I have been wondering for a while how the trash men empty our dumpster. It is locked, like all the dumpsters on the alley. I wondered if there was some secret way the dumpsters opened, like maybe when they pick them up with the trash truck the side magically opens up or something.

Ever inquisitive, today I stalked them and found out the answer.

It is nothing so complex. They have a key. They just unlock the dumpster, pick it up with the truck, put it back down, and lock it again.

So that got me to wondering- surely they can’t have a key to every dumpster in the city.

Well, they don’t. They have a master key. And actually, so do I! My key opens every dumpster in the city. Everyone probably has a key like this.

Now, isn’t that kind of amazing?

This information also explains how the homeless people still manage to get into the locked dumpsters and strew the trash all over the place. They, too, have access to these magical master keys.

You know I didn’t have the $88 million for the original Damien Hirst. Because I lost all my money in the Madoff ponzi scheme.

Needless to say I want this jeweled skull kit even more than I want a thousand fluffy kittens to bring me peeled grapes and bonbons:

Sadly, the horrible and non standards-compliant website design makes purchasing it impossible. I guess that’s what you get for hiring graphic design majors instead of qualified web developers with a resume a mile long. Ha! Just kidding.

Let’s take a little trip down memory lane.  Here’s my more economical jeweled skull from a couple of years ago.

Sigh.

iartistlondon, if you have a browser that supports it.

I see we are in for another round of “Is a college education worth it since the economy is a catastrophe and the majority of jobs are in retail?”

What can anyone say about this ongoing, pointless debate that people have been having since universities were first created back in the 1100s?

Answer: Nothing. But that doesn’t stop articles from being written about it.

Kyle Daley, 23, of Walnut Creek, Calif., graduated from UCLA a year ago with a bachelor’s in political science and is still looking for a job. Recently he put his resume into an old wine bottle and threw it into the Pacific Ocean.

I am sorry, but who is going to hire a litterbug?

If I found his resume, I would go to his house and give him a stern lecture and some pamphlets from Greenpeace.

Today we went to the Greek street festival which has resulted in lots of NO PARKING AFTER 4 AM TOWING ENFORCED and ALLEY CLOSED signs on our block. There are many flags that match the bright blue outdoor carpet they have put down. The Greek Church is on the corner. By craning my neck around I can see the cross on the cupola from where I am sitting, elegantly sipping a glass of Retsina. (Not really, it is a glass of decent Cabernet.) We are in the thick of things- we can hear the music, loud loud loud, see the drunk people staggering around, smell the charcoal smoke from the grills, see the raffle booth from the house. Maybe we will go buy raffle tickets and try to win plane tickets to Greece or an iPad. This leads me to the point of this post: Fries. We got some wonderful ones at the festival.

I love fries. Here are the best ethnic varieties.

1. Curry and Chips: England. Just how it sounds. Curry sauce on fries.
2. Greek Fries: Homemade potato chips soaked in lemon vinaigrette and oregano, covered in feta.

The meat sticks are souvlaki. Beef or pork, I’m not sure.

3. French fry omelet sandwich- Spain. Take your ordinary frozen french fries, fry them in a gallon of olive oil and twelve pounds of salt. Then take half a dozen irradiated eggs. These do not have to be refrigerated. Add an inch of oil to the pan and make an omelet- add fries to omelet. Put omelet on a baguette sliced in half lengthwise. Serve with side of french fries. Get angry if people don’t clear their plates. (Fries can be replaced with an entire garlic plant)
4. Country Fried Taters- favored food of American White People. I enjoy them with ketchup and Ranch. My mother makes good ones but mine are blackened lumps of death.

Today another sample of Starbucks Via instant coffee came with the newspaper. I like the samples, and I think the coffee is good. But this is not an item that I will ever buy. It is just too expensive for what it is.

I’m lazy so I’m not going to do a full cost-benefit analysis of Starbucks Via instant coffee the way I did for my Liberal Arts degree or Master of Fine Arts but:

3 cups of Starbucks Via costs $3.
Or, if I buy Safeway brand instant crystals, 100 cups costs $3.

Or to change this up, 9 cups of Starbucks Via costs $9.
But if I buy a half pound of Starbucks coffee beans, that also costs $9 but I can make about 60 cups of coffee.

So that means I pay about 7 times as much money for Starbucks Via as I would for normal Starbucks beans. That makes no sense to me.

Setting: The situp mat

Old guy: I need to stop at the stationery store and pick up some nice paper for when I fax the resume.

Young hunky guy: I’m not sure it makes a difference- it’s a fax.

Old guy: Every little bit helps in this economy.

Young hunky guy: But it’s a fax. They can’t see what kind of paper it’s on.

Old guy: It would be a little better on nice paper. I knew a guy who got laid off from this high powered job on the city council. Made buckets of money. Buckets. And now he can’t even get a job as a bouncer at a strip club!

Young hunky guy: Well, I’m not sure those jobs require the same skill set.

Old guy: He applied at a strip club and they told him he wasn’t qualified! Times are really tough.

Young hunky guy: I mean maybe he was short. You don’t see too many short guys as bouncers.

(etc)

I’m sure we’ve all heard about the art heist from the Paris Museum of Modern Art and a French cultural official who beseeched the thieves to return it, claiming nobody would buy it on the black market. “What would you do with $120 million in stolen art?” He asked (or something like that).

Here’s what I’d do with it.

The Braque and the Modigliani I’d put over the couch. But I really think the frames should be gold.

The Matisse I’d put on the wall in the “entry nook” and the Picasso over the piano.

A Leger was also stolen, but Leger is not my favorite, so I would take that one and sell it. Then I could afford to wear fur coats and ride around in a Bentley. Anyway, my point is a painting is something you put on the wall and enjoy, regardless of its value.

And FBI, Interpol, or whoever- please don’t send a SWAT team to my house, these pictures are totally faked in Photoshop. I did not steal the art!

I got these flowers from the maintenance men.

Our neighbors across the street have (well, had) these huge, beautiful bushes in front of their house. I want to call them butterfly bushes but I’m not sure that is right. They are kind of like giant marigolds as high as your head and the flowers are a mass of tiny round multicolored petals in orange and red and yellow. With the sun full on it, the bush blazed like a pile of jewels. Almost every single day I saw a random stranger pass by and stop and admire the flowers, exclaim about them to their friends, take pictures on their phones, touch them, smell them (they had no fragrance.) Anyway, it was an amazing sight.

But yesterday the yard workers showed up with their weed whackers and hedge clippers and mutilated the poor bush as well as the hot pink bougainvillea next to it. Chop chop! And the glory of the bush was no more.

So I rushed out and collected these flowers off the ground before they could sweep them all away.

“I like flowers,” I panted to the maintenance man because that was all the Spanish I could remember in the heat of the moment.

Here he is in action: