BunkBlog

A student at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee was walking home from work when four men pulled him into an alley and forced him to lie face-down with a gun to his neck. They took everything from his pockets, but when the gang leader looked in the victim’s wallet and saw an Army Reserve ID card, he told his accomplices to give him his stuff back. “The guy continued to say throughout the situation that he respects what I do and at one point he actually thanked me and he actually apologized,” the unidentified 21-year-old victim said. “The leader of the group actually walked back [and] gave me a quick fist bump.” Police note that 10 minutes later, the gang robbed another man, who had a Department of Corrections inmate ID in his wallet. They didn’t give him his wallet back.

A few years ago, I had a coworker who routinely burned microwave popcorn. I don’t miss him much. I do wonder, though, if it would have been better if he’d been burning bacon-flavored popcorn instead. Is everything really better with bacon? Is it?

This is just crazy – the past three days, I’ve been working all day long. This is just unacceptable; my boss is crazy to think I can keep up this kind of pace. Next he’ll expect me to accurately report my work hours.

Seriously, I’ve installed Red Hat on 18 machines in the past three days, and some of them have CPUs propelled by gerbils. Painful.

This is a great video. You should watch it in HD, and full-screen and ogle at the wondrousness.

After listening to Orgy’s “Santa’s Creepy Secret” this morning, this comic seemed appropriate.

I have, over the years, frequently pointed out that most of the world’s great philosophical and religious movements can be boiled down to one phrase: Don’t be a dick.  Glad to see someone agrees with me.

Notwithstanding the aircraft carrier-sized plot holes (not the least of which is the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling being inside St. Peter’s Basilica), the science that seems to have been invented by a screenwriter for maximum gibberish factor, and the general feel of “disaster porn,” The Boy convinced me to see the latest Roland Emmerich explodafest.

As I was summarizing the flick to The Woman, I was impressed with the sheer number of coincidences to move the plot in anything like a coherent direction. The failed writer just so happens to know a Russian mafioso with connections to the ark project, but just so happens to need a copilot, and the writer’s ex’s boyfriend just so happens to be an amateur pilot, etc.

And the characterizations… Well, there are a couple ways to approach an “end of the world” movie. You could look at the human drama of man’s inhumanity to man, with deep introspection and evaluation of the hard decisions needed to perpetuate the human species. Or, you could just slam an aircraft carrier into the White House. Since this is a Roland Emmerich film, you know which way he went.

Still, it’s not like anyone going to see “2012” expects anything other than what it delivers, and it delivers in spades. The Boy said it was the best movie he’d ever seen, and even though he says that about every movie we watch, and even though he seemed to forget that 6.89 billion people die in the film, he’s probably right. This is possibly the best disaster porn explodafest you’ll ever see.

Thinkgeek has a problem with their April Fool’s Day gags – some people actually want to buy them. In 2007, they posted the 8-bit tie as a gag. So many people wrote in, it’s now part of their catalog. This year, they invented the then-satirical Tauntaun Sleeping Bag. They’re gonna sell them in November. There ya go, Lys.  🙂

For what seems the infinitiest time, another media industry honcho has said something which makes you wonder about his sanity. APN News & Media chief executive Brendan Hopkins said the following recently:

“To use an analogy, I see search engines as breaking into our homes, itemising the contents, walking out and listing everything for everyone to see. And they get money out of that process.”

Really? And when Jack Valenti told Congress, “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone,” that didn’t turn out to be a bit over the top and perhaps even, dare I say it, completely wrong?

If search engines are showing the table of contents of news sites, then aren’t they driving more traffic to the site?  Isn’t Google News essentially giving the New York Times and other media sites free advertising?  You can’t read the whole article on Google – you have to go to the news site. How is that in any way equated to theft? For that matter, how does one steal a good which is intangible and effectively infinite anyway?

When the media companies get a little pinch of economic hard times, they claim that people are stealing from them, that the world will come to an end if they don’t get paid what they want (rather than what the market will bear), etc. And every time throughout history, they’ve been proven wrong. Sheet music didn’t kill singing. Piano rolls didn’t destroy piano bars. Radio didn’t raid the coffers of the record companies. VCRs did not cause the complete collapse of the movie industry. MP3 players have still, after 10 years, failed to completely annihilate the recording industry, despite the music executives best efforts to jump on a sword or two. In most cases, the new technology has actually been a boon for the existing industry eventually. Stop thinking that your business involves one particular format, and think about what people actually want to buy. People don’t want records or CDs; they want music. People don’t want newspapers or magazines; they want information and pictures. Give your customers what they want in a convenient form they want, and your industry will boom. Prevent them from accessing your media and you’ll soon find you have very little media left to sell. People will read the news online, just maybe not from your company, if you make it too hard to do. It’s possible you’re just making buggy whips and everyone has moved to cars.

This is all in the context of folks like Rupert Murdoch saying he’s going to lock up his news sites behind pay walls, so that people must pay to read his NY Post articles. Hmmm… The NY Times actually took down their pay wall a while back. Their presence online suddenly became much larger, they got more traffic and I’d assume higher advertising revenue. It must be said that the Times is actually talking about rebuilding their pay wall; I’m sure it will be much more successful the second time around. /snark

Just one more example of why I avoid that place.

Well, that sucks.

Remember the touching story of Roxanne Shante, former teen mother from the projects turned rap star, who got her evil record company (Warner Music) to pay for her doctorate? Not all that true. Like, pretty much none of it is true. OK, maybe it’s a bald-faced lie.

Shante, or Lolita Gooden as she’s legally named, claims to have an M.A. from Cornell, but Cornell says, “who’s that?”  She also calls herself “Dr. Shante” even though she freely admits she has no doctorate of any kind. Also, she never had a contract with Warner Music, and the companies she did have contracts with say they never put some education clause into any contract ever.

To make this more of a he said-she said thing, nobody can come up with a copy of any of these contracts. To muddy the waters further, she was listed on a page of notable Cornell alumni as of last week; her name is missing from that list now. Shante was mentioned as a Cornell alum in an article about a hiphop summit; that mention was excised this week. She still is listed as a PhD recipient in another Cornell article, as of this writing. That’s obviously in error, as she admits she never got a PhD.

Goes to show, you can’t trust anything you read.

Wouldn’t this have made the movie much more interesting?

I had the vinyl of this, but all my vinyl disappeared when I joined the Army – it either ended up thrown away or in my brother’s house, and there’s no expectation I’ll see the licorice pizzas ever again.  But, the song is one I’ve been hoping to find digitally for years, and now I’m just giving up. It’s a 12 minute megamix of a crazy assortment of hip hop and rap from 1985, which was called (if I remember correctly) LA Beats Megamix or something like that. Not only is this classic of the era completely missing from any online store, it’s even missing from many people’s memories. Many of the songs which are part of the mix don’t seem to have been preserved even as lyrics on the web today.

The Knights of the Turntable section, from their classic Techno Scratch, is remembered fondly. But what about the section in vocoder that says, “don’t be afraid of these vicious beats” – where is the tribute to that band, whose name even I forget?  Let me up freak, get me some juice, indeed! You only came to the party to rock shock and dance… Ah, memories.

If you’re reading this anywhere but at my actual blog, the little streaming player won’t show up for you.

[podcast]http://www.andysocial.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/LA-Beats-Megamix.mp3[/podcast]

Inspired by the recent news article on Roxanne Shante, I got all old skool and looked at my stack of tapes, hunting for those obscure bits that I’ve not found on digital media yet. I was reminded of the strange and jarring hiccup in “La Di Da Di” at the 2:38 mark, which was not present in the original and kind of obscures the next phrase in complete non sequitur. Seriously, they didn’t try to record an alternate version of the song when they got smacked by the lawyers, they just clipped 10 seconds of expository story out of it. The listener ends up wondering why this girl is crying over Rick and feeling blue. Sure, you’d like to tell her not to cry and dry her eyes, but why in the world is she crying in the first place? So, I grabbed my trusty patch cord, and now I have the original, found only on cassette, full version of the classic Doug E Fresh song on my computer. Take that, sampling copyright violations!

Now, to see what else I’ve got hiding out. Ooh, the LA Beats megamix…

Once again, a Democrat finds a new and entertaining way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. For want of a signature…

It’s just so easy.

You may recall the decorated sheep that are now placed around San Angelo – the husky was scared of one a while back, and The Boy and I watched the Sheeptacular parade when they were first introduced to the community. Some idiot college students swiped one. They were planning to return it, they said, because who needs a five-foot fiberglass sheep in their living room?  Of course, they also let the police knock on their door for an hour before letting them in; did they think the cops might get tired and go away?

Surprisingly to many, this is considered a state felony, because the value of the stolen property was over $1500. I remember some folks in high school swiped the Bob’s Big Boy statue from down the road – would have sucked to get hit with a felony charge.

Remember, don’t rustle sheep – Jonny Law will get ya.

As I’m sure Stewart himself will find apalling, there’s a Time online poll (no scientific accuracy to speak of, self-selected population, blah blah blah) which shows more people think Jon Stewart is a trustworthy news source than Brian Williams or Charlie Gibson or Katie Couric.

For years now, Stewart has been defending himself from mainstream journalists and pundits, who say he’s not upholding the correct dignity or standards of a journalist. His response is always some variation of, “I’m on Comedy Central and you expect me to be the journalistic role model? We are screwed as a country.” Yet, academic studies have found that the Daily Show, although calling themselves a fake news show, has just as much or more substantive news coverage as the networks. How sad is that?