Author: CoolDMZ

"X-ray vision to see in between / Where's my kimono and my time machine?"

Your Cowtown Revolutionizes Online World

Finally, what we’ve all been waiting for: the launch of Your Cowtown. For weeks Sacramentans have wondered what online wonders the new site would present, then we played the cow-tipping game until we were masters (though I could never get past 1 cow until it timed out. What the dealio?). Now we have the full site, and all our questions are answered. In what is absolutely the biggest shocker since the Webber trade, the site is brought to us by…the Maloofs? KCRA? the Money Store? Sony? Sorry, it’s Crystal Dairy!

The site features the classic “Cow Tippin” game, a link out to Crystal Cream & Butter Company’s site, a tool for getting home delivery of dairy products (welcome to the 1950s!), a retail locator, and the two strangest things I’ve seen in a long time: a call for “columnists” (on a dairy producer’s site?) and a “Create a Blog” feature which is actually just a guestbook. What’s next, a screen of brain-hemorrage inducing dancing cows?

Don’t get me wrong: I loves me some Crystal products. For your money, Crystal ice cream is the way to go, unless you want high-quality ice cream in nice-looking packaging that doesn’t fall apart when touched. But seriously. Great milk, top-notch. And now a great website to boot!

Needed: Local Music Scene Coverage

If you live here, you’ll know that the Sacto music scene is like the younger, scrappier cousin to the Bay Area scene–the kind of cousin that gets in a lot more fights and can’t keep a job. It’s been that way since before Daisy Spot and it’ll weather Team Sleep and ride Papa Roach all the way to their Behind the Music. (Do they have one yet?)

I loved me some concerts in my younger days. Nar, Jackpot, The Pretty Girls at Old I, The Troublemakers and Groovie Ghoulies at Cattle Club, Sex 66 at Cesar Chavez, and the best concert I ever attended, Payback at Duke’s. But I’m a daddy now and thus I’m not exactly a frequent concertgoer anymore. That’s where you come in.

We need a few writers to cover the local concert scene. No compensation but the satisfaction of being part of a new voice on all things Sacto. Email me, CoolDMZ-at-gmail.com and let me know if you’re interested.

Griego Erwin…Out

Today Bee Executive Editor Rick Rodriguez announced that local Metro section columnist Diana Griego Erwin has resigned (registration required…why exactly?), amid an internal investigation into allegedly falsified sources in her columns. This is the groundbreaking thinker behind “male testosterone and sports may cause fighting.”

When I was a junior in high school, Erwin followed my Catholic youth group to Denver for World Youth Day, when the Pope (JPII, not Dick One-Six as I like to call him) came to America. I’m sure her dispatches are lost to the dustbin of the microfiche room of history, but I will always remember her at Mile High Stadium, looking down the aisle at my group of about six, clearly not being as excited and experiencing the required amount of religious fervor, and saying something along the lines of “I can’t believe you guys are not getting excited!”

Now I wonder–and I realize a trip to aforementioned microfiche room could verify this–if she went home and wrote about a different youth group of made up teenagers who rent their garments and sprouted Stigmata at the sight of the Pope mobile?

(N.B. I do not mean any disrespect toward the Pope or toward religious people in general. I loves me some church every week and I think John Paul II was one of the greatest men of the 20th Century.)

Jay Street Ghost Town

Driving up Jay Street from the the plaza (heretofore known as the DTP!) the other day I noticed that Jay Street has become an utter wasteland from about 9th to 12th street. Which is weird because as we all know the vacant lot on the southside of 8th-9th is becoming non vacant, which it has been for centuries or at least 25 years. The most striking block is the southside of 10th-11th, where all doors but Mother India are gone. At the time of posting, a few days after this observation, more vacancies might possibly have ocurred (The Sac Rag, as a fledgling snarkblog, lacks the budget for live camera feeds of every block of the city).

Two possible ways to read this: a) somebody has bought that block and is tearing the whole shebang down, or b) there is nowhere to park within 3 blocks and there was nothing there anyway except a vacuum repair shop. I hope a) and that what goes up next is either not a multiplex or is the giantest, most fantabulous hamburger stand the world has ever seen.

New Willie’s Burger a Zinger?

I know the restaurant is not new, but this Website is, so it’s my first chance to comment on the new Willie’s at Arden and Fair Oaks.

The pseudo-industrial design in the place is fine, it’s a great experience (despite the lack of a real ATM machine, argh, worse than Rick’s because you can wait for dessert), blah blah blah, but what I love is the new charbroiled menu. This submenu introduces a new burger called the Cheesy Bad Boy. It is a scrumptious burger no doubt, but what is more interesting about it is that Cheesy Bad Boy is a very appropriately titled menu item at an establishment frequented by Jesuit boys.

NOTE: I am a Jesuit boy myself (class of ’94), but if the Jesuits taught me nothing else it was to not take myself too seriously. Actually, that’s the exact opposite of almost every educational goal of the Jesuits.

A Walking Dude Stalks Us All

Chief among my reasons for wanting to launch this site is the phenomenon, peculiar I am sure to the urban areas of Sacramento, of the Walking Dude. The Walking Dude phenomenon can be described as follows: there exists a person–nay, a ghost, a shade, merely a phantasm–whose pedestrian circuit around the city will intersect with yours in ways that stretch the bounds of time and space. Your walking dude will be with you as you come out of the parking garage under the Downtown Mall, and suddenly as you flip over to KWOD at 16th next to the Auditorium there he is again, on foot, illogically pacing you in your car. Do others see him? Is he the gremlin on the wing of the rain-swept plane that is your Sacramento existence? Is he whacked out on some sort of secret drug that enables him to actually fly?

Someday I will photograph my walking dude (which will be funny actually, because he is a dead ringer for Barry Gibb) and embark on a voyage of scientific discovery into the truth behind the Walking Dude Phenomenon.