Comic Books & Stuff

This is a pretty cool site. It's called Beware, There's a Crosseyed Cyclops in My Basement. It seems comic book collectors are huge geeks with nothing else to do but sit around and scan boxes and boxes of comic books all day. And that's great! Wanna read a Perry Mason comic book? How about one from The Munsters? Or four Mr. Ed comic books? Even comic book for The Courtship of Eddie's Father. Yeah, I didn't know any of those had their own comics. There's all sorts of cool stuff there. Maybe read an old Bananas magazine. Better yet, the entire Abbott & Costello Go to Mars movie.

Really, take a month off and start downloading. He makes lots of stuff available almost every day.

K-tel Ad

I'm guessing they got this girl from the shipping department in Plymouth or something like that. (Yeah, it's a MN company.) Or maybe she showed up right after school and was pretty tired from P.E. (the goofballs in Minnesota call it "phy ed" instead of "phys ed", pronounced "fie" like "pie").

Hammerax

Hammerax is a newish company (as far as cymbal companies go) that makes some amazingly cool looking and totally unique sounding cymbals and gong type thingies. They have a bunch of videos posted to their blog and main site. You can even mouse–over most of the images on their main page for a sample.

He's Horny

Oh, what to do when your trumpet explodes?! Always have a backup plan.

The Blue Amp Lives!

Looky what I brought back from Keota. It still works! I'd forgotten it was an Epiphone. I just knew it was blue. Dad had the speaker detached from the amp and had a long speaker wire soldered to the speaker that ran over to where a small TV used to be. The larger speaker helped them hear the TV when they were on the treadmill. Plugged the Strat in, turned it on, and slowly touched knobs and strings to make sure there wasn't some short or something (it has no ground). Gently turned it up after it warmed up and was greeted with some nice distortion when it got to full blast. I shot a short video so you can hear what it sounds like. YouTube is currently doing something with it; it's not there yet. I'll add the video here when it finally gets there.

I also got Bob's old Marantz 1060 integrated amp, which is newer than the Epi by just a few years. I played his 2 Rush albums (Fly by Night and All the World's a Stage) countless times through that stereo. It too still works, although the power switch doesn't stay depressed when I turn it on. Feels like there could be some gummy lubricants in there. I found a place online that rebuilds vintage stereo equipment and asked him about it. I have it down in the shop hooked up to a CD player and my old MCS bookshelf speakers. I tried 3 tape decks before the CD player. None of them managed to play a tape. Probably more gummy lube and/or dried out rubber belts.

Leave It On! Leave It On!

This is pretty NSFW. It's also the most pathetic amateur stripper you'll ever see. Perhaps some music would help keep the gyrating motions, well, gyrating. She's also about 3 months past touching up her bleached outgrowth. I wonder what that was she found on her face. A zit? Some food? Prepare to get totally turned off by the face she makes as she starts to tend to her nipples right before the video thankfully ends. Also good news; there is no part 2. Oh yeah, is that a rooster outdoors?

Lawrence Welk on Acid

Who was smoking the floor wax when they came up with this nightmare?

It's Motoramic!

See if you can count how many times he says "new" and how many product terms they made up in these '55 Chevy spots. Takes a while to load, so be patient, but you should be able to start playing after 30 seconds or so.

And that's "anti–dive brakes," not "anti–die brakes".

Hurst Girls

You never hear much about the Hurst Girls other than Linda Vaughn. The one named Nikki was so much cuter than Linda. Sure, she didn't have the ample jugs like Linda's, but who cares. Besides, Linda was chunky. But what I really wanna see is more pictures of that Hurst golf cart they're driving in the one photo!

Retrofucked

OK, now I'm getting angry. I asked Roxio about who my 6.x backup of my G5 is now complaining about a login/name problem when it never did that before I upgraded 8.1 to 8.2. I also complained about their wake-on-lan not working on that computer and asked when it will be fixed. I also complained that they have not put back into 8.x anything similar to the old Retrospect Event Handler and asked when that would happen. Here's what I got back. Copy & pasted canned responses.

Retrospect 8.2 requires the client to have a login username/password. You will need to update the client on the system. Mac OS X Clients require the following:
PowerPC G3, G4, or G5, or any Intel processor
Mac OS X or Mac OS X Server 10.3.9, 10.4.11, or 10.5.5 or later
RAM that meets Apple's guidelines for each OS
Note: Backing up Mac OS X Server clients requires Retrospect Multi Server or Retrospect Single Server with available Server Client Licenses.
Retrospect offers the Wake-on-LAN support for client computers.This gives Retrospect the ability to wake Mac OS X clients from sleep immediately prior to a Proactive backup, resulting in improved energy efficiency and reducing costs.
This should correct the problem.

I especially like that last line, the one that comes after a bunch of product specs and feature descriptions, not after, say, some fixes I could try.

Spaghetti Western Orchestra

I highly recommend you crank up the res to 720, or at least to 480 to get better sound. These guys are from Australia. I saw them on this episode of Later… with Jools Holland. Love that show.

RetNOrespect

So it seems that installing the 8.2 updates fucked up my 6.1.126 somehow. It can no longer connect to my G5 to back it up. I'm still using 6 for that because I need the Retrospect Event Handler to wake it up and put it to sleep. Otherwise it's a power hog that just heats up the room. 8 doesn't offer such a nice AppleScript thingy as that, and 8's built–in Wake–on–LAN feature doesn't work on the G5. They picked a non–standard wake–on–lan implementation?

But hey, at least they fixed the label recognition thing so it will once again ignore anything with the Grey label. It was including lots and lots of humongous stuff that didn't need to be backed up because the earlier versions didn't work with labels correctly. Looks like they fixed that in 8.1.x, but I didn't notice until now. However, they still put folders into the backup that should be filtered out, but not their contents. They say that's the correct behavior. I can live with that, even though it doesn't sound correct to me. Why recreate the folder structure of folders that will be empty and the user didn't want backed up in the first place?

Dudley Moore

He sure is one helluva jazz player. Here he is with his trio and his funny '60s British hair.

Vintage Wards Commercial

Too bad about the audio sync problem. Check out that fancy dispenser thingy where the Jet-Dry goes.

The Many Loves of Retrospect

Seems nobody wants to remain the owner of Retrospect for very long. It changed from Dantz to EMC a year or two ago I think, and now suddenly I get a release announcement from Roxio. At least Roxio has a well–loved product that should give some clout to Retrospect. And they still make you do all the legwork in figuring out how to download and update the clients and server, even though the app itself can download and install its own update. They give you a little dialog box that says to update the client and server, and there's an Update button, which you think will update them for you. Nope. It takes you to a web site and you have to figure out that you need to download the one named Retrospect 8.2.0 (399) Installer, even though that will re–download the app that you just got done updating. But it also contains the server and client. Why entire fucking thing isn't automated, I can't figure out. Dumbasses.

Snobby Bitch

At first I thought this was going to be an apology from a girl to her mom, but then it took a brutal turn. So, if you have kids, talk to them and don't always be buzzed. Good advice.

Tunnel Construction

For some reason, I don't imagine the people of 1910 being smart enough to come up with something like this method of prefabricating tunnel sections and sinking them into the river. For 1910 I think of castor oil and horses pooping in the streets and people bathing once a month, not engineers who can dream up this technique.