Monthly Archive for January, 2004

Mary-Ellis Bunim, RIP

Published
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on 30 Jan 04
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Still, you have to admit that the potential to milk this is practically limitless. “Making the Funeral?” “The Real Netherworld?” “The Real Netherworld/Making the Funeral Stupid Team Physical Stunts Competition!” That’s it. Yeeeah.

Best CDC Journal Name Ever

Published
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Britain
on 29 Jan 04
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You can subscribe for free to the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Print it out and leave it in the bathroom along with the Goth Street Journal.

Rep. Upton speaks out on increasing “indecency” fines.

Published
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Britain
on 29 Jan 04
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“As a parent with two young children, I believe American families should
be able to rely on the fact that — at times when their children are likely
to be tuning in — broadcast
television and radio programming will be free of indecency,
obscenity and profanity,” href="http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/news.aspx?id=12532">Upton
said.

C’mon, now, Fred. Some mornings, those three things are
the only things that get me through the commute to work!

Old Photos of Usenet Regulars

Published
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Britain
on 28 Jan 04
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When John Gilmore isn’t crusading to protect air travelers’
privacy, he blows off steam by presenting

random groups of headshots
of Usenet posters, as captured at Usenix conferences in “meatspace,” so
Usenet people could attach a face to a name in the days before web
pages made everyone as ubiquitous as they want to be. It
only took me three pages of these headshots to run into a former ANS cow
orker. Most-recoemmended are anyone whose email address ends in .uucp,
an old, just-about-obsolete domain for computers that used Unix-to-Unix
Copy Protocol to transfer mail and news in the days before an always-on
line was feasible.

Stating The Oblivious

Published
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Britain
on 27 Jan 04
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Man, am I glad Apple didn’t implement any of these suggestions before I got mine. Perhaps he’s making a subtle point I’m completely missing, but minimizing the opportunities to buy more stuff is one of the many things I like about my iPod. It doesn’t try to sell me anything, except maybe a pocketdock and a showcase. And one of those sweet Burton jackets. Wait, what was my point?

A Couple of Classic Kooks

Published
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on 27 Jan 04
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I could not remember the guy’s name to save my life — only the name of his website: “My Dad And These Air-Disasters.” I could not remember the URL to save my life, either, so the Wayback Machine would be of no help. Then, I found Recall, through which I discovered his name and his long-dead website URL, which sadly is not cached in the WBM, though references to it were: Lionel Stanislaus Dunn.

Investigating L.S. Dunn showed me another prime example: Russ Wuertz.

And for some reason all this reminded me of Sam Sloan. It’s really not fair to categorize Sloan as a kook — not when he actually publishes parodies, wrtten by Usenet people, of his own website articles. It would be fair to categorize him as a kook, though, for embedding MIDI files on all his pages.

Letters to the Editor by Jack O’Neil, Sewickley.

Published
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Britain
on 27 Jan 04
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Sometimes you can still find good stuff on MeFi, like this archive of letters-to-the-editor from a very opinionated newspaper reader. From the cultured minds behind Wesley Willis Art, and much like its sister site, it rocks Saddam Hussein’s ass to Russia.

Nuttin’ but Soundwave.

Published
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Britain
on 27 Jan 04
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A page of dialogue snippets spoken by Soundwave on the Transformers cartoon show.

Weakened Update

Published
by
Britain
on 24 Jan 04
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News URLs I compiled over the course of the week but was unable to log:

  • In the early days, NASA’s Aerogel information site was located at aerogels.com. Yeah, NASA actually registered a dot-com domain. If you go there now you will discover it is… pr0n. Just like nasa.com, NASA.gov let this slip through its fingers.
  • I’d prefer not to take this article on for its possibly ageist opinion. I would just like to thank the Hindustan Times for choosing a photo [the lower one] that makes Madonna look distinctly similar to Jerri Blank.
  • Comrades, it’s time to send in the big guns. ??Because if our beer is lost, then, for God’s sake, the terrorists win.

I usually don’t do the news items if I can help it. If you are looking for news, I highly recommend Google News or its evil twin, Metafilter.

R.I.P. Cap’n ‘roo

Published
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Britain
on 23 Jan 04
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CBS’ exhaustive coverage — including “breaking news” styled breakins of local radio affiliates throughout the afternoon and prominent placement at the front of updates — of the announcement of Keeshan’s passing, earlier today, would seem a lot more sincere if it wasn’t CBS News doing the reporting. Sure, Captain Kangaroo made CBS his home for most of his TV career. However, it was CBS News who kicked him off the air in the, er, late-eighties-early-nineties1984, to create TV’s longest-running comedy, the “CBS-News-Produced Morning Broadcast.”