Talk about bad karma or whatever, but I always believed, like everything else in life, some cars are fated to have problems. This is beyond the car being a lemon and breaking down all the time. This has to do with serendipity (or lack thereof) and some people may call it chance or bad luck but it comes in streaks, and is relentless.

In the last week I've been pulled over what seems like a million times for lacking a front license plate and/or for having expired tags. I admit, it is my fault for letting the registration lapse while away in Hong Kong, but I've let it lapse before and I've never had a front plate on this car and I've never ever been pulled over for it. I've also amassed a mountain of parking tickets that aren't parking tickets but cite either registration and/or front plate. Why am I getting busted so many times in such a short amount of time? It feels like a curse.

I got my first ticket a week ago, and when the millionth cop stopped me a couple days ago, I told him to give me a chance to fix it -- I was going in on Monday!

Call BMW for the front plate bracket. $39.99 for the part and I have to drill holes in the plastic guard. Yeah, right. Since I'm a Home Depot junkie, I go there and buy enough screws, bolts and washers to mount 10 front plates for less than $2. Done.

Today, I park the car, put money in the meter, start my stop watch. I am determined not to get a parking ticket.

Returning, I turn the corner and as my car comes into view my stop watch is telling me the meter just expired. Except there's a parking attendant right there, taking out her book... I'm at the end of the block. But I run and get there for her to tell me, "I've already written it down off your front plate. Sorry, I can't stop now..."

I almost lost it. But I stayed calm and took my ticket and waited to get into the car before yelling:

FUCK.

I'm looking for furniture online and I come across Vitra. A couple of their chairs look promising so I do a search on Google for an Eames chair and I come up with this. Look! Their Eames plywood lounge chairs are a steal at $142...

Wait a minute.

This particular Vitra line of furniture is only suitable for Barbie and Ken. Of Mattel doll fame.

I was leaving my apartment building last week late at night and it looked like it was daytime in the alley behind my garage. Hmmm... What's going on? Curiousity gets the best of me and I enter the alley into the middle of an on-location shoot. I pretend like I belong and start taking pictures. But I give myself away when I ask one of the union guys, "What are you guys shooting?" They were filming "Angel", the "Buffy: The Vampire Slayer" spin-off.

For the worst dining in all of Los Angeles, you'd drive to that hip area on North Vermont in Los Feliz and find Figaro Brasserie. This place claims to be a French Bistro and does actually look the part, but fails miserably in the food department. It is absolutely awful.

Rather than waste my time trying to describe how awful it is, I'm going to list a few of the problems. I apologize in advance — maybe this is real French food and I've been eating the fake stuff all along.

• Fois Gras is sweeter than honey and spreads on like really oily lard.
• Mussels in milk soup.
• Vegetarian dish is a plate of steamed vegetables.
• Onion Soup is just onions and cheese with no liquid at all. Sweeter than sugar. Like a dessert!
• Lamb was flavorless and overcooked.
• Monk Fish should be called little Filet O'Fish McNuggets with sub-McDonald's-standard tartar sauce.

We all love dessert. We were hoping for a decent end to the meal. Forgehduboudit.

• The Pear Tart starts out tasting OK when you first take a bite, but quickly escalates into a sugar rush that hurts your throat.
• Chocolate Mousse was year-old super-frozen chocolate ice cream.

I was the only one who finished my dessert:

• Their "World Famous" Creme Brulee, which was one step below mediocre.

That was the high point in my meal.

BTW, everyone looks relatively happy in these pictures because we haven't tried the food yet.

Forget the big room with the big name DJs at Giant. Head straight to the small room where, this last Saturday, Eddie Almodar was spinnin' relentless, funky House tunes and the crowd never stopped moving.

Listen to him fit Eddie Van Halen's "Eruption" into the mix for a little rest. Perfectly. To. The. Beat. How the hell did he do it?

Since my new place has one small storage closet, my shirts have been homeless until today.

Ikea has a canvas covered wardrobe in the IVAR line but the IVAR frame seemed kind of flimsy to me. And it didn't have casters. I want to roll the sucker around.

Then I found an almost perfect canvas covered 48" metal frame wardrobe on casters made by Intermetro at Hold Everything -- it's portable, sturdy and easy to move. Unfortunately, it costs $270.

So I looked around.

And I found a much better alternative at Target, a $60 36" metal wardrobe made by Store-It. But it didn't have a canvas cover!

What to do?

It turns out the $25 IVAR canvas cover fits perfectly. So I bought two of each. And now, I have one and a half times the storage for less than two-thirds the price.

I tried using Juno as an alternative to paying for Netzero's unlimited access, but could never, ever, ever log on. It always brings up an error message and says I can't have access after (or before? whatever...) 4:00AM EST. What does that mean? Isn't it always before or after 4:00AM EST? Is this another way of saying "tough luck"?

Now, I read Juno is trying to get customers to leave their computers on all the time and give Juno hard drive space and computing power to create a distributed virtual super computer, whose time can be sold to biotech firms wanting to decode our DNA. Even if you could connect to Juno, I'm assuming free ISP users generally have one phone line -- won't this tie up the line all the time?

I watched "God of Cookery" the other night and was just talking with Joe about why there wasn't an American version to leverage off the success of the Iron Chef. Well, here it is. And here's Lego Chef on IFilm. via Slashdot.

For those of you who are interested in the Casio Wrist Camera (I want one too!), there is a month's worth of pictures at Harrumph/Jezebel. Also, check out famewhore. Wristcam. wrist. wrist. wrist.

wrist. wrist. wrist. wrist. wrist. wrist. wrist. What a weird word. Think about it too much and it becomes meaningless. wrist.

Just in case you've missed the new features that have been posted, theVooner's been pretty prolific recently, writing reviews on the Rolex Daytona, the Sony PC-5 DV camera, and the Compaq iPaq. Expect more in the near future.

Since I'm still in the process of moving, I've resigned myself to another month of Netzero. Thing is, Netzero charges now for use over 40 hours per month.

I used up my 40 hours in January the first week I was back. How the hell did I do it? There's no way. Well, it turns out I used up the rest of the 40 hours allocated per household. Since both Joe and I use Netzero, between the two of us, it was real easy to hit the limit.

But I was not one to go without an Internet connection. Pay $9.95 and I get unlimited access for the rest of the month. It doesn't feel bad because it's just a credit card charge. Not like I'm signing up for service; next month, I get my 40 free hours again and the option, when that runs out, to charge up another $9.95. So it takes a massive downturn for companies like Netzero to realize you can't make money by giving away connections and serving banner ads.

When it was free, I lived with the Netzero bugs. Now that I'm paying though, it feels like crap when Netzero crashes my computer three times in a row. This morning I spent more time restarting my machine than I did online.

Why does DSL take over a month to set up? I can just imagine it probably takes one guy to flip some switch somewhere to activate it... but it takes a month for that guy to get the order.