July 2007 Archives

"You're in your living grave, fuck those neon lights. That's just how I behave riding my bike." Had an extraordinarily awesome bike ride through PTown with Zach last nite which involved weaving quickly in and out of tourists who love to jump in front of you to gawk at sea-themed baubles, seeing the drag queen Dina Martina on her bike doing the same, stopping at Town Hall to watch a guitar player busking with backing looped samples, Zach being toppled by John Waters, pizza and booze. Made me think of this song. Made think of how I love playing Name That Tune with friends. I would have completely rocked that game show. Check the live orchestra memebers in the background, and the guy on the right's face when the host says, "Tahiti." Check the unbelieveably arcane references to pop culture lost on us kids today. This show is so rad.

There are literally dozens of hilarious cereal mascots, most of which are invented animals who like to hug children, especially as the children are trying to eat.

The above bizarre Critters aside, I think the whole cereal mascot meme ("hmm... cereal" = "delicious singing invented animal wants to hug me") is one of those things we'll just never be able to explain to Martians.

I think a lot about how it must have been to grow up during the political riots in America, and yeah they were hippies or whatever, but it still holds a place in my soft body human heart. Well, the two things I am going to show you today have a lot to do with that sentiment. I am repping these works on paper right now at the gallery and I thought I would share them as my very first thatsplenty offering. Irene Lipton is one of sweetest, most gracious, hard-working artists I have ever met. She lives in an Airstream here on the Cape with her husband Phil and Jack Russell terrier Jake. She also does all the design work for the gallery, to great visual success. Hearts to Irene. Untitled (LP 502), 2007, o/c, 54" x 65" Next week, I'll be hosting a screening of the amazing documentary B.I.K.E. on Fountainhead, as in Ayn Rand's novel that I will not talk more about at the given moment. One of these guys in this film came to loft space in NA, MA and ate my cheesy puffs, if memory serves me correctly. I also skipped him in the joint rotation and it was a negative experience for all in the room. But I messed that up, it should have gone joint then cheesy puffs, of course. We’ve since made up and all is well. Bon Appetit!

Most people have heard about the Michael Vick dog fighting thing, but not everyone I've talked to about it has seen this video of Michael Vick's teammate talking about how dogfighting is totally okay.

Gold!

She is from Russia, but speaks perfect english because she moved here 11 years ago.

Without extensive surgery and lessons, I will never be an aviatrix. Parody
Swingin' The Alphabet by The Three Stooges / Minced by Richard & Danny Elfman
This is a case of discovering the parody before the original and thinking it's an awesome original. Oh well. Forbidden Zone is a fairly amazing movie from 1980 made by Ricahrd Elfman, brother of Danny Elfman (the Oingo Boingo/soundtrack guy) when they were both part of the Mystic Knights of Oingo Boingo, which was less rock band and more performance art. Forbidden Zone has a slew of songs in it, some covers, some lip synchs, some a mixture of the two, with a few originals in there as well. It also features a snotty princess who walks around with a rider's crop in stiletos, topless in a tiarra and wears big granny panties, which is the proper way to handle nudity as far as I'm converned. So, the movie is great, and one of my favorite scenes is during school when the teacher makes everyone do the ABCs. And I just found out this is a rip on the 3 Stooges, who I don't really care for which, I've been told, makes me un-american and also possibly a fag. I dunno, I liked the first Die Hard movie. So with out any more ramblings, 3 Stooges vs a Forbidden Zone:
vs
Bonus below: Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo on the Gong Show and some more selections from the Forbidden Zone with brief notes..

I went to Japan and took some photos. This was a sewer grating thingy.

From "Smart, Curious, Ticklish. Rats?" by NATALIE ANGIER, New York Times:

In the Georgia study, rats were asked to show their ability to distinguish between tones lasting about 2 seconds, and sounds of about 8 seconds, by pressing one or another lever. If the rat guessed correctly, it was rewarded with a large meal; if it judged incorrectly, it got nothing.

For each trial, the rat could, after hearing the tone, opt to either take the test and press the short or long lever, or poke its nose through a side of the chamber designated the, “I don’t know” option, at which point it would get a tiny snack. During the trials, the rats made clear they knew their audio limits. The closer the tones were to either 2 or 8 seconds, the likelier the rats were to express confidence in their judgment by indicating they wanted to take the lever test and earn their full-course dinner. But as the tones edged into the ambiguous realms of 4 seconds, the rats began opting ever more often for modest but reliable morsels of the clueless option.

Goddamn I love animal science, esp. animal ethology (Lat., lit. "why we do stuff-ology"). I'm going to train rats to write blog posts about rats, and then I'll be out of pseudo-work and finally able to enjoy this giant spinning wheel I built. Joy!

if you liked the good bits from solaris, alien, event horizon (yeah it sucks but it has some good bits), total recall, silent running, etc. see this movie

if you ever wanted magical realism to be realistic magic, see this movie.

This is an open call for new contributors to That's Plenty!

Due to a few lapsed memberships and two of our fiercest bloggers turning in to a splinter group that hates America, we're now looking for one or two more people to join the team and keep the blog going.

We're looking at all age ranges, all topics. We're most interested in getting people on board that have a wide range of interests, and someone looking to blog their creative process would be a plus.

Please send a writing sample to sbruckert |nospam| gmail.com.

Thanks!

Terrified! I'm going to be at the Ritz Carlton i think that's the same place as lost in translation. I'm going to wear girls undapants

12 centimeters of yum or of cute? Can it be both?

Sure enough. Available where fine .torrent files are DL'ed.

Not sure which one to download? Have your favorite torrent site sort by date uploaded.

The LA Times quotes Lisa Holton, president of trade publishing and book fairs at Scholastic, as saying they plan to

"...take down all this different material, and by taking it down we'll never know whether any of it was real until you read it yourself on Saturday morning."

Brilliant! She's right: just give them a couple minutes, and they'll have all the illicit copies down off the internet. After all, stopping the spread of information on a global computer network is a breeze. Right, MPAA?

Best of luck mashing all that toothpaste back into the tube, Lisa! Let me know how it works out.

Link to NY Times Blurb.

Apple's iPhone could emerge as the most overrated and misunderstood product of the 21st century - and the overwhelming majority of American's couldn't give even a quarter of a shit, new research suggests.

Lightspeed Research surveyed 39,000 people on its U.S. online panel in the days following the launch of the device on June 29-- and the research findings are staggering.

Sixty-eight percent of those surveyed who do not currently own an iPhone stated that they can't be bothered to drop that kind of cash, with 16 percent unwilling to sign up for two years of anything with AT&T, for fear their calling logs will be delivered without question to the NSA and 44 percent can't imagine why they would spend $600 for a device that actually does less than their current phone.

Respondents ages 45 and over care the least about Apple's new device. Sixty percent of respondents ages 18 to 24 said they are never going to buy an iPhone, followed closely by 25 to 34 year olds (64 percent) and 35 to 44 year olds (67 percent).

Despite the most aggressive hyping of recent memory, nearly 10 percent of respondents have never heard of the device.

Lightspeed Research claims those who live in the Pacific region were less than half as likely as those who live in other regions to ignore the iPhone. The New England and Mid-Atlantic regions also showed below average indifference levels.

In an additional survey of 34,000 respondents conducted by Lightspeed Research on 5 July, nearly half of those who won't buy an iPhone stated that having music, movie, internet and wireless all in one has already been done better for less money.

Straight outta the Distric' of Columbia, I've recieved a lovely little piece of mail art from one Lady Ay See.

It has been years since I've had this kind of exchange, mostly because I had dropped the ball on several long-term mail art pen pals.

It feels really, really good to be doing it again. And with such a talented partner!

Suck it milk.

Check it out here.

Even more exciting, I think, is the little speaker button next to the word.

Click the speaker to hear the dictionary say 'crunk' in a dictionary voice!

Worth a watch. I think you should judge for yourself, but there is one moment that made my blood run cold: our President wearing a gentle smirk while talking about mass graves and mutilation in the first couple minutes.

Anyway, it's not often you see someone directly challenge and question the man without a lot of cuts. Like I said, worth a watch.

We're almost there. The next step is to not mention her at all.

The NYT had an article about a new CD out of compiled smutty/dirty wax cylinders which is sure to sit on my slsk wishlist for awhile.  Some wax cylinder enthuisist (Dylan?) got one called "The Virtues of Raw Oysters" (yeah) and then found other people who had some, etc.  They say how people went to jail for 3 months for obscenity laws back in the 1890s. 

There's an interesting lil part about how the language sounds like anything you'd hear today, which brings me to my dirty little secret.  I got an albulm called <U>Copulation Blues</u> which is all songs with sexual inneundo fro the 1900's-1940.  It's very silly.  Songs like "Elevator Papa and Switchboard Mama" are silly.  Songs like "No Wonder She's A Blushing Bride" are almost cute.  Songs like "Have you seen my pussy?" are probably innacuratly on this mix.  However, the very last on the 2nd cd is called "Shave 'Em Dry" and it's downright pornographic.  It's an alt. recording of a usually much more benign (lyrically) song.  Uh, this one says things like "kiss my ass" , "asshole", "cum" and "titties."  And all this time I thought my uncle had invented the word in the 1970's.  Still fairly silly, and I'm not sure what "shave em dry" means and I'm 27.  26.  Anyways, it's worth a listen: [Shave 'Em Dry mp3 by Lucille Bogan]

Bonus wax cylinder....

Hotlinking images is rude. It uses up my bandwith, and is just generally bad form.

I've told Dylan and Michelle this about 100,000 times, but they always say the same thing.

"We're laaaazy. We don't want to go to the trouble of downloading and uploading."

Well, the trouble with hotlinking is that you're giving someone else space on your website. Like one gentleman who saw the lovely post Karen did about finger moustache tattoos and decided to make his own post about it on his own blog.

Which has, as a result given me a 'back door' into his website.

Care to see what I can fit throuh his back door?

(And in case he fixes my little h@xz0r, terrible, terrible screen cap of his new blog post, courtesy of me, after the jump.)

So I watched about 4 minutes of Spider-Man 3 last nite and saw him riding a 1977 Puch Newport moped! So I googled, and look what's on ebay:

A five year old boy risked his own life by battling a rabid fox during a cookout in North
Carolina. Eventually after being shot at three times by a neighbor, the fox was beaten to death by the boy's stepfather. Kind of like Rasputin. The boy is now undergoing rabies treatment (similar to the silent treatment, though less vindictive.)
link

Are aphrodisiacs, according to Penthouse.

I'm a fan of celery, and I drink enough coffee each morning (and afternoon and evening and sometimes night) to chemically lobotomize a healthy water bison.

So I was real happy about this finding until I read that, "Men who drink a cup a day are twice as likely to describe themselves as sexually active." Meaning the surveyed men only think they're sack-tigers (that phrase doesn't work when inverted, does it?). They could be lying, exaggerating, or drinking decaff.

Perhaps the effects of celery and coffee at the same time should be tested... Or [roommate's name omitted] should stop buying Penthouse.

The photography's terrible, and the wooden articles about "guy stuff" feel as if they were written by either small boys fantasizing about "real manly adult life" and all the "cars" and "hot chicks" and "coffee" they'd eventually encounter...

or by very intelligent rhesus monkeys, perhaps the subjects of advanced cognitive research, deep in the heart of New "Old" Jersesy... In which case... I don't mean to be a dick, but everyone knows chocolate's an aphrodisiac, Siwwa. And give Jetal her damn ornamental mirror back or we'll have to tranq you with the Mystery Juice again!

And no one likes the Mystery Juice...

Thanks to Heather, Tom, and Joe for pointing this out to me. Adam Curtis is a documentarian for the BBC whose work mostly centers around the imposition of ideologies on societies. All of his series are up on Google Video. I highly recommend watching the four part Century of the Self. Adam Curtis sez: "(The Century of the Self) is about how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy." Check it out! The other one I made it through was The Trap, which is about the use of game theory applied to the ordering of society.