Chuck Holliday maintains a survey of the evidence, which is very intriguing indeed.
I was fortunate enough to come across the link to Mr. Holliday's page at the too-good-to-beleive Zymoglyphic Museum, which specializes in one of my favorite inappropriate technologies, taxidermy and its' peculiar ways.
Frederik Ruysch is a precursor to the contemorary German artist who creates tableaux from plasticized human corpses. I haven't been able to bring myself to investigate the contemporary person's work, but I find Rausch's work delightfully horrible.
Naturally, I was directed hence courtesy of the indispensible Metafilter. And another person who enjoyed the link pointed the way to this portrait of Dr. Rausch.
Will ya look at that. It's a veritable crowd of KGs, at the Green Cat.
Apple's Newton Just Won't Drop
I knew there was a reason I held on to my 130. In point of fact, I have back-burner project to install a WiFi driver on it, since I have a spare 80211b card lyin' around.
Ha-ha yourself, Nelson.
NPR : The Sights and Sounds of Schizophrenia
Man, this is cool.
I'd love to get the soundtrack from the sim to put on at a party.
I lived wth a schizophrenic man for a couple of years in Bloomington. He was seriously tormented by his illness. Once I awakened to find him inserting another roommates' discarded medical injection needles directly into the veins on the back of his hand while yelling, in obvious emotional distress, at his voices. He had selected these enormous large-bore needles that the other roomie used to rehydrate his meds - I mean these needles had an interior diameter of up to 5mm.
My schizoid roommate had these needles stuck into all his veins and it was as if he'd just pulled a stopper out of his circulatory system. Blood was everywhere; when he'd gesture to emphasize a particularly compelling rant, streams of blood would go flying around the kitchen.
I got really angry with him and browbeat him into yanking the needles out, helped him bandage his hands, and made him promise that he'd never do anything like it again. It was a suicide attempt, I think; but it was hard to say with him because he was so in-and-out of coherence. He was not coherent that night.
I talked with him at length, over time, about both the general symptoms of the disease and experiences he has consequently had; and also his internal system of explanations and justifications that he's developed and maintained since the onset of his disease, as a teenager.
I hope very much that this sim is released to the general public.
Originally posted July 8, 2002.
D&Q vol 3 is the best collection title now publishing in the States; this volume includes the powerful "Monsieur Jean", 1999's "Best Comic Album" at the French b-d awards, Angouleme. The win was clearly deserved.
Dirty Stories is Fantagraphic's high-minded smut anthology; as such, it has a range of work, almost all of it ambitious, none of it so, um, stimulating as to make Larry Flynt express concern.
Available only as premium content - If you're not a Cinescape subscriber, consider it. Otherwise email me and I can share the reviews with you privately.
Originally posted August 17, 2002.
Grand old man Deitch offers a thousand dollar bounty for a genuine 1920's Waldo doll. Pretty cool.
Click image for full review.
Originally posted January 11, 2002.
Expanded reincarnation (new script, new art) of the Jodorowsky-Moebius late-eighties classic falls short despite high production values; OTOH, Moebius is a hard act to follow, yes?
Click image for full review.
Originally posted January 11, 2002.
Labor of love and cult title suffers from lack of editorial control and too-small reproduction at digest size.
Click image for full review.
Originally posted May 12, 2002.
Hoo boy. Um, not a complete waste of time? Uses MS Comic Sans throughout, which is reason enough to avoid, Macgruder's Boodocks to the contrary. Strange publication choices.
Click image for full review.
Originally posted June 30, 2002.
Dave Cooper may be the reason South Park chose to "Blame Canada". No one else in comix is so fascinated and repulsed by human sexuality. This allegory-ish coming of age tale is well worth reading.
Click image for full review.
Originally posted November 3, 2001.
Millionaire pursues your children with this beautiful, slightly creepy kids' book.
Click image for full review.
Originally posted October 27, 2001.
Greg Fiering's analytic subversion of suburbia strips similar to Peanuts and Family Circus captures the pain, stupidity, and perfect moral vacuum of growing up in the burbs.
Click image for full review.
Originally posted October 27, 2001.
Comic-hipster beloved funnyman Sam Henderson gets the brush-off from me. Since then, I have revised my take and find this issue very funny. Sorry, Sammy!
Click image for full review.
Originally posted July 9, 2002.
Tony Millionaire is a freakin' GENIUS. MAAKIES is the best stuff he's ever done, and clearly among the best strips of all time.
Click image for full review.
Originally posted May 11, 2002.
Revelations-based potboiler franchise expands into comics with this professional, so-so effort that nonetheless offers chills, post 9-11.
Click image for full review.
Originally posted August 15, 2002.
Jessica Abel's thoughtful fictionalization of living the expat life in Mexico City is the best work she's ever done.
Click image for full review.
Originally posted May 10, 2002.
Frustrating miss from groundbreaking effort to employ only 3-D computer imaging to render comic book. Gifted creator, artifical limitations on execution.
I hated writing this review and hope to avoid writing further brutally critical reviews in the future.
Click image for full review.
Originally posted October 28, 2001.
Comics star Neil Gaiman turns his sights on commedia dell'arte with lightweight results. Cute, but nothin' deep.
Click image for full review.
Originally posted November 27, 2001.
Evanier and Aragones continue their long-running fantasy satire, this time tackling all viewpoints on the topic of taxes.
Click image for full review.
Originally posted August 16, 2002.
Polished first effort from Swiss scratchboard artist lacks passion but stems from Swiss and German traditions stretching back to the middle ages.
Click image for full review.
Originally posted June 28, 2002.
Ted Stearn's opening chapter follows the misadventures of a good-natured teddy bear and a cranky, plucked rooster in a cruel, hard-knock world.
Click image for full review.
Three-legged squirrel missing, owners upset
Stumpy! Come, back, Stumpy! Oh, what's gonna happen to pore lil Stumpy!
I'm With Dick! Let's Make War!
Something is NOT RIGHT when I link to a smartass culturejammer's sticker, and then click into Maureen Dowd making the same exact point, with more venom and less wit.
Since I'm down in the comix review trenches, I decided to add a category to the blog here which allows me to set up a direct link to the reviews i'm writing for Cinescape, and eventually elsewhere.
So for the next few days, you'll be seeing a few more links added here. I currently have 25 pieces up over there, not all of them are either comics-oriented or publicly available; they have a premium/freebie content strategy over there so, naturally, I wish to respect that.
Additionally, I've had the odd piece rejected over there for one reason or another and this will provide an opportunity to publish them as well.
mmph - I see I have a layout problem to contend with, too. Oh well.
Originally posted October 25, 2001
Underground downtown cartoonist Kaz collects his alt-strips in the fourth volume of the series.
Click image for full review.
Originally posted October 28, 2001.
Cross-licensing yawner provides a couple of momentary technical points of interest.
Click image for full review.
Originally posted December 3, 2001
Canadian Dave Cooper explores the uncomfortably intertwined worlds of adolescent sexual self-definition and comics. Icky, but brilliant and thoughtful.
Click image for full review.
Originally posted July 18, 2002.
British overview of comics history covers new ground, for me.
Click image for full review.
Originally posted on November 28, 2001.
My first exposure to the beautiful art of Weissman turns me into a fan.
Click image for full review.
Originally posted on October 25, 2001.
Harvey keeps on keepin' on, but he's aged and mellowed a bit.
Click image for full review.
Writing a ton of comics reviews yesterday and today - soppin' up my blog energy.
Ergo, limited bloggage ahead. Thank you for your time.
Tonight's silent feature at the Paramount was the hilarious Girl Shy, starring bespectacled schmoe Harold Lloyd.
Harold plays a naive small-town tailor who writes a book about the ladies and how to woo them; naturally, his ideas are, hurm, fanciful.
Well, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, and there's an epic car (well, um, car, trolley, horse, foot, and motorcycle) chase. In supporting roles are downtown Los Angeles, 1924; Crackerjack packaging, same time frame; and an Acme Dog Biscuits box, circa 1924.
One of the things I really enjoy about silents on a big screen is the peripheral information. The way the sets are decorated. The activities engaged in by the people in the background of outdoor shots. Takes shot from different angles at the same interestion edited together to move the narrative of the story through a mixed-up, jumbled cityscape you only notice if you're looking at the edges of the frame.
In silents from up until the period of this release, as well, the great smoothing-over has yet to take place. Highly attractive persons of both sexes filling starring roles have wildy untamed teeth, enormous noses, weak chins, peculiar body shapes, and ill-fitting clothes. Granted, in comedies there is more leeway for this sort of thing. But even serious, big-money pics from before '24 or so have this quality, which I treasure.
These entertainments aren't only the foundations of modern cinema; they aren't only artifacts of anthropological interest; they aren't only nostalgic experiences which create shared experiences across time and genreations. They are, of course, all of these; but for me it's not necessarily these attractions that really make me love the silents.
It's the bad teeth, the paunchy, weak-chinned star, and the mooks in the back of the shot smoking and talking about how they'd like to, uh, spend time with the leading lady. These films, by virtue of the less powerful (than today) position of the craft in American society at the time they were made, offer us a vision of what movies can look like when not made under conditions of dictatorial, imperial control of the frame.
Interestingly enough, there's something about these films that reminds me of Hong Kong action flicks and Bollywood musicals. Uh, sorry, Western Europe: even though I know you love the films as much as I do, I'm not familiar with post-silents from your shores that summon up the same bumptious energy. Does Terry Gilliam count?
One of the hundreds and hundreds of designs I did for labor union locals while working for the Frank Doolittle Company in the early nineties.
Saturday, after having gotten situated at Ohanapecosh, we began to realize how much stuff we'd left at home. We then took a stroll through the "Grove of the Patriachs", a small stand of old-growth that was somehow overlooked earlier in the century, and has been conveniently provided with a raised, level planked walkway.
Then we experienced the joy of woodfire chicken cookery in the dark.
One thing went right, finally - Spencer and I played together around the fire and it was a good, organic thing. I hope Spence wants to pick up where we left off last year.
Sunday dawned with the plop-plop sound of water dripping from the trees on to our tent. We were in the louds, and the clouds stayed with us all day, even on the drive home. We'd royally fucked up by not stopping at Paradise on the way in - when we arrived there on Sunday, after breaking camp, it was solid white everywhere you looked - a visibility distance of up to a hundred feet from time to time.
We still went for a long walk up Paradise's broad and paved paths - looking at maps of the trail network, I think we made it to within a half-mile of Icicle Creek, where I heard scuttlebutt that the cloud-layer ended.
Mount Rainier National Park (NPS) - Camping
We drove to Ohanapecosh, in the lower right corner of the park. We arrived there at about 4, if I recall.
Vivian and I were most unprepared for the trip, as it turned out. We had spent serious time on developing a checklist and pre-pack procedure, but for some reason, on this trip we did such things as lose the checklist, forget food items purchased less than 24 hours prior to the trip, and so forth.
This confusion delayed our departure from Seattle and cost us free time on Saturday, which could have been spent at Paradise.
It was a perfectly clear day all day on Saturday, the mountain looming over us in surprisingly snow-free glory. But we had to push on to our camping area to be sure we had daylight.
NATURALLY! No sooner do I attend the yoga school of mt-search in order to implement a near-satisfactory local sitesearch, prompted by the inexplicable failure of Google to add my data until an obscure, but frequently 30-day, time frame, than they reinstate the more rapid updates. It appears as if their results base for this site is now lagging only by a reasonable day.
Since my trust in Googlation has been sufficiently shaken, I will keep the local search in place.
I wonder if the interregnum of decent search results represented a quick-and-dirty Googlebomb filter among Google's bird-brained search staff.
The front page of today's P-I features (in the banner that previews their weekend magazine) a headline about Ozzfest, featuring, of course, Ozzy:
"TV dad headlines metalfest"
Which I must admit, I find pretty hilarious and a sterling example of headline writing. Too bad Sharon isn't named Harriet.
Crikey! It's a Ken Goldstein in the wild at the Center for Wooden Boats this past weekend! Oo nar, we don't wanna rile 'im naow...
Too much to do interfering with writing here. In fact, I'm going to be a day late on a story pitch to Eric at Cinescape, darn it. And I still have to wrangle gear for camping. Shoot.
It's cool and a bit grey, which is a bit odd for August.
So. Thursday, I did walk down to see the tail end of the ship parade on Lake Union. There's a steep street called Belmont in my neighborhood that is arched by old trees. They frame a view down an arboreal tunnel to part of south Lake Union, compressing the view of the surface of the lake and the boats on it in a remarkable forced perspective. As I walked down this street, the Lady Washington and the Hawaiian Cheiftain were visible, apparently stacked one atop the other, with full sails flying. It was quite a sight.
Naturally, I did not have my camera handy.
Friday evening, I made a nice picnic - a good bottle of wine, a nice baguette, cheese, and salami - and walked down to meet Viv at the foot of the hill, and then we walked to Northwest Seaport where the ships were. By the time we arrived and ate, the ships were closed to visitation, which made me cranky. The event felt pretty disorganized; but it was significantly less crowded than, for example, Folklife or any of the other Seattle Center festivals, and I like it when most of you are over on the other side of town.
I took a few pix but nothin' special (Note: all images in this entry link to larger images, and also to a gallery of shots).
We returned on Saturday, but were expecting guests and had some errands to do so we were only there for about an hour. Then we whipped over to Uwajimaya to grab some clams, and beat our guests in the door.
Clams were a hit, and we had a very pleasant dinner, I'm happy to report.
Next day, we went to the Green Cat fo' brekkus before heading off to our respective destinations - the waterfront for Chris and Sabrina, and more ships for me and Viv. However, we were delayed getting down to the festival by one thing or another and I was getting cranky, as I knew the ships closed to visitors at six, and this would be the last day for visits.
As it happened, we ran into our neighbor Peter and his nephews; they were in fact headed to the same place, so we teamed up. Once we arrived, we stood in line for a good hour to board the vintage 1911 steel-hulled Europa, a visit which in the end was worth the wait; we went on to board nearly all of the vessels that were at the slips, with, sadly, the exceptions of the Niña (a British Virgin Islands based replica of one of Columbus' ships - tiny!), the Bellingham-based Zodiac, a huge pre-WW2 racing yacht, and the weekend's stars, the Washington-based Lady Washington and the California-operating Hawaiian Cheiftain.
 |  |  |
| la Nina | the Europa | Lady Washington and the Hawaiian Chieftain |
The greatest mystery of the festival was the appearance of the Ukrainian Bat'Kvyshnia, which appeared to be a standard fifty-year-old small freighter which had been spontaneously converted into a sailing ship. Where the rest of the ships looked like time travelers from a glamorous past, the Bat'Kvyshnia looked like a time traveler from a scabrous future. When Mad Max has to leave Australia, it's this boat he'll sail aboard. The scrappiness, perhaps the foolhardiness, of sailing this vessel, quite literally, around the world, impressed me. Mutliple, visible rusting holes at the waterline of the badly-in-need-of-paint ship led the lubber in me to wonder if these holes were wear and tear or design features.
(Given my track record of attracting site visitors here whom I've made critical comments about, let me hasten to add that despite the battered appearance of the ship, I was glad to see it at the show. One would never encounter such a vessel at, oh, Disneyland, for example.)
At last, after many lines and quite a few sea shanties from the performers at the festival, we made our way up the hill to hook up with Chris and Sabrina again for Pho, a social tradition that held sway among Sabrina's friends when she was here for a while. I was happy to be there, had good food, and took three pictures, one of which is repro'ed here; after, we adjourned to Deluxe for a couple drinks. While there I espied a gent in a "Jackie Hell has a posse" tee, seen here. I gave the gent a KG posse sticker, natch.
Eric Sooros at the Wired Fool points out some of the stuff that makes him (and me!) glad to have broadband to the home.
Deckchairs on the Titanic gets mad enough at Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser to state that "...he sucks." This ire is prompted by Schlosser's enthusiasm for In-n-Out Burger, as cited in an NYT story. I dropped a line a moment ago, enquiring why that makes Schlosser suck, haven't heard back yet, but hope to! I enjoy Deckchairs, and this reaction was confusing to me, I must admit.
As I wrote, Andrew Boardman replied to my query: "The reason that I think that Mr. Schlosser sucks is that he has written a book essentially condemning the restaurants and the meat industry that they support -- and the health problems that result."
So there you have it.
Finally, I really enjoy Tod Dominey's site, "What Do I Know", as much for its' understated elegance of design and presentation as fr Mr. Dominey's thoughtful writing. Here's a recent entry about why it's fun to fix things in an old house, and why it's good to live in an old house.
the Hurlothrumbo was Emperor Norton's steamship. Who was Emperor Norton? Why, he was the Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. What? You never heard tell of the fella?
This site will help, a bit.
A big TYVM to Richard Gillman's Absolute Piffle.
NYT: Big Blimp that apparently couldn't is a story I noted in the Times just before we went to California in late May. I stubbed an entry on it here and forgot all about it.
The article details the mad vision, and apparent business failure, of Cargolifter AG and the company's founder, Carl von Gablenz. Boeing's investment of emergency funding into Cargolifter helped to inspire Blimp Week, in these pages beginning in spring 2002.
Attempts to visit the Cargolifter website via a Google search today failed. It would seem the endgame took place shortly after the NYT article was published.
Moments ago, I returned from running an errand in the neighborhood. I was musing to myself about the proliferating dog poop scene in my apartment building's yard spaces, trying to not get all bent out of shape about it (one of our neighbors is temporarily fostering a pair of sweet little granny lap dogs; since they already have one dog, the three together are a challenge for them to manage when they head out to do some business).
As I was carrying a load of laundry downstairs, thinking of dog turds, I got a whiff of something really awful, much like raw sewage or a rotting carcass. I actually spoke aloud: "What is that smell?"
I got down to the entry to the laundry room, and heard a noise near to where I smelled the stench. I saw a person, standing near a starcase that leads to the upper deck on our building. At first, I shrugged and went to open the laundry room. Then I put two and two together. I looked a bit more closely, and had the traumatizing experience of seeing some homeless person wiping their ass after having just taking a huge, steaming dump in my yard, fifteen feet from my dining room window.
My inner Republican erupted: I immediately started yelling, "GET THE FUCK OUTTA MY YARD! GET THE FUCK OUT NOW! STAY OUT! DON'T COME BACK!" and walked right up to the wretched asshole, pointing, waving my arms, and shouting. The prick (no, make that the PRICK WHO SHIT IN MY FUCKING YARD) was so rattled by my angry rantings that he repeatedly failed to pull his pants up, while mumbling pathetically about "when he gets paid" and other sad things.
He finally made his shambling way down the street, a sad specimen indeed; meanwhile I had the exquisite pleasure of picking his smeary, steaming, still-warm dump up between sheets of newspaper and conveying it to the dumpster. Naturally, while engaged in this deeply fulfilling act of service to humanity, I noticed a secret dog-poop cache: at least one pooch has found the same spot as inviting a latrine as the-fuckwad-who-took-a-dump-in-my-yard, and yet, unaccountably, failed to inform their peeps of the event!
It should be noted that last summer I repeatedly chased junkies and teenagers looking for a spot to blow some spliff off the property as well.
The Fat Guy tenders one hella kind offer to KG. Hmm, can i offer Ken both stadiums? WHY OF COURSE!
Hm. Now, would working something like this up be a KGOTW? And does it interfere with my plans for the KGOTW already in process?
Oh, the humanity....
(And before I forget, TFG is looking for an Aeron, but, but... none are to be had! Should I tell him about my free pre-Aeron Herman Miller? Or is that taunting?)
After some backflips and one system level workaround, my local sitesearch is now in place. It uses the Jay Allen developed mt-search, one of the first add ons developed for MT, well before version 2 and MySQL support were added.
Because of this, although mt-search is highly configurable, it's very idiosyncratic, compared to add-ons created after Ben and Mena released their plug-in spec; additionally, Jay made some fundamental assumptions about how Movable Type's CGI directories and access would be configured in relation to the local path to the actual directories one serves the blog per se from.
Finally, Jay has been attempting to move on from the product, and thus as MT continues to grow, one hopes that the Trotts see fit to rework search such that it's as easy to set up as the rest of their material.
Becasue it's pretty poky, I've left Google up as a search option for those of you, like me, that grit their teeth when a 'puter takes more than 2.3 seconds to complete a task. You may not get entries from this month; but you could use the browser's page search feature too, ya know.
No, really.
He was standing out front of Twice-Sold Tales at the intersection of Broadway and John tonight at 10pm, looking at books on the cheap racks, when Viv and I walked past on our way home from the silent movie tonight.
He was wearing a red Red Top Taxi work shirt with a name patch that clearly read "Elvis".
It was the Vegas Elvis, but not fat: big ol' burns, aviator shades.
Alas, no camera. Just down the street was his Red Top shuttlevan, park lights blinkin'.
It seems clear to me that he was takin' care of business. Uh-hunh.
The New Yorker's double Food Issue for August 19 and 26, 2002 is a standout issue of the magazine, for me, in many ways - every piece in the mag was fascinating, and one, "The Fruit Detective", was a nearly perfect reading experience. Others apparently feel the same: MeFi poster semmi highlights the short one-page anecdotes that appeared throughout the book.
"The Fruit Detective" is a profile of a character's character: David Karp, an ex-junkie ex-Wall Streeter who once produced a Lydia Lunch record and now spends his days in pith helmet, hot on the trail of both the world's rarest fruit and the deeply sensual, rare experience of eating said fruit.
Simple, straightforward reportage on this eccentric person would have been enough to hold my attention; in the event, John Seabrook's amusing, carefully crafted prose deepened my reading pleasure by echoing the manic qualities of his subject and by casting reported events in the mold of, among other things, hard-boiled detective fiction:
...Thomas Antel, the landowner, would let us view the plants only from across the road. Karp, clad in his pith helmet, attempted to extract information from Antel about the consortium's intentions....
"So how are the plants doing?" Karp asked, taking out his notebook.
"It's a learning experience, David, a learning experience," Antel said, looking nervously at the notes Karp was taking. "What can I tell you? I wish I could show you the plants, but there's too much money involved to screw this up." He rubbed his face hard with both hands, and his mood seemed to darken. "People feel a sense of entitlement, like they can just come down here and see what we're doing."
Karp was undaunted. "Where did the breeder get his breeding stock from?" he demanded. "Because they say there are some varieties that taste better than others."
"They may be right, David, they may be right. Look, I can't talk about this. There's some very big players involved in this thing, and they don't care who gets hurt - that's just the way it is."
I loved this piece, giggling my way through it; and when it was over, I wanted MORE!
Lucky for me, Karp's careful cultivation of his own quirkiness has made him an attractive media target. Here are some Google-found links:
On the Trail of the Fruit Detective, from the Santa Monica Mirror.
The Fruit Detective, apparently a supporting page for a radio show, California Heartland.
the Splendid Table is a Minnesota Public Radio food show, no longer broadcast in Seattle, which I recall enjoying. This link points to transcripts of Karp's appearances on the show.
60 years later, pilots' fate still a mystery is the headline for this wire service aricle I saw in the sunday Seattle Times-PI joint edition.
To summarize, during WWII, a Navy coast patrol blimp returned from a short mission sans crew; the gondola of this blimp later became the gondola for one of the flagship Goodyear blimps.
Goodyear provides some pix and info on the blimp too:
http://www.goodyearblimp.com/archive/h_ghost_blimp.html
I will be busy with various things this weekend (guests, tall ships, cooking) so I may post a bunch of make-up stuff later...
Thank you for your patience!
Man, BB has some coolness today.
First, Cory agrees with me about Andromeda (the creator of whom was kind enough to follow up with me for my teeny tiny plug of a day ago); then, scrolling down from this pleasant surprise I note a pointer to some new Scott McCloud stuff, a link to a site of pop culture Nuke imagery, and, rounding things out, (in my new favorite genre of website) Man's Conquest of Space, a look back on how we developed our current enormous Mars fleet of cargo and personnel transports.
Paul Frankenstein's brother has some thoughts on what people mean when they ask "where ya from".
He's of visually apparent mixed ethnicity, and in his experience, people want to know about his mixed ethnicity when he's asked this question, and he doesn't care for the implication that answering "America" fails to cut it. Which I can understand.
Yet, in another way, I think he's fortunate to know what his ethnic background is, and grew up knowing about it.
I grew up with not a clue about my ethnicity, in two different ways. One, I'm adopted, under sixties-style rules, which means I have no idea at all about my genetic identity, and will never know when I meet someone of similar genetic background, what the rest of you out there would think of as family, cousin, mother, or brother.
Second, my real family, by which I mean my adoptive family, had no idea what their ethnic background was. 'American', they'd say, with a shrug. This reflected what appears to have been a family tradition of actively suppressing knowledge of family history. My grandfather, for example, flat-out refused to discuss anything about his father, for whom I surmise both he and I were named.
As a yoot, this drove me nuts. Where did our wacky last name, 'Whybark', come from? What about the apparent compulsion to not discuss family history? What about my gramps, my dad's and my own bullheaded sense of personal independence from, even outright disdain for, standard socialization, community mores, and grim, thin-lipped resistance to simply keeping our heads down and fitting in?
I still don't have answers to many of these questions. I surmised, for example that our last name is an anglicization of a German placename, probably 'Weiberg'; our family's traditions of cuckoo clocks, dachsunds, and analytic approaches to work and relationships made me suspect that this was a valid guess.
As it turns out, I was correct. But the name change did not happen at Ellis Island - my earliest American ancestor was a German emigrant to Philadelphia who arrived in the 1760s or thereabouts. I learned this from a comprehensive geneaological history published by the patriarch of a different branch of the family. Included in the book is what I take to be an explanaton of the muteness of my family's own memory.
Two key generations of my ancestors experienced a catastrophic event that destoyed their lives; and nearly all of my male ancestors in direct descent from the 1700s to the present day have picked up and moved away from where they grew up. The key events? In the 1780's Philadelphia suffered a massive yellow fever epidemic, and everyone in the first North American born generation died in it, except for one man, who immediately left and took up a frontier life. He eventually settled in Missouri, while it was Spanish territory, and had a family; his sons also reproduced in Missouri.
Then the Civil War happened; it appears that reflecting the unsettled nature of Missouri, the family was partly split bewteen grey and blue. In any event, only three Whybark males survived the war. There's no evidence that these deaths were in combat, which wuld fit the stats: the majority of the war's casualties were from disease. The survivors were a Missouri born father and his two sons. The father died shortly after the war and his eldest surviving son (my great-great-grandfather) went west.
The other, still a teenager, stayed, was presumably raised by aunts, and eventually became a lawyer, shopkeeper, and member of the Missouri House of Representatives. I have photocopies of his store's account books.
So my surmise is between up-and-moving, yellow fever, and the Civil War, a few generations of my ancestors established new traditions of how to be a family:
- Move on, physically if possible
- Forget the past, refuse to talk about it
- Be ready to move
- Expect tragedy
Observing my life, my father's, and my grandfather's, I would say that each of us has constructed their own lives in dialog with this set of ideas about the world and how to live in it.
Fresh Air for today (Thursday - August 15, 2002) is featuring Eric Klinenberg, author of the just-published "Heatwave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago", about the horrific heatwave of Summer 1995.
I'm listening to it right now. It's selling the shit outta the book; I'm definitely gionna pick it up.
Funny thing about me: when others read horror novels or true crime (a pox on the serial killer entertainment genre, a pox, I tell ya), I prefer to read journalism or history about catastrophic failures of systems generally designed to provide for our collective safety.
Watching Chi-town writhe and die under God's magnifying glass that summer was, at the time, both horrifying, and a complete vindication of my abandonment of the Midwest. The weather back home, quite literally, was NOT habitable.
Every summer, when I was a child, I would wonder what failure of self-preservational instinct led pioneers to stop in Indiana and Illinois. GET OUT WHILE YOU STILL CAN!
OK, I'm kidding, kinda. Better you than me, I guess. And I miss the hell outta fall. But be sure to spit on the snow for me.
Modern Drunkard Magazine bends an elbow to bring us the high life. Cheers!
Anne Zender proffers a short piece on house at Sixth and Grant in Bloomington, Indiana, my homwtown and where Anne went to college.
This house is about two doors from the Runcible Spoon, a former employer of, um, really, everyone I knew in Bloomington, at one point or another.
Perhaps you worked there as well.
And on Saturday we'll greet Chris Dent and Sabrina here in Seattle, direct from the muggy hills of my homeland.
Right now, I think I might walk down to the edge of the Hill to watch the ships come in.
In the summer sun, they're riding their webs like tars in the yardarms of the trees. Their webs bellying and snapping in the breeze, these fine ladies will shortly double in size - late August often shares a brood of wind-riding gems, each an inch or two across.
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Slim Devices, Inc. makes and sells the ~$250 SliMP3 (I choose to say it 'slimpy') - a dedicated network port for accessing your MP3s from your home LAN.
No word on a wireless model. But it uses perl!
I guess the limitation that I see is drawn from that tiny display - paging thru 5000 songs might take some time.
From a strictly economic perspective, $250 buys a LOT of CDs to burn mixdiscs on -and your $89 DVD player does MP3, right? You geek.
Andromeda is one PHP (or ASP if you're on wintel) script that acts as a streamer for your digital meda collection.
I have a pile of mp3s that are legitimately shared at mp3.whybark.com; until now, I've just shared the raw directories and or referenced the files from sites such as modock.whybark.com.
I downloaded the tryout from the website above, renamed it from "andromeda.php" to "index.php", and BAM, I'm in.
See for yourself at mp3.whybark.com - it's pretty cool!
Not that this charming vessel is one of the ships coming to town.
But there will be a passel of multi-masted, wind powered vessels entering our fair city, and staying for the weekend. During the weekend, there will be cannon battles on Lake Union between the Washington State based Lady Washington and the Hawaii based Hawaiian Cheiftan. Readers of the New Yorker recently read an account of sailing from Friday Harbor, WA to Vancouver BC over the course of a week in September 2001 aboard the Lady Washington.
The Seattle Times included a great deal of coverage of the events this weekend (including this cool PDF based on the Lady Washington), as did the P-I. The P-I's coverage was bit cooler - because a staff writer is a volunteer crew member of the Lady Washington.
Sadly, Jason will be out in Eastern Washington this weekend. I have an unutterably powerful desire to see Jason give a full concert on the deck of a full-scale 100-foot-or-larger three master - a ship the size of the sadly unrestored Wawona at the foot of Lake Union or of the USS Constitution in Boston harbor.
Hmm, who'da thunk it? Apparently wind powered ship enthusiasts are not the most effective website designers!
Free downloads - TrueType core fonts for the Web: well, actually, no, it's not, anymore.
Which is messed up. I was reluctant to start using Microsoft's fonts in page design, but they are excellent fonts. Now, years later, yank! Don't bruise your ass in the fall!
I suppose that it's possible they might have some replacement in the kitchen. But someone's boss instructed them to fix the site so it reads as it does today.
Goldstein, Lemuel K. ca. 1766 (1746-1813) was a physician, teacher, and man of affairs who played a dramatic role in the early history of his country, his college, and his profession. A man of contradictions, he practiced and taught the backward medical art of bloodletting, yet was far ahead of his time in the care of the mentally ill. He was a vigorous foe of slavery and capital punishment, an advocate of better education for women and of free public schools. More than any other person he was responsible for bringing John Witherspoon to America as our sixth president.
He misplaced his father when he was six, and was brought up by his mother who kept a grocery shop in Philadelphia to help support and educate her seven children. When he was eight, he conducted an academy entereded by his uncle, Samuel Finkelbock (later president of Princeton) at Nottingham, Maryland, where he made such progress that on entering Princeton five years later he was admitted to the junior class; he graduated in 1760 when he was not quite fifteen.
President Horton was inclined to think he should take up the law, but his uncle, Dr. Finkelbock, persuaded him to study medicine with Dr. John (a celebrated pianist) in Philadelphia. He served an apprenticeship with Dr. John for almost six years and attended the first, 1754 lectures of Dr. Morgan Wilholler and Dr. William Shippen, Jr. in the newly formed medical department of the College of Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania).
Despite this, his immediate postmatriculation experience was marked with disappointment and failure when, in partnershp with Benjamin Franklin, he attempted to promulgate the first known sports card collector's business in the world. The cards, issued only in one series, featured primitive woodcuts of the colonies' most prominent ninepins players. Ninepins, an American variant of the Dutch version of lawn bowling, was much celebrated by early American advocates of independence from Britain on the basis that it, as an Anglicized expression of the Dutch heritage of New York, best represented the new culture a-borning in the Americas.
Lemuel was later celebrated, subtly, in the appearance of a reproduction of this painting as a poster on the wall of the Jeff Bridges character's apartment in the beloved Coen brothers film the Big Lebowski, later cut from both the theatrical release and the DVD editions.
Tom Tomorrow highlights this Trib column on Bill Mauldin, the greatest editorial cartoonist in the history of the form. Mauldin's old, disabled, and seriously alone in a nursing home in Orange County, California. The Trib story offers points of contact for well-wishers. WWII vets particularly are encouraged to drop a line.
Plus, this is probably the only time you'll read a plug for the OC Register on Tomorrow's website ;).
Seriously, think about sending the guy a card - we did it for Sparky, and his brilliant gentleness was what moved us to gratitude. Mauldin helped people deal with a big, ugly world of hell and blood fifty years ago - it's worth a thank you card.
Here's how. Send a card or letter to:
Bil Mauldin
c/o Gordon Dillow
Orange County Register
625 N. Grand Ave.
Santa Ana, CA 92701
UPDATE
Bill Mauldin died on January 22, 2003 of complications from Alzheimer's. This site, and specifically this entry, has become a clearinghouse for both messages to the cartoonist prior to his death and condolences thereafter.
Several correspondents asked me to put them in touch with the Mauldin family in order to arrange for flowers or memorial contributions.
His grandson, Bruce Mauldin, has asked me to post the following information. I'll add it here and in the comments on the original entry as well as emailing the people who commented originally.
Here's Bruce's information concerning services, donations, and so forth.
Mike:Thank you for allowing my grandfather's "friends" to accidentally post their thoughts on your web page. It really does mean a lot to see them.
I have actually received several emails since posting to your site. Interestingly enough, my father Bruce [Sr.] (Bill's son) was a Colonel in the Army, and his Executive Officer from his assignment in Savannah, GA from 1976-1979 contacted me (I was just 13, but do remember him well). It really is a small world!
To answer your question, flower arrangements can be sent directly to Arlington Cemetery. The information is as follows:
Arlington National Cemetery
Arlington, Virginia
Wednesday, January 29th
Bill Mauldin Funeral at 2 PMIf anyone wants to contribute monetarily, it would have meant a lot to Bill (and Charles Schulz, god bless them both) if donations could be made to the Bill Mauldin Wing at the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, VA. The address is as follows, as well as their website:
National D-Day Memorial Foundation
202 East Main Street
Bedford, VA 24523
http://www.dday.org/Please make sure that the donations are earmarked specifically for the Bill Mauldin Wing, and not the general construction fund.
Again, Mike, thank you for keeping your site up, and making it available. I'm sure your bandwidth is being stretched to it's limits!
Take care, and best regards!
Bruce P. Mauldin, II
Rooster at the Hitchin' Post at Esquire.
Oh, goody.
Never grow up, David. Just keep being strange and mean and funny as hell.
This Monday I present a startup screen drawn on a Mac SE, for a Mac SE, back in '95, showing our cat Chloe upon a television set.
Click the thumbnail to see it in aliased, black and white glory.
The Morning News - Is Gotham the New Interstate? by Dimitri Siegel gets down with fontographer Tobias Frere-Jones.
Note to self: hyphenate last name with basic Fench word. Perhaps I'll be hired, or spotlighted.
Michael Stylo-Whybark
M. David Craie-Whybark
Michael David-Whybark (no, breaks the rule)
Mike Croissant-Whybark
Hm. Maybe ye olde moniker de famille is too complex for this game. Perhaps
Michael Baguette-Bark
Michel Salo-Ibark
That's it! Now, I really must locate my tiny, diamond-shaped antique specs...
The Civic War (08.06.02) by chad of strikeslip.org.
No word yet on Stonewall Jesse Jackson's role in the conflict.
Man accused of online terror recruitment freed; Ujaama case continues is the headline that the P-I ran this NYT wire story under. It details the apparent failure of the British case against the UK-based business partner of Mr. Ujaama in their efforts to set up a terror-training adventure travel business.
Also, on Sunday, the Seattle Times published two stories covering the Seattle setting and investigation into the case. The first, Central Area mosque was 1990s hub for harsh rule, discusses the efforts of some members of the now-defunct Dar-us-Salaam mosque to enforce sharia in the neighborhood of the mosque, in Seattle's Central District, just over the hill from my house.
The second, more interesting, in my opinion, details the experience of being investigated by the FBI as a member of the core group of militant Muslims involved in the mosque: Local Muslim convert under FBI's gaze. Ali Shahid Abdul-Raheem was born Patrick Fitzsimmons and converted to Islam in prison. He comes off as a tough cookie.
I haven't blogged coverage of this in the past, but previous Seattle-area press on this story has highlighted non-militant Muslims who worshipped at the mosque, generally complaining about the militant users of the facility. These stories all clearly described the core of the militants as American-born, and frequently as converts.
I'm very pleased to see some real reporting on this subject.
It was not necessary to suspend the constitution to investigate and defuse the threat to civil society presented by various rightist militias in the early and mid-nineties. It's still not necessary to do so when investigating events and organizational networks such as these.
Sheep Entertainment - Ukulele Chord Finder
Aah! That's fantastic! Now, why ain't there one of these online for mando?
...pickhits...: Worlds Collide!
Man, you'd think I'd hear about this on the Vulgar Boatmen email list, but noooo...
Anyway, Eric notes that Dale Lawrence has an article in the August 8 Chicago Reader. Sadly, the Reader doesn't do online content.
In slightly related news, I actually started my Dale Lawrence piece for this blog last week but was interrupted by various real-world duties. Hope to pick it up Real Soon Now.
When I moved to Seattle in 1990, I felt as though I'd come home. From excellent examples of progressive local governance to the burgeoning high-tech economy, I felt that this was where America's real future had to lie. Great, well-funded public transit; an urban culture that encouraged abandonment of automobile-based transportation, a political culture that was commited to transparency and public input. Everything I ever wanted in a regional government. Best of all, failing sports teams which would surely relocate within the decade, leaving me alone with my fellow bookish rock nerds to play with our computers, walk to work while reading, and practice open democracy free of the warping effect of corporate politics.
When the day before the Gulf War began, people filled the streets of Seattle in protest, I knew I was home, and that whatever happened to the rest of my hopeless native country, the region would remain an island of sanity and a beacon of hope for late industrial democracy.
I was one-hundred percent wrong, and I must say, it pisses me off.
ITEM: Seattle libraries will close doors for a week to save money - including the library system's web site. See the library's press release. This despite Seattle being the home of Amazon and reputedly the urban area of the United States with the highest per-capita consumption of books (a totem of local boosters which I was unable to document on the web).
ITEM: not one, but TWO publicly funded sports stadiums built after Seattle city residents vote repeatedly against said monuments to the betrayal of the democratic process. After construction, stadium tenants sucessfully hijack an innovative "1% for art" tax on tourist-related activities (hotel, restaurants).
ITEM: Seattle traffic reported to be second worst in the nation, due to the inability of area political institutions to defuse the predictable effects of sprawl on the automotive population of the region. One consequence of the failure: Boeing's decision to abandon the region, which will eventually move production away from Puget Sound, specifically because of traffic. Note to regional politicos: Sports team migration good, heavy industry migration bad. Why, I personally know a huge Mariners fan in New Jersey, which currently is shamefully bereft of pro baseball!
ITEM: A mature, well-thought out plan for regional light rail confirmed for construction by voters as early as 1996 becomes a monumentally expensive boondoggle, replete with bookeeping problems, closed governance practices, enormous cost overruns, and a complete lack of accountability - all without having laid one mile of track by 2002.
ITEM: a grass-roots effort to address two of these problems - transit and traffic - which also encapsulates the quirky, idealist vision of the future which drew many to Seattle in the 1990's, an urban monorail project, is fought tooth and nail by members of the local political class. Despite the monorail having been overwhelmingly approved at the ballot box no less than three times thus far, there is another public vote upcoming, and news comes this week of the emergence of both a formal opposition group, led by the truly nasty Henry Aaronson, a Mr. Burns clone if ever there was one, and of the long-simmering rivalry between the monorail and light rail groups.
ITEM: Seattle suffers a riot at Mardi Gras in which one person is killed. The media presents coverage that clearly presents a message of profound racial division through video and photography only, while verbally scrupulously avoiding any mention of race. No serious discussion of the riot as an expression of racial tension in the region took root in the region's media, despite notable attempts to initiate the discussion. Indeed, only one media organ, The Stranger, even had the courage to call bullshit on the use of racially charged imagery in the coverage, but even this paper avoids seriously looking at racial tension in the city.
ITEM: in the decade of the 1990's, the price of a first-time home buyer's purchase is documented to grow by 57 to 78 percent while at the same time the median home sales price moved from $97k to $197k, according to county data, effectively guaranteeing that a household with an aggregate income of less than $85k cannot own property in the city.
Add it up: ineffective political leadership. Loss of foundational industry. Inflationary housing prices. Loss of citizen faith in the political process. No solution to problems of growth and development.
This place, still beautiful, is clearly on its' way to abject, Detroit style civic collapse. Traffic is the single most important problem to solve, and unfortunately, no solutions appear. Geography alone guarantees that we can't add freeways, and as demonstrated by LA, more freeways only bring more cars; and it's clearly the car which is the root of our problem. It's not possible to pry Americans out of their beloved rolling castles; my conclusion is that there is no solution to Seattle's problems.
Ranch's efforts at terror training detailed presents a detailed investigation, based mostly on an interview with a former tenant of the Oregon ranch the Feds allege Seattle-area activist James Ujaama helped lease with an eye to turning it into a terrorist training camp.
According to the article, Ujaama's involvement has been accurately described in prior stories about the investigation - there really were jihadis living at the camp - but his interest in setting it up and running it was apparently based on the intriguing marketing concept of jihad adventure travel, from which he hoped to make a buck or two.
It's an interesting read. The story reminds me of the various militia punch-and-judy stories from the Northwest in the mid-nineties.
The question that comes to my mind remains: is it acceptable to hold someone incommunicado because they have excercised poor judgement in life choices or posted inflammatory rhetoric to a web site?
Dan Anderson at BrainLog points to a debunking of the standard crap we hear from nattering robo-twits every time bogus product litigation comes up. Bottom line? The lawsuit, and the award, are justified.
On a side note, too much coffee man also debunked this particular totemic icon of our bootlicker buddies; sadly, his site makes the strip impossible to find.
Space.com's Investigation Casts Light on the Mysterious Flying Black Triangle. Some Nevada-based nutball-science shop, the National Institute for Discovery Science, has been getting plenty of link with a recently released study concerning the contemporary "black triangle" variant of yoofo.
They theorize that said inky deltas are super-secret military LTA craft: that's BLIMP to me and thee, English.
(Is it just me, or should someone tell NIDS that big purple triangles in a prominent graphic on the root page of a UFO site brings a certain Nike-wearing alienist death cult to mind?)
Well, Space.com summarizes some of the speculation from NIDS thusly:
"Among a range of NIDS observations, the group believes the BBDs are powered by electrokinetic/field drives, or airborne nuclear power units. These craft also fly at extreme altitudes, high above conventional aircraft and the pulsing of ground-based traffic control radar."
To which, I gotta say, I am profoundly skeptical.
First, all of my reading on the US military and lighter-than-air aviation makes is absolutely clear: American military career people HATE the idea of LTA and fear it because of its' failure (perceived or otherwise) as a military technology. Advocate LTA, lose your career. The idea that some portion of the Pentagon's black budget is going to an LTA vehicle that operates with crew is just not realistic.
Second, although there are at least two serious, ongoing efforts to bring a heavy, cargo-oriented LTA vehicle to commercial service, it's a hard sell, at least party because of military resistance to the technology. The military is the primary source of incubation and development capital for new aviation concepts, and without the brass and cash, both Zeppelin NT and Cargolifter are having hard times, uh, getting things off the ground.
Finally, I find the power-source speculation absurd, as well.
First, "electrokinetic/field" drives are unknown in practice, although apparently several patents have been granted on the idea; if I actually follow the theories the idea is based on, the effects only take place at the molecular level and therefore do not produce a propulsive or lifting force great enough to push anything around bigger than a molecule. But I'm no expert here, just a skeptic.
The alternative, nuclear power, while obviously a viable energy source, has in fact been considered, in one form or another, as a power supply for aircraft; but not for quite a long time. As I recall, the technology involved was not a standard reactor but rather some sort of ramjet, in the context of ICBMs, and was rejected because of the obvious problems in testing: what if the craft came apart while in flight?
The link above contains exhaustive coverage to the history of experimentation with nuke-powered flight; unfortunately some of the material appears not to have made the transition to HTML, including a lot of the non-rocket-and-space material; it additionally shows that reactor-based power-supplies were indeed the primary focus of the research. However, development was dropped in the early 1970s in the face of increasing public skepticism concerning the viability of nuclear power.
Obviously, the military has indeed kept using the power supply; so why do I doubt that a reactor would be at the heart of this secret airship?
Well, primarily because the culture of LTA technology development has always emphasized light materials as the basic design and construction principle. While a giant blimp can obviously offer sufficient bouyancy (as NIDS notes) to loft considerably larger loads than any other form of flight technology, I have a hard time imagining an LTA engineer opting for a power supply which requires a fuel and equipment density the likes of nukes.
Additionally, while the Navy's LTA program was winding down in the early to mid sixties, some very large, and very ambitious, blimp designs were, um, floated. If ever someone was going to propose a reactor as the powersupply for a blimp, this would have been the time and place. Blimps, in the Navy, are not disssimilar to subs, just slower, easier to shoot down, and in the air. The Navy got its' nuclear subs and carriers; it cancelled its' LTA program altogether.
So, while the idea of a supersecret nuclear-powered LTA flying wing (I'm not even gonna bother taking on the form factor) is cool, and definitely entertaining, I'm gonna have to come down on the "uh - I don't think so" side of the equation. YMMV, natch.
Where Warriors and Ogres Lock Arms Instead of Swords
...and...
Cinescape's managing editor just told me that ComiCon in San Diego attracted 75,000 people this time, including the full weight of the Hollywood star machine due to upcomoing comics-based flicks.
When comics events become more popular than sporting events and the paper of record covers a player con for a MMOL role-playing game, does it signify something? Are the two events related at all?
In researching grad schools, I have learned that the newly revised UW Tuition Rates are insanely complex.
See, starting this fall, there are no fewer than SIXTEEN possible rates - each of which will be hiked every quarter for the next year.
Taking the hikes into account, that's up to SIXTY-FOUR varying rates a given grad student might find themselves paying over the upcoming academic year, depending upon which quarter it is and which school they are enrolled in.
Determining which rate is for you is, naturally, left for you, potential consumer or ensnared enrollee, to sort out.
One potential effect is that in a particularly popular course, each student might be enrolled from different program, and therefore each student is paying a different price for the exact same product.
How modern! How abusive! How arrogant!
Why, it's a brand-new Y2k voodoo doll, complete with pins!
Congratulations, Paul, now you can hold off that pesky Millennium Bug with ease as long as necessary! Please email shipping info as soon as is convenient, and we'll move heaven and Earth to get your prize to you.
p h o b e . c o m is a roundup of silliness that I stumbled across whilst looking for a sufficently offbeat virtual otter pop. I chuckled; perhaps you will too.
Of note: the obsessively detailed life of Harold Haxton, the director of such notable B-flicks as "I was a Monkey's Uncle" and "The Mummy's Foot".
Who can forget the scenery-chewing antics of T. Ross Mancini in "Green Doom"?
In July 25th's En cas d'urgence gardez votre calme I acknowledged that I'd recieved my fabulous prize from Paul Frankenstein Light Industries by posting a shot of me in the shirt.
Blabbing on at length, I eventually proposed this site's inaugural contest: who ever first identified all of the items in the photo (not counting your humble host) which had been previously featured in individual entries here would recieve a randomly drawn gimcrack from our household Big Bag o' Mystery Stuff, a bag which was manufactured by none other than your pal and mine, Archie McPhee.
How fitting, then, that the winner of the contest should prove to be Paul Frankenstein ("Stine", to his personal trainer and entourage). Mr. Frankenstein correctly identified the two items immediately behind my head as having been the subject of blog entries: the infamous KG Bobblehead and the less-well-beloved Blue King.
Oops! In looking into that last entry I realized that I'm overdue to provide my wife with a special prize of her own. So here it is:
Mr. Frankenstein, in the comments section on the entry which launched his winning observations, also felt that he recognized the "Redneck Rock" LP seen on the floor of my apartment in the lower right of the large picture. I assured him that it was doubtful, as the LP was an independent release originating in Vancuver, WA in the mid-seventies, and that I had found it in a free pile recently but been afraid to listen to it to date.
Rest assured, I'll listen soon, and you'll get to share the love, dear readers.
ken goldskee: yourn, this week garnered a comment I thought worthy of promotion, from one "Buck Wooley", a skee-baller (see below) of great repute (bolds and italics mine):
Dear Sir, I understand that you felt the need to profess your love of Ken Goldstein with a sincere description of his character. But as another admirer of "the steen", I feel compelled to show you the error of your ways.Ken Goldstein is a proud gallant hero of words and wisdom. A godly figure dressed in golden suede bell bottoms & ray bans.
Why? Why attempt to tarnish the reputation of the suave Ken Goldstein w/ such cardigan-wearing, easily-intimidated, pale-dry-boy falsities?
To which I can only say, woah! Hey, now, FOKG (see below), I'm not pickin' on nobuddy heah! I bow to no one in my admiration of the dashing figure Mr. Goldstein cuts!
Now, as far as Ken and falsies go, well, I can't possibly discuss that.
Also: "golden suede bell bottoms & ray bans" ? Um, was there a party I didn't get to because of my enhanced geezerness?
Yeesh! Ima put on my favorite cardigan now!
---
FOKG = Friends of Ken Goldstein.
While the sages don't clearly record how skilled a skee-baller Buck Wooley was, skee-ball fans from every corner of this great nation of ours have inundated me in deluge of Telex flimsies, singing telegrams, and whispering campaigns in an effort to correct my oversight: Mr. Wooley was, in fact, a sportswriter, and not a skee-ball pro. My oversight, and I thank the legions of Wooleyheads out there for your gentle corrective action.
Metafilter poster GriffX cites the excellent article "Death of a Dirigible", which alert and longtime readers of mike.whybark.com will recall cited as a part of my research links in my own account of the wreck of the airship Shenandoah published during the original Blimp Week, these many weeks ago.
Just kidding about the catch-up, you smart mobs out there!
Ken has published a helpful guide to The Illuminated Donkey which makes reference to the infamous issue #15. Sought after by collectors due to it's careful documentation of the history of Philadelphia's Museum of Skin Ailments (and the relationship of said museum to LA's Museum of Jurassic Technology) as well as previously unpublished photos of Marilyn Monroe, #15 also reprinted a comic strip of mine, "The Unexpected Beret", in the back of the book.
Since I have a personal perpective on this, and because (following my recent prose experiment in last week's KG of the Week) Mr. Goldstein (aka "Kenny", or "Goldy", to the boys in the deli) inadvertently dubbed the KG of the Week "MW of the Week", that's what we have here today.
This was prior to my introduction as a regular "sidekick" character (Chalky White to Mr. Goldstein's Rusty Brown, for you digilliterati out there), and the second appearance of me as a character in the continuing saga of The Donk. However, as the author of the story, I must stress that the character of Ike Whattree is merely self-caricature, and although accurately identified in the Guide as having had his handlebar moustache removed by bootleggers of the issue (see accompanying illo) after it's collectable value became apparent, does not apear under my name in the context of the issue at all.
An additional point on this matter: although I certainly gave Mr. Goldstein ("Steen", to those in the know) verbal permission to publish The Unexpected Beret in his book, the details of compensation were, unfortunately for me, left for later discussion.
To date, said compensation has included:
- One Fisher Space Pen, in package
- a WWF collectors card of Andre the Giant
- a postcard featuring the splashdown and recovery of Apollo 13
- and a tee shirt from the Deke Slayton Memorial Space and Bike Museum, of Sparta, Wisconsin
but no monetary compensation of any sort, despite the astounding amounts that suspiciously fresh, yet apparently non-counterfeit, copies of issue #15 regularly bring on eBay.
Despite this, I'd like to publicly disavow any rumors of a dispute or acrimony between Mr. Goldstein, his publishers and myself. Allegations of such a dispute - now or ever - are as baseless as allegations of my own involvement in the production of the counterfeit #15. Absolutely baseless, with no grounding in reality whatsoever.
This is the first flyer I did for my old band, the Bare Knuckle Boxers.
We had a monthly gig at the Art Bar, downtown (near one of the Amazon outposts), for about a year. Maybe a bit longer. The regulars in the place were more to the hip-hop end of the scale than people one might expect to attend gigs by a rock band playing punk-ish versions of Irish traditional music, but we definitely had some good nights. The show advertised on this flyer was one of them.
We had the good fortune to talk the incredilby talented Jason Webley into opening for us; honestly, it's hard to actually go on after Jason, because he's so good and so entertaining. Nonetheless, we ripped it up that night, and Jason was part of the reason.
Other highlights of the Art Bar tenure included a very drunk man, who spoke no English, from somewhere in Africa repeatedly attempting to hug everyone in the band, one at a time, while we were onstage and in the middle of songs, over and over again. He succeeded in getting us all to jump in the air while shouting "Africa", in imitation of an expression of happiness he had repeatedly made.
eBay: eBay item 1369970060 (Ends Aug-05-02 06:25:04 PDT ) - OOAK BAG LADY BARBIE CART & EMPTY CANS INCLD.
What does OOAK stand for?
I found this while looking for a doohickey I saw a little old lady with at the grocery store last week - basically a tripod golf bag cat that had been redesigned for use as an urban pedestrian's shopping bag hauler. The main spar of the cart had a bunch of heavy-duty hooks on it to hang bags from, a reasonably-tall rubber grip handle with a locking brake on it, and the rig itself rode on three 12-inch spoked wheel with inflated rubber tires.
I use a little-old-lady cheaply made wire-basket cart and doing so has given me more than enough time to identify the specific featuresI desire and potential engineering solutions to employ: the cart glimpsed at the store appeared to have them all.
It was the shopping cart of my dreams, and I can't find it on the web, because "shopping cart" in google means the digital mechanism where by one orders stuff on the web.
Alas.
Today we spent a pleasant afternoon with my parents in Seattle's International District; they hadn't visited the new megaUwajimaya and Mom was in the market for some Vietnamese fish sauce. Viv and I had been to the store previously but hadn't really wandered around it.
It's huge. The fish they have on display in range and price was competitive to what's available at the Pike Place Market, notably including sole for well under $5/lb. I ended up with a (non-oriental) barbeque grilling basket and a bottle of sale-price sake. Mom found her fish sauce and picked up food for the plane as well.
We wandered down the street and had pho for lunch, and foud some inexpensive ceramic bowls to use as cat food and water containers. Then we headed for SeaTac to see my parents off. The airport was not very busy, somewhat to my surprise.
In the morning the Blue Angels had been performing over our house, and in one memorable moment I experienced the sound and sight of an F-16 blasting full throttle from 500 feet away as the pilot stood his plane on end and began a loop. The tailpipes were pointed right at me.
On our return drive from the airport I noticed two miltary grey F-16s maneuvering fast, in following formation, and at about 300 feet over the freeway and nearby suburban areas. I immediately experienced concern. The jets continued to chase around our field of view, clearly distracting the freeway full of cars, for several minues, before coming low with gear extended in preparation for a landing at Boeing Field.
They were just a part of the Seafair festivities.
The day before I noted a military grey MiG flying low and south over our house at about 6 pm, presumably also coming to Boeing Field.
The Blue Angels retain their entertainment value for me; it was interesting to note how these unconventional airplane sightings, otherwise a source of joy for me in the past, provoked a more complex reaction this year.
Today I passed the exam for a Washington state learner's permit. I've never had a driver's license. Wish me luck.
Tangent.cx offers inter-site auto-linking, a concept of interest to wiki-ons and/or warp-ites. I suspect.
Ken is a husky fellow, who is actually physically larger than I believe he thinks himself - strapping, one might say. Yet he's generally somewhat retiring in demeanor, although quite capable of outbursts given the proper stimulus.
He's neither slender nor plump, yet his huskiness is not particularly of the athletic variety. He is somewhat self-conscious about his weight.
He has ginger hair, with a curl, which he keeps in a conventional short brush-back style; he wears oval glasses which are small enough to be in style yet not so small nor made of some outlandish material as to in some way mark him as artsy or high-falutin'. He has a strong appreciation for british media humor, and a similar interest in baseball, and, apparently, skee-ball. His eyes are brown, and slightly tilted, in toward the the center of his face. This tilt may actually be a result of his generally good-humored expression, which is also a result of his typical attitude.
His skin tone is fairly pale, with pale freckles. It has been prone to an uncomfortable dryness which he has remedied in a way which shall not be described here. Suffice to say it was both unconventional and harmless and inoffensive enough that it could be practiced in public.
His clothing tastes, again, are not sufficiently demanding of immediate note as to create an uncomfortable self-awareness for the wearer, yet they betray many of his tastes and fascinations. For instance, Ken possesses an assortment of both sweater vests and cardigans. These items of clothing are of course favored by the British clay animation character Wallace, of "Wallace and Grommit". Ken won first prize for best costume at a Halloween party in Seattle while attired as Wallace and Grommit.
Steve Buscemi's character in "Ghost World" favored cardigans; his wardrobe was based at least in part upon the wardrobe of "Ghost World" author Dan Clowes. Ken, of course, has a long standing appreciation for the work of Mr. Clowes, as well.
He owns, and will don in cold weather, an Arsenal team supporters' scarf. Typically, this is worn with a blue flannel anorak, the kind of hooded winter coat that features rope-and-tapered oak dowel fasteners. Jason Alexander wore a coat like this in several appearances on the television sitcom "Seinfeld".
Ken also has an interest in matters of fortune; which is to say, he knows what the inside of a casino looks like. He favors his interest in gambling as a dash of spice to his personality - it's his leather jacket, if you will.
As he himself has let us know, he is very nice. He can be quite retiring, and is prone to intimidation. He has a surprising streak of adventurousness. One way this adventurousness expresses itself is via Ken's relationships with others more brassy and noticeably bold than he.
