Deciphering Web Photos

Because everybody has a web presence, you ought to know what it really says about them.

Poems 2.0

Jim London is a videographer, sound recordist, and photographer who has created virtual animated movies of great poets. Reincarnated through computer animation, they read their poems in the visual style of old movies.

Robert Frost - "The Road Not Taken"


Walt Whitman - "O Captain! My Captain!"


Edgar Allan Poe - "The Raven"

Proto-Douche?

Who can say Steve Jobs is not a man far ahead of his time?

Jobs not only developed the first iPhone circuit board prototype more than 20 years ago (even though Woz did all the work), but he pioneered the popped collar trend that's sweeping tanning salons, batting cages, and car modding shops everywhere. The modern douchebag finally has an ancestor of renown and mystique.

Headline News

Sometimes there's not enough time to keep up with the day's events, but that's why we boil it down to the headlines!


Lawyer: Britney wants no contact with Sam Lutfi
Note to Osama "Sam" Lufti - so do we. What does that say when even Brittanica thinks she's too good for you?

Astronaut technology could prevent elderly falls
Yes, it's called zero gravity, and Granny will love it.

Off-duty LAPD officer shot by Long Beach police
Damn these gang wars! It's an eye for an eye...when does it stop!

Experts see quake as 'teachable moment'
Now you know exactly when to crap your pants in terror

Tide of illegal immigrants now being reversed
So does that mean U.S. citizens are flooding into Mexico or there's a whole lotta Canadians coming?

McCain camp compares Obama to Spears, Hilton
Just to show how out of touch he is, McCain references Marcus Hilton, a British ballroom dancer and gay porn star Zak Spears.

World's oldest joke traced back to 1900 BC
World's oldest groan traced back to same time

Incredible discoveries made in remote caves
I don't trust this story and refuse to go there with it...it's creepy and reminds me of those guys who drive vans and ask you to go with them and help find their lost puppy

House passes bill to regulate tobacco
Finally, some legislation to protect hapless consumers against the ills of tobacco products!

Bush signs bill to triple AIDS funding
The president later reversed this when he found out the money would not go towards a weaponized version of AIDS to be used in the 'War on Terror'.

Man wins appeal in bizarre gasoline suicide case
With stories like that in the news, we all win.

A Loss To The Acting World

According to reports, Freddie Prinze Jr. has retired from acting, at least temporarily...and a nation mourns.

What has one of our country's top thespians leaving the stage? He landed a gig as a writer for the WWE. That's World Wrestling Entertainment. "Bringing on board an experienced Hollywood writer, actor and producer like Freddie Prinze, Jr. will only increase the level of entertainment to millions of viewers and passionate WWE fans every Monday on USA," said Chris McCumber, soon to be former Executive Vice President of Marketing Digital & Brand Strategy for USA Network. Because if there's one demographic I know has a big overlap on that Venn diagram, it's Freddy Prinze, Jr. fans and wrestling aficionados.

Prinze has already worked with the WWE as a blogger with their Fan Nation site, and is a reportedly a huge fan of the WWE, which therefore qualifies him to be a wrestling writer. Just like I'm ready to become a hockey coach. If ever there was a rung of the writing ladder that seemed unnecessary at the bottom, it's the one shared by the authors of wresting plotlines and reality television contests.

What a lucky little boy. He probably jumps out of his bunk bed (top, of course - sorry SMG) in the morning and runs downstairs wearing his bootie pjs, then eats cereal while drawing writing wrestling pictures stories in crayon. Such a life!

In Advance

Amy Winehouse is some kind of crypt-dwelling, undead fiend, I'm certain. Let's just write her obit now so we don't waste time when it happens in a few weeks. The singer demon junkie is just taunting us - we, the living. I can see if you call Pink Dot for a 6-pack and some beef jerky, but what monster needs fresh blood?

As for Brittanica, we need to give her that Mother Of The Year Award right away. Though I'm all for timing it with Mother's Day, May's another 10 months off, and she really ought to get it before she puts one of those retard kids in a microwave to dry off or chokes to death on a funyun.

Surgical Grade Material Girl

After completing phase one earlier this year, Madonna finished phase two this week and will have a fully hinged jaw by the end of the year...right about the time this succubus has turned Guy Ritchie into a completely shriveled husk to be discarded. Shit, if you're going to spend some money improving looks, for God's sake help your daughter with some electrolysis.

Not Going To Get You Points

I don't even know if beach volleyball is being considered for the Olympics, but a whole lot of this action would get me to watch. And really, what's this about being one of the best players in the world? I think he'd have blocked, dodged, or did anything but take it square in the pie if that was the case.

Ctrl-Z

A team of European scientists unveiled a new method for extracting images hidden under old masters' paintings, and demonstrated by recreating a color portrait of a woman's face unseen since Vincent van Gogh painted over it in 1887. Now all those great art choices can be undone!

The new approach was used on "Patch of Grass," a small oil study of a field that Van Gogh painted in Paris while living with his brother Theo. While not exact in every detail, the image produced is a woman's head that may be the same model Van Gogh painted in a series of portraits leading up to the 1885 masterpiece "The Potato Eaters." The sale line is this new method will allow art historians to obtain higher quality and more detailed images underlying old masterpieces. In Van Gogh's case, "it could reveal details of works that were painted over. For other works, it could provide new insights into the studies that the artist built a painting on." But the bottom line is, screw the art and artist's choices, just take your tech and use it to peel back the decisions they made for what they presented and dwell on the analysis of that.

High-intensity x-rays from a particle accelerator compiled a two-dimensional map of the metallic atoms on the painting beneath the top image. Knowing that mercury atoms were part of a red pigment and the antimony atoms were part of a yellow pigment, the researchers were able to chart those colors in the underlying image. "We visualized — in great detail — the nose, the eyes, according to the chemical composition," scanning a roughly 7-inch square of the larger portrait, which took two full days.

Though his paintings are now worth millions, Van Gogh was virtually unknown during his lifetime and struggled financially before committing suicide, and often reused canvas to save money, either painting on the back or over the top of existing paintings. Experts believe roughly a third of his works hide a second painting underneath. The painting under "Patch of Grass" adds weight to the theory that Van Gogh mailed paintings from the Netherlands to his brother Theo, and, after moving to Paris to join him, found the old works and painted over them.

The researchers were excited about the prospect of using the technique to probe paintings by Van Gogh and other famous artists such as Rembrandt and Picasso, and totally undermine their creative output!

As a writer and musician, there's always a question of where your idea is going, and at what point it's complete. There are lots of false starts, big mistakes, poor choices, and bad decisions along the way, and by the time you see or hear something from an artist, that's what you were meant to take in. Sure, they want to see possible "masterpieces" from Vince because he was a recycler, but steping back into an artist's creative process is damaging to the end piece. Listening to a song in it's demo stage can be terrible. Looking over preliminary drafts of a story can be awful. Those discarded, replaced, and unused directions, while entertaining for the curious, are no place to be mining for prizes the artist clearly was not trying to share.

Get Motivated

Came across a ton of motivational posters...except they're for the Dungeons & Dragons crowd. Your inner-nerd will find them uplifting...

I Hope The Rings Are Symbolic

A Chinese company called Elasun has rolled out these clever Olympic-inspired ads that combine the little sporty stick figures of the Olympics with condoms and the ill-translated phrase "Sports make you health". Because sports do make you health.

Perhaps they imply that sex is a sport, or that sex is everywhere we look, or maybe that the Olympics are just all about fucking. With their start in a few weeks, that's about the only thing that may get my attention. The Sydney Morning Herald Olympics blog has the rest of the ads, plus this nugget of information:

Speaking of prophylactics, the phrase "avoiding pregnancy" has become a euphemistic way of saying that you're going to avoid the Olympics. In Chinese, "bi-yun", means contraception. "Ao-yun" means the Olympics. So bi-yun in the context of the Games is a sort of double entendre meaning avoiding the Games.

Now that dog is off the menu, what other reason could you have to miss the games?

Behind The Science

There was an earthquake today in Southern California. And I think I know what happened.

H2O Plus?

Within about 10 years, you might be drinking anti-aging enzymes with your bottled water. But don't worry, there'll still be flavored waters too.

California biochemists have a plan to keep the world younger and healthier by using nanotech to deliver an enzyme called CoQ10 to our drinking water. This coenzyme is naturally produced by the body, but in smaller and smaller amounts as we age - doesn't that suck! It's vital for the body's basic functioning, as it helps our cells convert sugars to energy, and if we boost its presence in our bodies as we age, our organs should remain productive and healthy for much longer.

Decades ago, nutritionists lobbied the US government to add iodine to salt, because most US residents weren't getting enough iodine in their diets. Today, most of us here in the US accept that salt comes with iodine (though you can buy it without). Chemists who study CoQ10, hope that in the future we will also accept the idea that CoQ10 comes in drinking water, perhaps along with several other vital vitamins and enzymes.

So even if you want to grow old and die in the old-fashioned way, you may not be able to — at least, not if you drink water.

Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine in our ongoing tale of morality, practicality, and vitality is up and ready for your perusal. Because that's what His Words - Not Mine is all about.

Double Dumb

It's bad enough that there's a debate as to what professional sports are, but how is it ever going to be settle when there's confusion starting at such a young age?

Enter the stupidity of the New York City public schooling system, who has moved to implement double dutch as an officially sanctioned sport in high schools. School officials say adding double dutch to the calendar should get hundreds of students participating in an enjoyable aerobic activity. I say it's school - you don't have a choice. Take your mandated physical education classes and run those laps!

"We're always thinking, what do we need to do to get more kids playing?" said Eric Goldstein, chief executive of the Public School Athletic League. Sure, like take something that kids are already playing on their own and now make it a school activity. Double dutch will be a spring sport this coming school year after basketball season is over and there is space in the gyms. Because that makes it look more legit if it's indoors and not on the street, where it's done all the time.

The game has been a competitive activity since the 1970s when police Detective David Walker worked with physical education instructors to develop rules and a scoring system. However, it isn't an official sport in any other school district in the United States, Goldstein said. and that's right - it's not.

"We're the first, and we like being first," he said. Yes, the New Yorker mentality - first it best, regardless of what it is.

Ruth Payne, a retired drug-prevention counselor who coaches double dutch, said "It's a great thing. Thousands of girls jump rope, but they do it as a recreational sport, just for fun. For it to be in the schools, that means it's getting good recognition as a sport." Actually, it means you gave it recognition as a sport. It was just a playground game until then. Payne said young people who participate in double dutch learn skills that will help them succeed in life - "They learn how to negotiate, they learn how to talk, they learn discipline. And they learn to work together." Yeah, and most importantly, they learn how to twirl a rope.

Crapendectomy Weekend

Time to put in the extra hours at work for the end of the month, and that also means cleaning all the shit off my desk. Then there's the continuing battle against the entropy of my apartment, which will certainly be set back by the exertion of cleaning at work. Maybe I should just buy a new place...that way, I have to throw all my crap out rahter than pack it. I should ask Famous Sister, who as of this week is a homeowner. Congrats, sis...once again you've bested me, first to another accomplishment. I guess that's why mom and dad had two kids...y'know, for backup.

I am sad this weekend not just for needing wake up before dawn and spend the day downtown at work, but because there's only one IMAX theater nearby and all the reasonable showings of The Dark Knight are sold out in advance. Stubborn enough to mandate I see it in IMAX, but unwilling to see a 1.40am screening - yep, that's me.

And finally, weekend greetings over to SDCC - San Diego Comic Con for you non-geeks. La Fem(Ry)bot and Herr Docktor are both down there, albeit not together. La Fem(Ry)bot is covering the nerdining for Mahalo Daily, whilst PhD is enjoying the perks of accompanying his gal Weebins, who is also circling the con for Blizzard/Activision.

Three Wasted Decades

Artist Scott Weaver spent 35 years working on this toothpick structure of San Francisco, which required 100,000 toothpicks and has a ball that rolls through the entire thing in Rube Goldberg fashion. Perhaps the best part of this is Weaver's sentiment towards the project, when he mentions that he loves to "know that I'm building something that people will see later on that took a long time to build for no reason."

The nine-foot-tall creation is called "Rolling Through the Bay" and is currently on display at the Sonoma County Fair in Northern California.

Bat-sanity

Chez points out how utterly batshit today's op/ed piece in The Wall Street Journal is. Really. Like, Joker nuts. The hilariously right-on comments from DXM here, and a mixed bag of support and critisism on the WSJ message board.

What Bush and Batman Have in Common
By ANDREW KLAVAN

A cry for help goes out from a city beleaguered by violence and fear: A beam of light flashed into the night sky, the dark symbol of a bat projected onto the surface of the racing clouds...

Oh, wait a minute. That's not a bat, actually. In fact, when you trace the outline with your finger, it looks kind of like . . . a "W."

There seems to me no question that the Batman film The Dark Knight, currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society -- in which people sometimes make the wrong choices -- and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

The Dark Knight, then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year's 300, The Dark Knight is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.

Conversely, time after time, left-wing films about the war on terror -- films like In The Valley of Elah, Rendition and Redacted -- which preach moral equivalence and advocate surrender, that disrespect the military and their mission, that seem unable to distinguish the difference between America and Islamo-fascism, have bombed more spectacularly than Operation Shock and Awe.

Why is it then that left-wingers feel free to make their films direct and realistic, whereas Hollywood conservatives have to put on a mask in order to speak what they know to be the truth? Why is it, indeed, that the conservative values that power our defense -- values like morality, faith, self-sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for the right -- only appear in fantasy or comic-inspired films like 300, Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Spiderman 3 and now The Dark Knight?

The moment filmmakers take on the problem of Islamic terrorism in realistic films, suddenly those values vanish. The good guys become indistinguishable from the bad guys, and we end up denigrating the very heroes who defend us. Why should this be?

The answers to these questions seem to me to be embedded in the story of The Dark Knight itself: Doing what's right is hard, and speaking the truth is dangerous. Many have been abhorred for it, some killed, one crucified.

Leftists frequently complain that right-wing morality is simplistic. Morality is relative, they say; nuanced, complex. They're wrong, of course, even on their own terms.

Left and right, all Americans know that freedom is better than slavery, that love is better than hate, kindness better than cruelty, tolerance better than bigotry. We don't always know how we know these things, and yet mysteriously we know them nonetheless.

The true complexity arises when we must defend these values in a world that does not universally embrace them -- when we reach the place where we must be intolerant in order to defend tolerance, or unkind in order to defend kindness, or hateful in order to defend what we love.

When heroes arise who take those difficult duties on themselves, it is tempting for the rest of us to turn our backs on them, to vilify them in order to protect our own appearance of righteousness. We prosecute and execrate the violent soldier or the cruel interrogator in order to parade ourselves as paragons of the peaceful values they preserve. As Gary Oldman's Commissioner Gordon says of the hated and hunted Batman, "He has to run away -- because we have to chase him."

That's real moral complexity. And when our artistic community is ready to show that sometimes men must kill in order to preserve life; that sometimes they must violate their values in order to maintain those values; and that while movie stars may strut in the bright light of our adulation for pretending to be heroes, true heroes often must slink in the shadows, slump-shouldered and despised -- then and only then will we be able to pay President Bush his due and make good and true films about the war on terror.

Perhaps that's when Hollywood conservatives will be able to take off their masks and speak plainly in the light of day.

Today's Tom Sawyer

When Rush rocked The Colbert Report last week, they also tried their hand at the Rock Band version of "Tom Sawyer". And chunked hard - they failed to complete the song, scoring 31% on expert mode.

I think that ought to settle the difference between musicianship and gamesmanship.

Harken Back To The Classic Days Of Cinema

The trailer for the well-named Bitch Slap. I know...it looks amazing.

Un-Fare

Police have arrested an 18-year-old man accused of stealing at least three county buses and driving them on their routes. You mean, he did somebody's job for free?

James L. Harris is charged with three counts each of third-degree grand theft and burglary of an occupied conveyance.

According to police, Harris would take the buses from several Miami-Dade Transit bus depots in the county and drive the buses on their routes, picking up and dropping off passengers along the way. He would then return the buses at the end of the day. Harris didn't raise any suspicion because he was dressed like a Miami-Dade Transit employee. Police also said he didn't steal any bus fare.

Birthus Interruptus (Chapter Eight, Part Two)

We've got a second part to this week's His Words-Not Mine, seeing as not even childbirth can stifle my partner-in-writing. He just needed to give it one last little push to get the rest of that chapter out. Read on!

El Pollo Rocko

In the late 1990s, Jeff Simmermon formed a band with two chickens as members. This is his story:

The keyboard players in my band were spacier than Sun Ra, more abstract than John Coltrane and brought more sheer, squalid anarchy to the stage than GG Allin and the Sex Pistols combined. When they weren’t playing music they were either feeding, fighting, or shitting on the floor – and they managed to do a lot of that onstage, too. But they didn’t just act like barnyard animals, they were barnyard animals: the keyboard players in my band were two chickens named Kitty Wells and Patsy Cline.

I played percussion on a modified vintage typewriter miked up loud enough to sound like the thunder of an angry God. At that volume, the space bar and shift keys rumbled like a kick drum, and the letter keys snapped like a tight snare. My friend Tim Gordon (the band’s other human being) played the guitar and bass semi-simultaneously, wearing the guitar up by his collarbone and the bass slung low at his hips – he’d loop the bass notes through a pedal and play rhythm guitar against himself while I thumped and cracked the typewriter. Once we hit a stride of sorts, we’d pull a blanket off the top of the cage where Kitty Wells and Patsy Cline sat with two little Casio Keyboards.We’d glue chicken feed to the keys we wanted them to hit the most, the ones in tune with Tim. But really, whatever the chickens played was up to them – we just tried to follow along as best we could. We told ourselves that we were influenced by classic country, John Cage, dub reggae and Gonzo the Great. But really, we just tried to create listenable backing rhythms while two birds with brains the size of your pinkie nail took center stage.

A lot of people over the years have asked me “but why? Why’d you even DO this in the first place?” Sometimes you fall in love with an idea and it just grips you tight and won’t let you go until you give birth to it.Thomas Edison, it was the light bulb. For George Mallory, it was Mount Everest. For us, it was chickens playing keyboards. And really, the only answer is because. But you know, as fascinating as all of this may sound, it was IMPOSSIBLE to get shows. Everyone loved hearing about the band, but nobody wanted to book us. We’d been handing tapes out all over town, but couldn’t get any traction anywhere. People would listen, and say “yeah, you guys are alright, man …” then just trail off.

It’s true. Richmond, VA is a rock and roll town through and through – home to Lamb of God, GWAR, Avail, and a disproportionate number of shitty punk bands. It was the capitol of the Confederacy and it’s doing the same thing with punk rock that it does with the Confederacy: sits around its carcass on life support just drinking and talking about the good old days, waiting for it to rise again. No matter how funny or cool people said our idea was, when came down to it, none of the chain-wallet Mafia that ran that town wanted to let us open for them – we were, admittedly, a tough act to follow. And I mean, as cool as the idea is, we weren’t exactly top-billing material, either. Bars and restaurants were right out as venues, too. Although it is fine for them to serve chicken piece-by-piece in a basket, two live ones on stage violate all manner of food and alcohol restrictions.

We started looking for farms to take Kitty Wells and Patsy Cline to, farms that probably wouldn’t butcher them.

Then one day, a show came through. We met these guys who were huge Sun Ra fans and totally got what we did – and invited us to open for them at an art gallery in town a month later. We kicked into gear, big time. Me and Tim and the chickens started practicing twice a day. When you’re in a band with superstars like those two ladies, you kinda have to work around their schedule – feeding times, in this case. Chickens are basically feather-coated solar-powered robots, and they wake up with the sun, crowing for food. When it’s dark for a few minutes, they power down.

Me and Tim got up every morning about an hour before sunrise and set up our amps, practiced a little together as the sun crept toward the ladies’ cage. They’d wake up and crow, we’d pop two keyboards and mikes in there, drop some feed on the keys and have a full band rehearsal until the chickens got full. Then we’d go off to work, come home, make some dinner, and have a sundown rehearsal.

The thing is, that wasn’t enough for me. I have far more ideas than actual skills, and I needed all the practice I could get. We were already getting up at 5 am to practice and doing it again at night, but I was still panicking. I was giving this thing everything I had and it just wasn’t enough. We were supposed to perform onstage with live chickens in a few weeks’ time and I was terrified that we were going to look ridiculous.

Then Tim hit on it: we started putting the chickens to sleep. If you put a chicken’s head under your armpit and stroke it softly, it will think it’s nighttime and go right to sleep. We’d done this when they got to fighting too much, and we started doing it during breakfast and dinner rehearsals. It worked a treat, too: The armpit trick performed a ctrl-alt-delete on the chickens’ brains, and they woke up every time thinking it was a brand-new day. They also forgot they’d eaten, and came to with the breakfast instinct each time. We stopped it once they started moving kinda slow, but we could eke out another 30-45 minutes each practice that way.Practices were grueling. It was hot in our little apartment, and the chickens had pecked each other up pretty good. All they did was fight. Tim and I were fighting too, exhausted from all the early rising. Just because something is funny doesn’t mean it’s not serious, and we were exhausted and freaking out.

Then, disaster. The day before the show, the gallery manager called me and tried to cancel it altogether. She said the board had heard we were bringing barnyard animals in to perform and freaked out. They were afraid the chickens would get loose and fly around and claw up the artwork or peck the sculptures or something. So, sorry, better luck next time, she said, like we could just up and go play somewhere else.

I lost it a little bit.

I said listen. I have been keeping two chickens in a 2 bedroom apartment for over a month. I have gotten up at 5 am for a month to rehearse with my bandmate and some chickens. I am exhausted, and literally henpecked, and furthermore CHICKENS CAN’T FLY, THAT’S WHY WE ARE ABLE TO CATCH AND EAT THEM SO EASILY. I can’t remember what all else I said, but I just kept hammering away at her until we were both silent, panting from a battle of wills.

She let us go on.

There’s not but one or two cool things to do a month in Richmond, and that night we were IT. The gallery was packed, and small towns being what they are, everybody had heard all about the drama already. Folks showed up all gossipy and excited, just looking for a fight.

We came out in matching red, white, and blue tuxedoes with the chicken’s cage wrapped in an American flag. This was before 9/11, when you weren’t such an asshole for doing that. We warmed up and hit our stride, and when we saw the crowd look like they were grooving a little, I whipped that flag away and the chickens woke up and started crowing and pecking. Tim threw some chicken feed in there and they went nuts – we’d skipped morning rehearsal so the birds would be nice and hungry, and they played like hell.

Then, the crowd got the fight they were looking for. Kitty Wells was standing with one foot on her keys, making this steady drone, all Velvet Underground style, pecking away at a piece of corn on one of the high notes. And Patsy Cline decided she wanted that very same piece of corn. They both pecked at it for a while, making this amazing drone, punctuated with staccato notes – then they just went for each other’s eyes.

They crowed and puffed up, flapping their wings and howling as they jumped up and down on the piano keys. It was like fucking Jerry Springer. The crowd leapt to their feet and was like “OOOOOooo!” and started chanting and whistling. We kept playing until we saw a little chicken blood hit the keyboards, at which point we each grabbed a bird and jammed her head under our armpit and took a bow.

This may have been the crowning achievement of my musical career, and I wasn’t even the star. Patsy Cline and Kitty Wells stole the show, took their paychecks and vanished. Like so many anonymous session musicians, they spent the remainder of their short, wretched lives scratching for food, having babies they’d never meet and dying in the tremendous shadow of their own legend.

Now I’m here in New York – and every year or so me and Tim talk about getting the band back together and playing on the subway platforms.

The following recording is ripped from a tape of our first live performance, back in 1998. We refined some stuff — a LOT of stuff — before the story above took place. You’ll hear Tim playing the bass, me speaking and manipulating the vocals and drum machine, and Kitty Wells and Patsy Cline playing the keyboards. We hadn’t yet figured out that feeding time needed to be showtime, so their involvement’s a little more spare than in later performances. I can remember being enamored with Ministry, Sun Ra, King Tubby and Nation of Ulysses at the time, and I think those influences are pretty clear here. I can also remember being fairly full of myself as an art student, and that’s more than apparent.

To the best of my knowledge, this is our only existing recording, though I would really, really like to be wrong. It’s nothing you’re going to pump in the club or listen to on your iPod while you’re training for a marathon, but ten years later, I still find this to be a pretty interesting piece. Here it is:

Royal Quiet Deluxe, April 1998

Some years later, my friend Eric Browne and I were rehearsing to rehydrate the long-dead Royal Quiet Deluxe. It never happened. But we did get this track out of all our hard work — something you may find much more listenable. I am playing percussion and manipulating the whooping sounds. I have NO idea how we did this, and we could probably never do it again.

Mushroom

Burning Chicken

yes, burning chicken

Borderline Mindblowing

Golden Shellback is a coating that lets you spill, pour, or submerge your gadget in a liquid and have it survive.

Rad.

Golden Shellback says it will protect against oils, water-based liquids, synthetic fluids, dust and dirt. Here's a segment on Golden Shellback which has footage of cellphones and CB radios functioning normally under a foot of water (Golden Shellback claimed the CB sat underwater for 455 consecutive hours). Apparently, the coating is applied in a vacuum and covers both the inner and outer components of a gadget, which doesn't conduct electricity. Golden Shellback hopes the protective coating will be available soon, and expect the service to cost between $50-$75 depending on the size of the gadget. .

Grecian Vacation Formula

Nine British women were facing prostitution charges after being arrested for taking part in an oral sex competition in the Greek holiday island of Zakynthos. No word who won.

Six British and six Greek men, including two bar owners, were also charged in the incident, which took place at Laganas beach in the south of the Ionian island, which lies off the west coast of mainland Greece. I hope they were just judges.

The women, who came to the popular resort on holiday, had been paid to take part in the competition, which was video recorded and was to be posted on the internet. Where, I ask? The men were charged with encouraging obscene behavior.

In recent years, Laganas has established itself as one of Greece's most popular destinations for twenty-something holidaymakers and is known for its wild party scene. Around 15 million people -- a fifth of them British -- visit the eastern Mediterranean country each year, drawn by its soaring summer temperatures, azure waters and sandy beaches.

Waiting For Their Balls To Drop

Mistress Stacey calls it like we all see it:

Wrong: (Adverb) In an unsuitable or undesirable manner or direction.

What. The fuck.

Seriously now. There is so much going on in this picture that disturbs me, I'm almost at a loss. First of all, why are three adolescent boys who are allegedly A) straight, B) virgins and C) brothers draped on each other like it's the cover of a fucking spank mag? I mean, the one on the left is literally in the process of seductively ripping off the shirt of the one in the middle, while the one in the middle is holding onto the tie of the one on the right like it's a leash. Kinky.

Second of all, what are a bunch of Grade A Turds like the Jonas Brothers doing on the cover of Rolling Stone in the first place? I understand that Rolling Stone is hardly the bastion of pop culture relevancy these days, but it's like they've just completely given up at this point. Death row inmates in Texas are less resigned than this.

Never have the pretty girls from Hanson looked so butch. America's sweethearts? There's going to be some really filthy pron being watched to get rid of all this bromoerotic garbage.

Parking Violation

An elderly man was found dead late Tuesday in a parked car that had been ticketed earlier in the day on a street in an unincorporated industrial area near Pico Rivera. Exactly how much was that ticket? The LA Times spills it:

A passerby noticed the man in the driver's seat of the black Lincoln Town Car near Peck and Rooks roads about 7:50 p.m. and notified employees at a nearby truck shop. A maintenance worker from the shop who went to investigate said a parking ticket on the car was marked as being written about 11 a.m., said Chantelle Amaya, assistant manager at L.A. Freightliner."The poor man was out there all day," Amaya said.

Amaya said workers at the shop called for help after knocking on the window of the locked car and getting no response.

Authorities were not immediately able to say whether the man was in his car at the time the ticket was issued or if he had returned to it later. Street signs forbid parking on that side of the street from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesdays to allow street cleaning, and overnight parking is prohibited.

Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputy David Zarda said he was not sure when the car was ticketed or why the man was not spotted in the car earlier. He said the street has become congested because of growing businesses and big rigs tying up multiple parking spaces.

Workers said it is not uncommon to see cars parked illegally during the day or left overnight. Truckers from the port often park their big rigs on the street or leave their cars there temporarily while they work, they said. The Peck Road entrance to the southbound 605 Freeway is less than a block from where the man's body was found.

Tow truck companies also tow wrecked cars from the nearby freeway and abandon them on the street for days at a time, said Tony Simpson, operations manager at Whittier Transfer and Storage Co. Simpson, 36, said he has been e-mailing sheriff's officials weekly to complain about cars illegally parked in his lot or those that appear abandoned, which are often broken into.

Zarda said he has received only one report of tow trucks dumping cars on the street and none about car break-ins.

Simpson, who arrives for work at 6 a.m., said he did not notice the man in the car Tuesday, although he did see the car later in the morning but did not notice anyone in it. He found out that the man was found dead Wednesday morning, after an employee called him asking if he knew whether the road was still blocked because of investigations.

The area receives a moderate amount of foot traffic because a horse trail is nearby, but it is unusual to see people sitting in their cars, Simpson and other local workers said. "It's just very deserted here," said Angie Villanueva, a secretary at Whittier Transfer, which is across the street from where the car was found.

Los Angeles County coroner's spokesman Ed Winter said the man was in his 70s. His identity has not been released because relatives have not been notified.

It was unclear how long the man had been dead or what caused his death. Authorities plan an autopsy no sooner than Thursday, Winter said. The case is being investigated by Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department homicide detectives, which authorities said is routine given the circumstances. There were no obvious signs of foul play, sheriff's officials said.

In December, an elderly woman was found in the front passenger seat of a crumpled car in a San Fernando Valley tow yard. The woman had been left in the car for a day after paramedics removed her son from the same vehicle after a crash.

Simpson said that after he learned that the body had been found in the car near Pico Rivera, he wondered about a noise he heard about noon shortly after the street sweeper passed through: repeated honking from a nearby car. Uncertain of which direction it was coming from, Simpson said he went back to work without looking around for the source of the honking. At his job Wednesday, Simpson said he wondered now: "God, what if it was the man honking for help?"

All I can say is if they ticketed the car while he was dying in it, that is the most hardcore. Meter maids, FTW.

I Knew Batman Was A Hero

The London tabloids are loving the Christian Bale assault drama, but it's clear they're on the side of Bruce Wayne, as just about every story for the last few days has made Bale look temperamental but certainly not crazy. Heavyweight gabber The Sun UK does their part today and claims the fight started when his sister asked to borrow 200,000 dollars and Christian refused:

Legal sources said sister Sharon needed £100,000 to help her bring up her three children. They said Bale, 34, snubbed the plea and a row flared in his suite at the Dorchester Hotel in London’s West End. Sources said Jenny (Bales mom) inflamed the situation by hurling insults about his wife Sibi, 38. Sharon and Jenny, a part-time clown from Bournemouth, left the hotel on Monday morning and, on the way to their Dorset home, stopped at a Hampshire police station and reported Bale for assault. Sharon, who works in computer programming, has two daughters — aged ten and 12 — from a previous marriage and a baby from a new relationship.

Clearly, after fighting The Joker, the last thing you want is another clown, even a part-time one, giving you shit.

Former Playmate To Baywatch Bathing Suit Filler To Punchline

There may be a joke in here somewhere about Traci Bingham.

Cancer Phones

Limit cell phone use because of the possible risk of cancer, says Dr. Ronald B. Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. By the way, that's contrary to numerous studies that don't find a link between cancer and cell phone use.

The head of the institute issued an unprecedented warning to his faculty and staff today, due in part to his own belief in a public lack of worry by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Now that's being responsible!

Chicken Little Herberman is basing his alarm on early unpublished data. Try and read this next part without your drow hitting the floor: He says it takes too long to get answers from science and he believes people should take action now — especially when it comes to children. "Really at the heart of my concern is that we shouldn't wait for a definitive study to come out, but err on the side of being safe rather than sorry later," Herberman said. And by the way, that big lunch you had may not be what's pushing your belly out - you're pregnant!

No other major academic cancer research institutions have sounded such an alarm about cell phone use, but Herberman's advice certainly will raise concern among many cell phone users and parents. In the memo he sent to about 3,000 faculty and staff, he says children should use cell phones only for emergencies because their brains are still developing. Adults should keep the phone away from the head and use the speakerphone or a wireless headset, he says. He even warns against using cell phones in public places like a bus because it exposes others to the phone's electromagnetic fields. The issue that concerns some scientists — though nowhere near a consensus — is electromagnetic radiation, especially its possible effects on children. It is not a major topic in conferences of brain specialists.

A 2008 University of Utah analysis looked at nine studies — including some Herberman cites — with thousands of brain tumor patients and concludes "we found no overall increased risk of brain tumors among cellular phone users. The potential elevated risk of brain tumors after long-term cellular phone use awaits confirmation by future studies." Not good enough? Studies last year in France and Norway concluded the same thing.

"If there is a risk from these products — and at this point we do not know that there is — it is probably very small," the Food and Drug Administration said.

"Although the evidence is still controversial, I am convinced that there are sufficient data to warrant issuing an advisory to share some precautionary advice on cell phone use," Herberman wrote. And that advice is spurred by Devra Lee Davis, the director of the university's center for environmental oncology. "The question is do you want to play Russian roulette with your brain," she said. "I don't know that cell phones are dangerous. But I don't know that they are safe." Well, what the fuck do you know, and why are you talking about things you have no knowledge of?

The insane tag team of Herberman and Davis point to a massive ongoing research project known as Interphone, involving scientists in 13 nations, mostly in Europe. Results already published in peer-reviewed journals from this project aren't so alarming, but Herberman is citing work not yet published. Yes, that magic bullet that only he knows because he's privileged.

The published research focuses on more than 5,000 cases of brain tumors. The National Research Council in the U.S., which isn't participating in the Interphone project, reported in January that the brain tumor research had "selection bias." That means it relied on people with cancer to remember how often they used cell phones. It is not considered the most accurate research approach. By a longshot.

The largest published study, which appeared in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in 2006, tracked 420,000 Danish cell phone users, including thousands that had used the phones for more than 10 years. It found no increased risk of cancer among those using cell phones. A French study based on Interphone research and published in 2007 concluded that regular cell phone users had "no significant increased risk" for three major types of nervous system tumors. It did note, however, that there was "the possibility of an increased risk among the heaviest users" for one type of brain tumor, but that needs to be verified in future research.

Earlier research also has found no connection. Shall we repeat that?

Joshua Muscat, a Penn State University researcher who has studied cancer and cell phones in other projects, said there are at least a dozen studies that have found no cancer-cell phone link. He said a Swedish study cited by Herberman as support for his warning was biased and flawed. "We certainly don't know of any mechanism by which radio frequency exposure would cause a cancerous effect in cells. We just don't know this might possibly occur."

Cell phones emit radio frequency energy, a type of radiation that is a form of electromagnetic radiation, according to the National Cancer Institute. Though studies are being done to see if there is a link between it and tumors of the brain and central nervous system, there is no definitive link between the two, the institute says.

"By all means, if a person feels compelled that they should take precautions in reducing the amount of electromagnetic radio waves through their bodies, by all means they should do so," said a spokesman for the American Cancer Society. "But at the same time, we have to remember there's no conclusive evidence that links cell phones to cancer, whether it's brain tumors or other forms of cancer."

Let's face the facts - everything can give you cancer, but not everything does. Ask the good doctor about all the electromagnetic waves and fields generated not only from cell phones next to your head, but those from others near you. And the beaming of that, television, radio, and wireless signals across, over and through your body. Do you have any idea of how many electromagnetic frequencies, fields, and waves you have come into contact with in you life. Or every day? There's nothing better than fact-less science to create panic. This is the kind if misuse of position and authority that makes you root for people getting the cancerous kiss of karma.

according to Joe Jackson, everything gives you cancer

Poor Baby Lamont

Hundreds of baby penguins swept from the icy shores of Antarctica and Patagonia are washing up dead on Rio de Janeiro's tropical beaches, according to rescuers and penguin experts. This is worse than those severed feet in British Columbia!

More than 400 penguins, most of them young, have been found dead on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro state over the past two months. While it is common here to find some penguins — both dead and alive — swept by strong ocean currents from the Strait of Magellan, there have been more this year than at any time in recent memory, and rescuers and those who treat penguins are divided over the possible causes. That must be a tough debate to have to step in between.

A veterinarian at the state's Niteroi Zoo, believes overfishing has forced the penguins to swim further from shore to find fish to eat "and that leaves them more vulnerable to getting caught up in the strong ocean currents." Niteroi has already received about 100 penguins for treatment this year and many are drenched in petroleum. The Campos oil field that supplies most of Brazil's oil lies offshore. They had not seen penguins suffering from the effects of other pollutants, but already dead penguins aren't brought in for treatment.

Another suggestion is weather patterns could be involved. Because of global warming, which affects ocean currents, creates more cyclones, and makes the seas rougher, baby birds - the vast majority of penguins turning up - that have just left the nest and are likely unable to out-swim the strong ocean currents they encounter while searching for food.

In a heartwarming end to the beaches littered with penguin corpses, every year Brazil airlifts dozens of penguins back to Antarctica or Patagonia.

Tank On The Move

The beast with a pig's ass the size of a tank may be trying to climb up a rung on the reality-TV ladder.

Former "Dancing with the Stars" winner Helio Castroneves let it slip backstage at the ESPY awards last week that Kim Kardashian is gonna be a contestant on the next season of the show.

Well, looks as though the country has officially run out of stars, and is now resorting to whatever trash will sign a waiver to appear on television. Maybe the report is wrong, and the next season of the show is being held on her ass.

No Wonder That Guy Seems Like Such A Jerk

"There was one actor I worked with who used to burn his leg with cigarettes. I can’t name names. Well, let’s just call him Sean Penn."

- Gary Oldman

Punks

An interesting piece on the "steampunk" design (?) wave that's been a hot commodity of late in the geek world. I too am a little tired of this retro-nuevo trend in it's proliferation of moding and skinning, even though the basic concept, like it's future sister cyberpunk, is worth examining.

“A little reflection will show that humbug is an astonishingly wide-spread phenomenon — in fact almost universal.” — P.T. Barnum’s Humbugs of the World

Humbug is a term infrequently used in design. It is an archaism straight out of the 19th century, meaning hoax or nonsense. The word has strong associations with Dickens’ Scrooge and the ultimate showman and hoaxer himself, P.T. Barnum. In this time of cultural recycling, it is a word perhaps best used to describe Steampunk, a subculture supposedly born out of a mash-up of DIY (do-it-yourself), Victoriana, punk, science fiction, Japanese anime and the urge to re-skin one’s computer as 19th century bric-a-brac. If the number of recent articles in the mainstream press is any reliable barometer (The New York Times, Boston Globe, Paper, and Print all have featured the movement in the past year), Steampunk is the next big thing. This appears to be the result of a fascination with remixing historical and contemporary aesthetics, as if all eras can be collapsed into the present. What is most interesting and disappointing about Steampunk is the odd DIY design culture that it has engendered.

Dissatisfied with their out of the box Dells or Apples, Steampunkers have declared war on mass production. Their solution? Nineteenth-century Victorian England. A strange choice to say the least. Recalling an era that is the ground zero of mass production, the cultural inflection point from the artisan to the manufactured is an odd way to escape the evils of silicon chips, instant obsolescence and homogeneous design, devoid of the human hand. I haven’t figured out whether cracking open your computer, attaching it to an Underwood typewriter, then inserting it into a combination Victorian mantel clock/desk and calling it “The Nagy Magical-Movable-Type Pixello-Dynamotronic Computational Engine” is some sort of daft wit or evidence of a pedantry bordering on the pathological. Steampunkers may have dubious taste, but one cannot accuse them of lacking a sense of humor. However, the jig is up: as a design aesthetic, Steampunk is still nascent, a set of interesting ideas that have been given the spotlight far too soon.

Subculture or not, Steampunk appears to have achieved the level of a cottage industry on the web. From The Steampunk Workshop to the Aether Emporium there seems to be no end of sites showing off these farragoes. Guitars embellished with gears, countless keyboards and LCD monitors embroidered with brass fittings and feet, and objects which merely seem to be fulfilling the formula of: brass + wood grain = Victorian. Conversely, there seems to be a distinct fascination with exposing mechanisms, peering inside the shells of things. This is a popular, almost hackneyed post-modernist trope, an idea about dismantling received structures and conventions that have run rampant through every conceivable medium over the last half century: the turning of buildings inside-out to expose ductwork and utilitarian structures once hidden; the meta-fictional narrative where the conventions of the narrative structure are continually exposed and corrupted; clothing that bares every seam, stitch and piece of fabric, etc., ad nauseam. The Steampunkers seem to take all this a bit more literally. Sean Orlando of the Kinetic Steam Works ingenuously observes, “The wonderful thing about a steam engine is that you can follow the path of power generation and function beginning with the fire box and boiler, follow the plumbing, valves, gauges, gears, d-valves, pistons, eccentric shafts and fly-wheels all the way from the source of power to the final outcome of kinetic potential.” One could easily argue that following the etched surface of a printed circuit board would provide no less a fascinating visual "map" of the processes of a computer or electronic device.

Yet as Peter Berbergal of the Boston Globe notes, “In all of the new Steampunk design there is a strong nostalgia for a time when technology was mysterious and yet had a real mark of the craftsperson burnished into it.” Never mind the fact that the Victorian era was a time of demystification: Darwin’s theory of natural selection upset centuries of received religious knowledge about human origins, and the mechanization of virtually everything meant you could produce objects, designs and books ten or twenty times faster and distribute them to the very ends of the earth. As Philip Meggs, commenting on the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, has succinctly put it: “Handicraft almost completely vanished. The unity of design and production ended." The world had suddenly become smaller. If Steampunkers are looking to the past for some sort of inspired return to a prior era, then they are running in slack parallel with their ancestors. The Victorians were cultural raiders without peer. Rococo, Tudor, Gothic Revival and the umpteenth generation of Neo-Neo-Classicism were not enough. They went abroad to bring back the ill-gotten gains of their imperial aesthetic loot. Moorish ornaments, Ukiyo-e, Chinese porcelain, hieroglyphics all found their way into Victorian eclecticism. Form before concept.

Despite the formal clumsiness of most Steampunk objects, there is a certain conceptual zing to them: the immediate thrill of a counterfactual come to life. What if Charles Babbage’s steam powered difference engines (think of a computer with mechanical gears instead of silicon chips) had been completed and mass produced in the 1820s? Voilà! It would look exactly like this “antiqued” Powerbook, the mutant spawn of a 19th century Sears catalog and the Apple Industrial Design Group. Or perhaps not. If one gets past the patina, the quaintly burnished woodwork, the problem is that Steampunk is far too enamored of the look, the surface skin of an derivatively small chunk of the Victorian era filtered through Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Jules Verne, whose illustrated “scientific romances” seem to have formed the ur-aesthetic for Steampunk. But the inspiration gets butchered in the process. There is nothing yet in Steampunk that can remotely compare visually to Gilliam’s dystopian epic or the ornamental splendor of the Hetzel edition of Verne. In comparison, Steampunk is humbug design, scrap-booking masquerading as the avant-garde.



There also is the larger issue of what exactly the Victorian influences are doing on the level of meaning. If Terry Gilliam’s Brazil is really a touchstone for Steampunkers, does that not imply that they are substantively misreading Gilliam's use of the Victorian? In Brazil, it is fairly clear that these aesthetic anachronisms are instruments of oppression and surveillance: the omnipresent, naked CRT monitors with magnifying glass attached and typewriter keyboards give a sweatshop aura to every office. Or, the labyrinthine ductwork that emerges from the walls clumsily conceals the infra-structural guts of a society that is cheap, totalitarian, and constantly at war (the lack of finish and recycled nature of most contraptions in the movie seems to indicate war time shortages and rationing). I would even argue that Brazil is less influenced by Victoriana in its aesthetic than say film noir and a funhouse version of Blitz-era London. Was not Brazil once described by Gilliam as “Walter Mitty meets Franz Kafka”? But these nuances seem to be lost on the Steampunkers, who obsessively fixate on a few oddly-styled gadgets from the film.

Steampunking, with its commerce driven, faddish re-skinning of their own history, is closer to Disney than punk or sci-fi. A laptop styled like a Eastlake sideboard is merely a threat of bad taste, not a threatening reaction to massive social and economic disenfranchisement. In its essence Steampunk seems suburban in its attitude: nostalgic for an imagined, non-existent past, politically quietist, and culturally insular hidden behind cul-de-sacs of carefully styled anachronisms that let in no chaos or ferment. The larger, more impossible questions are missing. How would the Victorian imagination conceive and execute a functioning computer? The answer must be more interesting than adding wood veneers to your laptop or turning a mouse into a contraption of gears that looks more like a medieval torture device.

We are being taken for rubes. At worst, the Steampunkers seem to be mediocre hobbyists with great publicists. It seems fine to me that an obscure niche of DIY hobbyists want to create an imaginary Victorian present, no matter how insular or simpleminded it might be. Reality is what you make of it, even if it is apparent that some people prefer reality to look like a discarded sci-fi movie prop. It is entirely another thing for the press, in their endless “style” trolling, to claim Steampunk as some sort of important movement. If the press behaves as a gaggle of inept tastemakers, then the uncritical pimping of Steampunk must serve as a “mission accomplished.” What it boils down to is that instead of inventing something new, the Steampunkers have mastered one of the oldest of arts: that of self-promotion. P.T. Barnum, that 19th century master of theater, hoax and hype, would be proud.