impersonate one, and to treat other people with such consummate selfrighteous arrogance?
<i>Who bawls someone else out when they don't succeed in illegally passing them</i> on a crowded suburban street on a double yellow line?

Z thinks maybe he was an aging stripper, sorta embittered that his cop thing wasn't sexy anymore. Who knows.

I just WISH I'd had the presence of mind to get my cellphone out and call 911 while the dude was banging on the window. That would have been so much smarter of me. As it is I didn't' even get his license number.

x-posted to LJ.

I forgot to blog the St. Patrick's Day presents I got last week.

Maybe he didn't buy me conventional bling for Valentine's Day, but he did buy me an implausibly expensive irreverent stuffed animal.




I don't mind the lateness of the gift-- the stuffed Joanna doll didn't go up for sale until two days after the St Pat's ship-by deadline, and he figured it'd be best to wait and get both items, but then the shirt went backordered, so i got them just in time for Easter instead.
But you know, I'll wear it to all the seisuns i sing at.

(Have I pimped on here that I often sing at the traditional Irish sessions on Saturday afternoons [5ish-8ish pm] at Nietszche's? Free admission, Guinness on special, I sing you song, Kurt plays harp, Bill plays accordion sometimes, Ann plays fiddle, maybe a piper or two shows up, maybe someone with a mandolin, Patricia might bring her guitar and sing irreverent folksongs or really sappy Irish ballads in a perhaps-sarcastic-you'll-never-know manner. You never know who'll show up. It's a good time. I generally get tanked.)

Also I and many rollergirls will be attending the Dyngus Day celebrations in Polonia tomorrow-- hopefully, on wheels at the Central Terminal. That's the plan anyway. Also someone who doesn't sign a name has been texting me about pussy willows-- I know it's a rollergirl because they have my cellphone number which is only posted on the private Rollergirls Yahoo group. So I have 35 pussy willows and eight wheels. I am nearly unstoppable.

And oh!!!
Highlight reel of the March 31st roller derby bout. You have to watch the whole thing to see (e:zobar)'s costume-- he's in the closing credits. If you want to watch for me, I'm wearing the white-capped Pro-Designed kneepads and a pair of black and white striped tights, and matching armbands, so you can often spot me by the stripes glowing in the blacklight. The lighting's awful, sorry.

Dammit, I can't steal the video. I guess I have to just link to it. It's here. On Myspace. Sorry. :(




My team's in blue. Individuals and incidents to look out for include:

• #007, Supernova, has an awesome booty (in real life she's a model, a plus-size model, though there's really only one part of her that's plus-sized at all, as you'll see) and often makes entertaining gestures involving it.
  
• # 459, Janeiac, often skated as jammer, and throughout the course of the evening, fell enough times that she accumulated a 2nd-degree friction burn through her fishnets, so that the next day it looked like a truck had run her over.
  
• # RU486, Lizzie McFighter, gets checked into the chairs, on film (actually nearly right into the camera) by the Saucies captain Dr. Dementer. In that fall she injured her knee so badly she's possibly out for the season. But what the camera doesn't show is that she got up and skated through the pack one more time, getting 4 more points, before giving up and getting carried out on a stretcher (also on film).
  
• One of the Dollies, who skated as a ref for this bout (as the Dollies did not compete; we'll face them Apr. 28th), one Redfox, wore a crop-top halterneck shirt, a pair of striped spankies, and some Muppet-fur chaps that she made herself. Look for the cowboy hat and red hair, as if the striped spankies weren't enough to find her by... We all decided, in the Knockouts locker room, that we were gay for her. Just for her, in some of our cases, although others not so much. She found this hilariously entertaining. She really is that hot though.
  
• The girl in the gold sequined leotard and bunny ears, was briefly fired from her job for being involved in such a sexual and violent sport. She was fired, not for the video, but for the mention, of her pseudonym, in Artvoice. But the firing didn't stick so she's back at work now. (That's not an incident in the video, but it does add something, to know that.)

And yes, she did tell them all off on her way out, which made it that much better when they were forced to take her back.

There's one shot of me falling, dramatically from behind. There's another shot that apparently shows me going into the chairs, although I have no memory of such occuring. Actually I only remember falling once, in a pileup that didn't appear on the video-- a Saucy landed right on top of me and kind of squashed me but it didn't hurt much, so I shook her off and got up. But the video shows me falling all over the place. Which is probably a pretty good endorsement of my new equipment-- pads from Pro-Designed--

Anyway that's all for now.

Heh, what's funniest is that I can't view the video I posted. It doesn't load in my browser. I've already forgotten what I posted. I am sure it's dumb.

I have been involved in a horrid and stupid and messy flamewar for the last two days, over on Myspace, about roller derby. I am exhausted, but somewhat proud of myself that I have actually managed to largely get the thing to remain on-topic, and actually managed (this should go down in Internet history) to wrestle my way through and, within the comment thread, convince not one but two of my flamers that the thing they were freaking out about had not in fact been what I meant by what I posted.

The only person still flaming away is someone only peripherally involved, which is kind of funny. He seems to think he's still going to beat me somehow, even though I finally got him to paraphrase what he thinks I said (it was a two-paragraph post, and the first paragraph was a sentence and a half), and his paraphrase is not what I said, and thus renders his entire argument unusable.
I still haven't won, because he's apparently too stupid to give up even in the face of that logic, but I'm not really overly concerned, because he's not even involved in this, he's just some idiot who seems to think he is. So...

• dances a bit*

My Internet flaming kung-fu is massive!!

That said, I'm not ever ever linking to *this* blog from there. Good Christ. Well, not for a while anyway. It's bad enough that some of them know where my Livejournal is. It's not my fault-- I knew some of them before I joined roller derby. It's too late to swear them to secrecy, I guess.
It's just... agh, I have been blogging publicly on the Internet for six years now, I will not be deterred by something so small. But when it's people you know in real life, it's a lot higher-stakes. I had planned on just walking away from that blog post, but then I realized, I'm going to see these people at the meeting on Tuesday, and if I don't go to that meeting, they'll think I'm running from them. And...
Bah.

Anyhow. I posted the photos of the bout on Flickr, so that I could link to them from any of my blogs without putting in a direct link to another blog. There might still be like one or two people on Myspace who don't know my Livejournal name and if they're that oblivious I'd prefer they stay that way. Also I'm not giving Myspace more page views than I have to-- those ads are fucking annoying.

So: bout photos, and detailed captions are here:


If anyone's curious, I also posted a recap of the bout as I experienced it here:

(e:zobar)'s dancing rabbit is traumatizing me.

He traumatized a lot of little kids too. That was pretty priceless. I am now filled with a perverse desire to breed. I can't explain it.

I've been trying to post stupid videos and cellphone-camera pictures because I now have a phone that does photos and video, but I can't seem to make the moblogging feature thing work, so you all are denied my cellphone-video directorial genius for now. We'll see if I can manage to figure it out. If so, I now will have tons of content for my (e:strip) blog, because I am trying to use my stupid expensive cellphone enough to justify the expense, and this will make me feel better about it.

Also my life is so fascinating it needs to be chronicled, hopefully in multimedia.

So, stay tuned, folks, for stupid grainy videos of pointless mundanity. Yay! I'm psyched.

(I'm uploading this video from my computer, but that's not really moblogging. I am determined to become a moblogger. it would help if I could actually type on a cellphone. Perhaps I'll learn.)

::DOWNLOAD MEDIA::

See poster, previous draft. I suppose it would be gauche to post it again. Nickel City Knockouts vs. Suicidal Saucies, 7 pm Saturday, Rainbow Rink (just off the Twin City Hwy).

The Knockouts got our team uniforms tonight!!! They are HOT. I am not just saying that. Dave from Jackdaw did the design and the screens, and some of you may be familiar with the caliber of his work from the Jackdaw merch: Our uniforms are beautifully screenprinted, impeccably designed, and absolutely gorgeous.

Much of the team will be out tomorrow night in uniform at the Jackdaw show at Mohawk Place, so if you're curious, you know where to find us. I hear that Jackdaw inspires spontaneous dancing and also spontaneous makeouts. I hope not to be disappointed. I will be wearing a very, very, very short skirt with a set of brass knuckles screenprinted on the ass, so I should be easy to find for the aforementioned spontaneous dancing.
I am kind of getting over a cold so maybe you might want to hold off on the spontaneous makeouts. But we'll see. Alcohol kills germs, after all.

I've been meaning to get to a Jackdaw show for over a year, so, I guess that's a minor indicator of just how extremely lame I am. Nevertheless, I am excited. And also will be wearing an exceedingly hot uniform. So consider the excitement exponentially increased. I can't sleep because I can't wait to skate. I can't wait. It is going to be AWESOME.

But I made a vow to avoid capslock, so I had better stop squeeing now.