My friend is going to wear Achewood t-shirts on television.

Hey, before you read the rest of this blog entry, could you please go to this AOL/Bravo voting page and click to vote on "Stephen's Life"? It's only one of two choices. Thanks. This will just take a second, and will pop up in a new window which you can quickly close and not get involved.

Long story short, my old chums Dave and Andrew competed on Situation: Comedy, a "reality show" about producing a television pilot. Through the magic of television, Dave and Andrew stand to win $50,000 if their show, "Stephen's Life," wins the audience vote. Because that's how great works of art and comedy are made, right? By unaccountable committees numbering in the millions? Anyhow, Dave and Andrew have pledged that if I ask the seventeen people and sixty-five hundred web-indexing spiders that follow my blog to click on Stephen's Life, they will buy me some egg rolls if I ever see them again.

I thank you for your time, and your click, and your willingness to, like the rest of the world, toss aside your integrity for a moment when it comes to helping friends win money on television.

We're friends now,
Chris Onstad

PS: Watch them wear Achewood apparel on Bravo, 6pm, Friday September 2nd, and then again on the 9th when the winner is announced. If you want to, that is. Personally, I have karate practice at my "dojo" on those evenings.

MISSING BALLOON - EXTREMELY SMALL REWARD

Now, anyone who knows me will tell you that I'm not the sort to go out and buy a seven-dollar balloon shaped like a parrot, but when the happiness of my girl (the younger one) is at stake then reputation be damned, I will buy that balloon. You see, she enjoys batting at large interesting balloons while sitting in her office bouncy-chair, which means (a) she is pleasantly entertained, and (b) I can get at least five minutes' worth of work done.

The big transparent dolphin balloon finally withered away to sea-jerky, so today was the day to head out to Diddams party supply store and have the gothic girl who mans the helium tank fill up a new one. The baby likes balloons with lots of pointy ends, so the parrot fit the bill pretty well, we thought, and $7.58 later we were rolling along with our shiny new friend.

She was having a bit of trouble falling into her morning nap, so we tacked another mile or so onto our walk, all the while mindful of keeping the parrot out of low-hanging foliage and street signs and whatnot. Well, I think that gothic girl needs to up her intake of proteins and vitamin D, because the knot she had used to tie the balloon to the string and floor-weight was pretty damned weak. Somewhere around the intersection of San Carlos Avenue and that street by Longs Drugs the string went limp in my hands and I looked up to see that the bird had taken flight. With a sinking heart I bade the entourage to stop and get mad at me, which promptly occurred. Head hung in shame, I wound the string into a ball and tucked it in a pocket.

SO, the upshot of all of this is that if you find a large metallic parrot balloon, and it's still in decent shape, by all means drop me a line. Last I saw it was headed somewhere high over Highway 280, roughly in the direction of San Francisco, and just gathering steam. I understand there's an infestation of feral parrots somewhere near Coit Tower — perhaps it found its way there, to be worshiped like the godlike thing that it was.

The day's work is done.

Time to lean back in the old upholstered computer chair and flip the top off an ice-cold pilsner. The comic strip has been uploaded, the books have been signed, the tot is snoozing away in her crib, and this week's installment of Tony Bourdain's new travelogue has been carefully watched. This evening Tony ate a three-foot horse cock and took a ride on a boat. The man's got style.

Tony Bourdain's various travel shows can be fairly characterized by the following standard conventions:

1) Tony will go to a third-world nation and drink their local moonshine out of used plastic soda bottles,

2) Tony will work in a lot of tough-guy references to war movies or Viet Nam,

3) Tony will eat something's cock or face.

Usually the cock or face is nicely braised and served in a delicious sauce, but I thought it worth mentioning. One rarely gets the opportunity to eat cocks and faces, so I suppose that as an adventurous gastronome he is holding a pretty lucky ticket. Today I had a corned beef sandwich and some ratatouille, and I would gladly have traded either of these meals for a bit of Tony's horse cock soup. I mean, honestly, you only live once, and if it was really quite tasty, you'd probably become fast friends with your local Santeria butcher-priest.

TOASTER OVEN : AMERICA SPEAKS

I would like to thank the good readers of Achewood and, more specifically, of this blog (I doubt there is any need to draw a Venn diagram to separate the two families) for unanimously recommending the Black & Decker toaster oven mounting hood in response to my last post.

Now comes the hard part. So many people wrote in, with so many kind words and so much enthusiasm, that I feel bad saying this:

I already knew about the Black & Decker Toaster Oven Mounting Hood. Like many of you, I too have access to Google. I'm not saying this to be snotty, like some guy in a silver Mercedes CL600 pulling up at a stoplight, rolling down his window, and yelling to the guy begging for change on the median: "I HAVE ACCESS TO GOOGLE! WHAT HAVE YOU GOT? HAVE YOU...NOTHING?!"

I'm just saying, I should have pointed that out before my last post. What I can do to set things right is issue this proclamation:

The World, we need an alternative to the Black & Decker Toaster Oven Mounting Hood. It seems to be the only mounting hood on the market. The readers of Achewood have made this painfully clear. Plus, it is 0.5" too wide for the bottom of the cabinet where I was hoping to install it.

Thank you, The World, and thank you, kind reader. Thank you for being involved in my casual search for a toaster oven.

/C