This time I’m really going to write it.
Archive for the 'Nerd Pride' Category
Will Elder passed away late last week, Born Wolf Eisenberg, he both had a unique personal style and the gift of perfect mimicry of other artists. His mimicry of advertising art was indistinguishable form the real thing, until you found the gotcha. I’ve heard it argued that he actually had multiple personal styles, his painted work considered from his line work. He was the origin of Mad’s gag art in the margin, although in his case it was additional gags he wrote and blended perfectly with the art for the (usually Kurtzman written) piece he was illustrating. This became known as Chicken Fat or Chotchkies. Along with Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood he was the backbone of the original Mad Magazine. For those of you that don’t know, Mad was the only EC comic book to survive the great Comic purge of the early 50′s, in which various clergy and a certain psychologist claimed that comic books were perverting the youth of Amerika. Elder was unique in his mastery of parody and satire, his become famous not for his pioneering work at Mad, but for Little Annie Fanny, and adult strip he and Kurtzman did for Playboy.
I grew up reading the old copies of Mad that littered the barbershop we frequented, and coveted the bound in copies that Mad put in their Specials in the early 70s, I bought all the mad paperbacks to get all the old work. Will Elder was one of the reasons I’ve used some variation of the ords parody and satire as my online nicknames for close to 30 years.
It’s LEGO’s 50th anniversary.
I’m not the only one who noticed 
FInd your local LEGO store here, the Chicago store is on Boul Mich:
The LEGO® Store
Chicago, IL, USA
520 North Michigan Avenue, 3rd Floor
Chicago, IL 60611
USA
Phone: (312) 494-0760
Fax: (312) 494-0764
(and contact me for contributing to the Nathan Stoltz Future LEGO Fund, he’s not quite old enough yet.)
Joybubbles, the man who was the legendary blind phone phreaker The Whistler is dead. I don’t have have any particulars except this article. Read it and the linked articles as well. Joybubbles was amazing.
Jamie Zawinski posted a link to this Sarah Nixey video in which he dissed some ignorent young whippersnappers.
Jamie is younger then I am. Jamie is hip and cool, and owns a club. I am a burned out, fat, bald, talentless nerd. But, like Pepperidge Farms, I remember. And I’m not pissing on Jamie, he has done great things, and writes better then I do.
I am amazed a woman born in 1973 would do a cover of a song that wasn’t a hit in 1980, for a band that took it’s name from a faction in a roll playing game, The Human League. I don’t know why, considering that every song that had any radio airplay when I was 7 has been covered to death, and those covers are now all over the local oldies station 
And I had never heard of her previous outfit, Blackbox Recorder. I’m not ashamed. It was impossible back in the 70′s and 80′s to keep up with everything, it’s harder now, with everyone and her mother making music and writing. ah well, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
I had a copy of the game (Starforce: Alpha Centauri), it was the only SF or space based game I could find at the time. Only ever convinced one friend to play it. As a result I never became a gamer. I also had the Human League album that single was off of. I would have bought almost anything that had a synth on it, and originally thought the name was a play on Arthur Conan Doyle’s Red Headed League. Oddly enough, the guys who turned me on to the original Human League, as opposed to the version with all the early 80′s hits, was about 5 years younger then me. And totally into Traveler.
Then there’s the video. Back when the original song came out, there was no widespread dissemination of music promos as they were called at the time. I can remember going to see the movie version of Fiddler on the Roof and being treated to a couple of Cat Stevens “promos” and one of the still rare Beatles “promos.” Even in the early 80′s when MTV first started, cable wasn’t ubiquitous. I didn’t know anyone with cable. Hell, clubs opened and tried using videos as their draw. Now we just snap our fingers (on a mouse) and bingo, you all have a video to watch. And MTV is just a cable channel that does reality shows.
As for the WTF? and NOWAI in JWZ’s post, all I can say is “dude, they’re just not on the bus.” Maybe retro just isn’t their thing. Dig it.
(Not to call up a Lamprey piece I did a week ago, but it does dawn on me that even worse then the songs of my high school years being oldies station fodder is the songs of the early electropop era becoming Standards, the covers that most people of my generation’s parents listened to of songs that were hits when their grandparents or great grandparents were kids. This is terrifying. )
So a a link to a video of song from a period before widespread dissemination of music videos, covered by a woman who was seven at the time it first came out, reported to you by an ex-hacker who wasn’t born when I was seven, and commented on by a guy whose personal idium is littered with the slang of at least 3 dead subcultures of the past 70 years,, who’s over the hill and sees amusing connections in almost everything. At least when his mood is right. If i had actually read the post when it was published, I’d have probably posted the same thing
So thank you JWZ for bringing the matter to my attention.
(UPDATED)
I have been fascinated by lock picking since i was a child, partly as a result of being raised by my grandmother on a steady diet of old PI, cop, Noir, and suspense movies and tv shows. I love watching locksmiths work. I have made, improvised and used my own picks (although no where as cool as Don DeRuiter’s tools). So the news that Medeco high security locks had been bypassed both by bump key and by a screw driver with shim technique took me by surprise. These are the famously un-pickable locks of the last 30 years, and some of the most finicky locks in general. I had two jobs were being issued bad keys to these locks or possibly damage from repeated attempts from others to pick them were the bane of my existence. I’ve never even tried to pick them since the literature says it can’t be done, short of drilling them out. Here’s the article, and make sure you watch the 13 year old girl bump one in the video: White House High-Security Locks Broken: Bumped and Picked at DefCon
(I just recieved an email correction: Jennalynn just turned 12. That is just so freaking awesome…)
Disclaimer: I have never used picks to gain entrance to anyplace I didn’t already have keys for and have legal right to be in: to date i have used picks on one of my apartments, my parents home, and my cars–since I no longer have any of these things I no longer make or carry picks. Hell, I don’t even carry all the keys I’m entitled to carry anymore. Weighs too much and takes up too much space in the bag.
Brian May, the lead guitarist of Queen is finishing the PhD in astrophysics he started in 1971. It’s amazing that his thesis topic is still untapped. And that he still cares.
Uber Nerd. Military Editor of the Berkeley Barb. Master of the Tom Swift Terminal. “Toastmaster” of the Homebrew Computing Club. Creator of the Sol-20 and the Osbourne 1. Honcho of Community Memory. Purveyor of the Pedal Powered Internet in Laos. Read his bio. Or this one. Or this one. Or this article. Or this one. Read his blog here.
(UPDATED)
Don Herbert, AKA Mr. Wizard, died yesterday after a bout with cancer. He was just shy of his 90th birthday. Mr. Wizard was a pioneer in children’s science educational TV: his show Watch Mr. Wizard debuted in 1951 on NBC. He’s easily responsible for a few generations of nerds More on Mr. Wizard here.
NPR obit here. International Herald Tribune obit here.
(And to head things off, no, he isn’t the origin of “Help me Mr. Wizard!,” That’s Tooter Turtle. To this day I don’t know how the two got confused…)
Thanks to Ben for the heads up.
