Category: anti-blog Page 10 of 12

Hmm, how’d that happen: The web sites of Shasta (soft drink manufacturer) and Furby (crappy toy) bear a strange but undeniable resemblance to each other.

This is not to say they don’t both suck.

[Note from the author nearly sixteen and one half years later: The fact was that they did suck. One way in which they sucked was that they were both built primarily in Flash. That means that they are not preserved at Archive.org, a site that does not suck and never has.]

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Broadband rocks.

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No real movement yet on a state budget. But I did get an email from the Guv today:

June 20, 2001

Dear State Employee:

Many state employees have contacted me recently to share their concerns about the government shutdown that could occur if the Legislature fails to pass a budget by July 1st. I regret that we have to prepare for a situation that is completely avoidable and understand that this is a stressful time for all.

Since my inauguration as Governor, I have had the opportunity to see first-hand the good work that each of you do on behalf of the State of Minnesota. Your work contributes to the vitality of our state and helps make Minnesota the best place to live and work. I want to assure you that my commissioners, my staff and I understand the disruption a government shutdown could cause in your life. The Administration has worked tirelessly since the end of the regular legislative session to broker an agreement to prevent a government shutdown. We will continue to pursue a reasonable solution to the issues at the heart of this impasse.

In the meantime, we have created a link on the North Star website (www.state.mn.us) to provide you with the most recent information on the potential government shutdown. If you have specific questions or comments about the shutdown, please use the contact information provided on the website.

Gee, thanks. That’ll sure cushion the blow if I’m laid off.

Er, yeah, and I’m single now.

Sheesh, what got into me? I’ll tell you later.

Of Montreal was incredible—again, more later.

For those of you who require instant gratification, here’s a site that consists only of user-submitted bad haikus. What a great idea; it’s made for me, really.

I’m commemorating 50 years of computing by getting broadband tomorrow. Yay! Let’s see if it’s worth the expense.

At least I’m not this poor guy. An owner of a small business was assigned a phone number that happened to be listed in the most recent phone book as the post office’s number. He changed it—and got ANOTHER former post office number. Come on. Someone had to have it out for him—the chances of that happening have to be astronomical. He seems to be responding to the second occurrence with resignation—no, no, man! That’s what they want!

Cripes, you wait 2 1/2 weeks for this joker [me] to add a humorous and inspired snippet of wit and social commentary, and all you get is fact-checking in a routine news story about baseball? Read the article (or at least the first four paragraphs), and then come back.

Okay, notice anything? I’m really impressed by the sheer incompetence condensed into just one sentence, in the second paragraph:

Ellis Burks followed by hitting a ground ball just past the glove of third baseman Travis Fryman [sic] ¹ and Milwaukee manager Phil Garner [sic] ² replaced Fox with lefthander Ray King.

Most noticeably, it’s a run-on sentence. It also has two incorrect facts that never should have slipped by the writer or the editor, who both theoretically should know something about baseball, or at least have copies of major league rosters handy for fact-checking. But apparently they don’t, and they don’t. Or they don’t care enough to bother, or they’re just drunk all the time. Who really cares, right? I don’t, really; I’m just in a bad mood.

¹ The writer meant Tyler Houston, of course. Fryman plays for the Indians.

² Garner, now the manager of the Detroit Tigers, was at one time manager of the Brewers. He was fired before the 2000 season, though, and replaced by Davey Lopes. Later in the article, Lopes is cited correctly as Milwaukee’s manager but is referred to as “Dave Lopes,” a first [to my knowledge] since he was hired by the Brewers.

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I see a bad mood rising: I mentioned I work for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, right? Well, I might be taking a little unpaid “furlough” [link no longer valid] starting July 1st if the Legislature doesn’t get off their high horses and fund the state for fiscal year ’01-’02. Did I mention there’s no such thing as a furlough? There is a cold, hard reality, though: No appropriations means no funding for web designers—or for most of the 50,000+ “non-essential” state employees.

[Update: It looks like the state and the unions have agreed to let us use up our vacation time if a shutdown happens, at least for the first couple weeks. Gee, great.]

Please forgive my irritation. I thought I’d be safe from the dot-com curse.

Seriously, even if there is a shutdown (which isn’t certain at this point), I doubt it’ll last long. Of course, I doubted it would ever get this far: The legislature is almost a month past their constitutionally-set deadline for ending the regular session.

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While I’m in this bad mood, you know what else I hate? I don’t actually mind, in general, if people pull in front of me in their cars—IF they’re going faster than I am, which isn’t often. <RANT>What I hate is when they pull in front of me and then drive in an extremely pokey fashion.

I also hate ID-required, 21-and-up concerts. They don’t really have those in Wisconsin—many venues sell beer, and they stamp your hand if you’re over 21. Not the best way to keep beer out of underage drinkers’ hands (a pointless battle anyway), but a great way to let people from 18 to 21 (oh, what a frustrating age bracket) see the artists they’d like to see.</RANT>

I’m going to see Of Montreal tonight at the Entry—21+, of course. That should shake this.

I’m a little behind. There are a couple things in my head I’ve been meaning to put here but I just haven’t had the time. One such thing is this:

Woo-hoo! I won the F(a,kow,tL)S-/A-DBG! I was sent a free book in the mail last week. Completely, genuinely free. How? Easy — I won a contest held by weblogger Mark Anderson (no relation, I assume, to the Mark Anderson I know in Madison), simply by being the first one to ask about it. Thanks, Mark; I appreciate it.

Mark has experience sending books through the mail, but he usually gets them back. His weblog is unique (as far as I know, which isn’t particularly far) in that he operates a personal “lending library.” It’s a clever and generous touch.

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Like Mark, I too have been captivated by the Kaycee Nicole hoax saga of the last two weeks. There are starting points here and here if you’re not familiar with it.

Having been unfamiliar with her story or site until Zeldman linked to her site (and again) after her “death,” I was only distantly affected emotionally. It doesn’t really change anything for me in the way I relate to people in person and on the Internet — I’ve almost exclusively had good experiences. [I consider myself smart and lucky, in about equal proportions.]

It is an extremely intriguing story, to me, because of 1. the depth, breadth, and length of the pathological deception, 2. the way the story seems to have garnered the attention of quite a few web people, resulting in the (unfortunate) knocking out of some sites with its bandwidth-sucking capacities, and 3. the amazing nature of the Google detective work that some curious souls used to out the hoaxer. I think people will be better for it overall, with the possible exception of the victimized 19-year-old girl whose face the hoaxer stole and attached to a false name. That’s the worst part of the whole thing, in my opinion.

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My life — real as far as I can tell: Amber and I took a mini-road trip Sunday and Monday of this past (beautiful) long weekend. We had been planning since last winter to visit The House on the Rock (in Spring Green, WI) and the Forevertron (just south of Baraboo, WI), and this weekend afforded a perfect opportunity.

What a study in contrasts, though. The Land of Evermor, created by “Dr. Evermor” (aka Tom Every), is a whimsical outdoor sculpture garden constructed of scrap mechanical bits, largely from the Badger Army Ammunition Plant just across U.S. Highway 12. The centerpiece of the park is the majestic Forevertron, which you just have to see to understand. (Check the website.) We sat in a sheet-metal gazebo and leisurely drew in our sketchbooks, rolled around a field in people-sized metal “hamster wheels,” and generally had a great time. I would highly recommend a visit if you’re in that area. Admission is free, and the proprietors are friendly (we spoke with artist Eleanor Every, Dr. Evermor’s wife).

The House on the Rock is the product of another, creepier vision: that of a man named Andrew Jordan, 1914-1989. According to Mrs. Every, Dr. Evermor actually worked with Jordan on the House for 12 years, creating major components such as the “World’s Largest Carousel.” However, Dr. Evermor is not publicly credited with any of the work. If I were he, I’d be happy about that.

The House itself is essentially the physical embodiment of an epic, obsessive-compulsive, almost cliché nightmare. The tour is actually 2 1/2 meandering miles long. The first leg of the tour features the “Infinity Room,” a long, narrow, seemingly unsupported room which comes to a point, jutting out impressively over the lush, pastoral Wisconsin landscape, while swaying ominously. The tour continues relatively innocuously, if eccentrically: visitors wind through the opium-den-like living quarters, complete with blue translucent windows, shag-carpeted cushions on 8-foot long plush couches, stained glass, Eastern memorabilia, and the like. That area, dubbed “The Early Years,” is a curiosity and nothing more.

The second leg of the tour is where things get interesting. Jordan created a faux downtown street c. 1880. If you’ve ever seen “Streets of Old Milwaukee” at the Milwaukee Public Museum, it’s similar to that, but less genuine-seeming and more sinister. The entire house is filled with collections of dolls, guns, ivory, stuffed wildlife, models of ships, circus memorabilia, etc. Significant portions of the house consist of mechanical, musical oddities — orchestras of musical instruments clothed in machines that apparently play them automatically (for the price of 1-2 tokens, 25 cents each). Admission is $19.50. I can’t really recommend it in good faith, though I was impressed by Jordan’s ability to realize his ambition at such a grand scale, warped and disturbing as his vision was. There is more — a 2-story sculpture of a whale fighting an octopus, a pipe-organ room that is creepy as (and evocative of) hell, and worse — but I’ve already spent too much time writing about it.

If you must go there, (which, hell, why not, it’s more interesting than spending a day playing video games or watching TV), visit the first two parts of the three-part tour, look at the carousel, and then turn around and exit. Read the WWI- & WWII-era newspapers that paper the walls. There’s no need to go through the horned monkey’s mouth. Either way, if you go, many surprises are in store. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

On the way home, both Amber and I wished we had gone to the House first and the Forevertron second. It would have been nice if the more pleasant memories had been the more recent. A stop at Perkins (um) perked us up, though; and, overall, it was a very nice weekend.

Incidentally, we stayed at a clean, nice, cheap place (recommended) called the Usonian Inn [Cripes, our whole weekend is on the web!], joking about what the name might mean on the way there (e.g. “I think ‘Usonian’ means ‘pay in blood'”). We asked the proprietor, and found out that “Usonian” describes the U.S.-only style of building houses (flat roof, low ceiling, recessed lighting) invented by Frank Lloyd Wright, who hails from the Spring Green area. Ah.

In today’s world, “Usonian” also seems to mean “has cable TV.”

And luckily, we missed the deer, which does not appear on the web.

Here’s good news. The Baltimore Ravens tried to steal a guy’s idea, and he didn’t let them — to the tune of $10,000,000. The man deserves to have his share of the benefits of his creativity, no matter what his education level or professional standing. Clearly, the NFL team thought otherwise.

Reorg: Here’s what I have done to the site today. I’ve separated out the increasingly unwieldy anti-blog into palatable, bite-size, month-long chunks.

Sure makes it look like I haven’t done much. I’m also about to interweave the “news/newest” section entries into these entries. There’s no sense having two essentially identical sections.

In web news, uh… why was Stanley Ian Letovsky’s otherwise ordinary page the most popular link on Backflip today? Sure, he’s the director of Informatics at the Genome Database, but he wasn’t in the news or anything, as far as I can tell….

Yes, I just started using Backflip yesterday… I now have 7 browsers on 3 computers that I use regularly, so I figured a bookmarking solution was in order. [How does a site like that survive, by the way? Ad revenue alone? Come on.]

Now that I think about it, there is something vaguely sinister about a big database containing everyone’s genetic code — or everyone’s Internet bookmarks, for that matter. All that data in the wrong hands could lead to evil.

Let’s build a bridge to, like, the year 2000 or something: Fresher and more human than Tom Tomorrow’s This Modern World, it’s Lloyd Dangle’s Troubletown!

Seriously, both are great weekly comics that comment on today’s society, from a position with which I am largely sympathetic.

RIP, DNA: I had no plans to post today. However, this came as a hard punch to the gut: British author Douglas Adams has died at only 49, of a heart attack.

At the risk of admitting how deeply nerdy I am, Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy [pick it up at your local independent bookseller] was the book that influenced me most during my pre-teen years. I remember the first time I attempted to read it, at just 8 years old: I was coming back from a picnic with my dad and a friend of his from work. His son was reading it, and I read it in the car on the way back. It was just outside the comprehension of that innocent young me, but it stuck with me until I found it in paperback in 6th or 7th grade. I have fond memories of listening to the tapes of the radio show with my best friend Will, I think on the way back from camping with his dad.

I hadn’t been keeping up with Adams’ recent work, but it’s a big loss nonetheless.

Apparently, in homage to the book — the Guide — the one with “Don’t Panic!” printed on it in large friendly letters, there is an online Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy….

[I hope the (unintended) dead celebrity theme stops now before it has a chance to snowball.]

OBEY: I had been curious about this. Andre the Giant (may he rest in peace) apparently has a posse. [Through BLK/MRKT from DiK again.]

Quick one: Today is the anniversary of the birth of Saul Bass. He was a design deity, whose work on film titles was, to me, especially stunning.