sasnaK

Phone Trips

There is quite a bit of interesting stuff here. Check out the The 790 Story (NSFW) or Reverend Mark Bernay explains the true nature of the universe to start with. If you find some other good stuff, post it in the comments. I don't think I am going to have time to go through it all.

UPDATE: I remembered seeing another site dealing with recorded phone conversations during the 80's. After a little googling, I found what I was looking for. Here is an FAQ about The National Cynical Network and another FAQ about Midnight Voicejail itself.

UPDATE II: Concerto for Voicemail #1

Not from the Onion

Bush told his senior aides Tuesday that he "didn't want to see any stories" quoting unnamed administration officials in the media anymore, and that if he did, there would be consequences, said a senior administration official who asked that his name not be used.

I promise, no more posts about Bush, but this was just too funny to pass up.

A big cat and a poem

Did you hear about the 350-pound Bengal tiger that was found in a Harlem apartment, or did you read the poem our president wrote to his wife? Wow. I had to check Snopes - nothing yet on either one. Could they both be true stories?

UPDATE: The Missouri Review has rejected the submission of Bush's poem.

Demo Derby

The derby photos are here. Video of John's third place finish in the compact class is on the way.

Update: The video is in the derby gallery. There are three file sizes to choose from, depending on your connection speed. If you want to download the video, right click here for the high resolution (44.2 MB QT), here for the medium resolution (16.6 MB QT), and here for the low resolution (7.4 MB QT).

Old Memorial Day party pics

Justin just posted some pics from one of Talley's Memorial Day parties. Check them out here.
Edit: Now Benson's bachelor party shots are here.

More Tucker Max

I wonder if Katy Johnson still thinks it was a good idea to initiate a lawsuit against Tucker Max? Here is my earlier post regarding the case.

I guess the temporary injunction has been lifted, because Max has posted the original story, the court documents, plus a picture and a video of them at the wedding.

Walker's birthday

Here are the photos from Randy's birthday party. I wasn't lucky enough to win any of the raffle prizes, but got quite a few good shots of people's facial expressions when Zippy started sharing shots from the bottle of Everclear that he won in the raffle. (Taking shots of Everclear is not a good idea. As you can see from the faces of folks who did take a shot of Everclear, it is not very enjoyable. Please, don't try this at home, the people in these photos are all highly trained stunt drinkers.)

When I get the rest of this weekend's photos up, they will be on this page of the gallery.

Interviews by Don Swaim

If you don't have the time to listen to a bunch of interviews with all sorts of great authors, then don't click on this link. I've listened to a few of them and they have all been pretty good. Burroughs talks a little bit about Lawrence, Douglas Adams is great, I had no idea Richard Condon stuttered, and Vonnegut is probably one of the coolest guys on the face of the planet.
I've now relegated myself to one a day, and while I'm listening to it I look around the internet for other things related to the author or topics brought up in the interview. While I was listening to the Carver interview I found this page that has translated transcripts of two other interviews with him. It was kind of fun to read them with the sound of Carver's odd cadence and deep breaths still in my head.

New Stuff

I put up some pictures of Filthy Jim and some photos and video of The Cherry Valence from their show on Sunday, and some video of The Danny Pound Band from their show at the Replay last Saturday. Also, Justin's photos (they go from the bachelor party to the morning after the wedding) have been added to Brad and Jen's Wedding album. Enjoy!

Mug shots

Check this guy out. Man, that nose is something else. In addition, there is this amazing progression of photos that was in the comments on the Metafilter post where I found the first picture.
The second set of photos made me think of two things right off the bat. First was this story I read in the L.A. Times. (If you aren't registered for the L.A. Times (you should be, it's free) you can read the article here, but this copy is only for my personal non-commercial use. They say I can use this content online, but if you click the "more info" link it says, "The content will be used by one person, for personal reference, and will not be copied or redistributed to any other person in any form." I really don't know how I can put it online and still guarantee that it won't be redistributed, but I am going to give it a try, hence the "personal non-commercial use" disclaimer.)
Anyway, after reading the story I couldn't help but not like the photographer, Mr. Clarkes. When I found this article I liked him even less. "I'm forcing people to look at these women ... to look into their eyes, to really see them: a woman, a child that's grown up. Somebody's mother, somebody's sister." Whatever. He isn't forcing people to look at these women, he is making money off of them and glamorizing their awful existence. Here are some more shots of his "Heroines." Contrast them with these pictures from someone who was trying to find out who was killing these women. I know which one makes me look at the women like they are somebody's mother or sister, and it just happens to not be the pretentious asshole who thinks he is forcing me ... "to look into their eyes". Give me a break.
Oh, and now for the other thing that I was reminded of. It is a much nicer chronology that has nothing to do with Nazis or drug addled prostitutes.

"This is a true story"

This story from the Guardian is pretty sad.

[A]ccording to the article, a 28-year-old woman had left Tokyo a month earlier to travel to North Dakota, in America's midwest. The police were called after she was spotted wandering around the outskirts of the state capital, Bismarck. When officers interviewed the woman, she showed them a "crude map" that was supposed to show the location where the money was hidden in the movie. A perplexed spokesman for the Bismarck police was quoted saying: "We tried to explain to her that it was a fictional movie, and there really wasn't any treasure."

New Gallery

Hot Damn, I finally got a new gallery program up and running (tip of the day - don't upload binaries in ASCII, they won't work). Check it out.

I was just using iPhoto to spit out webpages, but once you uploaded the files it was a pain to change anything, and I had to go in and add the link to the main index template every time I added a new gallery. Now there are all kinds of options. You guys can comment on the pictures (try to keep it clean), I can add new pictures or move things around with ease, and I can import pictures from all over. If anyone has any photos (or movies) that they want posted, just drop me an email. I can set up a username and password and you can upload them from your own computer, or if they are already in a directory somewhere online I can just pull them from there if you give me the address. Also, the new gallery has a slideshow feature for those of you who are too lazy to click through all the thumbnails.

As for the old galleries, the links on the left are gone, but the stuff is still there. If you sent a link to someone saying "man, Dodge throws a mean washer -, check it out", or "Justin sure is a safe BBQer - , but he's not very good at eating cupcakes - ", the pictures will still be there.

Pryor Hearing

In this post I alluded to how much fun the Senate Judiciary committee hearing on the nomination of Bill Pryor would be. Well, it is tomorrow morning. It looks like they changed the room, but you should still be able to listen to it. Check this page for the audio feed. It doesn't look like C-SPAN will be showing it live, but they may get the video up on their site eventually. It should be quite a hearing. If you are not familiar with Pryor, just click here, or here. You can also check out Iqnatz for anti-Pryor info, and Southern Appeal for pro-Pryor info.

Tucker Max and Miss Vermont

A friend of mine from school told me about Tucker Max one afternoon when we were outside between classes smoking a cigarette. I never did check out his site, but thanks to Katy Johnson's legal antics, his site came to me, and lots of other people who would have never bothered to go check it out or who would have never even heard of him in the first place.
Here is his site. Here is her site. Here is the NY Times article about the legal battle. Here is the Google Cache of the page he wrote that started the whole legal battle, and here is the commentary from Metafilter.
EDIT: The Google cache has been updated, but here is a mirror, and if that fails, here is a .pdf.

The Lonely Island

Here is a time waster. These guys, who seem to have a pretty sweet house in L.A. and a bunch of time on their hands, have put quite a bit of audio and video up on their site. I recommend Episode 2: "Regarding Ardy", for the Brooke Shields intro, and Episode 1: "White Power", for its Keifer Sutherland connection. If you scroll down to the shorts, there is one where Keifer tells Jay Leno about interrupting the fellas while they were shooting a scene for "White Power." I ended up watching pretty much everything and came to the conclusion that these guys have watched quite a bit of Mr. Show, and that I will probably see them on their own show at some point.

Cellular Automata

The first time I really took notice of Cellular Automata (CA) was when I found this website. It is part of what led me to buy Stephan Wolfram's huge book, A New Kind of Science, when it first came out. I've made it through the first 442 pages, and still have 755 left to go.

Today, via boingboing, I came across these Java applets that let you play with some of the different CA talked about in Wolfram's book. I like the Langston's Ants in four color, but I haven't played with all of them yet. What a cool class project.

If you're like me and really like to watch little squares blink on and off, then this is the place to go for lots of information about the patterns involved. Now, If I can just get through the rest of Wolfram's book. I can't wait to get to the part where he shoots down Stephen Jay Gould's doctoral thesis. I said the CA was only part of the reason I bought the book, the rest of my motivation came from all of the hype surrounding it.

My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable

Moorish Science Temple and copyright

Who is this guy and what does he have to do with an opinion from the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit? Well, that is what I am trying to figure out.

It started with a link from Howard and a couple Conspirators. They pointed to Judge Easterbrook's opinion in United States v. James.

T.K. Webb

Looking like a semi truck driver who hadn’t showered since beginning his journey to deliver auto parts to a body shop halfway across the country, TK Webb . . . was, nonetheless, astounding.

This picture is from T.K.'s show at the Replay back on Jan. 29, 2008. Here are seven songs I pulled off the video I shot at the show. It was right after I got my camera, and I didn't use the infra-red so the video turned out to be pretty worthless, but the audio sounds just fine.

Another new $20 (this time with more color)

New bills every 7-10 years? That is what this CNN article says. Wow, the old new twenty dollar bill only lasted five years. By the time all the vending machines are upgraded to take the new bills it will be time to change the scanners again. If you want to stay on top of the changing currency sign up here to receive email updates from the government.