Sunday, July 27, 2008

Almost done with my trip

When last we left Nick Gibbons it was Thursday night and he was driving back from LA after seeing a comedy show. We now join Nick Gibbons as he tells us about Friday in California.

Nothing happened on Friday.

Actually to be totally honest, I can't remember for the life of me what I did on Friday. I don't have any pictures from Friday to jog my memory either. I seem to be missing an entire day out of my life. This screams X-Files and Star Trek to me. Alien Abduction anyone.

At any rate, Saturday rolls around and Vanessa wants to take me to an area in Long Beach called 5th street. It's named after Sir Reginald Fifth.

I'm not sure what they sold here...

A little redundant, this would be like if Red Lobster's sign said "Red Lobster: LOBSTERS!"

We walked up and down the strip, bought some clothes at Banana Republic, and talked about boys. You know just a girls day out.

We grabbed a snack, but before I could eat mine it was claimed by Mexico.

After a bloody battle defending our lunch and reclaiming it for America, we ducked inside a candy store.

This disturbed me...

Not only would you be eating a rat, you would be eating your pet rat. I never wanted to eat any of my pets, except the hamsters. I though this was awesome, they were playing Willie Wonka on a TV in the back of the place, which I'm pretty sure is illegal.

We walked back to the apartment, went on a bike ride around the beach, then started to get ready for our big night out.

Vanessa's cat found a new litter box.

It's a good thing I use Tide's Fresh Cat Shit Scent detergent.

The whole day had been leading up to our trip in the water taxi known as Aqua Link.

It went from Seal Beach to the Queen Mary, then to Long Beach.

Vanessa's sister Noelle had a pirate themed birthday party the week before I arrived, so Vanessa brought some of the pirate stuff form the party so we could be pirates on the boat.


They sold booze on the boat so I went down to buy us cocktails for the 30 minute journey. When I came back out on the deck, Vanessa had given away all of our pirate stuff to a group of kids. I didn't even get a chance to rape or pillage. I never get to rape or pillage damnit! Here are the little guys that wouldn't stop shouting "ARRRRRRRRRRRR" for the next 30 minutes.


Here is one of the ship mates, but more importantly behind him is the most bird shit I've ever seen.

Points of interest on the trip. Worlds largest flaming erector set.

The island where the real events took place that they based the show Gilligan's Island upon.

My tipsy partner in crime for the evening.

The Queen Mary, the only American naval ship to utilize two terms also used when discussing homosexuals.

Finally we made it to Long Beach, where we were going to have dinner. We were eating at a place called the Light House. It's on the far right side of this picture.

On the way to the restaurant I took a quick helicopter ride.

This structure had some significance, but is now used primarily as a restroom for homeless people. At least that what it smelled like.

You ever seen boats? These are boats.


That's our destination ahead.

We sat on the third floor which had an amazing view.

Our waitress was 8 foot tall. That's all I can remember about the restaurant.

We misjudged our time a little and ended up having to run to the Aqua Taxi. Running isn't much fun after eating seafood and drinking a bottle of wine. I finally realize now why I never won any of those marathons.


We were the only ones on the deck for the trip home, so I precariously placed the camera on something and tried to take our picture.

The next leg of our Saturday night involved meeting up with some of Vanessa's friends at a pub on our walk home.

This picture should help explain the next couple of pictures...

It was a crazy night full of pirates,

dancing,

and kitty cats.

After we got all of the "party" sufficiently drained out of us, we stumbled home for a well deserved blackout. Right before I passed out at around 2am, I remembered I had to spend all the next day in the sun at Disney Land. Nothing better at than a hang over at the happiest place on earth right? Space Mountain here I come!

Friday, July 25, 2008

Idea #4654855699364

My Space is officially pwned. Face Book is the winner. My Space keeps making half hearted, crappy attempts to crawl back into the ring with a broken leg, two broken arms, matching black eyes and a mouth full of loose teeth. Give up My Space, own your pwn. Face Book has shoved dynamite up your social networking ass and blown your balls into different hemispheres.

If you don't have a face book account, get one. It's confusing as hell at first, but once you get settled in, you'll start to discover all the awesomeness hidden deep within.

Here's my idea, I want to start a website parody of Face Book called Faced Book. It's the same as Face Book, but you have to be drunk to log on, and you can only post pictures of drunk people. It will require a small breathalyzer that hooks up to the computer through a USB port. They only cost 58 dollars, but it's totally worth it. I make the breathalyzers myself so just send me a check made out to cash and in 6 to 8 weeks you should get yours in the mail.

Also the URL "www.facedbook.com" is owned by Face Book, so I still need to get some capital raised to buy it from them. I haven't approached them yet, but I'm sure they only want like 10 bucks or something for it.

I'm a genius. Look out webternet, here comes the next multibillion dollar web mogul.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

The never ending triiiiip, ah ooh ah ah ooh ah ah ooh ah

It's now Thursday. I had nothing planned today and both the girls were working. I was man of the house today. I had a beach side apartment all to myself. Since I was three blocks from the beach and had no plans, I decided to watch The View. Next, the Price is Right. Oh yeah, I checked my e-mail. Sorry I don't have any pictures from all those cool activities.

Lunch rolled around and I decided to treat myself to some seafood at one of the nicer restaurants in downtown Seal Beach. I walked to the place, Willies I believe was the name, and got a table for one. I always forget how creepy and lonely it is to eat at a restaurant by yourself, especially when you wearing nothing but a pink g-string and carrying a harpoon gun.

I ordered up some of the finest muscles and went to town.

After stuffing myself with over priced shell fish, I walked down to the beach to try and take pictures of girls in bikinis. I forgot how creepy and lonely it was being 35, married, by myself, and trying to take pictures of teenagers in bikinis. I opted to snap shots of my surroundings instead.


I was planning to meet Vanessa in LA later that night and catching a show at the UCB Theater that starred a bunch of my New York comedian friends. Vanessa unfortunately had to work late so I had to force my social inept hermit ass out of the apartment alone go to see the show by myself.


The name of the show was Showgirls: The Best Movie Ever Made Ever. My friend John Flynn and Jackie Clark were the co-hosts of the show. They played a married couple that thought Showgirls was the best movie ever made. There were several other people in the cast who played actors that supposedly answered a casting call on Craigs List. They reenacted scenes from the script. The very funny John Reynolds played Joe Eszterhas the author of the Showgirls screenplay. John Reynolds stole the show. It was a great show. It actually ran at the UCB Theater in NY for a year, but I couldn't be bothered to see it when it was only a subway ride away from my apartment. I wanted to wait until I had to fly thousands of miles to see it.

The most awesome part of the evening for my star fucking ass was the fact that none other than Lt. Dangle, Tom Lennon, from Reno 911 and The State, sat right behind me. He didn't have the mustache though.

I hung out for several hours after the show at a bar with the cast. Here are the very funny John Flynn and Lennon Parham.

Don't they look happy? I do that to people.

I hopped in the rental around midnight and drove back to the OC. More trip coming soon.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Fun Fact #491743

Who ever is writing and directing those parody movies that keep coming out, has about as much talent as the contents of a port-a-potty on a construction site around 3pm on the day the lunch van has half price tacos.

Monday, July 21, 2008

Thrid Day in Californ-I-A

Before I get into the rest of my trip, I just wanted to say I saw The Dark Knight yesterday. I really think they should have waited for Christian Bale to get over that cold before they shot all his Batman scenes or at least given him a lozenge.

It's now Wednesday morning. I completed my pitch yesterday and now I have 6 days to kill before I fly back to Atlanta. I have several friends that work for O Entertainment, the studio that produces the Nickelodeon show Barnyard. The studio is located in San Juan Capistrano, a 45 minute drive south of the OC. I hop in my rental and make my way down the highway around lunchtime.

San Juan Capistrano is a weird place. None of the land is owned by big corporations, and that is sort of the whole towns thing. So there are no buildings higher than two stories, and they all look like they were shipped in from an old Mexican village.

Here is a picture of the mission I didn't pay 8 bucks to go in.


O Entertainment is in a strip shopping mallish structure. You would never know that's where an animation studio was stashed.

I met up with my friends Jon, Tom, Ben, Mike, Paul, and Jason for some lunch.



This is where we ate.

They specialized in a four horse meal starting with horsederves. Everything was delicious, I ate like what I was eating! I was stuffed at the end of the meal and almost said neigh to the desert.

It was awesome catching up with all my old DNA pals. While getting a tour of O Entertainment, this robot try to rip off my arms, but I escaped.

Jason wasn't so lucky...

Or was he?

I was going to Crash at Tom's place that night, so I drove to his apartment to drop off my shit and waste some time until we could all hang out. Tom lives in San Clemete 3 blocks from the beach.

I took a walk and discovered that this place was without a doubt one of the coolest areas I've ever seen. I've seen a lot of beach towns, but none of theme ever looked like I imagined they would, until now. I couldn't stop taking pictures. Each little apartment was cooler than the next.




The roads were winding and hilly.


There was a cool restaurant on the pier over looking the beach.


There were more underaged girls in bikinis then you could shake a stick at, I tried. I fell in love with this town.

I drove back up to San Juan Capistrano and met the guys for some beer and Mexican food. A couple of the guys had to split early. Our group, now smaller and more compact, went to a bar on the pier in San Clemente. We drank and then walked the streets for a while. It was a ton of fun, I can tell because most of the pictures I took are out of focus and poorly composed.



The next day I had planned to go to a casino with my friend Vanessa's sister, Noelle. She was in San Diego the night before so we met up and drove for 2 hours, eventually arriving at a casino in Palm Springs.

It was crazy how the casino was just in the middle of absolutely nothing.

The drive was through a desolate wasteland, that would have made Mad Max jealous. Desert all around you for miles and miles then all of a sudden, CASINO!



This caught my eye right away.

I'm not sure who I'm more excited about seeing, Ringo or Rat Dog.

I usually play roulette, but I was sad to find out they only had this video roulette table thing. I played it for a while, lost almost all of my cash.

Miraculously I won all my money back, so I decided to cut and run while I was 40 bucks ahead.

I was happy to see this casino wasn't bias against religion.

JUMPIN' GIGAWATS MAWTY!


Between loosing money I walked around the casino/hotel and wandered into this store.

When the clerk asked if she could help me with anything, I jokingly said, "Do you know where I can find a Hawaiian shirt?" This then lead into a 20 minute conversation about her husband being from Hawaii, her oldest boy about to get married, her first husband not being worth the dirt he walked on, and her son wanting to invite his biological father to the wedding, even though it would upset her. It must get lonely out in the middle of a desert.

After 4 hours in the casino, we decided to make the long trip back around 3pm. We drove through a windmill farm and it was absolutely breathtaking. These windmills seem to go on forever and they are all huge. If you stared at them while you drove you started to get vertigo.


Rubbing my eyes to make sure I wasn't hallucinating, I saw a vision that I could not believe on the horizon. There before me in the distance was something amazing, something astounding, something of story book legend. Materializing in front of my weary video roulette playing eyes was an iconic image from my childhood and like a ship drawn to a lighthouse, I directed the car straight to my destiny. Take a look.


That's right bitches, it's the dinosaur that none other that Pee Wee Herman himself sat inside on his journey to recover his bike. It was awe inspiring.

They even had a prehistoric Burger King. Unfortunately it took hours to get a burger, because they didn't have fire back then to flame broil.

The gift shop was all up inside this Brontosaurus.

If going inside these amazing life sized hollowed out concrete creatures from my childhood memories wasn't enough, the lady in the gift shop told us they had just finished their new "dino museum". Four bucks later we got to walk among the dinosaurs. The big, rubber, motionless dinosaurs.

I almost wet my pants when I saw this...

But it turned out you had to be a little kid to do it. Fucking kids suck.

I felt bad for the special needs dino.

One thing that bothered us about this "Museum", well there were several things actually, but two of them are pictured below. Peppered in-between the dinosaur statues was this statue of a lion and a lamb.

And this medieval crusader.

Granted the whole place had a religious slant, so the lion with the lamb thing sort of made sense, but the crusader dude made little to no sense at all. Confusion aside, none of it mattered once I was inside that Tyranisorous Rex, peering out through his teeth, just as Pee Wee had done back in 1985.

Next stop the basement of the Alamo!