Cheesy star sighting! John Larroquette dropping off his Mercedes at WI Simonson in Santa Monica. He looked exactly like this picture, except more grouchy and slouchy. It seemed to be a bad day for Mercedes. One woman, after waiting an eternity, started shouting "GIVE ME MY CAR NOW! I DON'T CARE IF IT'S WASHED! JUST GIVE ME MY CAR!" Worked like a charm.

The winter of Jennifer has begun. If you need me I'll be stripped to the waist, eating a block of cheese the size of a car battery.

Recent movies I've seen and ridiculously short reviews:

After the Thin Man - Pale imitation of the original.

Jarhead - Meh.

Mr. Sardonicus - Awful old horror movie. Don't bother.

An Unfinished Life - Couldn't finish it. From the moment it started you knew exactly where it was going.

Chronicles of Narnia - Loved it. At last a Disney movie with a little dignity. No wisecracking parrots or farting warthogs allowed.

This totally blows. Paco's is one of my favorite restaurants. There's me in the Paco's birthday sombrero above, finishing off one of their extremely strong margaritas.

My condolences to everyone there. We're pulling for the victim.

This weekend's Netflix review:

Silent Running: Horrible, horrible movie. We couldn't even finish watching it. It was all Bruce Dern ranting to cheesy robots that were obviously midgets in very uncomfortable suits. From what I could tell, for some reason they had to nuke all the forests and Bruce was pissed.

A far better movie from this time is The Omega Man with Charlton Heston. It's basically Chuck killing albino Luddite mutant hippies and getting a little groovy interracial love from Rosalind Cash and her Afro. It's fantastic.

Saturday morning at about 1am we were awakened by an unspeakably loud high-pitched sound. We leapt out of bed and ran around the apartment trying to figure out where it was coming from. In our sleep-addled state, we ripped the alarm clock out of the wall, but that wasn’t it. At first I thought it was some electronic device that had gone haywire, but we went from room to room, and it seemed to be coming from everywhere. The poor cats were frozen in terror and I imagined their little eardrums exploding because it was so very very loud and would not stop.

Finally, we woke up enough to look out the peephole and noticed the fire alarms flashing and people rushing around. We put some clothes on and opened the door and a neighbor told us there was a car on fire. We could smell the burning rubber and see smoke in the air. It seemed like it wasn’t a threat to us, because it was quite far away, so we left the cats behind and went down to the street.

Our neighbors were gathered around in various states of undress, standing on the sidewalk. One guy stood there with a fluffy cat sitting placidly in his arms. Within a minute or two the fire trucks started to arrive. Eventually there were five of them parked in the middle of Maxella.

The car was an expensive Mercedes parked in our parking structure. It wasn’t completely burned, just the hood. A lady dressed in a sparkly sequined top and black sweat suit stood there sheepishly. “Sorry, it was my car. It just wouldn’t go out.”

The fire guys made their sweep, even raising one of the ladders all the way to the fourth story of our parking structure, and brought in some industrial fans to get rid of the smoke. Eventually the horrible sound stopped, and we went home. The cats were under the bed, scared but apparently healthy.