Canadians are A-OK in my book. They're like Americans, but with sense and long vowels. Ever get sucker punched by a Canadian? I didn't think so. They also made this cool skateboardish segway.

Onemansafari: a nice photoblog with old found pictures.

Given enough time, anything can be made available in kit form. Here's absinthe. The professionally made stuff is supposed to taste downright nasty. I can't imaging how the bagged-specimen variety goes down.

Hey Kids: Philly Rock! A couple of unreleased studio tracks my band Puddle recorded a whiiiiile ago (early '95).
Puddle - Instant.mp3
Puddle - SorryGuys.mp3
Chris on vocals+guitar, me on bass, and a really cool guy named Rob who I've lost touch with on drums.

Treewave is a couple of musicians who uses old 8-bit computers for their backing band.
"We use two C64s live that run synthesizer software off a custom cartridge I programmed. That piano keyboard overlay that you see is an original C64 accessory. Commodore's SID sound chip is similar to an analog synthesizer and even includes a real analog filter. My software has several sound settings and includes an LFO, portamento, and filter control using paddle controllers."
May Banners: mp3

Virtual Beer Goggles (Nature)
But scientists now say that whatever effect someone expects from alcohol can be produced by simple exposure to flashes of alcohol-related words on a computer screen.

University of California researchers calculate that in large urban areas, children riding in school buses with diesel engines collectively inhale more school bus exhaust than everyone else in the city combined. (NYTimes)

Call me cynical, but I'm watching for an administration-sponsored bill attempting to declare bus exhaust as a vegatable.

Mary appears in a freeway salt stain.

The Shouting Men of Finland (utterly perplexing video)

Today is pants day. I've chosen sides, and I'm anti this guy, who features nothing, and pro this guy, who features some cool amateur bigfoot sketches.

Underpants by way of Toast

I'm always amazed at what people try to represent graphically with /,_,\, and .

How'd I miss Blogshares? How the hell is the Jive flatlining like a beached whale?

The Deliberately Concealed Garments Project. What the?! (from the ever-astounding Bifurcated Rivets)

ePodunk.com: Get the facts on any jerkwater cow-crossing you can curse through yer crooked teeth.

Ice Cream Truck Sound System Tech. "Turkey in the Straw" in screaming 8-bit digital; Repeat. All. Day. Long. Mister Softee got sick of it long ago and wrote their own tune.
(kinda related: Popsicle battle)

uppers.org: Providing a mod angle on the contemporary world since 1997

[Put your Rock Foot Forward] When you've got a camera and front row tickets, you wind up with excellent photos of musicians feet. This gallery, comprising 20 years of A-List boots, proves it.

200 Free, DRM-less mp3 downloads from Amazon!

A free selection of 80's-00's punk and new wave videos available for download at ScreenEdge Music (no pops, bothers, or registration) (courtesy of RnYxR0)

The radical right seems to be inventing their own dictionary. When I first heard about the economic 'Bush Boom', I thought it was a lefty, sarcastic indictment of the worst economic handling in modern history, but it turns out the corporate GOP power-base believes we're living in a economic Eden. Paul Krugman (NYTimes) today on how when you're talking to your friends in the hammer business, there seems to be a big future in nails.

The story is very different for the great majority of Americans, who live off their wages, not dividends or capital gains, and aren't doing well at all. Over the past three years, wage and salary income grew less than in any other postwar recovery - less than a tenth as fast as profits. But wage-earning Americans aren't part of the base.

However, if you're not part of the 'base', and want to take advantage of government initiatives, this administration may penalize you for your endorsement habits.

At least four of the two dozen or so U.S. delegates selected forthe [Inter-American Telecom Commission] meeting, sources tell TIME, have been bumped by the White Housebecause they supported John Kerry's 2004 campaign.

There's another word for this: "bribery".

Some nice free fonts at Chank!

"Where the hell is Australia anyway?"- Britney Spears, Pop Singer

A long, entertaining list of stupid quotes.

[Processing programming language] (w/ free download)
Processing is a programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an open-source alternative to commercial software tools in the same domain.
Check out the exhibition of sample programs (w/code). This is especially cool.

'K' Records' Calvin Johnson, and how his label managed to avoid the corporate ogre for 25 years. (PopMatters)

Often, when a band breaks up, songwriters will reach deep into their vaults in an attempt to scratch a few more bucks out of fans who never got enough. Robert Pollard, from Guided By Voices reached even deeper, and released an album of drunken stage banter. No music necessary.

You knew it was going to happen sooner or later (cnn). Now, apparently according to neofascist Republicans such as Tom Delay, the internet is a den of sin to be shunned by law and policy researchers. I wonder if Mr. Delay's outrage extends to such other atrocities of Christian thought as "books" and "academic research"? Approaching information published anywhere, the internet included, with a critical eye is certainly wise, but Delay's attack clearly goes beyond a "don't believe everything you read" warning. His message is clear: "modern" is "evil". Free information is heresy, and tools that can't be explicitly controlled by cash-wielding special interests and their administration pawns is a moral outrage. For all of their genuflecting to "freedom" as a partisan prop for ultraconservative submission, people like Mr. Delay often have a difficult time concealing their hatred of true freedom. Thank you again, Texas, for unleashing yet another villian on the rest of us.

"And not only that, but he said in session that he does his own research on the Internet? That is just incredibly outrageous."

Popesquatter! http://www.benedictxvi.com
Time to get that benediction shopping cart online, Rog... There are legions of guilty Catholics out there with money to burn.

The Ghost of Vice President Wallace Warns: "It Can Happen Here": A brilliant article I received in email. Thom Hartmann compares today's corporate-interest fueled policy machine with classical fascism. (Common Dreams)

Charles Weever Cushman, amateur photographer and Indiana University alumnus, bequeathed approximately 14,500 Kodachrome color slides to his alma mater. The photographs in this collection bridge a thirty-two year span from 1938 to 1969, during which time he extensively documented the United States as well as other countries.

Emitt Rhodes still doesn’t know what hit him. Thirty years ago, he was the new Paul McCartney, an ambitious kid who craved the perfect pop song. Then he got blindsided into submission by the heartless business of music. Now he’s just another sad guy with a boatload of talent that got buried in a black hole of depression.

6 Live Bloc Party radio sessions.

Listen to Beck's new album "Guero" (legal, streaming, entire album, NME)
(requires a reg. to Universal. they may spam you)

Kiddie Records Weekly Great Kids-themed vinyl archive
For the entire 2005 year, Basic Hip Digital Oddio will be featuring weekly stories and songs from the golden age of children's records, a period which ran from the mid 1940s into the early 1950s. This era produced a wealth of classics, headed by Capitol's Record-Readers and the RCA Victor Little Nipper series. Each one of these recordings has been carefully transferred from the original 78s (plus a few 45s) and encoded to MP3 format for you to download and enjoy.

Keroac poetry mp3s

One Brief, Scuzzy Moment - The East Villiage Art Scene in the mid 80's

Get a jump on the new White Stripes album with their first single "Blue Orchid".

A collection of Olivia Tremor Control Live, Demo, and boot recordings.

Punk Rock Picture Sleeves

As long as the music industry stays stocked with complete idiots, they'll never, ever get it. Now they're pissed off at Apple for daring to run a profitable business model with iTunes/iPod. For the past decade they've been walking around with huge targets on their heads screaming 'Pay the Middleman': just the kind of thing that technology was designed to irradicate. They can't go away soon enough.

These fundy maniacs are getting bothersome. Now they're planning an overt faith-based attack on Dems. Isn't it time to start fighting fire with fire? Why are Democrats so meek when it comes to self-defense? (NYtimes, pwd reqd)

Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for blocking President Bush's nominees.

P2P traffic is causing a global bandwidth shortage with estimates of 60-80% of packets going to swapping. Impressive.

If scientific papers sound like random techno-babble, it may be because that's exactly what they are. Two MIT students got a randomly generated piece of nonsense excepted for presentation at the World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics.

Whoops! U.S. Corporations may have inadvertantly released a deadly flu strain.

Beans Around the World (as in a single can of globetrotting beans)
These people travel the world with a can of beans and take pictures of it at various points of interest (and non-interest)
These beans have been more places than you.

Don't get me wrong... I'm all for artistic freedom. Still, these guys had to expect that the SS would show up with notepads.

I just saw something really strange - a snow white whale swimming up the Delaware river between Trenton, NJ and Morrisville PA. It was identified as a Beluga, which is even more strange, given its Arctic habitat. First spotted in the early afternoon, it's been swimming around the same area all day. I saw it at 7, and it came up several times for a really nice view.
Found a mention here.

A Realistic Assessment of How Many 12 Year Olds I could Beat Up Before They Overtook Me (McSweeneys)

Which online music service is best? (ExtremeTech)

Intrade lets you bet on pretty much anything, including papacy elections (Italy enjoys a huge lead), the American Idol winner, Olympic hosting (Paris out front), or even the weather.
In the pope-a-thon, speculation is so intense that some watchers are attempting to gain unfair advantage in predicting the outcome.

A spy could import a listening device, or even signal people outside the Vatican by a color-coded message. Atkinson suggested using colored smoke or by flushing dye down a toilet with a discharge pipe that could be monitored elsewhere.
"Are they going to search all the cardinals to see whether someone bugged their spectacles or crucifixes?" asked Giles Ebbut, a surveillance expert with the London consultancy Jane's. "The imagination can run riot."

Jeffords: The war was about oil. Iran is teed up next.
Mother Jones has a deeper analysis.
"So, even while publicly focusing on Iran's weapons of mass destruction, key administration figures are certainly thinking in geopolitical terms about Iran's role in the global energy equation and its capacity to obstruct the global flow of petroleum. As was the case with Iraq, the White House is determined to eliminate this threat once and for all. And so, while oil may not be the administration's sole reason for going to war with Iran, it is an essential factor in the overall strategic calculation that makes war likely."

Scientists are seeking the elusive 'Moho'. Hey, who isn't?

XBox2 is going to be announced May 12.

The Pitchman, Ron Popeil (New Yorker, a few years old, but a good read)

The Pope's CIA files

Large pen spinning video collection. Can't remember if I linked this before, but it's worth checking out again. I'm working on the leigun, which would probably be most useful in a pinch.

"The Democrats invented the game, and Republicans perfected it."
Mother Jones on pork and special interest pandering

"The corporate income tax bears no relation to income—it's a bunch of special-interest provisions," says Gary Hufbauer, a fellow at the Institute for International Economics and a former tax policy analyst in the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations. Corporate America, he says, has gotten the message: Taxation is little more than punishment for not promoting your interests on Capitol Hill. "If you do not lobby," says Hufbauer, "you are going to get taxed."

Sony patent looks to real-life Matrix (NewScientist) Yahoo on the same.

[Cynicism-a-Go-Go!] Project Censored 2005: The top censored stories.

More jive from the Christian Taliban under the auspices of the "Constitution Restoration Act" which is anything but. (from znet)

In the worshipful words of the Conservative Caucus, this historic legislation will "RESTORE OUR CONSTITUTION!", mainly by barring ANY federal court or judge from ever again reviewing "any matter to the extent that relief is sought against an entity of Federal, State, or local government, or against an officer or agent of Federal, State, or local government (whether or not acting in official or personal capacity), concerning that entity's, officer's, or agent's acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government."

In other words, the bill ensures that God's divine word (and our infallible leaders' interpretation thereof) will hereafter trump all our pathetic democratic notions about freedom, law and rights -- and our courts can't say a thing. This, of course, will take "In God We Trust" to an entirely new level, because soon He (and His personally anointed political elite) will be all the legal recourse we have left.

The Republican fraud machine is in high gear this spring, mailing tens of thousands of "Physician of the Year" award solicitations to doctors who write checks for $1250 to the Republican National Committiee. Republicans confer this award with no assessment of work quality, no peer review, no patient, association, or community feedback. It is not buttressed by adherance to any empirical standard of treatment effectiveness whatsoever. It's simply bought.

In addition to the obvious ethical breach, and betrays patient trust by implying a standard of care that's entirely undeserved. Solicitations are distributed by the U.S. Postal Service, so it's quite possibly mail fraud as well.

"To actually buy your award and it's not from your peers or from your patients or from the community that you serve, it's really deceptive," said Mueller, author of "As Sick As It Gets: The Shocking Reality of America's Healthcare, A Diagnosis and Treatment Plan." "It's not being honest, it's just not right."
To see what the award process was all about, Mueller sent in his $1,250 contribution and ABC News paid for his travel to Washington for the scheduled events March 14-15, which included a tax-reform workshop as well as appearances by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, and President Bush.

I wonder if they'll get "Hannitized" for outright dishonesty and breach of patient trust?

"It's like the old diploma mills," said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a government watchdog group. "It's the kind of scam that we've seen congressional investigations look at when they take place in the private sector. But here, since members of Congress are doing it, we're not going to see any investigation."

Swiss Watchers (Guardian, UK) Defending the pope til death. If you want to be a member of the Swiss Guard, here's what you've need. Joining a Faction is encouraged. (from vaticanengarde)

[We're the RIAA and you're wrong] If you had fun getting lectured on morality by the GOP over the past few years, you're going to love what's coming up next: Free Ethics 101 courtesy of the music industry!

The World is Flat (NYTimes)

[Good help is getting hard to find] Watch as this inept waiter screws up Pat Buchannan's salad order. It also appears that no ground pepper was offered. (vid)

The curious case of Sidd Finch (NYTimes)
The original article (1985) is here.