Right here, with transcript.
Archive for the 'Hitting the nail on the head' Category
It helps that she and her husband are retired Airforce officers, but this woman smashed up up the Comcast office for lieing to her and not hooking up her phone. I realize we all wish we could do it. But it’s the wrong target, COMCAST employees on the bottom aren’t the real problem. Hell, most “comcast” employees are actually subcontractors. It’s the snickering millionaire scum on the top who are the real problem. We’re not advocating you send the CEO dead fish or gophers, nor are we suggesting you do a fandango on him or his phone with a hammer. But here’s where his office is.
I’ve updated the Blogroll off in the far right sidebar. There’s some really good stuff there. There’s something like a time machine powered by bicycles.
I have a love hate relationship with time machines. I hate the science fictional concept. They are impossible, I’ll spare you the barely remembered mathematical disproof (you can’t travel faster then light is part of it). But…
But…
There Are Time Machines.
They come in three flavors, the poetical, the passive recording device, and the proactive recording device. I’m not a fan of Ray Bradbury, but he did write one masterpiece: a fictional chronicle of growing up in Waukegan, Illinois in the 1920s called Dandelion Wine. There are several poetic time machines in the book. He uses a pair of new sneakers to invoke a child’s visions of the summer to be’s possibilities (Run faster! Jump Higher! FLY With PF FLYERS!) and homemade dandelion flavored raisenjack to call up Those Thrilling Years of YesterWas (If you haven’t read it go do so ASAP, it’s the most evocative thing he wrote- other then the introductory essay to the Buck Rogers newspaper comic strip collection(and come to think of it, Bradbury brilliantly uses the comic strip as a poetic time machine)). Passive recording timer machines are obvious: this blog, that LP, the VHS tape growing dusty over there, the piles of old 8mm movies in junk stores. We’ll get to the proactive later.
One of my favorite poetic time machines is the bicycle. Picture in your minds eye the history of bikes, from the early 1820′s hobby horse to the original fixie, the Victorian Big Wheel (AKA the penny farthing), to the late 19th century safety bicycle to it’s early 20th century variants to the 1960′s epitomy of all that was right and wrong with Amerikan culture. The Schwinn Sting Ray. Either plain or fancy, but not the contemporary update (But if they had issued something like this insted, it would have been OK). Or the ultimate: the ultra super neato cool Raleigh Chopper Mk 1 (the Mk 2′s weren’t bad, they just moved the rear seat mount forward and added an unnecessary curve to the angular wonder that was Chopper). I never owned one, I had a used Sears Spyder clone from Minky’s Bike Shop on Devon, but it was close enough. Most bookers would agree. Get on your 20″ banana seated Muscle Bike and begin to peddle. Feel the bad balence, that high center of gravity, the awkward steering, and the pain in your ass. And then you begin to travel in time.
I was Wilbur and Orville at Kitty Hawk on my Sears lookalike–they were bicycle makers before they flew! They Knew! I flew over the trenches in WW I, rode with the Khan, went west in a covered wagon, attacked the Palefaces, explored the grand Canyon with Powell, relived the Battle of Britain and went to the moon. Before Neil Armstrong. I went to the fucking stars on that dilapidated bike, with it’s banana seat held on by a molley screw. Ray Bradbury had his sneakers, and I had a clone of a Schinn Sting Ray. Everytime I got on that bike the past or the future snapped sharply into focus, the possibilities were endless. Even if I was just going to the store for milk.
( to be continued)
SCO had their asses handed to themselves.
A judge ruled they don’t hold the copyright to Unix, Novell does. And the court ruled that SCO has to honor Novell’s waiver of claims against IBM and Sequent. And I bet Scotty feels real funny about paying them for a license Sun already had. And somebody had better update the old filksong Berkeley, California
A few days ago Dave Winer posted this idea (with a mockup) of the way he’d like to see his tv news. It’s essentially a checklist to filter your news from all the annoying things you don’t want to see. IE, i could check Sports and Fashion and never see a sports or fashion item. It’s a great idea, it’s what we should be able to get with online news, it’s what we desperately need for tv and radio news. In a way, it’s what we were promised with cable, but never got. It’s an idea i had years ago, before there was such a thing as a World Wide Web, and had forgotten till the Anna Nicole and Imus imbroglios. It’s such a great idea, I wrote a shameless stupid fan letter to Winer.
And we’ll almost certainly never see it.
Unless some enterprising RSS newsreader incorporates it. Which would probably be a huge pain. You’d have to filter more then the post title, and you’d have to filter context. But I’d sell my mother for it.
