sweasel.com

I am ALL ALONE on the internet today. It’s just me and the spammers. What is it, nice weather or something?

I’m here briefly, we’re headed out to the farmers market. YEAH for cinnamon rolls!

Bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit from McDs. It filled the empty satisfactorily – and to hell with the carbs.

The milf’s kid broke his arm yesterday horsing around on his Ripstick(tm) – the poor li’l uncoordinated twerp. I gotta go buy some medicinal fireworks for him.

I like the Knitted Weasel(tm).

Oh, man. You got to watch this. Give it a minute to get good:

I wish I’d thought of that.

Made me think of those Bollywood music-video gibberish “lyric translations” that were going around for a while.

Joe Cocker. Very strange.

I went and got the kid some fireworks. They had “waterproof” firecrackers that kids can throw into water and have a bang & splash all at once. The milf & co have a pool. I thought for a loooonnnggg time before deciding not to buy. They should thank me (and make me Bloody Marys) every day for a month.

Reminds me of the “this is your brain on drugs” PSA.

Awww…I like the hoggify moment. I love me some pigs. They is cute and they is tasty. That is called being ‘well-rounded’. As a kid, I always wondered why someone with such twitches and speech impediment was allowed on stage. I thought there really was something wrong with him.

You are a good man McGoo for ‘medicating’ the kid’s broken bone. I bet you will become his most favorite uncle.

Already have that title, PnB! The kid understands that I like to watch fireworks – but hate to run around and light them myself.

For years I was convinced JC was brain-damaged or sumpin. I still think I’m right.

Yes, I thought he had for real palsy or something, too. I saw Woodstock in the theaters when it came out, even though I was a tad young. Permissive mom.

That was just when they were getting the movie ratings system together. Before that, if mom said you could go, you could go. Remember?

I remember that, Weaz.I also saw Woodstock when it was at the theatres – but I was of age.

Joe Cocker – he was also “interesting” when he sang in the “We Are The World” collaboration video: He needed about 50 takes to get his fucked-up-voice song track in it just right. I don’t think anyone else knew why he was being so picky. Polishing a turd, if you ask me.

http://aardvarks.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/turd.wav

I always liked Joe, especially some of his later stuff. Helps a lot if ya don’t have to watch him.

And liner notes and printed lyrics make a lot of difference.

I got leather for my Fred

Ahahahahahahahhahahahha! Good find Stoaty!

Whelp, time to put another load in the laundry.

Skinny nerdy white boy rap: Bo Burnham.

Swease, that is truly disturbing and yet funny.

That was strange.

… so anyone wanna play, “Who said dat?”

http://aardvarks.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/cecil-b.wav

Or:

http://aardvarks.wordpress.com/files/2008/04/jizbcket.wav

Or:

http://aardvarks.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/barklike.wav

Or:

http://aardvarks.wordpress.com/files/2008/06/sun_shin.wav

OK – how ’bout this one:

http://aardvarks.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/spat_at.wav

I don’t know the others McGoo, but the last one is the long-time prisoner from “Life of Brian”.

if mom said you could go, you could go

Yeah and back then if mom sent you (at 8, 9, or 10) to the store for cigarettes, no one batted an eyelash. It was Glaser Drug for cigarettes, Kroger to redeem the soda bottles, then Ben Franklin five and dime to spend the bottle money on penny candy. Mom always had to have Swedish fish and taffy to get the taste of smoke out of her mouth – which she only did in the bathroom.

Right you are, Enas. The last one in both comments is Michael Palin (I believe) as the long-time prisoner that’s chained to a wall in L of B.

http://www.firesigntheatre.com/albums/sfi2.mp3

God bless Vespucciland! I’d forgotten that one. McGoo, I didn’t recognize a single one of those, except the last but only because Enas got it first.

This cheered me up:

Backstory here.

First one is Gene Wilder in Blazing Saddles, second is “The Landlady” in Dragnet (with Dan Ackroyd and Tom Hanks), third one is Bill Murray in Caddyshack.

The story is that I recorded all those snippets from laserdiscs of the movies back in the late 90’s when I lived in AZ. I recorded over 300 of ’em. Then I lost the entire directory in PC crash years ago, much to my regret. I was very upset.

I rediscovered the directory on a laptop that I had long-term loaned my (now deceased) brother and got back last year.

I saw that dancing-guy-all-over-the-world somewhere this morning. It’s neat! I liked the dancing-in-Korean-border-guard-post best.

That is a very peculiar story, McGoo. I mean, about your 300 snippets, and about them rising from the dead. One thing I found when moving was a box of reel-to-reel tapes that undoubtedly include some recordings of me as a small child, farting around with my parents’ recording equipment. I have one last, limping reel-to-reel recorder, so I’m going to hump them all over to England and go through them.

Funny, the North Korean one was my favorite, too. I guess because it was a grim, empty room and one little man in uniform with a WTF? look on his face.

Yep – that’s why I told the story – it was odd.

Weaz, I really valued those snippets, and it bugged me for months when I lost them. That’s when I started taking backups seriously. The wave files are no big deal to anyone else, but they kinda represent in toto my particular (and peculiar) sense of humor, and a particular time in my life.

Yeah – the lone Korean guard in the background made that video snippet seem weird. Bet he wondered what the fiddly fuck was going on with the doofus.

You might consider transferring your tapes to DVD or whatever. I just saw a discussion thread over at Slashdot(?) about “I wanna preserve my kids’ kiddie-photos and vids for them to have as adults What technology should I use?”

Caddyshack, one of my favorite movies. Watched it last night in fact, after watching the wildlife. There’s a veteran travelling around the country meeting people. I’m lending him my place in the mountains. He should be getting close in a few hours. Here’s his blog about his trip: http://danielsbigtrip.blogspot.com/

I had another guest stop by yesterday afternoon, Wally. OCD and he just blurts things out. Like: “it’s no longer morning!” It’s a bit odd.

Nice of you to extend hospitality, Allen. Next time you get the exotic women lined up, can I come over? I tipped his Paypal account, so make sure he brings his own the Valu-Rite!

Caddyshack is a classic. Bill Murray is fantastic in it. Here’s another of his lines – from Ghostbusters:

http://aardvarks.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/the-sky.wav

Behold, the power of post-production! I guess this is smut, so — over to you, McGoo!

McGoo, if you ever find yourself in Califobia give me a holler.

Down in the valley there is always something going on. http://kern.audubon.org/KRVSNF.htm

Oof! I’m the #1 hit on “joseph mengele wiki.”

Cool, I got a trip to the Akismet trap. I gnawed my leg off though, so here I am. McGoo, it’s always interesting to go down to the Kern River and watch people getting in the river.

You sit there shaking your head and wondering if one of them is going to end up in the news. The river averages about 6 people a year, but people never seem to learn. I used to volunteer for the river search and rescue but it got depressing. Now I just look for lost hikers. Great excuse to cruise the mountains on horseback.

Once again, I have to ask, where the f-f do you find this shit, Weaz!! That was funny.

Joseph Mengele wiki, eh? Strange.

You’ll be chagrined (or rapturous) to know you’re still #3 for “temptation – thy name is poop chute”. And still #1 for “PLF” of course.

http://aardvarks.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/themuse.wav

Allen – any idea why Akismet took a liking to you? I may view the Indy 500 the way you view that river: why would anyone want to go in a car that fast amongst other cars going equally fast?

Sadly, not DVD, McGoo. I did some digging into this a year or so back and the manufacturers (!) were warning me not to regard DVD as a reliable storage medium!

According to an IBM paper a year or so back, the most reliable backup medium we have is a 7,200rpm hard drive (apparently, the higher speed drives get better platters or summat). Alternatively, even digital tape is better than DVD, it’s said.

For archive stuff (yes, yes, I know I am anal) I backup to CD (apparently more reliable than DVD) and HD.

You probably know all this anyway, but just in case someone is reading this who doesn’t….

Allen: rescued. You have to travel outside your blogroll is all, McGoo. I think that one came from the ‘cheer me up’ thread on the conceptart.org forums.

See? I knew having a lot of stupid hobbies would come in handy.

Travel … outside … my blogroll?

*looks askance – then peers out there into the darkness*

You gotta be kiddin’. It’s dangerous out there. You go first.

Badger – I suspect “they” don’t want to make a durable medium. Laserdiscs were supposed to be great, until de-lamination and speckle/disc-rot kicked in. You would think they would have solved that problem with CD’s but no… Likewise, DVDs ought to have been stable, but they’re worse than all the others.

…And given the problems NASA is having with flash memory, that option is not viable.

Thanks Weasel. You saved some of your relatives. In the link you can click on the mammals. I didn’t know we had weasels around here, two varieties in fact. Similarly two varieties of badgers.

Now that’s interesting, McGoo! Whassup with flash memory? I haven’t heard this one.

Don’t know about you, McGoo, but I usually find enough stuff to cheer me up right here in Moronworld.

Moronworld provides the minimum daily requirement of news, silliness, and world-class snark. (I like snark.)

Does anyone else besides me suspect that Moronblogggers and Moronosphere readers are a bit older and/or a calmer percentile of the general population? Not that we can’t get volatile – its just that we seem to “choose our battles” more carefully.

The Phoenix Lander is/was having minor programming/memory/data issues. Nothing to get excited about. They knew it probably would have issues (and were ready with patches) after the Mars Rovers had to be re-programmed a year or two ago (Remember the seizure Spirit had early on that scared the shit out of everyone?), but it was too late to change hardware in the Lander.

I don’t know any other details, but I will dig them up and convey them asap.

Thanks, McGoo. All I’d heard about flash memory was that you need to defrag it regularly as it, quite literally, wears out by being accessed, so the more fragmented it gets, the more it’s used. Or something.

Back to the clay tablets. Where’s my cuneiform dictionary?

The first computer terminal I ever used was a Burroughs back in 1977. It was the size of an executive desk. It had a typewriter built into it (not even an IBM ball, but individual ‘arms/keys’) like your grandmother learned to type on in the 50’s. I could type much faster than it could accept the input. When the computer responded to you, it slapped out its answer onto paper. No expensive TV screens involved. It was essentially a teletype operation. Better than semaphore flags, but not much.

It had a hard drive in it, of sorts, although the terminal was hooked to a mainframe somewhere. The hard drive in the terminal was huge (in physical size). It occupied the space in the ‘desk’ where the drawers would usually be. It hummed and vibrated in there like a giant gyroscope, balancing against the slapping of the keys on that stripped computer paper.

Even though it was pretty fancy technology for the time, the whole thing reminded me of a steam tractor.

I suspect the memory in those babies wore out pretty quickly. There was nothing ‘flash’ about those units though… still, unlike Uncle Badger’s machine, at least it used paper, and didn’t spit its output onto clay tablets.

Hey, its Monday. Why are you still resting!! Gimme, gimme, gimme!!!

Now there is an idea for a geek toy! A “printer” that you feed Play-Doh(tm) and it squirts out tablets of the stuff with your print file stamped into the clay. Buy the “Mommy’s Oven” attachment and harden the clay into printed tablets.

Shit, you could use most of the innards from an IBM selectric ball-writer for the “stamper” – all you’d need to do is select a big font.

I would make office memos waaaayy more interesting.

IBM Selectric golfball typewriters… one of the finest bits of kit ever built… (nostalgic sigh)

Yep. Design in a replaceable typeball with infinite font/style/size variations, put in ONE fancy mechanical joint to steer the ball and do the hammerin’, and electronically control the joint movement.

Way more producible and repairable than the old individual-hammer antiques. They made teletypes with cylinder- or ball-type heads, too, before everything went all CRT-like.

Badger – The Phoenix flash memory article:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2008-111d

I saw another one last week but can’t find it yet.

Hello, Akismet. Go ahead – eat my comment!

Gotcher, McGoo.

I’ve been trying to work out what I need to put in my sidebar to show how many posts are currently stuck in the filter. That would be a nice reminder to me to check it.

Thanx, Weaz!

Kind of a “XX comments have died in the cold and dark this year! Don’t you be next! Know what you link!” PSA? That would be cool.