Code, nerd culture and humor from Greg Knauss.

So I'm sitting around the apartment on Friday night, cleaning my phone. And you can keep your smart-ass comments to yourself, thank-you-very-much.

Suddenly, from up the street a party erupts with the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" blaring out at a volume that could cause sterility in cows.

Great. The Beastie Boys. Manhattan Beach is a breeding ground for USC business school grad students and on Friday night they like to kick off the sterile conformity of their week-day existence and slip into the sterile conformity of their weekend existence. If you walk by a bar, you can count two dozen identical couples standing out front waiting to pay ten bucks to be a in a room where it's too loud to talk and too crowded to dance.

At least it's "Sabotage" and not--

"Fight for Your Right (To Party)" starts up. Gad. The anthem of the drunken moron. There's a bunch of them out on the balcony singing along, swilling the latest random concept beer. Ice Draft Dry Light or something.

At least it's not--

A country song starts up.

What the hell is going on here?

Now, I know some people who like country music and to a one, they're intelligent, thoughtful folk. But something about the whole concept rubs me the wrong way -- maybe it's the hats -- and your typical line-dancing crowd makes the Beastie Boys look like... well, let's say it makes them look less like chimps.

Any song that involves the word "Chattahoochie" should be banned by international agreement.

It's ending. Thank God. Maybe now we can get on to--

"Fight for Your Right" starts up again.

It and the country song are repeated back to back for the next twenty minutes.

If I kill them all, I could sell their clothes...

Hi there! My name's GREG KNAUSS and I like to make things.

Some of those things are software (like Romantimatic), Web sites (like the Webby-nominated Metababy and The American People) and stories (for Web sites like Suck and Fray, print magazines like Worth and Macworld, and books like "Things I Learned About My Dad" and "Rainy Day Fun and Games for Toddler and Total Bastard").

My e-mail address is greg@eod.com. I'd love to hear from you!

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