San Fernando Valley

Previously on Cheek and Bluster

• Freshly Aired: Big Pharma and Psychiatry

  July 16, 2010

  A lot of the public doesn’t realize how sophisticated the [pharmaceutical industry's] marketing techniques have become, really over the last 10 years… Essentially when a pharmaceutical company gets FDA approval for a drug, their marketing department can assure their bosses that they are going to be able to sell the drug, really whether the drug [...]

• It Must Be True – The Internet Says So

  July 15, 2010

  All I did was plug in text from this post and this post, and it was definitively confirmed… I write likeJames Joyce I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing! Hey, Dr. Karl Hufbauer – you and your C+ dismissal of my Freshman Billy Budd paper can kiss my baby tuckoo! What [...]

• Cameraphone Follies: Dirty Sign in Irvine

  June 14, 2010

  The mindset represented by this sign is what I mean when I refer to the Orange County city of Irvine as a soulless, planned-community hellscape. If I hadn’t spent 90% of my waking hours at the area’s one oasis of culture, the UCI Fine Arts village, I’d never have stayed there for four years. Full [...]

• World’s Worst Stalker

  May 26, 2010

  Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be stalkers. Especially if your babies are dumber than a box of rocks. Via the L.A. Times: A trial began this week in the case of a man accused of stalking and making threatening phone calls to a Huntington Beach police detective. Brian Dopler, 27, is charged [...]

• Got You Covered: “Helter Skelter”

  May 19, 2010

  How ubiquitous are cover versions of Beatles songs? They’re commonplace enough to make me wonder whose songs bands used to cover before the Beatles existed. That’s the price you pay for revolutionizing popular music — every song you ever record is covered by everybody under the sun. For this “Got You Covered” post series, I’m [...]