My major piece of info today is my sounds page. As is common in these things, I did some surfing and ended up on a WAV file page or two. I downloaded stuff with reckless abandon, suddenly presented with a whole series of “meaningful” sound bites. To Americans my age, The Wizard of Oz, for instance has assumed cosmic dimensions. It’s not just me, look at David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart”. If you don’t know your wizard, you will never really understand THAT movie. If you want to that is.That’s why I have included
“Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore” and
“I’m melting….melting!”
on my site.
We also have the voice of HAL from 2001 up there. These little bites are great for alerts, especially on windows. I am now using “What do you think you’re doing, Dave” as a shutdown alert and “I’ve just picked up a fault in the AE-35 unit” for an alert of impending system crash. Of course, you might want to use Peter Fonda from Easy Rider saying “I think I’m gonna crash” instead.
OH, THERE’S A LOT UP THERE. Hannibal Lecter. Bond…James Bond. Homer Simpson. “mmmmmm…invisible cola.” Free to download. Freedom of information! Long live the free internet! Or did you see that Enron geek before Congress talking about how they thought the “meltdown” of the market for bandwidth was a positive sign that their schemes were working? HUH? I just know that I used to get free webhosting, now I have to pay. It’s like…not fair, dood! I also see that there is some evil force at work trying to limit the potential of this tool and keep us down on the plantation from gettin’ uppity and trying to connect beyond our little villages and hidey holes. WHOA, DUDE, fight the power that bleeds! Download a WAV file from my site!!!
I would like to thank Tobias Pflaum for pointing out that the links on my journal page didn’t work. I beg your forgiveness. I blame microsoft. Their damn program rewrote a key piece of code without my knowledge and boy am I embarrassed. Somebody link me to a non-crashing cracked version of dreamweaver or something better, please! Here is that journal link again.
Tuxedomoon will play in Mexico City in April. We will play the Sonar Festival in Spain in June. We will play the Ramada Inn by the Highway 50 bypass in Pueblo, Colorado in 2011 for Blaine’s 30th high school re-union of the class of 1971. We are also available for Bar Mitzvahs, weddings and children’s parties. No questions asked. Payment is in cash, leave it in a paper bag behind the toilet, second stall from the right, rest stop number 23, Interstate 80, Cheyenne Wyoming. You will be contacted. No timewasters please.
I think I hear my mother calling. Considering she is in Colorado and I am near Turkey, you gotta admire the old gal’s voice.
Last night I went to the college radio station here in Mytilini and did two hours for them. I have never seen a radio station run on less. It is thanks to sheer will that they get a signal out at all. The studio monitor was a flickering clock radio tuned to the station. We passed around the one microphone which had a bad cable. During the course of the program someone made the mistake of closing the door behind themselves, probably me hunting down the toilet, which meant WE WERE LOCKED IN! The bad boogie band rehearsing in the next room were unlikely to come to our rescue, so Giorgos the host of our show called a friend who lived nearby to come let us out. Or course, I had a great time.
I have been beavering away today on two things. First thing, I have been sorting through e-mails in my down-time effort to make my journal current. I have caught up with myself up to my splendid adventures in Berlin from May to July 2000. This is a cracking read, folks, Blaine tells all in this day by day breakdown of the anything goes world of Berliner theatre. We have live chickens, horses, love, bicycles, ping pong tables and La Bamba. It’s all there, including a link to a virtual tour of Berlin. I sighed many a nostalgic sigh watching that little Javascript go around and around some very familiar sights indeed. Unfortunately all of my own photos of this period are still there in Berlin, awaiting uh….something.
I haven’t figured how to link to a menu that is contained in a frameset, so this link takes you to the page in question.
Excuse me if I sound a bit cranky on this one, folks. Snow Crashes will do that to one.
I have been running microsoft software on my computer for some time, since it was conveniently included with the package. Quelle coincidence! Suddenly, IT happened to me too. A computer dying on you like Generalissimo Franco did, that is, one piece at a time(“Today G. Franco’s kidneys failed, today G. Franco’s lungs failed, maybe you aren’t old enough to remember the daily bulletins on the news”). This kind of disaster is “something that always happens to someone else” like a traffic accident or hemmorhoids UNTIL IT HAPPENS TO YOU.
My cyberguru Coti and I sat up with this ailing beast for almost two days, watching in despair as one program after another packed it in. At one point, prior to his arrival, I even tried chanting Sufi healing mantras to it, and I was convinced that I had healed it with my mystical powers. Alas, I was deluded.
Like so many others before, I was privileged to experience for myself the arcane labyrinth that is the dark forest of SYSINI, and follow the track of The Dark Lord in my quest to destroy his ring in the Crack of Doom or whatever.
We obviously succeeded, or I would be unable to write this piece of fluff. Exhausted, I sat down to my laptop to engage in my nightly surfing activities. The only thing which came to mind as a basis for a search was “I HATE MICROSOFT”. I might as well have been searching “e-mail”. There were that many entries. I copied and pasted the first few and then worked up a lovely image for my holy site.
The text included there is a semi-literate e-mail which has become a much-quoted classic on anti microsoft sites, as has the “blue screen of death” haiku.
I will continue to use this stuff because everyone else does. Life can be like that sometimes. Basta.
[common] This term is closely related to the older Black Screen of Death but much more common (many non-hackers have picked it up). Due to the extreme fragility and bugginess of Microsoft Windows, misbehaving applications can readily crash the OS (and the OS sometimes crashes itself spontaneously). The Blue Screen of Death, sometimes decorated with hex error codes, is what you get when this happens. (Commonly abbreviated BSOD.)
The following entry from the Salon Haiku Contest, seems to have predated popular use of the term:
I found this, much to my delight and/or consternation.
Guido /gwee’do/ or /khwee’do/
Without qualification, Guido van Rossum (author of Python). Note that Guido answers to English /gwee’do/ but in Dutch it’s /khwee’do/.
nerd knob n.
[Cisco] A command in a complex piece of software which is more likely to be used by an extremely experienced user to tweak a setting of one sort or another – a setting which the average user may not even know exists. Nerd knobs tend to be toggles, turning on or off a particular, specific, narrowly defined behavior.
guru meditation n.
Amiga equivalent of `panic’ in Unix (sometimes just called a `guru’ or `guru event’). When the system crashes, a cryptic message of the form “GURU MEDITATION #XXXXXXXX.YYYYYYYY” may appear, indicating what the problem was. An Amiga guru can figure things out from the numbers. Sometimes a guru event must be followed by a Vulcan nerve pinch.
This term is (no surprise) an in-joke from the earliest days of the Amiga. An earlier product of the Amiga corporation was a device called a `Joyboard’ which was basically a plastic board built onto a joystick-like device; it was sold with a skiing game cartridge for the Atari game machine. It is said that whenever the prototype OS crashed, the system programmer responsible would calm down by concentrating on a solution while sitting cross-legged on a Joyboard trying to keep the board in balance. This position resembled that of a meditating guru. Sadly, the joke was removed fairly early on (but there’s a well-known patch to restore it in more recent versions). Apropos of Nothing:
Here is a wee French text about one of the weapons our boys are using in Aghanistan. The Predator Drone is an unmanned aircraft equipped with “Hellfire” missiles which can be piloted from a bunker in Kansas via new virtual interfaces while it rains death on the enemies of democracy far far away. Damn.
There is an organization of ex-radar technicians who meet to promote electronic warfare. They call themselves “Two Crows” because the WWII nickname for radar technicians was “Ravens”. Ho ho ho. You can find all about state of the art military hardware there if you really want to.
Greetings all. Here are the latest fruits of my labors watered by the sweat from
my brow, planted in the earth of my site. Sounds disgusting, no? Who wants a sweaty
computer?
As I was sitting here thinking of amusing ways to give myself carpal tunnel syndrome and
back problems from sitting in front of a computer screen for eight hours at a time, I thought
“Hello! Let’s translate the site for the benefit of our many non-English speaking visitors! There’s
a jolly idea, old fellow! Huzzah!” And then I wondered why I had started talking like a British
schoolboy from 1918.
I went and did it. There is a website, a venerable institution by web standards, perhaps 3 years old,
called BABELFISH. This name derives from “The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” in which one would
insert a tiny fish into one’s ear which would translate all known languages for the host. Babelfish is
a site where one may insert text in one language and have something vaguely resembling that text return
after a few minutes. One may also type in the URL of any given site and have the text “translated”.
“Hello, Harry!” I told myself, becoming Harry Potter for a second “there’s a capital idea!” But there is
usually a catch. The translation program got in there and stepped all over my code, man, inserting its
own links and other gremlins which took as long to clean up as it would have done to just translate the
damn thing myself. Also, the literal-minded sheer stupidity of the translation algorithms makes this
site a better destination for surrealist poets than people in need of translation. Of course, this is one thing I love about it.
There is also a little musical offering on each page just for the hell of it.
My thanks to Isabelle Corbisier who helped me translate at least the French version over Microsoft Messenger.
Quite an experience translating line by line from a chat program.
Now I will demonstrate Babelfish
I have translated this text using Babelfish. Babelfish is an online translating program.
I have 5 nipples. My left foot is an illegal alien. My right foot is lobbying for independence, but I
am only willing to grant it limited autonomy. If you remove the grey scratch panel from my eyes, lo I will
behold the universe in all its splendor. Pass the mashed potatoes, Elvis, I think Gladys is beating the
chickens again.
Ho tradotto questo testo usando Babelfish. Babelfish è un programma in linea di traduzione. Ho 5 ugelli. Il mio piede sinistro è uno straniero illegale. Il mio piede destro sta incitando per indipendenza, ma sono soltanto disposto ad assegnarla ho limitato l’ autonomia. Se rimuovete il pannello grigio della graffiatura dai miei occhi, bassi io behold di volontà l’ universo in tutto lo relativo splendor. Passare le purè di patate, Elvis, io pensano che Gladys stia battendo ancora i polli.
Ich habe diesen Text mit Babelfish übersetzt. Babelfish ist ein Onlineübersetzungsprogramm. Ich habe 5 Nippel. Mein linker Fuß ist ein ungültiger Ausländer. Mein rechter Fuß beeinflußt für Unabhängigkeit, aber ich bin nur bereit, sie zu bewilligen begrenzte Autonomie. Wenn Sie das graue Kratzerpanel von meinen Augen löschen, niedrig ich Willensbehold das Universum in seinem ganzem splendor. Führen Sie die gestampften Kartoffeln, Elvis, ich denken, daß Gladys die Hühner wieder schlägt.
And then back the other way, one language to the other into
-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+English again! Works great!-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
I have to translate this text with Babelfish. Babelfish is a program in the line of translation. Ho 5 nozzles. My left foot is an incorrect foreigner. My infuences of the skilful foot for independence, but me am only ready with the assegnarla that I limited autonomy. If cancelled the gray of panel of the draft of my eyes, the bottom of level Willensbehold relative universe in the splendor entirety. To carry out planted potatoes, Elvis, I think that Gladys always strikes the polli.
My friend Chris Silvey casually mentioned on the phone that he had burned himself while “ear-candling”. Now, I had heard of this practice as a medieval curiosity, or as one of Beethoven’s desperate measures to save his hearing, but I had no idea it was a done thing in the states. Live and learn.
What it is, in case you don’t know, you stick a cone-shaped hollow candle in your ear and light it. The resulting convection performs a demonstration of thermodynamics, vaporizes all the gunge which has been collecting in your ears throughout your entire life and you can collect it in a bowl and take it home to show the kids.
Sounds great!
Here are some FAQ’s about this subject.
Ear Candling
The Six Most Frequently Asked Questions About Ear Candling
1. What is Ear Candling? Ear Candling is a natural and mildly erotic way to clean out accumulated wax and white, flaky fungus from the ears. The accumulations withdrawn from your ears may be many months or even years old and are so disgusting they make me want to blow chunks. Ear Candles are custom designed from natural fibers and tapered to precise specifications. New Elvis-shaped ear candles have recently become “all the rage” in Athens’ trendy Kolonaki district. The collected discharges are especially favored by Greek bakers, who make a delicious pudding from them. They are often used as a sauce for calamari on the island of Lesbos.
2. Does Ear Candling hurt? Absolutely not! It is a painless, harmless and totally relaxing experience. If it weren’t for the intermittent crackling and hissing sounds the agonized shrieks and the smell of burning hair like a dog in a concentration camp oven– due to the burning of the wax and fungus being drawn up the chimney of the candle — you would never know that anything was happening in your ear. Many female ear candling therapists have recently taken to wearing black leather aprons and will perform other services, such as writing limericks on the client’s buttocks with a soldering iron if requested. Many patients like to have an ear candle inserted in their rectum and lit cigarettes in each ear, the new therapy called “butt candling” which is gaining favor in alternative healing circles.
3. How long does an Ear Candling session last? About forty-five (45) minutes per session, however, you should allow one (1) hour for your appointment. There have been reports of marathon 30 day “ear candling raves” being held on the west coast by former fans of the rock group “The Grateful Dead” but San Francisco police chief A. Eichmann refused to comment when we contacted him. Schoolchildren in Butte Montana have been detained for suspicious wax traces on their clothing, alleged to derive from satanist ear candling sabbaths held in the mountains outside of that city but no charges were filed.
4. How often should I have Ear Candling done? Initially, most people need just 2 or 3 candling sessions to get their ears clean. Often gangs of ear candlers in Los Angeles have been known to waylay victims and ear candle them at gun point, insisting that their clients return five or six times a day. Groups of homeless ear candle addicts “candling up” in vacant lots are becoming an all too frequent sight in American cities and President George Bush has recently announced a campaign to “Round up and hang these hairball slime” as part of his ongoing anti-terrorism measures. However, some people, may need up to eight (8) sessions over a six month period. Once your ears are clean, personal preference should determine how often you have your ears candled. Every three to six months would be practical.
5. Who can benefit from Ear Candling? Ear candling can benefit almost everyone, from infants to adults. Primary monetary benefits have been substantial among bee keepers who supply the wax for the candles. Musicians can benefit – especially singers and horn blowers – who often have a lot more wax build up than other people. People who wear hearing aids can benefit. Also, those people who have had previous ear injuries, can benefit from ear candling as they tend to have a greater build up of wax and fungus.
6. Who should not have Ear Candling? Ear Candling should not be done to people who have ear tubes, perforated ear drums, artificial ear drums, penis implants, breast-enhancement surgery, pierced eyelids or tattoos featuring disney characters.
And there you go. If you aren’t careful, I might turn this newsletter into a full-fledged online magazine. Provided, of course that there is an audience for a fairly geeky American muso with a hell of a lot of free time and a distorted view of his own importance in the scheme of things.
The good news is that today I bought a bicycle. The bad news is….there isn’t any bad news. Yesterday I was out on Athena’s bike, just drifting around when I happened upon a bicycle repair shop. This may be no big thing to you, but this is Greece and a bike repair shop isn’t that easy to find. The guy, I forget his name, though he told it to me, had some used bikes for sale, looking grungy enough to fit my budget. I pointed at one and asked, and he said “No problem, my friend. I feex and tomorrrrrow you take. 60 evRO.” My guy was as good as his word, and today I took delivery of my new old bicycle. He put it into the best shape possible and it is quite rideable. I took it out on the long jetty that protrudes into the harbor. This is heaven. Riding out into the sea with the mountains in the distance is about as close as one can come to riding out on the water itself. Whizzing along with the water on both sides is like shooting through a tube made of sky and sea, an ecstatic blue-white warp in the very fabric of Samsara, illuminated and vibrating like a bouzouki string.
Obsesso man is not satisfied with just sending text-based site updates. Oh no. He goes online to find an image editor
for ascii images and HE FINDS ONE. I also discovered that there is a community of dedicated geeks out there who make art
in this medium. That is, for those of you who don’t know, when sending e-mail with the various programs dedicated to that
function, one has the option to format as either “text” or “html”. With HTML, you have all the marvellous colors and pop up ads that we have come to know and love in our information age. With text, you have the bare bones characters which exist on your keyboard, no more, no less. Most mailing lists are limited to this format due to the miniscule size of the files in question. This one here, for instance.
If all things have worked out, you will see some handy dandy images which one can easily stick into the window of a chat program or cut copy paste and send to your friends. These images seem to read best with “courier” as the font and 10pt as the size.
If you LIKE this stuff, there are a couple of places to go. http://neptune.spaceports.com/~machouse/
for examples of this art form, very heavy on manga since the japanese seem to dig it.
USEFUL INTERNET EMOTICONS
EMOTICON MEANING
:)Â Happy person
:(Â Sad person
:-)Â Happy person with a nose
:-(Â Sad person with a nose
:---(Â Person who is sad because he or she has a large nose
:(Â Person who is sad because he or she has a large fish for a nose
:-DÂ Person laughing
:-D*Â Person laughing so hard that he or she does not notice that a 5-legged spider is hanging from his or her lip
:-|Â Person unsure of which long-distance company to choose
>8-O-(&)Â Person just realizing that he or she has a tapeworm
;-)Â Person winking
-)Â Person who can still smile despite losing an eyeball
:-0WWÂ Person vomiting a series of Slim Jims
:-QÂ Person who just had cybersex and is now enjoying a post-coital cybercigarette
>:-Q -... Person who was enjoying a post-coital cigarette until he suddenly noticed, to his alarm, that there is some kind of discharge dribbling from his cybermember
:-{8Â Person who is unhappy with the results of her breast-enlargement surgery
:V:-|Â Person who cannot figure out why nobody wants to talk to him or her, little suspecting that there is an alligator on his or her head
~oE]:-|Â Fisherperson heading for market with a basket on his or her head containing a three-legged octopus that is giving off smell rays
>:-[ -{9Â Person who is none too pleased to be giving birth to a squirrel
Here are some fine examples of emoticon art from the “macros” site.
Screenshot from original sitenews page.
I conclude by attempting to paste in an ascii image of my very own haid. Hope you can read this. If not, don’t blame me.
(it helps to get up and walk back a few paces from your computer. This helps anyway. Walk away….turn it off, blaine…turn it o f f f…….)
M U N D O B L A I N E O  NEWS   F E B. 8,  2 0 0 2
No sooner do I finish something than I have to tell everyone about it. It’s things like this that make life worthwhile. I have completed a wee lexicon of American slang that
I just couldn’t wait to post up to the site.
“Man Feebus, those are some pimp kicks!”
“Word, road dawg, these Nikes are wet!”
“Do tell, Fraaz. I wanted to Poonj my baitch, but she’s riding the cotton pony.”
“Yo man, that’s whack!”
If you are a citizen of empire, perhaps these bits o’ jargon won’t do much for you. If you are European, look out.
I have begun investigating u.s. army slang, just for the hell of it. Strange things on the way.
“I wanted to hit that Sergeant with the misery spoon when I was talking to the pig master”
“Bohica. Snafu for the DMOP.”
“Gimme some more Lifer Juice, Billy Bob”
“Yes sir.”
And these catchy tunes as sung by our marching lads.
Bin Laden
bin laden is a son of a bitch
drives his people into a ditch
when he’s through they’re always dead
till we put a bullet through his head
one from you
one from me
now he’s dead
you can see
P T
good for you
good for me
etc.
*******T U X E D O M O O NÂ Â Â ANDÂ O T H E RÂ Â C DÂ Â Â R E L E A S ES********
There are things being discussed right now for TM’s 2002 events.
1. We will most likely play St. Petersburg and Moscow in June, dates TBA.
In june we are also slated to play Sonar Festival in Spain.
2. The live in St. Petersburg CD is just about ready for release.
3. “Night Air” by BLR will be re-issued, together with “Paris en Automne”
by
Les Temps Modernes.
4. A collection of new tracks will be released by Gigolo Records very
soon.
5. We will continue work on the new “proper” CD either in Mexico or
Russia.
6. A collaboration between BLR, Roger Eno,Giancarlo Bigazzi and Pier Luigi
Andreoni will be released in spring, featuring vocals and texts by BLR.
*****MUNDOBLAINEO SITE NEWS WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 6, 2002*********
Howdy folks. Hope everyone made the transition from January into February unscathed. A brief note for the pedantic.
february Feb”ru*a*ry, n. [L. Februarius, orig., the month of expiation, because on the fifteenth of this month the great feast of expiation and purification was held, fr. februa, pl., the Roman festival of purification; akin to februare to purify, expiate.] The second month in the year, said to have been introduced into the Roman calendar by Numa. (who the hell was numa? blr) In common years this month contains twenty-eight days; in the bissextile, or leap year, it has twenty-nine days.
See? We’re all pagan all over the place and don’t even realize it when we’re going down to the Mithraeum to drink blood on Sunday. (SUNday? Dies Solis? The day of the sun, Mithra’s dad. Oh lordy lordy lord they’s conspiracy everwhere ya look!)
I digress, as usual. I’m still here on the island, it’s still splendid and I’m having big fun. Thought you’d like to know that.
The major piece of news in Mundoblaineo is that I have gone and added a page for my erstwhile pard, Steven Brown. I have left content up to him and I will exercise no editorial control over what kind of far left pinko commie subsersive drivel he sees fit to post there. Hey, that’s the kind of tolerant, even-tempered all around good guy I am. If I have visions of Joseph Cotten and Orson in Citizen Blaine, that’s my hallucination, ain’t it?
Inside Mundoblaineo 