l-dopa

Hey! I took a screen printing class. And one of my first decent designs was a monochromatic rendition of the Ubuntu Linux logo that you can see above.

I think the design came out quite nice; I made myself a couple shirts of various colors — the green/black logo and brown/yellow logo came out the best — and so I was wondering: would anyone be interested in buying one of these? I have a very small economy of scale here, so pricing would have to be at the microbrew level like Panic’s (awesome) t-shirts, like $19 for the shirt, $6 for the s/h. Obviously a portion of each sale would be donated to the Ubuntu project.

So: any interest? If so, comment below or email me; if there’s enough interest I’ll put up an online store.

~jeff

Guess what everybody. Last year something interesting happened on the internet. And did you know, three years before that, something really really cool was going around?

Welcome to my series on belated Internet Phenomena. I have the incredible power of discovering fascinating things on the internet that everyone has known about for quite some time.

So, without further ado (it’s like Barnum and Bailey’s over here with all the introducing), I introduce to you something I just discovered and love.* As I recently took up knitting, you can understand my deep and instantaneous and probably very lasting love of Squid Hat. I am also very impressed by the Diegestive System, but I can tell a project of that scope is too involved for me. I’m not going to even try to talk about the Penis Cozy with you people.

Until next time on the internet revue, see you on myspace!

*It was on boingboing in October 2005!

We, as technologically endowed human beings, have learned that the internet makes people type fast, spell badly, and call each other Nazis. We have also discovered the cultural gem called the internet phenomenon. They are consistently as sophisticated as a fart joke. I say all this so you can know the depth of passion I have for the things. I am totally usually completely taken with internet phenomena from the moment I discover them (usually one to five years after they’ve been popular) until long after they’ve died, putrefied, and turned back into the digital ether whence they came. It’s really just my undying love for internet phenomena that make me want to do this, but I’m going to pretend that there is some sort of sociological value in an attempt to review them all.

With this in mind, I bring you: Internet Phenomena Revue!!!!one!

*This has no meaning. Those interested can avail themselves of the Omen’s Hampshire Div III title generator button (lower right corner).

Oh how I love the Hatt-Baby phenom that swept the world in 2000. Arabic mistranslated/transferred into Swedish may be better even than Engrish. And I hear there’s a Swedish drinking game involved as well.

I hope this has whet your appetite for the INTERNET PHENOMENON REVUE coming soon to an internet near you…

If you haven’t heard this yet, check it out — a woman calls 911 because her Western Bacon Cheeseburger wasn’t quite being made her way. It’s hilarious, and Snopes has a run down and the transcript as well.

~jeff

Woo-hoo! I’m on vacation this week, so immediately the first thing I did was scoot down to the bookstore and pick up a trashy summer novel. This year, I chose Scott Smith’s The Ruins after stumbling upon the glowing review by none other than Stephen King on The Ruins Amazon page. It’s perhaps an odd choice for summer reading, as Smith’s previous novel A Simple Plan is a study in tension and duplicity, not typically feelings you want to experience and emulate in your beach reading — but King’s review was so effusive and glowing, I figured why not pick it up.

The Ruins is the story of six guys and girls in their early twenties who, during a crazy sexy drinky beach vacation to Cancun, decide for no particularly good reason to pack up and head off into the jungle. During their stumble in the jungle, they mistakenly fall into what is quickly and clearly The Wrong Place To Be. And then it gets increasingly worse from there.

It’s a quick read; I wound up reading the novel in two chunks in the span of about 12 hours. For the first couple hundred pages, I was riveted. The book is exquisitely written, with long detailed and well-voiced passages that pull you directly into the various characters point of view. The writing and pacing is very cinematic, perhaps suspiciously so, as the film rights have already been sold to Ben Stiller — who is thanked in the forward of the first printing.

But: sometime during the last hundred pages, I found myself tense, surly and depressed. I can’t tell you exactly why I think I felt that way without discussing-slash-completely-spoiling the ending, so click below if you don’t plan to read it but still really want to know about what I think is wrong with The Ruins…

Read the rest of this entry »

Nouriel Roubini, president of Roubini Global Economics, thinks so:

“This is the biggest housing slump in the last four or five decades: every housing indictor is in free fall, including now housing prices,” Roubini said. The decline in investment in the housing sector will exceed the drop in investment when the Nasdaq collapsed in 2000 and 2001, he said….”This is the tipping point for the U.S. consumer and the effects will be ugly,” he said. “Expect the great recession of 2007 to be much nastier, deeper and more protracted than the 2001 recession.”

…exciting news for prospective canned-bean-eating, ukulele-strumming, train-track-hoboes, i.e. soon all of us. I will take it one step further: I believe 2007 will be the year of the Housing Slump/Zombie Apocalypse, and I for one am boarding up my windows and gathering chainsaws as we speak.

~jeff

This is not a review of snakes on a plane. It’s not. Sorry. There are lots of those.

This is a review of the audience. I was at the 10 pm Saturday showing at the Metreon. I held out from the very tempting 8:10, because I wanted to see it in DLP. There was hissing in the previews, one drunk fellow in the front who had good effort and rubber snake, but clearly wasn’t ready to be the star of this audience. His only solid contribution was shouting “Skanks on a Plane!” when the about to be dead whore headed off to be bit. (Note: this isn’t a spoiler. The whore always dies.)

There was a smattering of hissing through the film, a solid bit of cheering in appropriate places, laughter at the especially campy aspects of the dialog, (“Time is Tissue!” –Snake Expert) and an entertaining round of trivia with the helping girls behind me trying to figure out just what movie that Adam Sandler was in (It was “Punch Drunk Love”).

Now I know it was a Saturday night. But I really thought that they would be more audience enthusiasm. Where were the rocky freaks?

In the Pioneer Valley area of Northampton, Massachusetts, there’s suddenly a debate over a proposed porn store, located about a block from where I rent an apartment. Signs have sprung up all over town for a new website, nopornnorthampton.com, a site dedicated to — you guessed it — not having a porn store on King St. in Northampton. They’ve got facts and figures and more long blocks of text than you have time in your life to read. And they’re freaked out by blue gloves.

However, despite their best efforts, I’m not convinced that this is genuinely a discussion about pornography in Northampton. I’m suspicious that this secretly might be more of a discussion about property values; there are already a couple of porn stores in Northampton; Drug tests; they’ve been here for years, and they have not elicited any sort of public outcry. The owners of noporn.com are two writers who happen to live a couple blocks from the proposed site. Are they more worried about the culture of their town, or are they envisioning blindly crazed pornography addicts stumbling through their well-manicured Northampton backyard?

But: maybe there’s something to be said for community standards as well. Surely they don’t put the porn stores and the strip bars — and to a lesser extent, the Hooterses — in the best part of town. There’s a set of train tracks running through Northampton, and it’s increasingly clear that I live on the wrong side of the tracks, or as I have affectionately come to term it, the “Indolent Scumbag District”. On the average, the residents of my neighborhood already sit around and smoke on their front porch all day, with the occasional break for (I assume) Red Bull and vodka shots, and so maybe it doesn’t need to get worse.

So: in the spirit of open discussion, I’ve started mopornnorthampton.com. C’mon in — it’s a Drupal site, so anyone can post a story (click “Speak Out!”) or shoot off a comment. And I hope you do.

~jeff

Great article on the words we choose to describe our world end up defining our world:

as I was reading through the interviews how often a language was used by these people that denied choice: “should,” “one must,” “have to.”

In Hannah Arendt’s book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Eichmann was asked, “Was it difficult for you to send these tens of thousands of people to their death?” And Eichmann answered very candidly, “To tell you the truth, it was easy. Our language made it easy.”

His interviewer asked what that language was, and Eichmann said, “My fellow officers and I coined our own name for our language. We called it amtssprache – ‘office talk.’” When asked for examples, Eichmann said, “It’s basically a language in which you deny responsibility for your actions. So if anybody says, ‘Why did you do it?’ you say, ‘I had to.’ ‘Why did you have to?’ ‘Superiors’ orders. Company policy. It’s the law.’”

~jeff

Nice work, Mel, we knew you could do it; and the line between reality and “South Park” blurs further and further.

My personal theory is that most people think that Mel Gibson is actually Sergeant Martin Riggs from “Lethal Weapon”, and thus actually believe him to be charmingly “funny-crazy”, instead of the less charming and less funny “actual-crazy”… which is probably more the case.

~jeff

My dream of getting into the Guinness Book of World Records has been crashed. I figured I could break the world record for four leaf clovers in my free time, but at 72,000 clovers (and a what, life sentence?) this guy has more ‘free’ time than I ever will.

Now I’m thinking the human domino record is probably the easiest to break. All we have to do is get 10,000 of our friends…

202 liters of Diet Coke and 523 Mentos, to be precise.

Oh, and with great music by Audio Body.

Great article by Andrew Brown investigating why it’s so easy to be a jerk to other people online:

George Meyer, the most admired writer on the Simpsons - and so one of the funniest men alive today - said in a New Yorker profile some years ago that television comedy has got meaner and nastier because it is now taped in front of a live studio audience. If the laugh isn’t immediate, it goes; and what’s recognised as an immediate laugh is something cruel. The participants in American sitcoms routinely say things to each other which in real life would have the recipient running from the room in tears - and yet, on television, they are greeted with roars of sycophantic laughter. The Internet gives everyone a studio audience in that sense. We are all among Friends when we type.

…George Meyer is also credited with the infamous Simpsons “sandwich gag” (I told that idiot to slice my sandwich!), so I’m inclined to believe him.

~jeff

I have never even thought to try to take a Dalmatian to McDonalds — not even so he could try the new McSnausage Wraps — but for some reason in 1996 McDonalds was purporting to be your “Dalmatian location”. Still, it’s not nearly as bad as “Pepsi World” was:

We believe in keeping things new, fresh, so that we can claim to move you in unexpected directions which hopefully, rev up the nerve center of your imagination to a degree never before experienced.

The holiday spirit has smacked us on the face with the strength of a snow-charged blow of frigid Nordic air. It’s Pepsi Holiday 96! Peruse our new wonderland and discover a bountiful chest of surprises. Get nifty e-cards, icy-cool screensavers, Microsoft stuff you’ve been wishing for and more prizes than stars up in the cloudless moonlit yonder.

…Pepsi’s 1996 over-cooked promitional copy possibly written by the same ad wizards who came up with “The Hub“, Walmart’s weak stab at a non-union, Mexican MySpace equivalent. Seriously, point at it and laugh, it’s rilly awful.

~jeff