Dept. of Decisions

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We here at Heathen Central are getting married; this is not news. Also not news, if you’ve seen us lately, is the fact that we need to lose a bit of weight before we take wedding pix. To that end, we’re getting back on the old exercise train.

Great. There is almost nothing as boring as exercise. Well, exercise qua exercise is boring; exercise that happens when you’re doing something fun is different — but also takes longer, making it less practical for very busy people during the week. Enter the iPod!

You can gets lots to listen to on an iPod, but what I really want is NPR. Of course, NPR is radio, not MP3, and the shows we like come on at times inconvenient to working out, so we have a bit of an issue.

Fortunately, the invisible hand of the market has produced TWO solutions to this quandry. If we want to listen to NPR on our own terms and not be bound by the tyranny of broadcast schedules, we can:

  1. Buy a Griffin RadioShark, which is sort of like a Tivo for radio.
    Pro
    • One-time cost ($69);
    • Can record anything on the radio (ATC, ME, TAL, WWDTM, etc.).
    Con
    • Must remember to set and use;
    • Will still have to listen to the gawdawful local inserts during the morning and evening news shows. NPR’s programming we like; however, we invariably change channels when the local idiots start jabbering.
  2. Get subscriptions to the desired programs over at Audible so that we can download what we want when we want it.
    Pro
    • Pick and choose, with no need to set a device or futz with reception issues;
    • Presumably better audio quality;
    • NO LOCAL INTERRUPTIONS — just a pure network feed, which is frankly all we want from any network. Local == crap.
    Con
    • Ongoing fees to the tune of $12-20 a month;
    • Potential DRM issues with the files;
    • Limited to programs that deal with Audible.

Looking at it this way, it sorta appears that spare computer + Radioshark + cron job to push ’em to the server (for consistent access from wherever we want) is probably the answer.

Adere Est Porkcere

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IM, just now:

KittyKitty: hey man
UberChet: bacontarian.com
KittyKitty: uhhmm, puerco
KittyKitty: are these meat eaters friends of your or 
KittyKitty: do you troll for all things prok
UberChet: I have a blog. People send me things.
UberChet: But I really need to go to spain/portugal, as I believe 
UberChet: them to be Porkvana.
KittyKitty: I have been to both. I have eaten pork in both
UberChet: Am I right?
KittyKitty: I think Ireland is prok heaven
UberChet: heh.
KittyKitty: pork that is
UberChet: porn:pr0n::pork:pr0k
KittyKitty: In England I achieved pork perfection
KittyKitty: English bacon on a buttered bagguette. 
KittyKitty: Simple, elegent and bacony
KittyKitty: uuhhhhm
UberChet: stop it, you're making me hard.
KittyKitty: I hpoe you mean lard
KittyKitty: hence the Ozzie termed "cracked a fat"
UberChet: heh
UberChet: ozzie or cockney rhyme?
KittyKitty: ozzie
KittyKitty: I have often wondered who would win in a bacon off
KittyKitty: Good ol' US streaky
UberChet: on that note,I made a hell of a carbonara over last weekend.
KittyKitty: versus Euro hame llike products
UberChet: Mmm, pasta, bacon, and eggs.
KittyKitty: heh
KittyKitty: go to an Irish pub and order a Bacon Butty
KittyKitty: yum
KittyKitty: ever wanna go to the salad bar and just get the bacon bits...
KittyKitty: oh stop you know have
UberChet: I'm so ashamed.
KittyKitty: we are only men
KittyKitty: and it is bacon
KittyKitty: crack for fat white guys
KittyKitty: if you could snort it we'd all have a greasy upper lip
KittyKitty: obviously I am very bored today
KittyKitty: send me more links
KittyKitty: please....just 1 more
UberChet: I'm totally putting this conversation on my blog.
KittyKitty: heh
KittyKitty: "keep a slick upper lip" the bacon snorters motto
KittyKitty: "Adere Est Porkcere"
KittyKitty: "To dare is to eat prok"

Math Fun the RIAA Way!

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You may or may not have heard by now that an Arizona teen has been convicted under an Arizona law prohibiting unauthorized copying of music. What’s wacky is how the RIAA figured the value of his “crime,” as Techdirt explains:

Yesterday, in discussing the odd case of a teen convicted under Arizona state laws for unauthorized copying, we wondered about some of the details — including the $50 million claim pinned to the material on his hard drive in early versions of the AP story (later removed, for no clear reason). Luckily, we’ve got some answers. Slate takes a look at the $50 million and explains how the content industry does math to come up with such figures. The real answer is they basically make it up. They determine that each work can be valued somewhere between $750 and $30,000, even if they can all be downloaded legally for $1 a piece. It certainly seems a bit presumptuous to put such a high number on the value. However, this story gets even better. Ernest Miller takes a crack at the specific Arizona state law that tripped up this guy, and realizes it turns fair use copying into a felony. That’s right. The details show that if you’re simply ripping your own legally purchased CDs into MP3s for personal use or backup, you are breaking this particular law, and could reach the felony stage with as little as 1,000 songs — even though fair use copying is legal. Of course, at $30,000 per song, that’s only $30 million. To get up to $50 million, you’d need to rip 1,667 songs. If we assume an average album has… say… 12 songs, you’d just need to rip approximately 140 CDs to reach the $50 million felon mark. Not so hard. You might already be there. So, while it appears this particular kid was doing much more, you too could be convicted of a felony for having $50 million worth of content on your hard drive just for legally (oh, wait, maybe not…) ripping a bunch of your legally purchased CDs into MP3s.

Meanwhile, we can’t get a single fucking cocktail waitress in our office

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[Axl] accompanied Buckethead on a jaunt to Disneyland when the guitarist was drifting toward quitting, several people involved recalled; then Buckethead announced he would be more comfortable working inside a chicken coop, so one was built for him in the studio, from wood planks and chicken wire.

This from The Most Expensive Album Never Made the NYT’s long piece on the long-awaited “Chinese Democracy” from Axl Rose.

(As with all NYT stories, hit it quick or it goes away. Use nogators/nogators.)

McGovern on HST

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From the LA Times, 3/3/05:

Gonzo but Not Forgotten
by George S. McGovern As the candidate who lost 49 states to Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election, I have always been pleased that among the precious few who thought I would have made the better president was Hunter S. Thompson, who went to his untimely grave saying that I was “the best of a lousy lot.” Thompson’s position was that I was “honest”–except for one “wicked moment” when I attended Nixon’s funeral and said a few sympathetic words to his family and friends. “Yeah,” Hunter told me, “you went into the tank with that evil bastard.” Hunter relished such frightful words. “Evil,” “wicked,” “fear and loathing.” These were the words that described the world best for him. Once, when he was pressed into the back seat of my car with three other people, he tried to escape to a nearby bar when I slowed for a red light in heavy traffic. Foiled by the baby lock that had been inadvertently clicked on, he raged at me: “Get me out of this evil contraption before I start killing.” On the jacket of his now-classic book about the 1972 election, “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail,” he printed a photograph of the two of us with the following caption: “Pictured above is George McGovern urging Dr. Hunter S. Thompson to accept the vice presidential nomination.” In retrospect, I wish I had. Perhaps then Hunter and I might both still be alive and well instead of dead and wounded, respectively. It’s true, as many have noted in recent days, that Hunter did not devote his energy and talent to the pursuit of factual accuracy. But accuracy isn’t everything. Frank Mankiewicz, the political director of my campaign, was right to call Hunter’s book “the least accurate and most truthful” of the campaign books that appeared after the 1972 race. Hunter was disheartened after the campaign, and it fell to me on several occasions to try to persuade him not to give up on what he called “this f—– up country.” What I didn’t get to tell him was that one of the reasons we should never give up on America is that from time to time, as we have been reminded recently, this country produces a genuine original–a Katharine Hepburn, a Ray Charles, an Arthur Miller, a Johnny Carson, an Ossie Davis, a professor Seymour Melman, or an inaccurate and irreverent and truthful Hunter Thompson. George S. McGovern was the Democratic presidential candidate in 1972.

“Mac for Productivity, Unix for Development, and Windows for Solitaire”

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Some great thoughts and reflections from a computing pro on why the Mac actually makes her more productive. It’s a worthy read, and free of ideology (for the most part).

The post header is an old jibe at Windows. Ms Stamper quotes it in her final graf:

I’m sure that everyone has heard the old saying, “Mac for Productivity, Unix for Development, and Windows for Solitaire”. My experience has shown me that at least for my needs, the Mac is not only for productivity, but for development as well. Windows? Well, some things never change.

Department of Irritating Jackassery

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So one of the companies I work with is evaluating Blackberry devices. I got one to use for a bit, and found it, frankly, utterly wanting. It receives mail pretty well, but managing and sending from the device is a very frustrating experience, beginning with the fact that folder management thereon is unusable; all messages are comingled in a single queue; all messages that come from it must come from the same email address; and the online “managment” site is so fucked it only works in IE. RIM may own this space for people saddled with Exchange back-ends, but their tool is a sick joke when hooked up to standards-based mailers — there’s not even any real IMAP support, for crying out loud.

Add to this the fact that the PDA functions are utter crap compared to, say, an 8 year old Palm, and you see why I pawned the thing off on a sales guy and got a Treo 650. Anyway, As part of the testing, I downloaded PocketMac for Blackberry, which allowed the Blackberry to sync with my desktop tools (well, mostly of them; it syncs only with iCal, Address Book, and Stickies — the Palm tools sync with StickyBrain). Since I’m done with the damn thing, I went to uninstall PocketMac.

It took a trip to the knowledge base before I found out that the install program (which I deleted) is how you uninstall PM. I re-downloaded it (jumping through some auth hoops in the meantime; thank goodness I kept the email with the URL) and stepped through to the “type of install” phase before I found the “uninstall” option; this alone is incredibly unintuitive, but what came next was even worse.

I’m accostomed to installers requiring my authentication before they do anything. This is normal on a Mac, and a good thing. What I was NOT prepared for was the fact that once I gave the PM uninstaller my password, IT SYSTEMATICALLY QUIT EVERY APPLICATION I HAD RUNNING. All of ’em. I had browser windows pointing to things I was planning to read; I had active terminal sessions on remote machine. A modern Mac is NOT a Windows machine; we don’t have to quit everything to uninstall a program, and we damn sure don’t appreciate having it done FOR us with no warning. It’s stupid, arrogant, and just plain fucked up.

PocketMac may be the only game in town for syncing Blackberries and Wince devices with Macs, and bully for them. But right now they’re on my shit list, and I’m damned glad I have no need of their software anymore.

Bush v. The Press

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Salon has a good summary of how GWB’s administration has systematically avoided any sort of public accountability for its actions by ignoring the mainstream press — and, more disturbingly, how the country doesn’t care.

Not that we’re keeping track, you understand.

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A fan writes, “Hey, how many posts on Heathen?” Well, son, we don’t know, but we figure we might be able to find out:

$ find . -type f -name "*.txt" | wc -l
2086

The earliest is dated 29 November 2000, which means we’ve been Heathening for just over 4.25 years, for an average of 490.8 posts per year, or about 1.3 per day.

No wonder our wrists hurt.

(Oh, and make that 2,087, counting this one.)

Later…

Actually, and somewhat shockingly, that figure is low; it assumes that all our posts are stored in .txt files, but in fact the “original” few months (from November 2000 through the beginning of July 2001) are still in Blogger-generated HTML files, and are therefore not in that count. What’s to be done?

$ perl -e 'while (<>){ $foo++ while m/"byline"/g; } print "We have $foo posts\n";' *.html
171

Heh. Now the total, as of the original post, is 2,086 + 171, or 2,257, which works out to 531 a year and an astonishing 1.45 per day. This is now high enough that we suspect a problem with our method or our hobbies, but who’s got time to chase that kind of niggling detail? We’ve got posts to write.

This Just In: Sony Continues To Be Run By Complete Idiots

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Apparently, they can’t even read their own study on DRM, and are therefore planning to hobble virtually all their releases this year — with some foolhardy DRM scheme that will be cracked in about 10 seconds. The Reuters coverage suggests the scheme will be the same old bullshit from SunnCom, which requires you to allow the new CD to install software in order to work. Um, why exactly would we do that?

We here at Heathen will refrain from buying anything DRM’d. If we can’t put a CD we bought on our iPod on our own terms, we don’t want it.

John Gilmore Fights for You

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In 2002, Sun millionaire John Gilmore refused to show ID to board a flight. He hasn’t flown domestically since, as he’s fighting the government on the issue; the Feds, for their part, won’t even let him see the law that supposedly mandates that he show ID to fly.

Think about that. Are you comfortable with the notion of being governed by secret laws? No? Then donate to the EFF. Today.

Warren Weighs In

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From his blog:

Up The Creek People keep asking if I’m going to say something about the death of Hunter S Thompson. Hell, a couple of newspapers have asked. This is because I wrote a graphic novel series called TRANSMETROPOLITAN, the creation of whose protagonist was somewhat influenced by Thompson’s writing, persona and life. I got the news from a friend at CBS at four in the morning, two minutes after it hit the ticker. I was, and am, numb. I’ve tried to write about it a couple of times. When John Peel died, I was wrecked. This time, I’m just numb. I read an article a few years ago, that I haven’t seen cited in the obituaries yet, wherein it’s stated that Thompson’s body was pretty much packing up on him. His stomach was having problems with toxic substances like, um, food, and his diet was mostly liquid, mashed avocado and yoghurt. He’d spent time in a wheelchair in recent years. His drug use had always been exaggerated for comedic effect, but, at 67, he’d been hammering his body in a committed way for some 50 years. And, at 67, you don’t grow back the bits you killed. There’s a fair chance he was looking at years of dependency, chronic illness, and listening to his own body die by inches. Anyone would find that frightening. He always wore his influences on his sleeve. JP Donleavy, Faulkner, Mencken, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Hemingway. He used and re-used the last line from A FAREWELL TO ARMS, over and over: “I walked back to the hotel in the rain.” Legend has it that he retyped a Hemingway novel to understand how the writer got his effects. Hemingway, of course, shot himself in the head. Old and sick and unable to live up to his own ideas on manhood. I always thought it peculiarly apt that the man who wrote that line, whose work was all about keeping the expression of human feeling underneath the surface, sat somewhere quiet and alone and put a shotgun in his mouth. Hunter Thompson waited until his young wife left the house, and then shot himself in the head with a pistol. He must have been quite aware that either she, or his son, there in the house with his grandson, would find his corpse. Dead bodies don’t lay neatly. They splay, spastic and awful. There is often shit. I never met Thompson. Had the opportunity a couple of times — magazines wanting to send me out to Woody Creek, that kind of thing — but turned them down. I’ve been lucky so far, in meeting my great influences. But they don’t always go well. Friends of mine have had horrific experiences with their personal heroes, and it often leaves them unable to enjoy the work afterwards. And I wanted to keep the work. So I don’t know what kind of man he was. And the numbness, in part, comes from now finding that he was the kind of man that’d let his family find him like that. I have a personal loathing for suicide. It’s stupid and selfish and ugly and cowardly and reeks of weakness. Someone said to me yesterday about Thompson, “What a ripoff.” And I kind of know what he meant. It’s become convenient to write Thompson off as parody in recent years, and there’s a case to be made that he peaked around the age of 36, with FEAR AND LOATHING ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL ’72. But he could still make me laugh, even in the most recent collection, HEY RUBE. ” ‘We have many cigarettes here,’ I said suavely” still makes me smile. Writing had clearly become difficult, and a job, but every now and then you’d get a clear burst of the old anger, as in his support for Lisl Auman (google it). He was done with the big fireworks, but the devil was still in him. Probably his great work of the last twenty years was in Being Hunter Thompson. In performance. But how you leave the stage is at least as important as how you enter it. And he left it alone in a kitchen with a .45, dying in — and wouldn’t it be nice if it were the last time these words were typed together? — — dying in fear, and loathing. Warren Ellis
down by the sea
February 2005

Dept. of Table-Turning

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This story reminds me of something I’m pretty sure Mike did in college. See, his dorm room phone number was one digit off the line used to reserve raquetball courts at the new Rec Center. When the semester started and the Rec Center opened, Mike started getting LOTS of wrong numbers, often earlier in the day than Mike wanted his phone to ring. Mike asked the campus phone people to change either his number or the raquetball number, but nothing doing — they’re set in stone for some reason.

So he stopped telling people they’d called a wrong number, and started taking reservations instead. As I recall, eventually they changed the number.

Fucking. Perfect.

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From the Washington Post:

Name-Calling in Its Purest Form
By Richard Leiby
Thursday, February 24, 2005; Page C03 You’re an Ashcroft! No, you’re the Ashcroft! Imagine hearing that exchange in a movie — you’d think that Hollywood had come up with a crazy new insult. Well, it turns out that some airline passengers watching the Oscar-nominated film “Sideways” on foreign flights are, in fact, hearing “Ashcroft” as a substitute for a certain seven-letter epithet commonly used to denote a human orifice. The Post’s Monte Reel, based in Buenos Aires, tells us he heard the former attorney general’s name substituted at least twice in “Sideways” dialogue when he watched the film earlier this week on an Aerolineas Argentinas flight to Lima, Peru. The movie was shown in English and the dubbing was done “in the actual voices of the actors,” Reel reports. Star Thomas Haden Church utters the A-word. Profanity is typically cut from in-flight movies to make them suitable for general audiences, but how did the studio come up with “Ashcroft”? Hoping for enlightenment yesterday, we queried Fox Searchlight Pictures, the studio behind “Sideways.” A spokeswoman initally e-mailed us to say she had “all the info” about dubbing, then failed to respond to our followup questions. Ashcroft did not return our phone message, but we’re certain he was busy and not just being an . . . WaPo

More memorials

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The Onion has a no-story headline memorializing Thompson:

Contemporaries Remember Hunter S. Thompson As Ravenous, Mutant 40-Eyed Lizard-Demon

You’re goddamn right. You’re goddamn right.

Photographs of the Doomed

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Remember the 9/11 Guy photoshopped onto the WTC’s observation deck with an airliner looming in the background? Well, it turns out there’s a real world version from the tsunami. John and Jackie Knill were on the beach when the waves started getting weird. They started taking pictures of the waves, which get pretty hairy before, presumably, they quit and tried to find shelter. They didn’t make it, but the memory card from their camera did.

This Just In: Government Comprised Mostly Of Idiots

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The Feds have decided that there’s no reason to encrypt the information stored in the RFID chips to be embedded in new passports. Here’s a hint: If Bruce Schneier says you’re screwing up on security, maybe you oughta reconsider your path. Wired quotes Schneier:

Bruce Schneier, a security expert and author who founded Counterpane Internet Security, questions how much shielding helps, since travelers often have to show identification to exchange currency or check into a hotel. “Shielding is a good idea, but the problem is if you travel in Europe you are asked to show your passport a lot,” Schneier said. “So all that shielding means is that someone who wants to sniff my passport just has to pick his location.” Schneier, who just renewed his passport to make sure he will not have an unencrypted passport for another 10 years, says he has yet to hear a good argument as to why the government is requiring remotely readable chips instead of a contact chip — which could hold the same information but would not be skimmable. “A contact chip would be so much safer,” Schneier said. “The only reason I can think of is the government wants surreptitious access. I’m running out of other explanations. I’d love to hear one.”

Fafblog on Love

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Read this one, too.

the one about the love “Giblets is the enemy of love!” says Giblets with his anti-love arsenal. “He will hunt it and kill it and mount its head upon his wall!” “I dunno Giblets,” says me. “I’m thinkin maybe this doesn’t have as much to do with love as it’s got to do with you gettin dumped again by Noodles.” “She will come crawling back to Giblets!” says Giblets. “She will come crawling back to Giblets NOOOOW!” “There’s plenty a women in the sea,” says me. “Like mermaids an naiads an squidladies.” “Keep your half-octopus females to yourself!” says Giblets. “All they wanna do is digest Giblets and turn him into ink.” “A good woman is like a fine cheese,” says me. “Or a large hat. Or an aggrieved sasquatch. Or an elephant made outta trees an ropes an lotsa smaller elephants.” “Giblets never wants to see another elephant again!” says Giblets. “He is done with them and their cheating hearts! He is burning all pianos!” “But you love the elephants,” says me. “You can’t live with em an you can’t live without em.” “Cause they tear out your liver an brains an replace em with the fungal herbs of the undead,” says Giblets. “Women like zombies on accounta their drive,” says me. “Zombies keep their eyes on the prize an the prize is eatin brains.” “Yes very goal-oriented,” says Giblets. “But what of the robots! With their laser-mounted death beams an their single-track extermination programming they sweep the ladies off their feet!” “In the battle a robots an zombies everybody loses,” says me. “That’s why all sides have to work together to end the robot-zombie arms race.” “You talk madness, we need the robots to keep the zombies at bay!” says Giblets. “There’s no goin back once the robot-zombie genie’s outta the bottle!” “That kinda thinkin won’t protect us from zombies or robots,” says me. “It’ll only lead to mutually assured zombification.” “That’s just a price we’ll have to pay to win the war,” says Giblets. “The war of love,” says me.

Dept. of Going-Out-With-A-Bang

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This CNN piece places HST’s suicide in some context:

DENVER, Colorado (AP) — Journalist Hunter S. Thompson did not take his life “in a moment of haste or anger or despondency” and probably planned his suicide well in advance because of his declining health, the family’s spokesman said Wednesday. Douglas Brinkley, a historian and author who has edited some of Thompson’s work, said the founder of “gonzo” journalism shot himself Sunday night after weeks of pain from a host of physical problems that included a broken leg and a hip replacement. “I think he made a conscious decision that he had an incredible run of 67 years, lived the way he wanted to, and wasn’t going to suffer the indignities of old age,” Brinkley said in a telephone interview from Aspen. “He was not going to let anybody dictate how he was going to die.” Thompson, famous for “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and other works of New Journalism, spent an intimate weekend with his son, Juan, daughter-in-law, Jennifer, and young grandson, William, the spokesman said. “He was trying to really bond and be close to the family” before his suicide, Brinkley said. “This was not just an act of irrationality. It was a very pre-planned act.” The family is looking into whether Thompson’s cremated remains can be blasted out of a cannon, a wish the gun-loving writer often expressed, Brinkley said. “The optimal, best-case scenario is the ashes will be shot out of a cannon,” he said. Other arrangements were pending.

Why the fuck not? Everyone else is linking to it.

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vicious animal. And now, a dramatic reading from Paris Hilton’s Sidekick:

Aguilera, Christina 1-310-917-9191 Durst, Fred 1-310-948-0808 Eminem 1-917-776-7643 Lavigne, Avril 1-613-532-4092 Lil John 1-678-362-6742 Lohan, Lindsay +1-347-596-9990 Olsen, Ashley 1-310-760-1996 Pearlman, Ronald 1-212-572-5060 [ ed: WTF? ] Pharrel 1-646-824-1999 Phillips, Bijou 1-323-316-5528 Simmons, Russel 1-212-840-9399 Simpson, Ashlee 1-310-254-7114