Pretty nifty art, eh? Find out more about it at Wired. I think I liked it better when I thought it was a drive-in screen, but maybe I was just ….
projecting.
Oh, if only my old computer George were still with us! Truly should George’s passage be mourned throughout the interwebs, for upon George is the only copy I have of one of my best short stories, one that would be a perfect addendum to this post, about a middling hypnotist who gets to do his routine in front of a very posh crowd for once in his life, slightly overreaches, and accidentally drives the entire group of Bilderbergers irrevocably insane.
Oopsie.
As a replacement, please enjoy listening to this audiorecording of the somewhat absurd and extremely creepy Sticks, the only short story of Karl Edward Wagner‘s that I ever really liked (nice guy, but better editor than writer). Best listened to by candlelight, in a remote cabin in the woods.
Two of my favorite men, together again for the first time.
I always wondered what happened to old unicorns. Now I know. Gee, Korea looks an awful lot like the workshops of Isengard. They should invest in a few orc suites and hook up some LOTR fanboy tourism!
And now, because I am pimping them out all over the place, here are my gossip links for today:
Bear with me, because I’m going to be tinkering. This entire post is going to be tinkering with the audio player at WordPress and seeing if I can get the Telephone Your Blog thingy to accept mp3’s, which would be a nifty trick indeedy. So, like I said, bear with me.
First attempt: Bog standard WP audioplayer with hotlinked mp3 from the Guardian’s piece on lithophones, computer-enhanced xylophones made out of the stones of the Lake District. This would be, I suppose, that upon which the Druids rocked out.
Okie dokey, it appears the Guardian podcasts allow hotlinking. Booya!
Now on to test the Telephone Your Blog thingy with a downloaded and uploaded via telephone mp3; the same one, because yea, I am very lazy.
So now, I have to save the mp3 to my hard drive, then I open Skype because the office phone won’t make a long-distance call and I still don’t have a cellphone and wouldn’t use the minutes on it for this even if I did, and I dial the number and punch in the code (how does one do that on Skype? Guess I’ll find out) and then I somehow play the mp3 into the headset which would be much easier with a proper mic and not just the headphones propped up against a hardcover of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince so the mic hovers around one of the speakers. At least, I THINK that’s the speaker; it might be an air vent or, more likely for Eve here (that’s my computer) an inlet to allow the gin in on those rare occasions it doesn’t make it from the glass into my mouth with the precision one hopes, but has no right to expect, it would after two already and where was I? Right, Harry Potter and the Lithophones of the Lakes. I’d better bring up an mp3 player, too, hadn’t I? I’ll take a flyer on Windows Media Player, because Zune and iTunes kill the speed on this computer. Wish me luck; did I say that already?
Oh, I’m gonna fart. PAUSE. Oh, it wants to tell me something. Apparently xvidcore.dll cannot be found. Well, that’s great, because I wasn’t looking for it in the first place.
Okay, so here’s what happened. I got Skype to open, and got it to call the blog. Then I input my code and started jabbering, which you can hear above. It appears that as soon as I took my earphone jack out of the computer and double-clicked the mp3 to play it, Skype crashed. That’s probably because, instead of Windows Media Player, which I had open and wanted to play it on, the darn thing opened Zune, which is huge and baroque and always kills things on my computer and causes the fan to go into classic silent-film-worthy conippification fits. So. Must find small, slick, non-interferesome mp3 player OR load the puppy into something I can play on the stereo while running Skype on the computer.
The life of a worker-arounder is not a restful one.
Oh, and then I had to go in and steal the telephoned/Skyped mp3 from the standalone post it automatically made called Audio Post and put it here. And now I think I’m going to go off and read Harry Potter and ponder some more.
Does your town have these? Ranks of failed artists lining the sidewalks of tourist strolls, charcoal at the ready and surrounded by slightly-off portraits of Tupac Shakur, Marilyn Monroe, Al Pacino in Scarface (why? whyyyyy???) and various other celebrities who are either dead or career dead and thus unlikely to sue.
We certainly do. At least the guys who line the sidewalks on the DTES are offering practical things like old DVDs, sweaters, candle holders, shoes, and psychoactive substances. The guys on Robson Street can’t say that!
What possesses the hapless (at least, they look hapless; I’ve rarely seen any hap at all evident anywhere on their persons) tourist to pick up one of these carbon-based travesties? The thought that surely there can be no more personal souvenir of Vancouver than a hand-drawn caricature of Roseanne Barr? Maybe they take one look at Tony Soprano there and say “if this guy can do that, I know he’ll do justice to THIS face?” And it’s not as if Tupac ever really broke into the Vancouver market in the first place.
Mohammed demonstrates REAL Radical Islam on Draw Mohammed Day
This would make an AWESOME tapestry, dude.
UPDATE: Facebook has taken down the Page of Draw Mohammed Day; apparently the Farmville revenue from Pakistan was worth more than their reputation as a platform for nonviolent groups to communicate. Who knew? (we all did, deep down). I’ll give five juicy Canadian dollars to the first person to do an image of Mark Zuckerberg as the Prophet Mohammed. I mean, it makes sense, right? It explains collusion, right?
Chris Crocker sez leave mohammed alone on Everybody Draw Mohammed Day
UPDATE UPDATED: The WordPress.Com blog is still up, and holds nothing sacred (most particularly not the English language, but you don’t see Shakespeare telling Hamlet to off them, now do ya?
Update UPDATE UPDATED: I grabbed a cached version of the FB page, but it’s gibbled a bit gibbled to the point I had to delete it, sorry.
Yes, today is the day we stand in solidarity with terrified Danish ink addicts everywhere and scrawl out our best portraits of the Prophet Mohammed, a day born of controversy, of conflict, of (apparent) confusion. I mean…
Nihad Awad says “freedom of expression does not create an obligation to offend or to show disrespect to the religious beliefs or revered figures of others.”That is quite literally correct; it is important to note that freedom of expression does not create obligations: it creates freedoms.
raincoaster 