Frybrid will retrofit your diesel engine to run on used cooking oil. Starting at $1600. They also sell biodiesel B-99.

Via miscmedia, an essay by Chuck Palahniuk:

If only by distorting events, tweaking them for more dramatic impact, exaggerating them to the point you forget your actual history — you forget who you are — is it possible to exploit your own life for the sake of a marketable story?

Moooovies!

Being a fan of the ‘Kill Bill’ movies, I thought I’d find some of the music from them on gnutella. Lots of Ennio Morricone, who did cues for lots and lots of spaghetti westerns, and one of my favorite movies, ‘Danger: Diabolik!’

So I downloaded some, and ended up with a few tracks from ‘Navajo Joe,’ which, it turns out, was available on tape at Scarecrow. Scarecrow, by the way, is one of the many reasons to live in Seattle.

But anyway. At the end of ‘Kill Bill, Vol. 2,’ just after the five-point-palm exploding heart technique is applied, Bill gets up and walks towards his doom. And the music you hear when he does this is from ‘Navajo Joe.’ This is all you need to ever know about ‘Navajo Joe.’ Do not seek it out. Do not find it. Do not rent it. It stars Burt Reynolds as Joe, and features sadism and death that is senseless. Not just in the sense that violence and death and hatred can be senseless, but in the sense that this movie doesn’t make any sense. They all do stupid things. Not because they’re stupid characters, or because there’s some kind of overarching point about ‘gee, don’t people seem to always do the stupid thing?’ No, they do the stupid thing because it’s a stupid script. It’s like if you took some 9-year-old boys and told them to make a movie about a band of bandits and a Navajo who saves the day, they’d write this movie. “And then.. and then the guy shoots the arrow? And frees Navajo Joe? By cutting the rope with his arrow? And… And… And Navajo Joe silently pulls himself out from being hung upside down for four hours and kills the guy with the gun… with his bare hands!”

So find the soundtrack, listen to it, and realize you’re hearing the best part of the movie. In fact, since I haven’t had a musique du jour entry of late, here it is to save you the trouble: Navajo Joe.

Now, when you go to Scarecrow, you are naturally overwhelmed by the absolutely overwhelming collection of just plain cool movies they have. They have a spaghetti western section! This is in addition to sections for the various directors who made spaghetti westerns, such as Sergio Leone. You really have to know your cinema to even find what you’re looking for, but once you get there, you have plenty of opportunities to find something interesting.

That was the case with ‘A Bullet For The General,’ which was also in the spaghetti western section. It’s a bizarre little tale about banditos and revolutionaries in Mexico in the ’20s, so it’s not exactly a western. But the tale is about some gun runners who rob a train, and end up befriending one of the passengers, an enigmatic American. This is actually a good movie, with less wanton violence and sadism than your average spaghetti western. The characters are multidimensional and you can really appreciate their ambiguity. Also an interesting political statement here and there. Worth checking out if you think you’ve seen all the spaghetti westerns there are.

Also at Scarecrow: ‘Highlander,’ ‘ElectroGlide in Blue,’ and ‘Taking of Pelham, One Two Three’ on Laserdisc. ‘Pelham’ rules. No wasted scenes, no BS. None of the colorful dialogue is extraneous. Every element belongs, and is balanced by everything else. The only flaw is Walter Matthau’s yellow tie. I haven’t seen ‘ElectroGlide’ in quite a while, so it’ll be interesting to see if it’s as good as I remember.

Driving back from an errand, I somehow find myself at a thrift store. I’m actually looking for something specific: a slide projector. None at this store. Time to move on. But…

I need to avail myself of a rest room. I head for the counter, and ask one of the women, “Is there a rest room I can use?” She’s tiny, and of an indeterminate oriental background. English is not her first language. She gives me a grave look. Instantly, I know that there is no rest room for customers.

She says, “We had rest room, customers could go poo, but they went poo and broke and flood bathroom with poo…” She motions with her utility-gloved hands, as if doing an interpretive dance to express the magnitude of the overflowing fecal matter. “…so no more customer in bathroom.”

She looks at me warily. As though I might insist, as though I might grab her and whip her and demand that she let me use the employee rest room. Instead, I smile politely and say, “Ok. That sounds reasonable.”

This does not satisfy her, however. “So now no one can go poo in rest room. No customers.” I nod. She goes on, “You can imagine, though, poo flow everywhere…”

I am walking out the door. I turn back, “Yes, I can imagine…”

I head to the McDonald’s next door.

I’m going to tell you the tale of my Friday.

First, I was going to go hiking with M. We were going to scale the heights up to Snow Lake, in the southwest corner of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness. I set my alarm for 8am. I kept waking up, however. Sometime around 4am I had to pee, then 5am the cat was complaining in the hallway, then 7am I woke up feeling that strange dizzy feeling you sometimes get when you haven’t slept enough.

All during this time I was having very strange dreams. In one episode, a bunch of late night talk show hosts were at a posh restaurant, all beckoning me to come sit at their table. I finally sat down at the bar with Conan O’Brian and joked that he should bring back Andy Richter. About this time, the maitre’d came and summoned him to his table for the evening, and he didn’t invite me along.

But another episode went like this: I was walking down the driveway at my house, the place I live now, and I had a strange feeling… I turned around to look and there was a mysterious black sillhouette of a figure that punched me in the back. This was enough to wake me up. And when I woke, I realized it was 10am. Two hours after I had planned to get up.

The phone rang. M was calling to warn me that she was going to the store, so she might not be there when I arrived. Har. As if. I told her how late I was running. I headed for the bathroom, the kitchen, the laundry room, let the dog out (she knows the command ‘go pee’), etc, etc, you get the picture. Put all the stuff in my backpack. Started walking down the driveway to my car, and bam. My back seized. I could barely move. I had to kneel down on the asphalt. The neighbor’s landscaper asked me if I was OK.

Moral of the story thus far: Pay attention to your dreams.

The story continues, however. I called up M and cancelled, popped some ibuprofen, drew a hot bath. Soaked for a while. M came over to borrow a camera to take pix of the hike. I started feeling better… I had a few errands to run now that I wasn’t hiking.

Went to pick up some film I was having developed. I tried to pay with my debit card, and it was declined. Declined? It’s my debit card! The photo place was right across the street from a bank branch, so I hobbled in, my back still acting up. I explained my predicament to the most inept teller ever to hold the job description. He was nice enough, he just had no clue how to handle this kind of situation. Finally, one of the customer service people took over and got to the bottom of it: Someone in Mexico had run up $1100 worth of charges.

A short while later I was in posession of more cash than I usually am, because my debit card won’t work until they issue me a new one.

Helas.

First of all, I’m flattered that in the comments for the last entry, some of you folks said basically that you put up with Xanga to read me. And that gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside, like when a puppy looks you in the eyes and wags his tail, or when a woman you’ve never met before comes up to you and says, “Nice shoes. Wanna fuck?”

Now, I’ve been contemplating the idea of doing a sort of end-run around Xanga. I like what they’re doing in general, and in the abstract. But I’m not that enamored of how they do it. I don’t want to talk shit about Xanga, because I’ve had an account here for, like, four years or something, and I keep posting, so obviously they’re doing something right.

And what they’re doing right is letting people get to know each other enough to want to come back, and maybe click on an Amazon link or two. The real commodity here isn’t what Xanga does, it’s what everyone does with Xanga. And it’s also true that there are other ways to do these things, if you know what I mean.

The point here is that I’m imagining something more focused than metafilter, but less focused than a personal or political ‘blog, but definately would involve a number of people. If Arriana Huffington can do it, why can’t I? I’ve got a server, some industrial-strength open source software, and enough time.

I’m posting this because I’m curious what other Xanga folks might think about it. So I ask: What do you folks think? If you knew that you could read some of your favorite Xangans (and/or ex-Xangans) at another site, would you? Or would that ‘Sites I Read’ link prevent you from reaching escape velocity?

Because, really, the whole point of participating here is to keep track of, and be kept track of by, some folks you like to read and who like to read you.

Xanga tells me I can’t join a blogring because I have too many.

What kind of BS is that? I’ve got premium for life, I’m on four blogrings I created, and having more than some arbitrary number of blogrings per user isn’t going to wreck the database.

This week’s Weekly Photo Challenge: Reflections.

This dude is in a man-made lake near The Woodlands, TX. The name of the town is ‘The Woodlands,’ complete with definite article. It’s a suburban town-ish incorporation between Houston and Conroe. A place with a shopping mall, restaurants with big tall signs by the interstate, and lots and lots of office parks. As Habitrails go, it’s not a bad one, though, and contains a nice outdoor amphitheater.

The image above is a crop. Here’s the full thing for comparison:

Last night I watched ‘War Photographer.’ Tonight I watched ‘Arakimentari.’ Both are documentaries about photographers; both are very different from each other.

‘War Photographer‘ is about James Nachtwey, most fearless and humble of all war photographers. That’s the real story in this movie: He doesn’t like to tell stories about his exploits. He’d rather talk about the issues he’s trying to bring to light. He has a very calm and quiet demeanor, and exemplifies the difference between being moved by what he sees and being overwhelmed by what he sees.

The guy’s interesting, but not two hours worth. There’s a lot of interesting footage of ‘camera-cam,’ where he has a tiny digital motion picture camera hooked up to his film still camera, and you can see him framing his shots, changing a few settings, and then shooting. You literally poke your nose into the scenes he’s poking his camera into. This also means that you get to see him shooting a picture, then you see him editing it, and then you see it in a magazine, and then you see it on the wall at an art gallery. Full cycle.

Worth seeing, not so much because you’ll learn about war photography, but because you’ll see this enigmatic man’s process.

And speaking of enigmas… ‘Arakimentari‘ is about a Japanese photographer named Nobuyoshi Araki. He makes smut. He also makes all kinds of other stuff. And he’s a manic freakazoid. And he SHOOTS PENTAX. (Well, a 645, at least.)

First we see him shooting a series of Japanese housewives for erotic magazines and phone cards. Later we see him shooting a butoh dance troupe. Bjork shows up and talks about how his book of photos of his wife’s death represents the highest possible expression of marital love. And so forth. A zillion different projects, and a lot of time watching Araki get drunk and say shit. Then we watch as he shoots some very beautiful and disturbing bondage shots. And we get to see his assistant meter the model’s… ahem. Araki’s loveable, a jerk, an asshole, brilliant, and probably pretty wonderful in limited doses.

Through this maze of contradictions, we eventually learn a little bit about what makes this man tick. And it’s quite moving, actually, but as Araki says at the beginning: Don’t be sad and pitiful, just take pictures.

Bluelens asks why images look different on the web than they do locally.

And, before you read further, you should go look at his site, because there are some lovely pix there, regardless of the color representation. He’s approaching photography as a discipline, which is a good influence on me, and one of the reasons I’m subscribed over there.

So, bluelens: Your pix are in the AdobeRGB ICC profile colorspace. The problem is that some web browsers don’t care about the ICC profile, and blithely display all images in the sRGB colorspace, or worse, the monitor’s calibrated profile. sRGB is a safe assumption, but not when another ICC profile is embedded in the image, there for the using.

So the solution comes in two forms: 1) When you’re preparing an image for the web, convert it to sRGB. On a Mac, you can make an AppleScript which will do this in a drag/drop fashion. Ask Apple Help how to do it and receive instruction. On Windows, I dunno. Either system, you can use Photoshop. 2) Add the ColorInfo tag to the image tags on your web site. Here’s a discussion about it. This requires that the user have the ICC profile installed on their computer, which might not be the case for AdobeRGB. Everybody’s got sRGB, though. It comes standard with Windows and Mac, and any other system made since 1996.

It’ll be nice when users won’t have to worry about this stuff, because the browser developers will have it all sussed. It’d also be nice if Xanga would make the proper ColorInfo tags for you, based on the embedded ICC profile in the image.