For the second year in a row, Playboy and C3 put on a late night party at SXSW, and for the second year in a row, I was lucky enough to attend.

While last year, the party was housed in a giant warehouse-type thing in the middle of nowhere, this year’s event was right downtown at a giant warehouse-type thing at the corner of 3rd and San Jacinto. The line circled the block and even the media entrance was swarmed by 11 PM.

Inside, there seemed to be a new adventure tucked into every corner: free barbecue; free drinks; a room full of Port-A-Potties that also housed a Rock Band hooked up to a television the the back of a car and a well lit area with a backdrop for crucial drunken photo seshes. The people were fascinating to watch:

• There was a surly red-headed bartender. She admonished people for taking too long to order their drinks; allowed her “regulars” to skip in head of the line; and when a particularly douche-y party goer knocked over her stack of plastic cups, she fixed him with a steely glare and lectured, “Really dude? Really?” Yeah, dude. Really? One day I’m going to marry that girl.
• There was a couple–or just two like souls who found each other in an instance of pure serendipity–who boogied toward the back entrance. He was dressed in a low-cut, V-neck, red velour with white racing stripes. His humongous, curly hair was accented by a white headband, and his face wore one of the sweeter ironic moustaches I’ve seen during the trip. She was wearing skin-tight striped hot pants that could barely contain her luscious booty. Their choreography consisted of moves that my have been stolen from the Torrance Community Dance Group, and they were pretty darn fabulous.
• And I think I saw Elijah Wood.

There were bands, too. The Heavy played some songs, and they were kind of whatever. MGMT gave me a headache, but not in an awesome High on Fire sort of way. Justice started off at a throbbing cacophony and just started cranking shit louder and louder until brains started frying. That’s when shit really started going off. Moby played a DJ set, but I missed it (I’m kind of bummed about it now since we’re totally bros now), and by the time I got back (around 3:45 AM), the venue (slowly clearing out) was pumped so thick full of smoke (and I was so pumped thick full of whiskey) that my eyes started tearing. Cutting through the haze was difficult, but there were a ton of people on stage, how many, and who was actually DJing, I couldn’t tell. It looked like a lot, and they were back lit, which made it kind of creepy.

Luckily, they were still serving whiskey, and back by the photo sesh area, a woman with sweet guns (in addition to other things) interviewed Spencer. Swag included: a wristband, guitar pick, free magazine and a couple other things I’m not allowed to mention because they may be incriminating. Good time had? Oh yeah.

On behalf of the Synthesis family I’d like to extend our congratulations to the Lego company. Today marks the 50th anniversary of Denmark’s Lego company registering the original patent for the Lego block. Responsible for countless hours of imaginative construction (and, as many parents can attest, countless barefooted midnight encounters with those durable, plastic little land mines). So thanks, Lego, for providing me with my play-toy of choice as a child, and also, the roundabout ways in which you keep me gainfully employed in early adulthood.
Check out the Lego time line for some fascinating…sorry, for some nearly fascinating trivia garbage. Such as:

• More than 400 billion LEGO bricks have been produced since 1949.
and
• 40 billion LEGO bricks stacked on top of one another would connect the earth with the moon.

And here’s one for old-time sakes:

All the shit you throw away — grocery bags, cd cases, water bottles, toys, iPods — ends up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a heap of debris floating in the Pacific twice the size of Texas, consisting of 80 percent plastics and weighing some 3.5 million tons, and floating where few people ever travel, in no-man’s land between San Francisco and Hawaii.

Ocean current patterns may keep the flotsam stashed in a part of the world few will ever see, but the majority of its content is generated onshore, according to a report from Greenpeace last year titled “Plastic Debris in the World’s Oceans.”The report found that 80 percent of the oceans’ litter originated on land. While ships drop the occasional load of shoes or hockey gloves into the waters (sometimes on purpose and illegally), the vast majority of sea garbage begins its journey as onshore trash.

If you want to feel really bad about it, read always-genius Mark Morford’s take on it here. You see, its not just killing fish and turtles and bird, but it’s killing us too!

The poetry goes something like this: Plastic bottle is tossed away. Plastic bottle, along with millions just like it, escapes out to sea, drifts and wanders and ultimately joins giant toxic stew of other plastic garbage sitting like a massive island in middle of impartial but increasingly wary ocean.

Time passes. Life churns. Sea birds and other large marine life ingest (and then die from) some of the billions of bits of brightly-colored plastic floating about, as the sun slowly breaks down the rest of the plastic bottle into its fundamental, ultra-toxic polymer molecules. Stew thickens.

And then, the magic happens. Nature’s most efficient organic filters, the sea jellies, absorb those tiny plastic molecules into their bodies. Small fish eat the jellies. Larger fish eat the smaller fish. Slowly, the deadly plastics, which never completely biodegrade, amble their way back up the food chain and back into the stomachs and bloodstreams and ecosystems of larger and larger animals until, voila, there again is your plastic bottle, right there on your dinner plate. Neat!

Hemp Bass Distributions has presented itself as a pioneer of Hemp Plastics as the primary distributor for their original Hemp Plastic Jewel cases. These cases have a look and feel unlike anything else, and on top of that, they are sustainable and cleaner for the environment. When hemp plastics are compared to conventional equivalents, there is less waste and much less energy burned during production.

The hemp plant is a viable alternative resource for many forms of paper and plastics production. An acre of hemp produces as much pulp as four acres of tree, and while it can take twenty years for re-growth of trees on the same land, hemp can be grown and harvested within 90 days, twice per year. In the current climate of deforestation and subsequent global warming, such sustainability gives hemp a distinct advantage overproducts in many markets.

If your don’t agree with the fact that our environment is on the brink of peril, you need to take off the blindfold. While Jewel Cases are a very small part of what needs to be done to achieve sustainability, it is yet another piece to the puzzle. This type of product tends lead the entreprenuer to new and exciting places. It presents the reality that contributing to the world’s sustainability is profitable. Most importantly, the market is anything but saturated.

On a lighter note, as my fingers race, the sound vibrations of “Hemp Bass Distribution Presents: Nexus Beats vol. 1″ is inoculating my eardrums. A heavy dub and dnb compilation featuring over 5 upbeat bassy DJ’s on one great promotional CD. Update: I have just been informed of some dubby HBD tracks on Perski’s Myspace Profile. (worth checking out.) DJ Perski is supposedly a key element at Hemp Bass. And remember, snocap feeds artists!

Wednesday evening, roughly 10,000 nationalistically devoted Chinese citizens gathered in Tiananmen Square to celebrate the one-year countdown to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Celebrations included detaining journalists, shutting down Web sites, and running over protesting students with tanks.

Some of the outside events from the 2008 games will likely be postponed or relocated to other areas because of air pollution. Meanwhile, the government still arrests people who proclaim Tibetan Independence, executes political prisoners, and says fuck you to human rights. Sweet.

Here’s a fun game: Look at anything you have that’s plastic - does it say “Made In China” on it? How about your shoes? YOU WIN!

The Olympics were started in Greece. So was the concept of democracy. Fuck China’s government in the face.