FURIOUS nads! by The One True b!X

Yesterday, I tossed a comment onto a post by Brian Hines about intelligent design, and it reminds me that, at some point, I wanted to adapt something I once posted to a different site of mine into a post here.

Hines’ post specifically is about the obvious motives behind the pushers of intelligent design, but my response was a more general statement about my own ragingly-devout agnosticism. The same will hold true here.

(Incidentally, this also gives me the parenthetical opportunity to mention that if you weren’t reading Mike Argento’s blogging about the recently-concluded, but not-yet-decided Dover Panda Trial, you really missed out.)

As I said, much of what follows is adapted by something I once posted elsewhere, so it might take some doing before I circle back around to the argument I made in my comment over at Hines’ site, but we’ll get there eventually.

Continue reading ‘The Only Thing That Means Anything Is What We Do’

As something of an experiment, I’m going to be digging into the archives now and again to offer up some portion of my past about which many people don’t know, or which I simply happen, for whatever reason, to find worth a moment here.

This time around, we’re going back to 1995, when I was embroiled in the fight against the Communications Decency Act, a bill pitched by the late Senator James Exon which was the first full-frontal assault by the U.S. Congress against First Amendment rights on the Internet.

What follows is the text of the opening to an article from Rolling Stone, published in its October 5, 1995, edition.

Continue reading ‘FURIOUS flashback! #1: Slowdog’s Hanging Out Upstairs’

Earlier today I had a sudden realization and posted a comment to yesterday’s post about Shakers.

That realization was that many years ago, at Sunday Night Coffeehouse on the campus of the State University of New York College at Purchase, three friends of mine who were performing under the name the Tom Vick Trio (their names were Pat, Jack, and Olivia) were joined on stage by the actual Tom Vick.

The reason for this was so that they could perform a song which the actual Tom Vick described as having been “written by a very famous Shaker, Michael Landon, and another very famous Shaker, Lou Reed.” This song, it was said, was about the chair on which Jack was sitting.

It was a song about a Shaker and his workshop. It was called, as is this post, “Sweet Chair.”

The entire reason for revisiting all of this in a post of its own, rather than leaving it as a comment on that earlier post is this: I’ve found my audio cassette of the Tom Vick Trio concert.

Which, of course, means that I can make available an mp3 of “Sweet Chair” (6.7 MB). As far as I know — and unless they played at some point after I left behind my college “career” — this is the first time the Tom Vick Trio has been heard outside of that Coffeehouse performance.

As the song says: “Anyone who’d swear off sex to make furniture must truly love his work, and truly be a Shaker”

With each new commercial or trailer for the Æon Flux movie, I become more and more convinced that it will be unrecognizable to those of us who actually recall the animated versions which preceded it a decade or so ago.

This evening I finally got around to wondering whether or not those originals were available on DVD, as they properly ought to be.

Lo and behold, it turns out that this Tuesday brings with it the release of Æon Flux - The Complete Animated Collection, a three-disc set which, all told, comes in at over three hours worth of material.

What I fully expect to be missing from the film is the sheer (a)moral ambiguity of the originals, and the headache-inducing ways in which any given character (of those few which actually carried over from any given episode into any other) would not necessarily come across consistently.

Not because the creators were lazy, but because it just seemed to be part of what they were doing.

Continue reading ‘Emanations Sent Forth By God’

Unlike other sites I’ve run in the past or run today, this one is deliciously spartan, utterly free and devoid of any sidebars, ads, or other extraneous clutter. This also means it doesn’t offer any permantent credits for, as an example, the bits of software that make it work.

So I’ll take this opportunity to mention some of that here.

First, like nearly everything I maintain, this site is published via Movable Type, and at this stage it’s a default installation without any extra functionality generated by any of the many fine plugins (except for SpamLookup and Nofollow which are installed by default) which have been developed by other MT users.

Those elements of the site which appear and disappear based upon clicking links (for example, the Archives link on the main page, and the Comments and Trackbacks links on the entry pages) do so through the magic of script.aculo.us, a suite of effects which in turn depend upon the Protoype framework.

In order to make the “live preview” portion of entry comments work properly, I had to kludge together two different scripts for that function. I’ve lost track of their origins, but one was lifted from a plugin originally intended and written for WordPress. The other, while I think I found it via an MT-based site, clearly had its initial basis in the WordPress community as well.

Why I had to mash together portions of two different “live preview” scripts in order to make this feature work properly is something that escapes me. But neither original script worked on its own.

Finally, in order to comment here you first will need to register with TypeKey. In addition to registration being required, comments (and, for that matter, trackbacks) will be moderated.

There will be no free-for-alls here, as this site is more comparable to my living room than to a corner of the public square.

On the other hand, some commenters eventually will be granted Trusted status, at which point their comments no longer will be held for moderation, and instead will publish immediately upon submission.