I want your bail bond!

Remember the 80's schlock-pop opus "I Want Your Sex", which in the early lizard-brain, Pavlovian-response days of the AIDS epidemic elicited a knee-jerk condemnation from concerned citizens, for (horror of horrors) "promoting casual sex ", an allegation which its composer, George Michael, was only too glad to publicly deny, thereby increasing buzz and sales for his new record?

Well, it seems that the song's creator has fallen on rather hard times, as this article will attest:

London, England (AHN) - Singer George Michael has been arrested in London over the weekend under the suspicion of possessing drugs. Sex toys and masks were also found in his car, according to reports.

The former Wham! frontman was found slumped over the wheel of his car close to Hyde Park Corner early on Sunday morning. ...

Read the whole thing here:
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7002581769

More spammer names and subject lines

Fresh from my inbox, here are some more incredible word combinations from people who really think we have excrement for brains, and who want to separate us from our money as quickly as possible, and play fast and loose with the English language in the process. My own comments are in italics.

Ultra Allure Pheromones will make women give you flowers.

- And other things, hopefully...

With our Viagra Soft Tabs you can crack nuts with your penis.

- I’m not sure that’s the best way to impress a date.

You don't know what is the best revenge for your ex girlfriend.

- I understand she's bought an AK-47...

If you cum with Spermamax on July 4th, people will take it for the firework.

- Now, I’d definitely pay to see that during the national anthem!

Erections are still possible. compress

- No, no, that’s the opposite of what you need to do...

hree we cmoe!

This could fix your entire relationship or marriage. exorcist

- Hiring one might be the best idea here.

A hill under the bad cover

clerical sorbet

Skinny cooks can't be trusted

air conditioned umbilical cord

Finger H. Radio

More coming soon to an inbox near you.

History of Rock, as viewed by a 1980's college student

The cartoon shown here is from a now-defunct student publication called "Crooked Beat".

Click on the image to enlarge it.

(Copyright 1984 by Joel Peterson)

Don't worry, it's only a liberal myth.

I originally posted the following play-by-play account to a USENET newsgroup back in 1998 in response to a rather nasty spate of tornadoes, not often seen in upstate NY.

I was sitting on my friend Keith's front porch tonight, sipping a glass of water and chatting with him and a mutual friend when a thunderstorm rolled through. It looked a lot like a typical upstate NY summer squall. The sky darkened and there was thunder. LOTS of thunder and way more lightning than I'm used to seeing. The trees across the street started shaking, swaying and gyrating like weeds in the gusty winds which pummeled them. Rain came down in sheets. If I'd left the porch to get something out of my car, parked directly in front of Keith's house, I would have been soaked to the skin. A leak in the porch roof, which usually just dripped when it rained, poured like a bathroom shower. After about 5 minutes of that, hail anywhere from pea-size to cateye-marble size clattered down onto ground and the porch roof. The yard and the street went white in a matter of minutes.

After 20 minutes or so, the storm abated. It turned out that this was just the opening act. Another storm, almost identical to the one before it, only much stronger, cut loose. More rain, more hail, and a lightning bolt which struck less than 2000 feet away, which sounded like a rifle shot amplified 1,000 times. This all happened not once but 6 more times. I had to drive home, 8 miles, through all of this. I saw husky, almost perfectly straight bolts of lightning (no forking) hit the tops of area mountains as I drove by them. I saw clouds the likes of which I never saw before in this area. The sky looked like a grainy b&w photograph. I had to stop for gas on the way home. Fortunately, the gas station/convenience store I chose had sheltered pumps and a sheltered entrance. As I waited in line inside to pay for my fill-up, I heard a muffled roar, like when an air-conditioning unit starts up, except that this was much louder. I asked the cashier if it was in fact the store's A/C unit. She confirmed what I already instinctively knew - that what I was hearing was the sound of freakishly heavy rain hitting the roof of the gas station. It was so heavy that there was no way I could continue my drive home until it let up.

One thought I had was "God, these storms are intense. I hope we don't get a tornado". Well, I never saw a one myself, but I learned on that evening's news that not one but several tornadoes had hit the area and a lot of people in outlying areas just narrowly escaped injury. (Twisters do seem to hit in outlying areas here when they occur, though in 1992 one wrecked a steel warehouse building and snapped an 80-year-old maple tree clean in half.). One TV news program showed an amateur video of one twister passing within about 100 feet of their backyard. That's as close as I ever want to come to seeing a real twister. Our local newspaper (singular) showed pictures of several peoples' houses reduced to rubble. I can only thank whatever greater entity there is up there that my home, or those of anyone else I knew was not among them. It makes me violently ill to contemplate those people losing not only their homes, but family records, keepsakes of past events in their lives, and book, record or other collections, all literally blown away by this otherworldly force. One local tv station had its building partially demolished (while the news anchors were still on the air), all of its broadcast equipment ruined by the resulting rain damage, and its 600-foot antenna tower and satellite dishes trashed. It and 2 local radio stations which were renting space on the tower got knocked off the air.

Our county executive said in a press conference that evening that this was the worst spate of tornadoes we've had in this area since 1936; that we've had only 3 confirmed twisters here since then and yesterday. A friend of mine was visiting relatives in one of the worst-hit areas, but apparently the storms missed them. I was relieved to hear she was okay. Most people I knew only heard of the twisters on the news. I guess we were damn lucky.

I used to love thunderstorms. They were a part of summer for me. Now when they predict thunderstorms - as they're doing for tomorrow and Wednesday, I'm going to be looking over my shoulder...

This global climate change thing isn't funny anymore.

--

I drove through some of the areas hit by the storms several weeks afterward. The twisters weren't the F5 monsters that occur in the Midwest which devour whole towns in minutes, they were only F1's or F2's which lacked the power to reach into the valley I lived in and mostly hit surrounding hills. Even so, the damage they did was barely comprehensible. Several stands of trees looked as if Godzilla had stepped on them. In one spot, a twister had ripped the pavement off a road before tearing into a small house nearby, its facade gone and its interior exposed to the elements. Someone, presumably its owner, had spray-painted "There's always hope" on an interior wall.

Whenever someone makes the mistake of associating the current trend toward more extreme weather with global climate shift, he gets shouted down, she gets told that it's only a myth, and the factories and SUV's keep right on chugging along. Garbage-mouthed pundits and talk-show hosts hurl salvo after salvo of invective. Business-as-usual trumps common sense. Will it take wholesale environmental catastrophe to shake up the careless profiteers who prop up the status quo?

The e-Mail tax: It's not an urban legend anymore.

America On-Line, that 5000-pound gorilla which has dominated internet access and has been littering our landscape with plastic and metal waste for many years now wants to seriously degrade the quality of our internet communications.

Apparently, AOL wants to create a two-tiered e-mail system where mass-mailers (read: spammers) who pay an exorbitant shakedown fee to AOL will have thir messages receive top priority while those of the lowly AOL home and business user will be shunted off to AOL's slow lanes and spam buckets.

If this scheme catches on, let's put it this way, if you liked the U.S. Postal service with their regular (until recently) as-clockwork rate increases, you're going to love this latest scheme by mammoth corporations to milk the Internet for every penny it can possibly scam. The logical conclusion of this plan is costly, mediocre service for average users and total domination of net communications by advertisers and corporations which exist to meet their needs, not ours. Kind of like the way television is now.

I would like to suggest that you read up on this odious proposal and do something about it before the free and open internet we now take for granted becomes just a fond memory.

The Oil Commissars Own Us, Lock Stock and oil barrel, or Why There Is No Hope, Installment 2

I originally wrote this as a comment to a posting on WFMU's Beware of the Blog:

Last spring, someone in an SUV (who may have been talking on a cell phone) rear-ended me as I waited at an intersection to merge onto a main street. My car, a compact, had its rear end flattened. The other driver's car, a massive SUV, wasn't even scratched. WHY do people drive these overpriced, elephantine porkmobiles? In the mid-1960's, gas-hungry "muscle cars" with massive engines were the rage. Even so, they had far better styling and handling. A Ford Mustang Shelby, an Oldsmobile Delta 88 or a Dodge Charger had the kind of style and class that these boxy, butt-ugly excuses for vehicles never will.

The problem with automotive transport is that, for most Americans there is simply no viable alternative. In a place like New York City, you can hop a subway and (usually) get where you need to go in rapid order. Here in upstate NY, public transportation sucks, plain and simple. A trip that takes 15 minutes by car takes a whopping 45 minutes or even longer by bus. That's because underfunded public transit systems have to make do with an inadequate number of buses, which must cover large swaths of populated areas, following routes along traffic-light-ridden main streets, or following labyrinthine paths through residential areas. Smaller buses or "jitneys" could speed things up in residential areas, but no legislature will allot ther money for them or take the necessary steps to put them on the road. More buses would permit more express runs to common destrinations like shopping malls, but again, the government's will and wallet just aren't there. And if you happen to live in the country (because housing costs in town are just too damn high), there's one or maybe two buses a day, if you're lucky.

And don't even talk to me about Greyhound. As the late singer/songwriter Harry Chapin once sang, "It's a dog of a way to go". They run their buses when they want to, not necessarily when you need them. If they don't see any profit in running buses to your home town, you're out of luck. Their prices are exorbitant for the mediocre level of serivce which they deliver, and they never let you forget that you're a captive audience.

One local transit bus driver said to me, about 15 years ago, that when the price of gas goes to $5.99 a gallon, then and only then will Americans start thinking seriously about public transport. I believe that the current status quo will only change when the oil commisars, their overpaid lobbyists and their bought-and-paid-for allies on capitol hill get booted out of the halls of government.

Pandora's Infinite Jukebox

Whatcha doing?

Listening to this new web site, pandora.com

Is it a download site?

No. It’s a custom radio site.

A what?

You feed it the name of one or more bands or sings that you like. Then it searches for other music that it thinks you’d like. For instance, I programmed in Buzzcocks, The Clash, and a few other 70's punk and New Wave bands, and now it’s cranking out 70's, 80's and 90's punk tunes by not only Buzzcocks, but the Toy Dolls, The Lillingtons, The Sex Pistols, Chron Gen, Black Flag and Green Day.

Green Day?

Well, there are probably still a few bugs in the system. It’s kind of new. But it still beats the crap out of shelling out for satellite radio.

So I can hear anything I want for free?

Well, not exactly. They choose the songs, though you can always skip ones you’d rather not hear, and you can edit your “seed” song list to change the flavor of the stream. If you want to hear anything fairly obscure, they might not have what you’re looking for.

In other words, don’t throw out those old 7-inchers?

Right. But they’ll do better by you than the local Clear Channel top-40 FM station or MTV any day.

I stopped watching MTV when I got a life!

I stopped watching it when I got a job. Pandora saved my butt when my boss banned playing CD’s in our workstations.

Because of that Sony Music rootkit thing?

You got it! It was pretty dismal around the office for a while!

You know, I’m wondering, who’s running this thing?

The Music Genome Project.

I mean who’s paying for it? The rights to all these tunes must cost a lot.

Not sure. Their FAQ doesn’t say. Their about screen says “At Pandora Media™ (formerly Savage Beast Technologies™), we have a single mission: To help you discover new music you'll love.” They’ve got links to Amazon.com and Itunes on their site. I guess it’s a marketing operation.

Or a mind-control operation.

Say what?

Think about it, if they can gather information on the kinds of music that millions of people are listening to, then they’ll be able to figure out what the country as a whole is thinking. Then they can pass the info along to the govermnent, who can use it to figure out how to get away with whatever it wants to get away with and how best to do it. It’s demographic science on a newer and much more intimate, invasive level. And as far as we can tell, all we’re doing is listening to free music.

What are you rattling on about?

...Or they can figure out who the liberals are. They’ll check out the kinds of music that each subscriber listens to. Think about it. They scientifically know what kinds of music a peace activist, a free-speech advocate or a secular humanist is most likely to listen to. Then they can come around and get us one by one.

Jesus, give me a break! You see Homeland Security agents under every dirty sock! Yeah, they probably are collecting information about what we listen to, and they probably are passing it along to Amazon, Itunes, and other music marketing entities. At least I sure hope they are. I’m so damn sick and tired of a handful of overfed, designer-suited, expense-accounted record company wonks with 50-dollar haircuts and drug habits telling us “what we want to hear”! If web sites like pandora.com shake up the business-as-usual of the music industry, and make the radio conglomerates finally sit up and take notice of what we REALLY want to hear, meaning that commercial radio might, just might become listenable again, then I’m all for it! I don't mind the free music either!