Wise Fwom Your Gwave !!!

I just found the best web site in existence. For anyone who owned a Sega Genesis this will be nostalgically hilarious.

Somebody captured the 4 spoken-word audio clips (and 1 groan) from Altered Beast, the game that came with Genesys, and looped them infinitely on a tiled screencapture backdrop and large swooping letters spelling "ALTERED BEAST." It's nothing if not brilliant.

When you click the link make sure you have your sound on.

http://alteredbeastclassic.ytmnd.com/

Visited States Update

After another 2 years of aimful (the opposite of aimless) travel, I've created a new visited states map. Note my artful dodge of the central states, which is both incidental and intentional. I've also created my visited Mexican states map, which is somewhat less inspiring.

A comprehensive tally of where I've been in the U.S. of America.

A comprehensive tally of where I have/haven't been in the U.S. of Mexico. Mexico supposedly has states, by the way.

I Want to Own an Aviary (repost)

I WANT TO OWN AN AVIARY
by Count Langenhoffen (originally posted February 2006)

An Aviary (capitalized because I would own it, and everything I own instantly accords capitalization) is a large enclosure filled with trees and such for the purpose of enclosing birds. You've seen aviaries in such blockbuster classics as Jurassic Park 3 (dazzlingly directed by Joe Johnston, between October Sky and Hidalgo) and The Haunting (which features a pre-celebrity Owen Wilson decapitated by a haunted fireplace[seriously]). So essentially the birds think they can fly through the webbed steel forming the aviary, but it turns out that steel reacts to birds the same way it does to everything else; they hit it, fall, and usually die. BUT, as Darwin taught us, the next generation of birds will know how the system works, and shall obey it unflaggingly, and so they become the living attraction of said Aviary.

Now, my Aviary will be different. First of all, it'll be fucking enormous; not because the birds need room to fly, but because I'm a big guy. In fact, my Aviary will be devoid of those dirty ornithological rats, and if birds end up in my Aviary, it's entirely coincidental. And as soon as you walk into my Aviary you'll be confronted by some kind of spike or boulder trap; notice I use "you," since I would never fall victim to one of my own traps. If you make it past the trap(s?), you'll notice the air is pungent with a tenebrous pall, due in large part to the still black pond to your right and the cobwebbed man-sized iron cages squeaking longingly towards the floor which are numerous and hanging from the roof on long, ancient chains. Spiders are rampant, of course, though not so many so as to draw your attention too much from an omnidirectional moan permeating the wispy white fog. There's some wilting shrubbery that's not been clipped for years, but its plainly obvious they were shorn to resemble souls writhing in the fires of Hell. Twisted trunks of half-dead trees litter the place haphazardly, and there's an exhausted cherry blossom, too (for contrast by juxtaposition). This is obviously just to create the mood for my Aviary, so that the next door neighbor's kids feel compelled to explore it. Then, once inside, they'd be trapped and thusly forced to serve me (not sexually) until their premature death or they embark as a group on a dangerous quest for a pirate ship full of gold hidden in a secret cave within the sewers of the town. If none of the kid's are Asian, then they won't have the quest option, since no one can convincingly yell, "Booby traps!"

Now, being a business-minded person, the logistics of maintaining such an aviary requires some serious rumination. First, there's manpower. Simple solution here: Pay some poor Polish countrymen to immigrate over and maintain my Aviary (I wouldn't use "Aviary" in the Warsaw newspaper ad so as not to stir suspicion). Their rudimentary belief in the spirits of the Old Country would surely remain lit as they torment and toil in my hellish Aviary. And while they toil and cry out at spirits nonexistent, they'd come to me begging to allow their indenture to end. I, of course, would grow to twice my size and cackle ghoulishly at their simple beliefs and hilarious terror. I might allow them put a bird in my Aviary if they agree to stop being fed, but the odds that they learn conversationl English are slim to none since the grand expenditures needed for the Aviary would prevent me from being able to afford Rosetta Stone.

Another important logistical consideration is making sure the Poles and trapped children remain motivated to work, so once in awhile I'd release into the Aviary a pack of hounds or a swarm of locusts. I might also release one of those badass string-tripped swinging log traps that did in the Predator, and I think also may have taken care of Benicio's character in the cinematic feast that is The Hunted.

If the INS gets too hot on my Aviary, I'd just cover it with a tarp whenever they came by looking for missing children and Poles. If they ask what's under the tarp I'd probably just make the whole damn thing send itself into another dimension, and then flash back into our realm when no one's looking.

What's most important for an Aviary is, of course, having a secret room where you crossbreed various hapless animals via torture. There'd be bunny rabbits, little kittens, cuddly otters, happy dolphins, chatty parrots (since they can talk), and tasty chickens (in the form of buffalo wings in the freezer), and also for good measure there'd be a couple of random beating cows' hearts connected to more electrodes than seems necessary. In this room I'd also pay Edgar Allen Poe's great grandson to sit in a tall black chair and read aloud The Telltale Heart and The Raven at odd temporal intervals. Once the creatures I manifest are ready to unleash doom upon the world I'd make sure they go straight for the places of worship, just to fuck with everyone's psyche.

One last item, let's throw in some gargantuan pterodactyls with lasers attached to their shoulders like those Dinobots.

I feel that building from this simple Aviary template, I'll have countless hours of entertainment to tide me over until my battleship is complete.

What's better than a big box of NERDS?

¡¡¡ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING!!!

I Know Where You Live(d): Google Maps Street View Coming to DC?

It looks like we'll finally be able to waste countless hours looking at streets we actually recognize rather than waste countless hours looking at streets we don't. Why? Because Google Maps' Supercreepy Street View tool might be coming to DC.

A picture of the Immersive Media car used to collect images for Lord Google's infinite appetite that I successfully stole from a better website.

Reports have come in from a variety of sources that Immersive Media, the company doing Google's bidding to capture millions of 360-degree photos along the streets of New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Miami, and Denver (seriously, why Denver?) for use in its dominant Maps feature, has been prowling the streets of DC in retrofitted VW Beetles. Normally, anything that's retrofitted is okay in my book, but you just have wonder about privacy issues in this case. For instance, what if I'm caught coming out of Rhino Bar in Georgetown at 3am with a 17-year old boy who's visiting his older brother at GW? Or what if I'm filmed shooting lethal doses of heroin into the homeless fellows lining up at St. Ursula's for their Sunday meal? These are all serious considerations we have to.....seriously consider.


Some people that have seen the aforementioned harvesters of photos:
Blogoscoped, June 6
Flickr, June 21


While new cities have recently been added to Google's list of owned cities, such as LA, Orlando, Galveston (again, seriously?), apparently it took several months after spotting the Immersive Media cars before the feature went live, so there's probably some time left to wait.


So in the meantime, DC, keep homoeroticizing and homiciding to your heart's content. The party's almost over.

Perspective

"Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era -- the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were here and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant . . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time -- and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights -- or very early mornings -- when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike
sparks anywhere.

There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle -- that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting -- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in
Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark -- that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

--- Hunter S. Thompson, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971

Kids show predicts end of mankind

I've been meaning to post this for awhile now, but it took me some time (another way of saying "awhile") to find the clip.

Those of you in my immediate demographic will remember Talk Soup, a show that played clips of various talk shows---then in their hey day---and then tore into them hilariously. The show fell into the doldrums during a five year stretch after its host (and only on-air personality) left, but was miraculously reborn (not unlike Jean Gray from X-Men, or Jesus from the New Testament) when a Rose Bowl ring-wearing Seattleite named Joel McHale stepped in.

The new reincarnation, called The Soup, ruthlessly chides the absurd world of reality TV, celebrity gossip, and just generally the vacuous self-import people on TV give themselves.

While it may not fit into any of those above categories, a few months ago, McHale derided this underproduced kids show called "Gina D's" that included a bizarre song and dance number that manages to unite the creative space between Nostradamus and Barney the Dinosaur. With her voice creepily enhanced by that weird Cher-"Believe" underwater effect, Gina D tells her youthful progeny that:

"There's a land of all dinosaurs/
spread around American shores/
waiting for the day and planning their way/
to rule all the world."

I'm sorry, what? First, there's a secret land of dinosaurs hidden somewhere among the coastline of the U.S.: the most populated part of the country? And second, these maniacal reptiles are working together to devise a plot to rise up and take over the entire planet? This is like the DinoBots teaming up with Cobra Command, for god's sakes. But does Gina D offer unilateral progressive bargaining arbitration with the dinosaur aggressors, or a campaign of preemptive special forces strikes to incapacitate their fragile clam-shell communication network? No, she just keeps fucking singing in that tin-can aqua-voice.

Later in the clip, other Soup staples such as Mankini and Running Prostitute wander around the set. All in all, it's pretty damn funny. If you think otherwise, you're wrong. Dead wrong.

More "Soup" clips can be found on the show's YouTube channel. New ones air and re-air Tuesday's at 8:30am and 9:00pm, Wednesdays at 1:00pm, and Thursdays at 6:30pm. Send me a check, Joel.

BIBLE FIGHT!

While searching for a video of the dancing robot for the dancing robot post (it's always good to start out a post with redundancy), I naturally started out with the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim's website. Something on it caught me eye; it was a game called BIBLE FIGHT.

It's pretty simple. You choose your favorite biblical character (choice of Noah, Moses, Mary, Jesus, Eve, and Satan, plus one secret character) and your opponent from the same list, then you fight Street Fighter II style. There may be no Blanka electricity or Ryu's "shoryuken!", but Noah's "Two of Everything Stampede" and Jesus' "Cross Smash" are noble replacements.

(ABOVE) Me as Jesus putting the hurt on Noah with a sick overheard Cross Smash.

Everyone from the pope on down to my atheist friends should enjoy this game. Also, if you're able to beat Satan in the Arcade option, let me know who the secret character is. I'm guessing it's either God or the game programmer's avatar from Second Life.

Play BIBLE FIGHT, and tell your friends you found it here---as if you have any friends besides me.

Pop Quiz

1. I've been at my job since September 2004; that's 28 months. How many emails do you think I have sent?

A) 1500
B) 2500
C) 3500
D) 4500
E) 5500
F) 6500
G) 7500

Answer: If you guessed A,B,C,D,E,or F, you're wrong. I've sent just about 9500 emails in the past 28 months. That's ...opening Excel... 340 emails per month, and 16 emails per work day.

2. I regularly interact with notable scientists, and have met and worked with several Nobel Laureates. How many Nobel Laureates do you think I've made out with?

A) 0
B) 1
C) 2
D) 3 or more

Answer: If you guessed B, you are correct. I made out with Dr. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, known especially for his calculation of gravitational collapse despite electron degeneracy pressure, a year ago during a conference in Prague on Earth-bound extramarital objects.

3. I am responsible for a variety of projects at work, from the small, easy, and quick to the complex, frustrating, and endless. What moment in my professional career has given me the biggest feeling of accomplishment?

A) Figuring out a way to cut $10,000 from a report's printing budget to keep the project on track
B) Receiving a promotion after a year on the job
C) Meeting Dr. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
D) Being offered a postdoctoral position from a university professor when I don't even have a Master's
E) Succesfully shooting a rubber band across my cubicle and landing it so that it hangs from a thumbtack stuck in the wall.

Answer: If you guessed E, you're right "on target." It took me at least 3 months to get the firing trajectory and power level just right so that I could even just hit the thumbtack; sticking it onto the tack, however, was God's work. The rubber band still hangs there to remind me of why I'm here.

4. People who know I do something "sciency" often confuse where I work with other notable sciency organizations. Which organization is most commonly confused with where I work?

A) National Science Foundation
B) National Aeronautics and Space Administration
C) The Weather Channel
D) The CNN.com Astrology Page
E) National Car Rental

Answer: If it was left up to you, I would be trying to rent you a convertible instead of the compact economy car you asked for.

5. According to the general public, the Universe consists primarily of and is interconnected by:

A) Transcendentalist ether
B) Very thin, very long rope
C) Failed dreams
D) Failed hopes
E) Griffins
F) Marshmallows
G) Dark matter

Answer: As delicious as it sounds, F is incorrect, despite what the Jet-Puffed company has tried to tell you. According to the latest astronomical research, swarms of the mythical half-eagle, half-lion Griffin inhabit the heavens, policing the Cosmic Order and ensuring that the Infinity Gauntlet, Rings of Power, and Symbiote Suit are never used again.