Burn Rate is a card game about, um, dot-com economics.
It’s a good companion piece to your dot-com Monopoly.
Amusingly, it’s being marketed by Wizards of the Coast, whom I helped beta test the hit card game Magic for.
Postal Humor
via boingboing, a pointer to a US Post Office site which features what Mark refers to as a “scary logo”; personally although the recently floated news concerning such things as a citizen informer corps and other institutionalizations of a surveillance culture do not please me or increase my sense of security, I don’t find the logo scary.
Someone who works for the PO was making a political opinion known – one which coincides with mine. Hope they don’t get in too much trouble.
Captain Kirk's Chair: SOLD!
eBay Live Auctions item 1834314676 (Ends ) – Capt. Kirk’s Bridge Command Chair sold at that eBAY auction I made note of the other day for… drumroll please… $265,000!
Is it a bargain? Is it very expensive naugahyde and plywood? Who can say?
BLIMP WEEK UPDATE PART UMPTEEN
Now on ebay: Own your own blimp!
Someone else’s loss is your gain. We found this SEA DOO blimp hung up on one of our fences on our ranch (in the middle of nowhere). It was fully inflated with helium and flying a couple of hundred feet in the air, so there are no holes in it. It has at least 200′ of cord (which was how it hung on our fence) so it can fly high over your place!
This thing draws a lot of attention!
The only damage that we could find was that the seam has come apart on one of the fins and it had duct tape around the edge. This doesn’t affect the part that holds the air, and would not be noticeable while “flying”.
We have it tied to our jeep in the picture, so you can see the size difference between the jeep and the blimp and the loader.
The object in question is an inflated 20-25 foot advertising buoy-blimp, the kind of thing one sees tethered over car dealerships. There is no mention of shipping details.
Ken et some croc
Good pal and inexplicable focus of my weekly “Ken Goldstein of the Week” feature Ken Goldstein did the only sensible thing a single man of 30 summers can do when presented with a four day weekend in the United States: he took a road trip.
He drove east to near Nashville, and then southwest into Georgia and South Carolina. Why, if I’d known, I could have had my parents feed him when he drove north through North Carolina!
Day One: Gatlinburg, Tennessee concludes a long, hard day of minor league baseball and Pigeon Forge, TN.
Day Two: The wonders of Pigeon Forge roll on and on, and so does Ken, down to Georgia, in search of a hotel room.
Day Three: What better way to spend the fourth in Appalachia than at the 7th Annual Redneck Games! This is one hilarious anecdote, yessuh.
Day Four: Mecca: Ken arrives at world-famous South of the Border, where instead of actual Mexican culture and Mexicans, you can see a peculiar, mid-century American imitation! Trivia question: which came first, Seattle’s Space Needle, or S.O.B’s Space Sombrero?
Why, I feel as though I’ve just spent four days peeling my skin off the broiling vinyl of my family’s 1973 Dodge Dart, reading, sweating, and bickering with my sister.
New Cinescape reviews up
Since last fall, I’ve been writing reviews of comics (with occasional Star Trek coverage, working with interviews of people on the crew of Enterprise) for Cinescape, a sort of latter-day Starlog or Fangoria which is much snappier, and broader in coverage, than these precursors.
Anyway, I recently turned in six reviews, and the first two of that batch have been posted.
Both are Fantagraphics books. I have an informal OK from my editor to begin soliciting review copies from some of the other boutique and art comix publishers, which I look forward to.
DJ Matty weighs in
from the hoodoo swamps of Noooo Orleans, it’s former cohort in punk rock MATT UHLMANN with his whiskey river quarter on my book reviews yestiddy and the broader topic of punk rock history publishing, incorporated. TAKE IT AWAY MATTY!
Man, don’t give up on rock and roll mike!
you really don’t get that sense of “possibility and excitement” anymore? or just when reading these books??
Just the books, Matt. But I get the sense of possibility and excitement mostly when I hear a field recording of a dead person trying to remember the words to a folksong that their grandparents taught them. Or when I’m playing a gig, I suppose.
remember when there WERE NO BOOKS ABOUT PUNK ROCK?? haha it wasn’t that long ago, was it?…then in the late 80’s one or two came out and mid 90’s they came pouring out…I have to admit I haven’t bought any even when I’ve seen them on the sale rack!! mostly they are repeated tellings of untruths and legends (punk rock happened in NYC and LONDON exclusively, and was an socio-art movement blahblahblah).
“Kill me” is a VH-1 style expose on the sordid lives of some true fuck ups…it IS NOT ABOUT THE MUSIC…which is by the way the only reason said individuals are worth talking about anyway. The fashions, the ideologies, the hair, the ‘life-styles’.
That was one of the problems with punk rock anyway… people didn’t admit that the music was what really mattered and punk rock was part of the bigger history of rock and roll. It’s the flip side of Lipstick Traces by Marcus and even worse: “subculture: the meaning of style” by dick hebdige. These two books also ignore the music – not to talk about the “Dirt”, but to overanalyze the so called ‘artistic’ and ‘socio-political’ aspects of (this time english) punk respectively.
Basically any book that flat out ignores the music is bunk. At least “traces” gives you a sense (however EXTREMELY slanted toward the negative aspects) of what was going on and maybe why. You could read a dry academic-ass book like “Subculture” 20 times and still have no concept of what being a punk (or mod or rocker or whatever) was all about.
I think one of the best and one I would probably actually buy if I saw it for 10 bucks or so is “Hardcore California” remember it? from like ’83 or so…now that was a good book. a good history FROM THE INSIDE that gave you a sense of the scene(s). maybe second and worth a good 5 bucks in the used bin is the re-printed sniffin glue (mostly for the lengthy forward/interview with Mark P. that explodes most of the punk rock myths the other books on punk and histories of rock and roll are trying to build.)
Oh, absolutely I recall Hardcore California. What an anomaly: it came out while all this was still happening, had great pix, good production vaules; hm, I bet it was as instrumental as MRR in propagating things back in the day actually. Sniffin’ Glue reprint was interesting at first but I can’t look at it today, it’s just not up my alley anymore.
also I must admit to having picked up (ALSO USED MIND YOU) the two collected volumes of search and destroy…the main thing for me to say about them is how the bands that framed themselves in the context of the history of rock and roll(or american culture)…eg. Suicide, the Cramps, the Damned, DEVO, etc. make for mostly interesting interviews…the bands that framed themselves in the contexts of ‘destroy the past, the revolution is coming’ (who also were not-coincidentally obsessed with a wider audience–you know “lets get more kids involved”) eg. the DILS, the AVENGERS, Feederz, the ahem–INDUSTRIAL folks, etc. make for mostly laughable/sad interviews.
anyway mike don’t give up the ROCK…I mean when I see a good band (I know, I know, it’s becoming a rare thing) or hear a good lp, or cd or see a good video whether it’s from this week or from 1980 or from 1958 I still feel that roller-coaster feeling inside…
Thank you, MATTY! A big hand, folks, for a man who knows more about the ROCK than I ever did or will!
C.O.S. gets boinged!
Old pal Chuck Swaim, and his mystery supergroup the Dead Air Fresheners get a plug on boingboing‘s guestbar.
Chuck has links here, too:
http://www.angelfire.com/band2/pit/nosleep1.html
http://www.mp3.com/stations/gothmusicandpoetry
And here’s a shot of me and Chuck at the Capitol in Olywa.
Amusingly, the guest curator of the guest bar, Tiffany Lee Brown, has a review of “American Hardcore” at one of her other blogs. She likes it okay but not enough to keep it, because the book reflects the macho exclusionary qualities of hardcore itself. She was also irritated by the Dumb Capitalization, I infer.
PWC Consulting RENAMED!
In what I can only assume to be continuing fallout from Enron, the dot-collapse, et al – PriceWaterhouseCoopers Consulting has chosen a new moniker. I’ll let Anne Zender fill you in – go on, I’ll be here when you get back, waiting.
What can I say? At least it’s a word.
Of course, it seems to me that if someone were to whip up a web poll (you know who you are) concerning posible days of the week one might wish to name a consulting firm after, there are other, more accurate and descriptive choices, such as “Beer Friday” and “Tuethursday” (this last of course describing the we-must-ship-the-software-now-no-one-may-leave-the-premises-until-someone-dies-or-the-project-is-done business practice sooo beloved in tech – ooh! triple overtime!).
I wonder, did they hire a consulting firm?
Of course, after reflection, I realize that the name is intended as an antidote to the wild-eyed spend-spend-spend world of accounting and consulting practices that closed Andersen recently.
That, and they can license a fine The Mamas and The Papas song. I don’t think they’ll buy using the Boomtown Rats song, though.
—
Mmmph. Self-annoyance! I meant to post this (well, duh) on Monday. Dagnabbit. Ken no doubt figures it’s john barleycorn wuz the causin’ of it all, but it wernt.
Frankenstein on the Pledge
in his longish entry for June 26th Paul says everything I wanted to about the recent supreme court decision that ye Prez has termed “ridiculous”. Congressional defiance of this decision simply underlines the growing distance between political reality and the one we actualy happen to live in. But then, we all knew the constitution was in serious fucking trouble during the election, and naturally, subequent events have done much to bear out this knowledge.
SPQR, indeed.