The Frades Papers

[ Home Town News ] [ The Home Front ] [ The Way of Things ] [ En La Cocina ] [ Garage Brewing ] [ Armchair Lit ] [ Plummet into Irrelevance ] [ Gentlemen's Club ] [ Unsettling Employment ] [ 'Where are they now' file ] [ Link Dump ]
Disclaimer: Although I'm sure website design is a useful skill, I'm so tanked up with useful (and useless) skills that I could sell them off one-by-one and still have enough left over to make it to December. It may take a while to turn this site into a dazzling graphic display, but don't hold your breath while you wait. I don't know any HTML -- in fact, I really don't want to learn -- I'm just flailing along as best I can. If I had a nerdy homunculus manservant, I would certainly have him fussing away on all those codes and tags all night. I've got content to work up; I can't be fussing around with all this computer crap. I have enough of that at work, but more on this later.	What's New... January 21, 2003!! I finally updated a bit, particularly my email address, which is now [email protected], but since I gave away my Frontpage software, I'm down to editing HTML. No idea how that works.... More stuff being cooked up right now. Onlyyyyyyyy problem is, I spilled beer on the keyyyyyyboard and the yyyyyy keyy keeps sticking. Lots of great new local news -- murders, frantic bacchanalia by our local new rich at Hearst Castle, plus more on the little lady who kept mom's corpse in the bedroom. I dish out a little "tough love" to Herman Melville, of all people -- Rebuttals soon --really! Look, for no reason, at my autographed Rod McKuen ('77) picture off e-bay Rare homemade wine labels on display with even more rare homemade wine Check out my Link Dump. I'm always adding.... Veronika says, "Kliknutim zde se dozvite vice...." What's up in my home town today? Simply put, SCARY THINGS straight out of Stephen King or Faulkner! Look here... on my new page of "Home Town News" Comment? Question? Admonition? Let me know If you have Netscape, not everything on this site will look right. Please abide by Bill Gates vision of a universal browser. If you do, you'll get all the planned fonts and whatnot, plus a lot of annoying sound effects and little animations.
This site is best viewed (as it was designed) from a rat-eaten 1964 La-Z-Boy recliner with the tattered old footpad cranked out to full horizontal, your bare feet plopped down on either side of the keyboard, a beer in one hand, a Bible in the other, and heavens-to-bejeezus if that's not an Alfred E. Neuman grin on your gesicht and a Roget's thesaurus down your pants. You're ready, pal -- Ready to pick up the gauntlet you almost left out in the car with your dignity and your cell phone, and ready to dig into the zesty hash of truth and myth that I'm concocting. Well, with the yuppie-fueled debacle of the old Information Superduperhighway of Babel lurching hazardously down upon its own poorly laid foundation, I figured it was safe to poke my head up through the dust and perhaps help fill that much-needed void with a bit of my own cyber-musings -- climbing the rubble heap like a conquering rat, if you will, albeit with nothing to sell but a few wooden nickels and an invitation to a dip in the ol' Fradesian pool of fun. For now, here's what you get -- and I'll be putting more stuff together, until this site becomes more overwrought than the Popemobile at a Tijuana body shop.

NEW! Home Town News! Howdy and welcome to friendly San Luis Obispo County! There's always lots happening on the Central Coast! People dying in police custody on back roads, face down in the dirt with their hands cuffed behind their backs; teenage Satanists sacrificing a girl to the Devil in exchange for success with their metal band; Rex Krebs torturing and murdering two Cal Poly girls and burying them in shallow graves -- and the latest, a woman's 94-year-old mother dies and gets left in the bedroom for SIX YEARS. The woman's excuse? She was just "uncomfortable" in reporting it! What'll it be today? Teenage binge drinking? Unacceptable public art displays? Student riots? A beached whale? Road construction on a cyclopean, Soviet scale? Or how about the great news that SLO is becoming unaffordable for anyone who didn't buy in early? Check it out! I got all my stories from The Tribune, and would give you a link to their website, but it's impossible because they have a portal within a portal and then just links to particular days. It's too complicated to try.
The Home Front This page is still pretty skimpy, but here is the personal stuff and pictures you're actually supposed to put on a website. For the sake of family and loved ones, I might move this to a less turbulent location if things get rough.
Click on the picture to see the tortured visions of Thomas Paine. Another one of those heretical nights... THE WAY OF THINGS I've been too preoccupied to scribble any diatribes up to now, but this page will have personal exploratory cogitations on subjects clear and opaque, and you're "free" to join in.
Don Está in La Cocina Here you'll learn what's burning, how to make it, and maybe you'll learn to put together an improbable feast, if you can handle the inevitable mess and unpredictable guest reactions. Incidentally, this page moves from the kitchen out to the garage for a little instruction in Garage-Brewed Beverages, which will probably provide everything you need to know on the crafting of fine homemade intoxicants from readily available items.
What's going on in The Gentlemen's Club? A few gentlemen are lounging thereabout -- and even the ladies are gentlemen in our club. Submissions are always welcome.
Low-Impact Literary Criticism There's not much here yet -- I don't know where it's going, but I'm bursting with books and opinions on same. I'm also working on a groundbreaking "step-by-step guide" for autodidacts, which is proving more difficult..
Unsettling Employment Experiences Disgusting, meaningless, ridiculous, drastic ... Anomalous, awkward job episodes -- more often entire jobs -- that were nothing you ever prepared for, and nothing you can use today. Hair-raising, eyebrow-raising, "what-was-I-thinking?!" sort of sidetracks into the berry bushes on the career path. Example: I've worked for the US Government twice: Once in an experiment wherein I was handsomely paid to go out drinking one night in Modesto in the name of research, and another job in the Czech Republic, where I spent two weeks training former teachers of Russian to teach English (under supervision of the British Council). By the time we were halfway through the program, we just about had our curriculum figured out; I still couldn't find a bank that would cash the US check they sent me!
Who is this man, and why can't he even get his face on a milk carton? Check out The Plummet into Irrelevance and find out.	The Plummet into Irrelevance Rod McKuen is involved, as are the Hungarians, Thomas Aquinas and so on. People, peoples and phenomena that were once the obsession of all thinking people. Then they not only fell out of vogue, they just about disappeared. Huh?
The "Where Are They Now?" File I thought maybe I'd dredge up a little info on people of mutual acquaintance and maybe slop it all together into some kind of informative page.

THE LINK DUMP

The Link Dump was starting to get grotesquely large, so I moved it here.
Come on in and find some sites that justify Al Gore's inventing the Internet.
Or dump a link on me, if you want. Don't forget to wipe.

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