2001 October❮❮prevnext❯❯

sweet and short

(13 comments)
Poem of the Moment
"MeWe!"
--Shortest poem according to "The Guinness Book of Records". This article talks about it and some other ideas in art.

Toy Link of the Moment
Modern Living is one of the coolest Flash sites I've ever seen. Click on the man in the recliner, then select a set of animations, then click on an animation. The collection has a very interesting style and a twisted edge, a bit like interactive Plymptoons. The parent site, hoogerbrugge.com, has some other animations as well.

sneezing of you

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Man, it seems like tons of people are getting sick... I think I helped to give a cold to Erin and John, and everyone at Mo's office was going home early the other day. I'm pretty confident it's just one of those things, but the timing is so ominous.

Link of the Moment
This is Nasubi. From the link:

Nippon Television's (NTV) producers have obviously never heard of the Geneva Convention. If they had, they wouldn't have treated poor Nasubi the way they did. They wouldn't have stripped him naked and shut him in an apartment, alone with no food, furniture, household goods, or entertainment. They wouldn't have kept him there for over a year until he had won $10 000 in prizes by sending in postcards to contests. They wouldn't have cut him off from the world and they would have told him that he was on nation-wide TV.

Japanese Entertainment: the world's finest! A very comprehensive webpage.

Quote of the Moment
"I cannot condone a society in which to eat a sheep is acceptable but to fuck a sheep is a crime..."
--The Rev. Dr. Jack Collins

toys and chocolate

(2 comments)
Conversation between Me and Mo
"Is that a shirt or a blouse you're wearing?"
      "It's a shirt, duh."
"Actually, what's the difference between a shirt and a blouse?"
      "Easy, I don't own any blouses"
--October 2, 2001. I've learned the hard way that the same differentiation applies between a "small bag" and a "purse": if Mo is carrying it, it is not a purse.

Kinder Eggs
In Germany Mo and I had these great "Kinder Überraschung Eier", or "Kid Surprise Eggs". They're white and dark chocolate eggs with a yellow capsule inside, and inside the capsule is a toy, either a figurine or something you assemble. They're a lot of fun and are available pretty much everywhere in the world except our nanny state USA, where the FDA considers pretty much any toy inside food a choking hazard ("Won't somebody think of the children?" Alas, they have.) This Unofficial site from the UK has a good FAQ. Recently I found out that people in the USA can order eggs from kinder-eggs.com. Jim MacKenzie will sell you a batch of 24 for less than a dollar an egg, including shipping. Supposedly everywhere but Germany gets the Italian version of the product, which they say aren't quite as finely crafted, but ones Mo and I bought in Mexico where interesting enough. (Link via and Bird Image blatantly ripped off of Ranjit's Kindereggs Page)

rather random

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Heh. When I was in high school (Dear old Euclid) we had a phenomenal football team. We'd kick everyone's butt, up to the point we had to play the Catholic schools, who could basically draft all the talent they needed. Anyway, a big part of that was a player named Robert Smith. He was a year ahead of me but I usually ended up sitting a few tables from him in the cafeteria, thanks to band. Anyway, this is the same Robert Smith who became one of the star players of the Minnesota Vikings... in fact he has fan sites dedicated just to him. It sounds like he's considered a real class act. He recently announced his retirement...some little thing about wanting to be able to walk when he was in his 40s. Anyway, I'm always amused when I end up controlling his character in "NFL Blitz 2000". I had to get out a yearbook to prove his EHS-ness to my cousin. (Euclid had some other great players, like Pepe Pearson, though as far as I know no one quite as stellar as Smith.)

Logo of the Moment
I saw this red cow logo, for the Robert Stigwood Organization, at the end of the movie "Tommy". The company was associated with some really big projects in the 1970s, Grease, Saturday Night Fever, Jesus Christ Superstar etc. Their "real site" seems dead, but information on what it did can be found on this Saturday Night Fever (the musical) site.

I dunno, I just really like the logo.

Link of the Moment
Ever heard of a trauma treatment called EMDR? Salon.com has an interesting piece on it...supposedly it's highly effective, though to an observer it looks like hokum, like low-rate hypnotism. Interesting.

nuttyphoto

(2 comments)
Quote of the Moment
"The guy's nuttier than squirrel turds"
--Officer in Me, Myself, & Irene

Link of the Moment
Nutty liberal conspiracy theory or did Gore win an outright victory in Florida? (Even more likely to be unmentioned in these times of crisis. I'm glad that President Jr. and Co. haven't just rushed in there, but I think Gore would have avoid loose talk of a "Crusade" and all the cowboy chatter.)

Image of the Moment

I just wanted to say that this tree that I pass weekdays on my way to work, although partially obscured by a telephone pole, looks a lot like a rooster. That is all.

thoughts of the produce section 3comic

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Notes: "The World's Angriest Eggplant" was one of the earliest participants in Thoughts of the Produce Section. The corn is thinking of a slogan that I couldn't get out of my head during my a cappella days with sQ (alternating with "Shake What Yo Mama Gave Ya".) The other two speak for themselves, for what it's worth. (More on the history of Thoughts of the Produce Section)

this amazing offer!shirt

Unbelievable Never to be Repeated Offer of the Moment

Wanna buy a kisrael.com shirt? Only $14 + $4 S/H. This amazing offer made possible by a really cool site called CafePress.com It costs you nothing to setup a 'store', upload art, and slap it on various shirts, mugs, hats, etc. You can then set the price: $14 is the base price for a basic white T, anything you wish to charge more than that can be your profit. (So far, the only annoying thing I've found about them is that you can only have one item type per 'store'--the thing is you can have multiple stores, so it's not as annoying as it could be.)

Supposedly they've been around for a few years, so it sounds like their business plan might actually work.

I used this picture as the basis for the gear. Also, I made up a full line of LoveBlenderWear, along with publishing a new Blender Digest.

cat woman. meow.

(6 comments)
"Batman Returns" was on this weekend. Catwoman. Yowza. Found this fan tribute page.

There's a war on. I don't want to think about it.

Instead, I'll think about Catwoman.

She can sharpen her claws on my furniture any time.

I have to find that song that goes "Catwoman...meow" in a weird deep growl techno voice.

team applehistory

Ugh, I can't believe that yesterday there were flakes of snow floating about. How discouraging. (Shut up Dylan.) And to think just this weekend I was a member of

Band Lemming Special Task Force Team Apple
Also, thanks to Dan (lower left) for another great link,
Apple Picking with Mr. T.

Quote of the Moment
"Mixed feelings are good. Keep ya balanced."
--Angus Shaw, She Creature, a good but not great Cinemax remake of an old Mermaid flick. Beautiful mermaid, though, almost up there with Catwoman.

Proverb of the Moment
"Blood cannot be washed out with blood."
--From this page of 100 Afghan Proverbs. Especially timely now.

guest who?

(1 comment)
Wow, it was a busy time on this site's guestbook yesterday. Not sure who Y.Nne is at the moment, maybe I'm being dense.

Multimedia of the Moment
Interesting flash film: What message? You left a message? (self-described as a "Science Fiction Flash Movie without Interest") Would be one of the coolest flash videos ever, except that it doesn't heed the precept "harmonicas spoil most things". (via Ranjit I think.)

Quote of the Moment
You can't make people happy by law. If you said to a bunch of average people two hundred years ago "Would you be happy in a world where medical care is widely available, houses are clean, the world's music and sights and foods can be brought into your home at small cost, travelling even 100 miles is easy, childbirth is generally not fatal to mother or child, you don't have to die of dental abcesses and you don't have to do what the squire tells you" they'd think you were talking about the New Jerusalem and say 'yes'.
--Terry Pratchett in alt.fan.pratchett. I might be going on a bit of a Pratchett quote kick.

when popcultures collide

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So, I've been able to lose some weight, which led to this exchange with Ranjit:

Chat Excerpt of the Moment
kirk: time to stairmaster...with good eatin' and exercise I'm back down to the 170s! Haven't been their til sometime right after highschool. Of course, I'm monitoring my weight like a teenage girl, but you know.
ranjit: Monitoring your weight like two teenage girls!
ranjit: Sorry, couldn't resist...

It's good to have friends who can knock softballs like that out of the park. (Previous prize went to Peterman...way back when I had been experimenting with having a Slimfast for breakfast he said "damn bitch, better drink two, that shit ain't working!")

Web Culture of the Moment
Currently making the rounds is the tale of how an image of Bert (of Bert and Ernie fame...my parent's remembered which one is which via the phrase "Ernie is Er-range") got onto posters carried by protesters in the Middle East. A while back (possibly before September 11?) someone added an image of Bert to one of Osama bin Laden. (This was a continuation of an earlier to a general Bert is Evil web meme.) And it seems that somehow the photo of the two of them made it into a collage carried by the protesters! The photos of the posters seem legit, although it seems like a later batch was made sans Muppet. The best investigation seems to be the lindqvist.com but Wired and FOX are both reporting on it. And here's another example of the poster in action from Reuters.

Man, that's really funny.

kirk

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Hmmm. I see kirk.com is back in "inscrutable" mode. For the longest time it had a picture of a VW van, and nothing else. Then for a while it was some sort of half-baked portal wannabe. Now it's just a graph of the word "Kirk" with a merged i and r. Odd. For a while, especially during the VW bug stage, I had this vision that "rats! if only that site wasn't there I'd have one of the ultimate vanity domains!" but the fact is there are a lot geeky Kirks out there, many of whom are more wired than yours truly, even by the standards of 1996.

Link of the Moment
Excellent essay on Fundamentalism and its conflict with the modern world, from the NY Times. I think people who say religion is bad should temper that sentiment...after some of the worst atrocities were by "godless" regimes. But they were, in a sense, fundamentalist. I'm begining to think fundamentalism is pretty much evil but right now I don't have a defintion of fundamentalism I'm happy with. (via camworld)

Quote of the Moment
"If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner."
--Tallulah Bankhead

thoughts of the produce section 4comic

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Hey, my high school best friend Mike's in town, with his friend Dave. I feel like I'm a pretty bad host when it comes to knowing how to show off a city, though.

Thoughts of the Produce Section 4


Notes: The pumpkin is kind of at the intersection of a few fairy tale ideas. The apple is a bit lovelorn. The potato is a reformed hippy, and the asparagus (tough to draw those) is spouting what I think sounds like old European wisdom. These four conclude my Palm-based Thoughts of the Produce section, though I still have some pixeltime ones to go.(More on the history of Thoughts of the Produce Section)

$50 for pool?

(1 comment)
(Message to Katie P... if you get this give mookie an e-mail at mookie@en.com)

Last night Mo and I went with Mike and Dave to Rudy's and then to Boston Billiard Club...it was fun, but pretty expensive... I guess the waitresses in the short black dresses and knee high boots shoulda been a give away. Our waitress was pretty amazing, with a body right out of the more realistically drawn R. Crumb cartoons...actually not too far from Devil Girl.

Political Quote of the Moment
But I think the deepest reason for this divergence is a simple lack of power. The awful thing about becoming a second-rank power is that you discover that foreign affairs involves dealing with foreigners, and taking seriously their absurd ideas about the world. This is something which America has yet to learn.
Andrew Brown in salon.com, on the divergence in foreign policy attitude between the USA and the UK.

Link of the Moment
A fun little read, A Letter To My Younger Self, where 42 year old Brian Elroy McKinley writes to his 14 year old incarnation. If only we all could do something like this! (Of course, if everyone told their younger selves to "buy microsoft stock" and so on, the markets would get pretty darn weird.)

Image of the Moment

Click for Original

On stileproject.com (a rather raunchy R-rated site), an unusually innocent image of a guy who made himself a transformer costume...that actually (more or less) transforms. Akihide Fukui from California made it...amazing in more ways than one.

in bostontravel

(4 comments)
Mike and Dave from this weekend. In the background is that neat building with big arch, between 93 and the harbor.

We went on the subway this weekend. I've always been struck by these two signs:

PASSENGER EMERGENCY INTERCOM UNIT AT END OF CAR.
SISTEMA DE INTERCOMUNICACION PARA PASAJEROS EN CASO DE EMERGENCIA SITUADO AL EXTREMO DEL TREN.

They say basically the same thing, but it always struck me how much more concise the English version was than the Spanish. On the other hand, certain other phrases, especially involving verbs and recipients of action, are much tighter in Spanish. That plus the smaller selection of word ending sounds probably is what makes for better poetry. But English seems good at the nouns.

Link of the Moment
There has been 4 of 5 cartoons in the What The Drugs Taught Me series up for a while, don't know if the fifth one is ever going to show up. (UPDATE: Here's the Final Cartoon) I like the narrator's mom's rule, a two year statute of limitations, after that you can admit anything and she can't get bad. (Other favorite quote: "Maybe everything I've been told is bad... is good!" Such a goofy sophomoric way of looking at the world.)

more middle east mush

Ah...got my Palm IIIc back the other week. That PalmV is falling apart. It's so nice to have a color screen...not for any particular color display need, but it's pure black-on-white (not dark grey on light grey) is so much easier to read. (The cat knocked the IIIc off the table onto the floor giving the screen a nasty crack or three.)

Web Comic of the Moment
This panel's from Get Your War On by mnftiu.cc. (The site name comes from "My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable", from a series of Karate cartoons also on the site. Also Filing cartoons.) The artist uses old clipart (I always thought that stuff was pretty creepy) to make some funny/true cartoons. Pretty decent political satire, actually. (via cruel.com)

Idea of the Moment
"An Israeli friend recently informed me that the UK fought the Islamic terrorist attacks by burying the criminals with a pig. Apparently the Islamic belief is that if ones' body is buried with a pig (because they are considered unclean) their soul will go to hell.
I did a little research into this subject matter and found it to be basically true. (at least for certain fundamentalists) This got me thinking. If we put a baby pig on every airline flight then all suicide terrorists would abort their missions as they would not want their souls to go to hell."
--Alien54 on slashdot. Hahaha, afraid of pork. That's almost as funny as that Osama Bert-Laden thing.

middle east to mountain king

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Sick Sad World of the Moment
Awright! What better way to pick up the pieces of the national psyche than a new CBS sitcom about the romance between two former spouses of WTC victims? Also, going on with yesterday's using pigs to stop Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, a piece on Sexual fantasies of a suicide bomber that talks about the relationship between sex and young male terrorists, from August.

Supposedly, Israeli forensic pathologists find that suicide bombers often wrap their genitals in protective material, in order to save them for all those virgins they'll be gettin' in the afterlife. I love the messed up halflogic of that. It's right up there with the pigs... I guess the materialist in me will kind of accept a spirituality, but it's this mix and match of the physical and the ethereal that makes me giggle.

Geek of the Moment
Ok, you have to be a fairly hardcore oldschool videogame geek to appreciate the beauty of this thorough map of Mountain King for the Atari 2600. Actually maybe not; the map has a certain elegance of its own. Anyway, it's a real achievement. Mountain King was an impressive game for the time, as you can see it had a very large world. (And a nice rendition of the song.) Plus, there was that secret area 'above' the main mountain, that the website covers pretty well. At first I assumed it was a glitch, but it turns out most of the Mountain King games for different systems had something like this. When you're way up there at the top, ladders and platforms shimmer and shake, it's like the game is letting you see something that doesn't really exist.

three monkeys. twelve monkeys.

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Games of the Moment
One of the cutest and most hypnotic games I've ever seen, chicken wings are not for flying. There is a whole slew of neat games there: some aren't so great, but most of them are beautifully done, with nice attention to visual design, sound, and gameplay. I especially like The Amazing Dare-Dozen ("The dangerously daring mission of twelve farm fresh eggs to boldly go where no egg has gone before") and The Three Monkeys. Also, be sure to check out the non-game 'misc' stuff on this page..."alphabet" is especially cool. (via John who pointed out a memepool link I had missed.)

Link of the Moment
Peterman mailed around a this link: Treatise on Staying Calm in the current situation. The guy points out that most of the likely terror attacks (biological, chemical, nuclear) aren't going to be that effective, and what to do if you are involved. It's actually pretty reassuring, and the guy sounds like he knows what he is talking about.

fearsome 8x8 pixel monstersgeek

(3 comments)
Oy...the one thing about starting your day by bringing a blood-laced kitty pee sample to the vets: you can have high hopes that everything else in the day will be an improvement.

Gaming Link of the Moment
Cool! ClassicGaming.com published my review of Crossroads I & II, with emulator downloads. This was a great pair of games for the Commodore 64, but not very well known, since they were released with a magazine COMPUTE!'s Gazette. I'm glad they'll be getting more attention on this site, they're kind of a pet cause of mine.

Link of the Moment
On slate.com: somewhere between the rosy future of Idealism and the throw-up-your-hands-hopelessness of Skepticism lies The Practical View of Negativism. I think it's a pretty good outlook.

Quote of the Moment
"'They can ta'k our live but they can never ta'k our freedom!' Now there's a battle cry not designed by a clear thinker..."
--Terry Pratchett on Braveheart in alt.fan.pratchett

that's unpossible!

--via Stileproject, obviously (raunchy site) I've seen this idea before but never done so well...

is everything about drugs to you?

(2 comments)
Link of the Moment
From the same thinking that brought us the Top 10 Reasons Scooby Doo is All About Drugs it's the Subtext of Gilligan Island Revealed! Actually, on a more serious note, I heard that it was originally planned as a fairly sophisticated philosophical metaphor for a class-based society, which is why you have all the types represented. (via Bill the Splut)

Web Comic of the Moment
Nowhere Girl is the first installment of a really good graphic novel style comic. Good artwork and a very good story. I actually used a new cheat script I made that lets you loads all the pages of it on one HTML page to view it, but I shouldn't publish the full link to that because of copyright issues...but e-mail if you want more info. (I just hate waiting for webpages to load as I'm trying to read something.) (via memepool)

to dream an impossible dreamcool

(9 comments)

Yay! Another one of my dreams has been turned into a four panel cartoon by Jesse Reklaw at Slow Wave! This one doesn't have quite the narrative punch as the first one he did but still I'm very happy with it. He got the Yak people down very well.

One dream that didn't make it was where I'm dealing with an orangutan-- kind of like King Louie from the Jungle Book-- and another friend of mine is eating this brown pellet. The other friend says "hmm, these taste funny, what are they, chocolate covered banana beans?" and the orangutan gets this sheepish/sly expression and says "yeah, that's what they are, banana beans" and I realize he's looking like that because it's actually his droppings, but he doesn't want to mention it.

Link of the Moment
An arguably very useful link for a change! 70 Things to Say When You're Losing a Technical Argument. The first one is probably the best: "That won't scale".

pixels on the runvideogames

(2 comments)
I've always loved the Mattel Intellivision "Running Man". I was always jealous, I was never able to make a good running animation as a kid in the 1980s, playing with sprite editors and the like. Though I never understood that line through his waist either. (I made this animation by clipping a banner from some website...sorry don't know which one, probably one of the ones linked to from this Intellivision page.)

This guy featured in Tron Deadly Discs for the 2600, one of my favorites...

Quote of the Moment
"If women like it, it's erotica. If men like it, it's pornography. WTF?!?!"
--Lord Kano on Slashdot a while back.

Link of the Moment
Windows XP's new default background seems to be taking its cue from a certain children's show...what's next, Barney Device Drivers? (You can see the full story here.)

think negative

Image of the Moment
This is a photographic negative of a stunning Earth at Night image from NASA. You can really see the difference between rural and urban areas, it's very interesting. (It almost makes you forget that it's never dark everywhere on Earth at once.) I'm not sure why I like the negative version of it, but I do, for a while it was my wallpaper. Turns out you can also get a poster of the image online. (via cellar.org's Image of the Day though I had seen it before.)

Newsflash of the Moment
This just forwarded by Mo, Citing anti-Israel bias, 2 firms pull funding from WBUR. Now on the one hand I acknowledge that currently I'm angrier with Israel than with the Palestinians, I think the settlement policy is a real travesty. And I acknowledge that some of this opinion might be shaped by the news I consume, which has a large NPR component. But still, you have to wonder why the sponsors are harping on this particular issue...frankly, if they are jewish, then it's hard to believe that they are being more impartial and even-handed than WBUR is, and it smacks of censorship.

Sometimes I really hate my last name. Not too long ago I was thinking about using my AOL-IM name "kirkjerk" as my domain name instead of kisrael.com. Crap like this makes me want to revisit that decision.

And for the record, I want to say it's not judaism I dislike, or even religion, but fundamentalism. And right now it seems like Israel is going through a right wing/fundamentalist resurgence.

Joke of the Moment
There were two cows in a field. One said "moo", the other one said "I was going to say that!"

stop thief

(1 comment)
Stange. Yesterday on Rt. 3/3A, John and I were stopped at a redlight (he was driving) when a guy driving a big brown van wanted to know if we wanted to buy some speakers. Well, as I had intuited and John had heard about, it's a scam. It was a little different than what the link describes in our case, since the van was marked with a (bogus?) company name, "AudioJam" instead of being plain white. (I guess they figured a plain white van was triggering suspicion, and wasn't more difficult to trace than a made-up company.)

Letter of the Moment
Mr. Henry Ford
Detroit, Mich.
Dear Sir:

While I still have got breath in my lungs I will tell you what a dandy car you make. I have drove Fords exclusively when I could get away with one. For sustained speed and freedom from trouble the Ford has got every other car skinned, and even if my business hasent been strickly legal it don't hurt enything to tell you what a fine car you got in the V8.

Yours truly
Clyde Champion Barrow

--of "Bonnie and Clyde" fame, from this page at snopes.com. Snopes.com is a great place to research urban myths, it's generally up to date, and can help you from looking gullible. It's also a very interesting read.

are you in, genius?

(3 comments)
Image of the Moment "Salvador Dali, In Voluptate Mors, 1944", a photographic collaboration between Phillipe Halsman and Salvador Dali. I have a T-shirt with the women-skull on it (oddly I can't find the link for that now though I bought it online). The skull also shows up in the poster image for Silence of the Lambs.