March 31, 2007
Amen.
From a recent e-mail from Matty O'Blackfive:
Please pray for DJ.Email this message to your friends and families. Ask them to have their churches, synagogues, or mosques to offer prayers for DJ. I will ask our minister in Ft. Myers to do this tomorrow.
At this point, DJ needs a miracle.
If an atheist can pray for an injured Marine, you can too.
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09:22 PM
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With you, I have rediscovered the childlike, unquestioning zest for life that I'd thought was gone forever.
(CAUTION: Romantics beware - comments may contain naughtiness)
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09:40 AM
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[Kill your God Kill your TV Kill your God Kill your TV]
David Berkowitz had his dog, I have my graffiti currency.
Posted by: Harvey at
09:36 AM
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Post contains 20 words, total size 1 kb.
Here's how it goes.
The answer is a (more or less) completely innocent word.
The hints, however, are designed to make you think of something... not so innocent.
I'll put the first hint in the main post, and the other two in the extended entry.
Good luck.
1) You have to stretch my skin to beat me
(see extended entry for more clues)
more...
Posted by: Harvey at
09:32 AM
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March 30, 2007
Odd that the MSM considers them less important than the body count in Iraq, since some of these numbers are also trickling upwards.
However, I'm here to make a tangential point. One of the footnotes in Michele's post says:
Some of the information was culled from Wikipedia and the NY Times (which I will not link to as it requires membership and means being subjected to lots of spam mail for you and me).
I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. The NY Times registration spaminator (as well as other compulsory registration sites) can be bypassed by using BugMeNot.
This site provides usernames & passwords for sites that require FREE, compulsory registration (they WON'T hand you the keys to pay sites, so don't bother asking). Just paste the URL of your target site in the search box and click the "Get Logins" button. You'll be sent to a page with several possible combinations of usernames & passwords.
Also, if you have a login you'd like to share, you may submit it to BugMeNot.
Finally, I should mention that Firefox has an extension available that allows you to automatically retrieve a login from BugMeNot by right-clicking on a login box and selecting BugMeNot from the context menu. I have it, I've used it, and it works great.
So the next time you want to send folks to an article that requires registration, you can rest easy, knowing that they can use BugMeNot to get the information without the spam.
Posted by: Harvey at
09:29 AM
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I tingle at the way you give a bedroom's worth of intimacy with a single glance.
(CAUTION: Romantics beware - comments may contain naughtiness)
Posted by: Harvey at
07:23 AM
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[He's the one who likes all the pretty songs and he likes to sing along and he likes to shoot his gun but he knows not what it means oooooooo]
As a follow up to the popular State Quarters program, the Treasury released the first in its new series of "Suicidal Singer Lyrics Dollars". Coming soon: "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky" and "Lord won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz?"
Posted by: Harvey at
07:23 AM
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Post contains 52 words, total size 1 kb.
Here's how it goes.
The answer is a (more or less) completely innocent word.
The hints, however, are designed to make you think of something... not so innocent.
I'll put the first hint in the main post, and the other two in the extended entry.
Good luck.
1) If you can't wipe me off, blow me
(see extended entry for more clues)
more...
Posted by: Harvey at
07:19 AM
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Post contains 91 words, total size 1 kb.
March 29, 2007
You've seen this movie before. It's the 21st century's "Hair", except the hippies are moving in bullet time. But the theme hasn't changed. The "heroes" are nothing but pointless flotsam, helplessly tossed about by the "turbulence of the times", victims of "the man" and circumstances beyond their control.
Personally, I'll stick with heroes who act, rather than those who are acted upon. Heroes who are players, rather than pieces. Heroes who trod a chosen a path instead of walking in drug-addled circles. Heroes who say "we did it", instead of "we couldn't help it".
But maybe that's just me.
Posted by: Harvey at
10:02 AM
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Post contains 131 words, total size 1 kb.
With twin drum magazine.
[via Frizzen Sparks, comment #6]
Posted by: Harvey at
09:58 AM
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At different hours, at different days, the spirit of your love comes in different flavors. It's a buffet of delights, and I thrill at the joy of tasting them all.
(CAUTION: Romantics beware - comments may contain naughtiness)
Posted by: Harvey at
09:56 AM
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[HALL OF SATAN (Pentagram)]
Proposed design for the Glenn Reynolds Memorial Building in Washington D.C.
Posted by: Harvey at
09:55 AM
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Post contains 21 words, total size 1 kb.
Here's how it goes.
The answer is a (more or less) completely innocent word.
The hints, however, are designed to make you think of something... not so innocent.
I'll put the first hint in the main post, and the other two in the extended entry.
Good luck.
1) My sausage hangs out in front
(see extended entry for more clues)
more...
Posted by: Harvey at
09:53 AM
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Post contains 92 words, total size 1 kb.
March 28, 2007
When the IMAO crew first brought up the idea of doing a podcast, I was totally against it. Figured that if I'd wanted to do voice work, I'd have gotten a job at a radio station. I mean, while it's true that I have a face for radio, I also have a voice for mime. Nevertheless, I took the plunge to be a team player.
The first step, of course (aside from reluctant acquiescence), was getting some recording equipment.
I started with a cheap microphone. Not the bottom of the line $10 model, the nearly-bottom $20 model.
I used this for most of the early podcasts, but around August of 2005, I splurged on a fancy $60 mike and a $150 amp on the advice of the podcast's then-producer, Scott McCollum, who wanted to standardize the quality of the recordings. You can probably tell the difference if you compare the earlier and later podcasts, but if podcasting is only a hobby for you, then a $20 mic is fine.
However, after I got my $20 mike, I realized that I also needed two pieces of equipment that I didn't have - a pop filter and a microphone stand.
Well, they didn't sell pop filters locally, I didn't want to wait to have one shipped, and I didn't want to spend the time to make one of the fancy home-made ones. Even the ultra-half-assed method of slipping old nylons over a bent coathanger was beyond my means, as my wife didn't have any old nylons kicking around.
So, working on the theory that what I *really* needed was just some porous material between my lips and the microphone, I took a sheet of mesh foam-grip drawer-liner and wrapped it around the head of the microphone.
As for the microphone stand, well, I figured all I needed to do was get the thing off my desk and near my face. So I put the mike in a glass cup (heavy enough so that it wouldn't tip over), and set the cup on a cigar box. Here's what it looked like:
Crude, yet effective. But mostly crude.
For recording software, I used WavePad - it's free and relatively intuitive.
Then there was my "recording studio".
You can't just talk in a room, you need something to deaden sound & minimize echoes and ambient noises. My chosen something was to put a sheet over my head and the computer monitor:
Sheet over computer monitor (left) and computer chair (right). Recording artist not included. Some assembly required.
Which does the job ok, although it does get a little warm under there, and the light's not very good. The main side effect of this method is that it makes you do several takes, aiming for one good read, because you don't want to spend MORE time under the sheet editing your recording and it's a pain to keep setting up & taking down the sheet.
Once the talky bits are recorded, it's time for some simple post-production work with WavePad:
1) Apply the noise reduction function - get rid of most of the pops, paper-shuffling, and chair-squeaks. Makes the rest of the clean up easier.
2) Amplify - With my computer system, I found it helpful to double the volume so that I could hear everything clearly without cranking up my speakers.
3) Frequency adjustments - using the Equalizer, lower the highs and boost the lows a bit, so that it doesn't sound so tinny.
3) Cut! Cut! Cut! - Carve it down to one good, clean take - mostly snipping out throat-clearings, dead air, and bad takes.
And then the nightmare begins:
Mixing in music.
First, trying to find royalty-free music on the web is like trying to find REAL information on discount mortgages - a LOT of fruitless searching through deceptive, search-engine-optimized web sites. Ditto for sound effects. It was even worse for me, since I'm not musically inclined enough to write my own tunes, and all the free music-generating software I found had miserably steep learning curves. Sure, those programs are versatile, but I'm stupid and impatient. Plus none of them seemed to come with electric guitar samples - which is what I was mainly looking for - although you can bass, drum, and piano to your heart's content.
In the end, I wound up finding some guitar chord samples and I put them together using some chording instructions for basic blues riffs. Not pretty, but it gave me 8 seconds of music that I could loop for background. You'll hear it in the last few podcasts behind my reading of the Fun Facts.
Blending music and speech is fairly simple with WavePad - just copy, set the volume to mix at, and paste - but getting the music to stop and start at precisely the right points is tedious and time-consuming. Putting together a three-minute Fun Facts segment (actually two 90-second ones) took about two hours from the time I started printing out my scripts to the time the last finishing touch was in place. Very nearly the same amount of time it took me to write the Fun Facts in the first place. Which somehow made it seem not worth the bother, because I didn't think the background music & occasional sound effects improved the piece all that much over the plain written version.
Once that was done, I was done. I just mailed it off to the podcast's producer/sound-engineer, and prayed for no last-minute re-writes.
So that's my experience with podcasting. It was a huge bother and I didn't much enjoy it.
However...
Going through the process, with all the script-writing, Skype-chatting, and e-mailing back & forth with other participants in the various IMAO podcast sketches DID help cement friendships with the rest of the IMAO crew.
And THAT made it all worthwhile.
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10:11 AM
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If there’s a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandmother. [...] It’s that fundamental belief — I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sisters’ keeper — that makes this country work.
I guess old friends in L.A. don't count as brothers.
For the record, I wouldn't have given the dirty old mooch a dime, either. And I guess that makes me an uncaring, stone-hearted monster. But then again, I've never pretended to be anything different.
But for a man who professes (in that same 2004 speech) to "believe we can provide jobs to the jobless, homes to the homeless", well, wouldn't that make yonder bleeding-heart liberal a lying bastard sack-o'-crap hypocrite, then?
Sorry... ARTICULATE lying bastard sack-o'-crap hypocrite.
The most amusing part to me was when Obama's advisers "suggested Mr. Kakugawa get help from social-service agencies".
Typical liberal - always looking to spend someone else's money to fix problems that matter to him instead of cracking his own damn wallet.
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07:40 AM
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Is it raining? With your arms around me, I didn't notice.
(CAUTION: Romantics beware - comments may contain naughtiness)
Posted by: Harvey at
07:35 AM
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(click to enlarge)
[(Front) Question: How do you distract a dummy? Turn over]
[(Back) Question: How do you distract a dummy? Turn over]
DAMMIT! I've been flipping this thing for HOURS!
WHAT'S THE ANSWER???
Posted by: Harvey at
07:34 AM
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Post contains 21 words, total size 1 kb.
Here's how it goes.
The answer is a (more or less) completely innocent word.
The hints, however, are designed to make you think of something... not so innocent.
I'll put the first hint in the main post, and the other two in the extended entry.
Good luck.
1) Cher doesn't have one
(see extended entry for more clues)
more...
Posted by: Harvey at
07:31 AM
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Post contains 84 words, total size 1 kb.
March 27, 2007
Welcome to Fun Facts About the 50 States. I'm your host, Harvey, and - week by week - I'll be taking you on a tour around this great nation of ours, providing you with interesting - yet completely useless, and probably untrue - information about each of the 50 states.
This week, we'll be wrapping up the Fun Facts About the 50 States series by fighting off a pack of rabid jackalopes as we tour Wyoming. So let's get started...
Wyoming became the 44th state on July 10th, 1890. Or maybe that was Colorado. I don't know... all those rectangular states look alike to me.
The state motto of Wyoming is "120 miles to the next rest area".
Wyoming gets its name from an Algonquin Indian word, "wa-ho-men", meaning "little too friendly with the sheep, there, cowboy".
The state song of Wyoming is "Go Back To Colorado And Ski On Your Own Mountains, Ya Damn Greenie!"
Wyoming's license plates feature black lettering on a scenic landscape background, a silhouette of a man riding a bucking bronco, and the tourism slogan "Our Women Are Like This, Too".
In 1869, Wyoming was the first state to grant women the right to vote, which earned it the nickname, "The Whipped State".
Rising nearly 1300 feet above the surrounding lands, Wyoming's Devil's Tower was designated as America's first National Monument in 1906. It also beat out Richard Dreyfuss for the Best Actor Oscar in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" in 1977.
Black Thunder, located near Wright, Wyoming, is America's largest coal mine. It was also Al Sharpton's nickname back in his stripper days, although the two are otherwise unconnected.
The first "Dude Ranch" was the Eaton Ranch near Wolf, Wyoming. The Eatons were the first to use the word "dude" in that capacity, as the term originally referred to a burr that had gotten tangled in a horse's butt-hair.
The horse featured on Wyoming's license plate is named "Old Steamboat", after an unridable bronco that gained fame in the early 1900's. Keep that in mind before buying a package of Old Steamboat brand hot dogs.
With less than 500,000 people, Wyoming has the smallest population of any of the 50 states. Strangely, this was true even before the release of "Brokeback Mountain".
Established in 1886, the Laramie County Library located in Cheyenne, Wyoming, is the oldest continually operating county library in the United States. In 2007, they plan to consider broadening their collection to include books not written by Louis L'Amour.
Just outside of Laramie, Wyoming, the 60-foot tall stone monolith known as Ames Pyramid marks the location of the world's first rodeo. More specifically, the site where a VERY drunken Robert Ames uttered his final words, "I'll bet I can sit on top of that angry bull for 8 seconds!"
Using a firearm to fish is strictly forbidden by Wyoming law, as is chumming with city slicker body parts.
Wyoming's Nellie Tayloe Ross was the first woman Governor elected in the US. Her first official act was to outlaw jokes about her that used either "Grand Tetons" or "Jackson Hole".
Newcastle, Wyoming, has a law that specifically prohibits couples from having sex inside a store's walk-in meat freezer. I probably don't need to mention that it was passed shortly after a Bill Clinton campaign stop.
The punishment for being drunk in a mine in Wyoming is a year in jail - or "Irish Condo", as the locals call it.
The Jackalope - common in Wyoming - is a cross between a pygmy deer and a particularly vicious breed of killer rabbit. While nominally considered a pest, the animal is credited with annually bringing millions of dollars of revenue into the state through the sale of Holy Hand Grendade hunting permits.
In Wyoming, it's illegal to wear a hat in a theater that obstructs someone's view. In the event of an offense, the obstructed person is allowed to shoot the hat off the other person's head - the only time it's legal to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater.
Jackson, Wyoming elected the first all-woman city council in 1920. The first law they passed banned fat guys in Speedos.
The spacecraft Voyager II has, as part of its artifacts cargo, an Ansel Adams photo of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Note to space aliens - it's actually just a come-on to get you to attend a time-share seminar.
There have been numerous sightings of Bigfoot in the woods outside Jackson, Wyoming. However, most scientists theorize that he's actually just an ordinary man who went feral after being exiled for wearing a Speedo.
The first person to ski down the 14,000 foot Grand Teton mountain was Bill Briggs, in 1971. And by "ski", I mean "fall to his screaming, bloody death with skis strapped to his feet, regretting his endeavor the whole way down".
Yellowstone National Park has over 10,000 geysers in addition to the popular "Old Faithful". Also intriguing, though less well-known, are "Middle-aged Erratic" and "Young Psychotic" - affectionately known as "Mel" and "Britney", respectively.
The state flag of Wyoming features a blue field bordered in white and red with a picture in the foreground that I'll describe as, "a bison that got REALLY drunk with a bunch of his rowdy friends and decided to blow the rest of his paycheck at a tattoo parlor - which SEEMED like a good idea at the time, and that eagle IS pretty cool, but that "equal rights" thing over the picture of that ugly chick might've been a mistake in retrospect - and what's the deal with that one guy grabbing his crotch like Michael Jackson - what was I THINKING?".
In 1991, a elementary school class discovered a the bones of a new species of dinosaur during a field trip at Alcova Lake, Wyoming. Since tradition allows a discoverer to name his find, the giant prehistoric carnivore was dubbed "Fartosaurus".
In 1872, Yellowstone was designated as the world's first National Park. The first non-American National Park was Le Pew Springs, outside Paris, France. It's pungent, sulfurous waters are said to be the source of France's cherished National Odor.
Wyoming law prohibits "fat people" - defined as 100 or more pounds overweight - from using playground or park equipment. This became the inspiration for Michael Moore's documentary, "Teeter-Tottering For Columbine".
While it IS true that Cody, Wyoming was named after William "Buffalo Bill" Cody, it is NOT true that Casper, Wyoming was named after a particularly gregarious-natured spectral apparition.
The first JC Penney store opened in Kemmerer, Wyoming, in 1902. It was the first department store that featured annual visits from Santa Claus - of sorts. The Wyomingized version of the jolly holiday elf, "Saint Clint", gave cigars and ponchos to good children, while misbehaving youngsters were hogtied & branded "naughty".
That wraps up the Wyoming edition of Fun Facts About the 50 States and ends our little tour around the greatest nation on earth. Hope you had as much fun reading it as I did writing it.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to grab my Speedo and get out of Jackson.
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01:27 PM
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Forlorn? Since I've met you, I don't know the meaning of the word. Heck, I had to look it up just now to make sure I spelled it right.
(CAUTION: Romantics beware - comments may contain naughtiness)
Posted by: Harvey at
07:26 AM
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Post contains 48 words, total size 1 kb.
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