The Gayest Thing Ever
by Adam & Lara on 06/04/11
Last weekend we witnessed the gayest possible thing we could ever possibly imagine. No, it wasn't my bros in San Francisco "icing" each other with Mike's Hard Lemonade. It was Adam's sister and her fiance celebrating their life-long love and commitment by having a big gay wedding that was the total shizznit.
Is that a play on "2 girls 1 cup" or am I just a complete asshole? Both is a possible answer.
Anna Saraceno and fiance Anna Vanderzee tied the knot in the historic Buskirk-Chumley theater in downtown Bloomington, Indiana. Following the beautiful and interesting ceremony (take that, ALL OTHER WEDDINGS EVER) merriment was had in the form of eating, dancing and taking pictures at a photo booth that had both gay and straight silly accessories.
The blushing brides, Anna and Mayor Adam West.
Lara and her chickenhead.
The ladies of both families doing armpit farts.
The Glass Family looking ab-fab.
Ty is a man with a plan... to make you feel discomfort.
Uncle Joe raising the roof.
If you haven't, you should check out www.annalovesanna.com. The two Annas chronicle the issues that arise when two people of the same sex try to marry each other in 'Merikuh. Things like congressmen trying to amend the f*cking constitution to prevent you from getting married and having a big gay photo booth. Also things like whackadoo Republican congressmen trying to make it illegal for teachers to acknowledge the existence of gay people to their students. I'm sure the 2 people who still read this blog would agree with and appreciate this PSA:
On a lighter note, they also chronicle the issues that arise when two people with the same first name get married. I know what you're thinking... same first names?! If we let people like that get married next thing you know public schools are going to become little homo factories, pumping out gays faster than private performing arts schools! Ban that shit. Go 'Merikuh.
Congrats to Anna and Anna for proving that "protectors" of traditional marriage are a bunch of stupids.
Jeepers, Pete!
by Adam & Lara on 05/07/11Well sack me in the ribs and call me Judy Garland! My long time crony Peter Dering just invented a new-fangled camera fastening gadget that'll knock your socks off I tells ya! And I'll be damned if he didn't beat the Russians to it!
Hop on the trolley and buy one yourself!
What really sweeps my chimney is that he's mustered over $70,000 in dough from camera-machine fanatics across the globe - from here to Walla Walla, Washington I tells ya! That's enough greenbacks to buy yourself a Studebaker and a driveway to park it in, smack-dab in the center of the booming grainbelt metropolis of East St. Louis!
And the press - we'll let me tell ya - the press ain't perked up like this since the Dewey Defeats Truman boner of '48! Electronic newspapers around the country have been bursting their flashbulbs to get the spin - Gizmodo, PetaPixel, Digital Trends - it's madness I tells ya! I must specifically point out that I am telling you these things, I tells ya!
Well Pete, here's to all that tinkering you did with the leftover steel from the war. You're living the great American dream. Next time I see you I'm sure you'll be sporting a brand new jacket from Sears and Roebuck and driving one of them fancy Edsels I read about in Popular Mechanics.
Crater Madness and the Head-Shot Heard Round The World
by Adam & Lara on 05/03/11You'll have to excuse us if this post isn't the sharpest. We were up all night last night marching around town with a bloodlusty flag-waving mob celebrating the death of Osama Bin Laden. And while we feel like that was a completely normal reaction, the fact of the matter is that we were up all Friday and Saturday night marching around town with bloodlusty flag-waving mobs celebrating the royal wedding. We're just praying that the NFL lockout doesn't end today since we don't know if we can handle another sleepless night of screaming the Star Spangled Banner.
In any case, suck it Trump.
Now's the time to place your bet on the ultra-right's next arbitrary burning platform!
In other news, we've seen a shitload of craters in the last month. Two to be exact, but crater distribution being what it is on the Earth's forever evolving crust, seeing two is a pretty big deal.
The first one was Crater Lake, which is a big round water-filled crater that was formed about 7,700 years ago in the middle of Oregon when a volcano blew up. During the Winter it's covered with snow, so we strapped on snow shoes and went at it.
The caldera in the middle is called Wizard Island because it was first discovered by Adam's middle school Dungeons and Dragons Group.
Our second crater experience was Meteor Crater in Arizona, which is hailed as the most well-preserved impact crater site in the World. It's also located on private land and requires payment of a $15 admission fee to view, making it the World's most profitable giant f*cking hole in the ground.
For $30 that's a pretty good view, considering that you can pay that same amount to attend an Astros game and see an equally empty void.
There you have it. After the squirrel balls post we wanted to up the maturity of our content. We hope you're pleased with it.
STOP EVERYTHING
by Adam & Lara on 05/02/11And look at the nuts on this squirrel:
Everything's bigger in Texas.
You can thank Lara for having the patience and artistic vision for capturing that gem. Now that we've shocked your sensitive virginal eyes, let us soothe you with some of the nicer furry friends that we've met in our travels. We've translated the captions into LOL so you can understand what they're thinking.
DIS LIL PIGGY STAID HOME.
O MAI GOD APPEL nom nom nom nom nom.
11 BABIEZ! I CAN HAZ REALITY TV SERIEZ?
POSE FOR TEH CAMERA... MAYBE HE LET US FREE!
DIS MAI ROCK, MUTHAF*CKAZ.
SO TIRED BUT MUS KEEP STANDIN.
HOLY SHIT GUYZ DER IS WHOLE NOTHER WORLD UP HERE!
SUP DAWG LEMME GET CRACKER OR SOMETIN.
LEEVE ME LONE I'S ENDANGERD!
I'S FROM SWITZERLAND!
HEY BIG FAT NEW ZEALAND PIGEONZ GOT FEELINZ TOO.
DIS IS MAI MOMMY NOW?
OK OK I HADZ ENUFF, PUT ME DOWN NOW PLS.
Well, that was awkward.
by Adam & Lara on 04/27/11Alright, we're just going to cut the bullshit and apologize for not writing anything for the last 6 weeks. We're sorry you had to spend your most recent 700 precious hours of internet time contacting family, reading news, and doing Google image searches for "tony larussa pinkeye" instead of ravenously feasting on the comedy-rich braincandy served up by andnowthisishappening.com. Seriously, your lives have probably been miserable. But don't worry, our lives have been great.
We still don't have jobs, but we managed to score a Lexus from Lara's father George. And since we only worked for a month in 2010, we scored some big fat tax returns that we're putting away in government bonds so that we may someday afford to buy one full tank of premium. Well, we call it a "government bond" but we're really just stuffing money in a mattress. Better APY.
The Lexus LS400 is widely recognized as the Volkswagen Bus of today's freeloading good-for-nothing pansy generation.
In the past month and a half we've been to Eugene, Portland, Seattle, Spokane, the Oregon Coast, Crater Lake, Chico, San Francisco, the Mojave Desert, the Grand Canyon, Albuquerque and currently Austin. We even stood on the corner in Winslow, Arizona.
Winslow is one of many towns located along old Route 66 where weary travelers can stop in and experience a unique piece of Americana and afterwards do jack shit.
This past weekend we hit up the first of five non-royal-family weddings on our summer agenda. Congrats to Rivi (Lara's college dorm roomie/bff) and Alex, whose beautiful and anthropologically fascinating wedding marks the first time that a single extended family contained hipsters, cowboys and French people.
When two hipster-dominant genepools mix there is always the danger of rare recessive genetic malformations to be expressed in the offspring, such as a baby who wears ironic '80s short shorts or enjoys the new Sleigh Bells album.
Whew, that's it. We finally broke the seal. Stay tuned, since we'll probably be running back to the internet to piss out more blog posts soon.
Culture Shock: America
by Adam & Lara on 03/15/11Coming back to America is somewhat freaky after you've been surrounded by this for a year:
Rush hour on one of New Zealand's new-fangled "motorcoach-ways."
There are new Saturday Night Live cast members (when did Tim Meadows leave?!), new booming companies (when did Google get so big?!) and a new winner in who is making us the fattest. About the only thing that didn't change was the conservative push to crush the rights of gays and union workers! Ahh, now that's the 'Merikuh that we remember!
Apart from all the new crap, there's plenty of sights that we've been exposed to in the past few weeks that you just plain don't see in New Zealand...
Apart from all the new crap, there's plenty of sights that we've been exposed to in the past few weeks that you just plain don't see in New Zealand...
Immense boxes built to facilitate extreme consumption!
Immense boxes built to facilitate extreme consumption!
Immense boxes built to facilitate extreme consumption!
Public yoga demonstrations!
Superfluous connectivity!
Old money!
Bars that don't play drum & bass that are still full of attractive people!
Needless to say, it's good to be back.
They See Us Rollin'
by Adam & Lara on 03/13/11
After 2 weeks back in the States we've done a good job of not sweating the small stuff. Cellphones, a car, jobs, health insurance and all that other crap can wait. We bought bicycles instead.
A 1950's Schwinn cruiser and a 1980's Peugeot mountain bike, 2 gether 4 ever.
Why didn't we do this earlier?! These things were cheap, use no gas, and ensure that no matter where we go we arrive disheveled and glistening with perspiration. And according to the 2011 Sports Illustration Swimsuit Issue, that look is sexy.
We bought these beasts from a quaint little establishment called Farmer John's Barn. It's a combination junkyard, junk barn and junk pile that sells old bicycles at a reasonable price. The service was impeccable. We were given a tour by Farmer John himself, who shared dirty jokes and a few suggestive comments that gave the ladies that old fashioned uncomfortable feeling that is hard to come by in today's obsessively PC society.
We bought these beasts from a quaint little establishment called Farmer John's Barn. It's a combination junkyard, junk barn and junk pile that sells old bicycles at a reasonable price. The service was impeccable. We were given a tour by Farmer John himself, who shared dirty jokes and a few suggestive comments that gave the ladies that old fashioned uncomfortable feeling that is hard to come by in today's obsessively PC society.
Adam fraternizing with the who's who of Chico: Farmer John and CBS 12 Action News anchor Kira Klapper. They spent the afternoon together behind the barn, leaning on fence posts and flipping nickels.
We're in Chico, CA at the moment, heading to Eugene, OR on March 16th. If you're in the Pacific Northwest and want a free dishwasher, dogsitter, hammer hand or gimp let us know.
Time For A New Look
by Adam & Lara on 03/02/11
And Now This Is Happening has a new look. It's slightly more 'Merikan than the old look, but slightly less 'Merikan than this look:
Even in this crippled economy, novelty t-shirt airbrush artists are never out of business so long as there are Tea Party conventions.
In addition, we've been blogging consistently for an entire year now. To celebrate we've placed a new banner in the sidebar and we're going to come stay at all of your houses for free.
Holy F*cking Shit
by Adam & Lara on 02/26/11We are back in San Francisco, safe and sound. Our year in New Zealand has officially come to an end. And let me tell you, we really went out with a bang.
We left Queenstown and drove up to Christchurch on the afternoon of February 20th. Our flight out was at 6:35am on the 23rd, so we had to get our asses there asap since Queenstowners can't recognize a great deal on a high-miles but well-running campervan even if it were stapled to every god damn hostel message board in town. Luckily we sold the van before 10am the next day to a kind fellow who preferred to sit in the passenger seat and drink beer instead of test driving the vehicle himself. We spent the rest of the day making it rain on the local craft market.
The next day we got up and went for a run since we knew we'd be spending the next 30 hours sitting and drinking at high altitudes. We got back to Stonehurst (our hostel) and showered up. Adam went upstairs to start packing all his crap, Lara stayed downstairs in the bathroom engaging in her mysterious 30-minute post-shower ritual. At that point (12:51pm) was when a giant f*cking earthquake began, shaking the f*ck out of every inch of our building and terrifying the complete living shit out of us.
It was a 6.3 magnitude and lasted for about 10 seconds. When it stopped Adam ran around the top floor looking for other people. There were none, so he ran downstairs and saw Lara in the hallway. We ran around looking for people on the bottom floor and then got the f*ck out.
Most of the windows were busted out of our building, and most of the furniture was either knocked over or had shimmied to the middle of the room. Some cracks had opened up in the parking lot and wet silt was starting to bubble up through them. The sky was clouded up with giant plumes of dust. Beyond that, shit seemed alright. So Adam got on his phone and called our friend Lucy in Queenstown to see if she felt the quake. That's when we saw the other half of our hostel and realized that shit was not alright.
What once was a 3 story building was now 2 because the bottom floor had pancaked and the exterior wall had been entirely ripped off. Adam hung up the phone and ran over to help locate a girl that was trapped underneath the rubble. Firemen were quickly flagged down and they took over the dig and managed to get her out 20 minutes later, hurt but alive.
At that point the hostel owner gathered up all of the staff and guests and did a role call to make sure nobody else was trapped inside. Since it was lunch hour on a weekday, most people were out and about so we couldn't account for them. But from what we could tell nobody was inside - a lucky coincidence of having an earthquake in the middle of the day.
We ran back into our building which appeared to be standing solid, ran upstairs and began throwing our clothes and valuables into our bags. 30 seconds into that an aftershock hit, once again scaring the complete and utter shit out of us. But this one was smaller and we immediately went back to packing. A minute or two later we ran back outside, lucky to have everything we owned with us in backpacks. We headed to nearby Latimer Square Park were people were converging.
Half of the park was filled with folks who had evacuated their buildings and had nowhere to go. The other half had been roped off and turned into a makeshift triage center. Police cars and ambulances were coming and going, and bodies covered in white sheets were beginning to accumulate on the grass. The air smelled horrible - smoke was wafting through the city from several large fires. Helicopters began flying overhead and dumping tanks of water onto burning buildings nearby. Every once in a while somebody would run up screaming and crying because they had just got out of a fallen building that still had others trapped inside. Every 20 minutes or so the ground would start shaking again causing momentary panic. The environment felt nightmarish and the aftershocks instilled a pants-shitting fear of being anywhere near buildings.
We sat down with a group of Israelis who were staying in our dorm room. They mentioned that back at the hostel somebody had arranged to bus us out, so we ran back and checked it out.
Aaron Keown, a Christchurch City Council Member who was in the area, had managed to flag down a city bus and direct it to Stonehurst. He wasn't sure where we'd go (or even if the streets were clear enough to navigate) but he said that we'd be better off getting out of the city center where all hell was breaking loose. We hopped on the bus immediately and 10 minutes later the bus was full and painfully turning away others.
As the bus drove out of the city we became more aware of the full extent of the damage. Buildings all over the city were down, cars were crushed by falling bricks, power was out everywhere, cars were sunk in giant cracks in the road that had filled with mud. I stopped taking pictures for awhile because it felt wrong to be "sightseeing" in the midst of a totally f*cked up disaster.
Getting out of our building unscathed, getting all of our stuff, and getting a ride out of downtown sparked a brilliant crescendo of luck that continued for the next 36 hours. In the late afternoon we decided to set up camp in a rugby field by the airport. The owner of the rugby clubhouse arrived and opened the facility for us to sleep in. This place had chairs and tables, running water and electricity despite the fact that the surrounding block of residences were blacked out. And, we're not shitting you, it had a full bar that the owner opened up for business. And, we're still not shitting you, they had the cheapest beer that we've seen in all of New Zealand.
The radio made an announcement that about 65 people were camped out at Burnside Park Rugby Club, so by the evening locals began stopping by with food and bedding. We literally ended up with more cookies, sausages, meat pies, blankets and pillows than we could possibly consume. By 8pm half of our group had been taken away to neighbors' houses to sleep on beds and sofas. We drank Speights until 1am with our Israeli friends who taught us a new set of rules to Asshole (the card game) involving more strategy and less binge drinking. As we slept aftershocks continued, which caused everybody to simultaneously wake up and poop bricks until the building stopped swaying.
On Wednesday morning Aaron led our group on a 6:30am pilgrimage to the airport, which had reopened for domestic flights only. Our stupidly awesome luck continued when the Jetstar agent booked us on a same-day flight to Auckland. By 9am Jetstar was telling people that the earliest they could book was Saturday. A 4.2 aftershock hit 10 minutes before boarding, which really made us happy to get the f*ck off of the ground.
That was the last we saw of Christchurch. We spent that night in Auckland and flew out to SFO the following day. To recap... Tuesday: giant earthquake in Christchurch. Wednesday: sitting in Auckland watching a jazz band which featured a xylophonist called "The Wizard." Thursday: sitting in Hobson's Choice with all of our San Francisco friends. There are still 200 people missing, still rescue crews working around the clock, still people sleeping in Latimer Square Park. I'm blogging from my friends apartment on the other side of the world.
That is a fortunate turn of events, and for it we will be eternally grateful.
Campervan For Sale
by Adam & Lara on 02/14/11
9 days left in New Zealand. Almost 1 year in and all we've got is this shitty blog, a bunch of shitty pictures, a crap load of shitty friends, and one amazing campervan for sale.
It's been a great run.
One thing we just realized - we'll have to change the title of this blog once we get back to the States. Any suggestions?
