March 2006 Archives
What happens when Disney creates a phony band consisting of kids singing Devo covers? Surprisingly, something wonderful. Devo songs are among the best ever written, and these kids, under the direction of Devo member Gerry Casale do a fantastic job of making the songs fun and keeping them strange.
This two disc set includes a DVD with an hour and a half worth of video, including songs and interviews with the original Devo bandmembers. In a world where most kids' music is condescending and vapid, this is an instant classic. $12.97 on Amazon.com
This is the only Wi-Fi detector I know of that can tell you whether or not an in-range Wi-Fi access point is open or closed.
That means when I'm in a hotel lobby, airport, or other public place, I can keep my notebook computer in its case and use this little gadget to find out if there's any usable Wi-Fi wafting through the area.
It's also the only device that tells you how many wireless access points are in range and the names and signal strengths of each. It requires no set-up and has just one button. Truly, a useful tool. $54.99 at Amazon
I've been looking for a cutlery set for a while, and when I checked the wonderful Amazon.com "Outlet" department (where everything is discounted at least 70%) I found this Cuisinart 6-Piece Cutlery Set for $39.99 (with free shipping), a 79% savings over the retail price of $195.00. Seems like a great deal to me. Link
Incredibly strange creatures walk the earth! Well, maybe in this case it's more accurate to say incredibly strange creatures swim and slither in the briny deep. These color plates, created by biologist Ernst Haeckel in the mid-1800s, are wonder-inspiring depictions of unusual forms of ocean life (though bug, birds, bats, and other beasts make an appearance here, too).
I've heard that Haeckel sort of force fit his drawings to conform to his unusual theories about evolution, one of which was, "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," that is, the developmental stages of an embryo follow the same stages of the evolutionary development of a species. That doesn't really bother me, because his drawings are so beautiful. $15.75 on Amazon
With over 30,000 emails in my Macintosh Mail application, searching had slowed to a crawl. My Mail.app seemed to be slower and buggier lately as well. Guessing that I had too many email messages in the database, I tried a highly-recommended email archiving program called MailSteward.
It's easy to use. Just click the "Setup" button and then click on a few checkboxes, then click "Store email in database." It took all night for it to index my files, but once it finished, I was able to clean out my email app and start from scratch. Now, at the end of each day, I click "Store email in database," button and MailSteward sucks all the new mail from that day into its database. $29.95
It's a shame Apple cripples its otherwise excellent iTunes and iPod by making it difficult to copy songs from one machine to another. Yes, I know Apple must play ball with the music industry, but the truth is, locking up hardware and embedding DRM into music doesn't prevent piracy. Anyone can buy a CD, rip it to MP3 and upload it to a filesharing network, rendering all that expensive and inconvenience-causing DRM useless.
I buy a lot of Macintoshes and iPods, and every time I get a new machine, I run into trouble transferring the songs. I'll plug my iPod into a new computer and a window in iTunes pops up that gives me the choice of either not being able to connect to iTunes or zapping every song on my iPod. What a lousy choice! And if you've ever tried to copy a song from iPod to iTunes, you will discover that you can't.
Thank goodness for iPodDisk, a free OS X utility that fixes what iTunes broke by letting you copy music from any iPod to any Mac. When you launch it, it opens a Finder window with all your music on it. You are free to copy it onto your Mac. Hurray! Free
One of the most memorable short stories I published in bOING bOING (the print zine) was a story by Wayne Allen Brenner called "Alphabet Noir," in which the narrator described the breakdown of his relationship with his former girlfriend in a series of small chapters, labeled A through Z.
Recently Brenner sent me a wildly inventive story he wrote and published in the form of a small pamphlet titled "Five Simple Steps to Great Joy in this World of Sorrow." Very well made, It looks just like the kind of crank religious booklet that was common in the pre-internet era, and the writing style is inspired by those supremely self-assured kooks who write pamphlets that promise to reveal the secrets of life.
Brenner's 8-page story is composed of five short chapters, labeled Step 1 through Step 5. Each step begins with a command to do something, followed by an explanation that sometimes includes a reference to mysterious, evil entities who manipulate gravity to their gain and humanity's loss.
Excerpt:
"Step One"The first thing you need to do is this: Let this document fall..."
"That's right, hold it in front of yourself and let it fall to the ground. Make sure you watch it fall--watch it closely, now--and make sure it falls all the way, make sure it actually hits the ground. If it hits the ground, then you know gravity is still at work, that everything's doing what it's supposed to do, and then you're free to move on to the next step."
As far as I know, the only way to get copies of this wonderful document is by sending one dollar to:
The Department of Gravitational Assurance
P.O. Box 4942
Austin, TX 78765
For $70, this is a nice solution for playing your iPod through your home stereo system. You plug the cables coming out of the dock into the aux jack of your stereo. (You also have to plug a wall wart into the dock in order to keep the iPod charged.) I appreciated the ease of use -- I didn't even need to use the manual.
The remote allows you to jump from one playlist to another, and skip forward or back by track, but there's no volume control. Also, the remote uses infrared not RF, so you need a line of sight to the dock to skip songs, which is not idea for my set up (I hide the stereo system and HiFi-Link in a cabinet, so I need to keep the cabinet doors open if I want to be able to change a song.)
The HiFi-Link also hooks up to a TV, so you can view photos and videos (if you have an iPod Video) with it. I haven't tried that yet. $70.99 on Amazon.com
Written in 1980, White Light is one of my favorite novels by one of my favorite authors, Rudy Rucker. The story concerns a severely disenchanted math professor name Felix Rayman who hates his job at a University in upstate New York. One day, while either lucid dreaming or astral projecting, Rayman finds himself in a world of more than four dimensions, populated by strange Alice-In-Wonderland creatures. One of them, a giant beetle named Franx, becomes Rayman's companion as he makes his way through across a mathematically-themed world, attempting to reach across infinity to meet God.
Rucker is the founder of a science fiction genre he called Transrealism, which can be summed up as "write like yourself, only more so." Here's Rucker's "A Transrealist Manifesto" from 1983. In it, he wrote, "The Transrealist writes about immediate perceptions in a fantastic way." I think it's a great way to write fiction. $11.16 on Amazon
Four Jobs I've Had in My Life in LA
1. Failure analysis engineer, Marina Del Rey. The worst job I've ever had. I commuted between Sherman Oaks and Marina Del Rey on the 405 and was in the mood for murder at the end of each drive. The actual job itself -- figuring out why 8-inch hard disk drives had failed -- sucked beyond belief, too. I quit after four months.
2. Computer systems consultant, Toluca Lake. Ran my own business setting up computers for people in the late 1980s.
3. Freelance designer, Hollywood California. I designed Billy Idol's Cyberpunk CD artwork. He called me on the phone one day out of the blue, after having picked up a copy of bOING bOING, and asked me if I'd be interested in designing his new CD cover. I said sure. About ten minutes later, the record company's art director called me and gave me the specs: Mac, Bhotoshop Tiffs, 300 dpi, etc. I had never used Photoshop or a Macintosh before, but I didn't tell him that. As soon as I got off the phone, I went to the store and bought a copy of Photoshop and started reading the manual.
The next day I put the Photoshop software in my backpack, got on my motorcycle and rode to Billy's house in the Hollywood Hills. He was super friendly and chatty. He led me to his in-home recording studio which had a Mac. I don't know what kind -- this was late 1992 or early 1993. I installed the 7 or 8 disks onto the Mac. Billy was staring over my shoulder the whole time. I was a little nervous. He had an external hard drive with some screen grabs of his recent music video. I figured out how to load the pictures, thank God. Then I just started opening the menus in Photoshop and trying out random stuff. The image was getting all warped and purple toned. I didn't know what to think. I was just going along for the ride, praying it would work out.
After about five minutes, Billy cried, "Stop! Whoa! Fuck me! That's brilliant!" So that was it. We used the image for the cover. For the next several weeks I did his other singles, his print ads, video boxes, and even wrote the advertising copy and his publicity kit bio. I spent a lot of time at his place, and got to know him. He was always very polite and loved to talk about any subject you brought up.
When I started working at Wired, I continued to do CD single design for him.
4. Editor-in-Chief, Make Magazine, Tarzana. I love this job more than any other job I've ever had, in LA or elsewhere. If I won the lottery, I'd still do it.
Four Movies About LA I Could Watch Over And Over:
1. The Player
3. Streets. 19990, starring Christina Applegate. From IMDB: "Serious, well-made story of runaways living in Venice, California, under the threat of a psychotic cop who is a serial killer of prostitutes."
4. Echo Park
Four Of My Favorite Foods Found In LA
1. Volcano Chicken Bowl at Newsroom Cafe on Robertson. This was one of the daily specials, and was the most scorchingly hot meal I've ever eaten (and I can tolerate very spicy dishes). The ensuing endorphin rush was exquisite. I'll never forget it. I have seen Volcano Chicken offered there again. Was it a dream?
2. Akbar Indian food, Pasadena.
3. Carney's, Studio City. Excellent Hamburgers served in a train car.
4. Bob's Big Boy, Burbank. Designed by mid-century architect Wayne MacAllister in 1949. As a bonus, the food is good and reasonably priced.
Tagged:
1. Neatorama
