The Tubes. Yes, The Tubes. The unsung band of the ’80s. “Didn’t they do ‘She’s a Beauty?” Yes, they did. It was their one big hit. They tried, oh how they tried to be more famous, but it never quite worked out. They were too ‘normal,’ just power pop, with an adolescent sense of humor. But really, they were subversive and clever, and had a lot to reward a careful listen. They had a great concept album in 1978 called ‘Remote Control,’ about television, but starting with 1981′s ‘Completion Backwards Principle’ they reached huge bigness when they hooked up with producer David Foster. Whereas before they were just writing songs, now they were producing AOR mini-symphonies, typified by Foster’s elaborate bridge sections. You can hear it in the video above if you listen long enough. Still, though, they couldn’t break out of being seen as a novelty act, which was a real shame because they were (and still are) just fun.

Anyway. I’m listening to side 2 of ‘Outside Inside,’ which is the side without all the hit songs. It even has an all-drums track called, appropriately enough, ‘Drums.’ All Prairie Prince all the time. Prince, by the way, is all over the place, drumming for everyone from XTC to David Sylvian and other people you’ve probably heard of. He’s one of those ‘musician’s musician’ type people.

This album reminds me of driving with my parents and then-friend-of-the-family-soon-to-be-in-law Jeff from Houston to Smoky Mountains National Park, and back via Chattanooga and Nashville. We had two tapes we listened to almost constantly, and my parents must have hated it. But I guess it kept us happy. ‘Outside Inside’ was one, and Styx’ ‘Kilroy Was Here’ was the other, both released the same year. Now, I remember that this trip included going to the Chattanooga World’s Fair, but that was 1982, and both these albums were released in 1983, so obviously I’m wrong.

‘Outside Inside’ was originally released with a die-cut sleeve showing the eye on the record label. The title is embossed on the sleeve, too, in the form of an eye chart like you’d see at an opthamologist’s office. Later on, they changed the artwork so it would be less expensive to produce, but as you can see, I Was There First.

I slotted some other Tubes records at the same time as this without listening: ‘Young Americans,’ ‘Completion Backwards Principle,’ and ‘Love Bomb,’ which is my favorite Tubes record.

You’ve heard of Zombo.com…. Now it’s time for Zonbu.com! Buy the Gnome Desktop thin-client computer for $100+, subscribe to the offsite service for ~$15/month. Access your files from wherever with a ‘net connection.

First they came for the illegal immigrants, but I remained silent…

OK, so someone asked how to get all the images from a web page on a Mac. And here’s how. It’s simple and easy so follow along, and you’ll learn how to use Automator.

Note a couple of things first… This only works in Mac OS X 10.4, because it uses Automator, which is only available in 10.4. Also, this is the drag-and-drop version; of course you could write a shell script for wget or whatever, but this is much more fun. Really.

First: Run Automator. It should be located in /Applications. It shows you a window like this:

Next, click on Safari in the far left panel, which is labeled ‘Library.’ You might need to click on the Applications folder triangle thingie to see it listed.

Now you’ll see a list of things Automator can tell Safari to do, called ‘Actions.’ The basic idea is to drag Actions out of the Actions pane and into the Workflow pane, which, oddly enough isn’t actually labeled. But it’s the big pane on the right. You drag the Actions over there and they execute in order when you run the Workflow.

There’s one called ‘Get Image URLs from Webpage.’ That looks like it would do the job, doesn’t it? Drag it over to the Workflow, and see what it says.

See the red ‘URLs’ at the top? That means it’s expecting some kind of input. It needs some URLs to suck dry of images! This means we have to put another action before that one, so there’s something to download.

To keep it simple, we’ll tell it to use the topmost window open in Safari as a source for image files. So back over in the Actions pane, find Get Current Webpage from Safari, and drag it above the ‘Get Images..’ one. Note how the ‘URLs’ text isn’t red any more, and in fact has turned into a little handshake of happiness. Yay.

So here’s what the workflow does so far…. Automator will get the URL of the current open window in Safari. Then it will look at that web page and get URLs for the images. So now we need to tell it to download those images and put them somewhere. And it just so happens that there’s an Action called: Download URLs. Drag that to the bottom of the workflow. This Action will put all the image files on the desktop by default, so you can change it to put them wherever you want.

So click the big Run button.

The workflow will download the images on this web page and put them on the desktop.

You’re done. Unless of course you want to save this Workflow for later use. You can save it as an application, and it will work like any other application: Just double-click it and it will do what it’s supposed to do.

Here’s what the window should look like when you’re done:

And here’s what your download folder will look like when you’ve scraped all the images off the web pages:

And using what you just learned, you could probably figure out how to automatically put all those images into iPhoto.

I’ve been looking at a bunch of Texas history stuff for various reasons, and here’s a chart showing how to display information while hiding its importance. It’s the black population as percentage, per county in eastern Texas in 1890, as drawn in 1976.

If you know the county and want to find out the percentage, you can. But if that’s the information you need, then you can just go to the same source the mapmaker went to and get a more accurate number. If you want to see where the black population of Texas in 1890 was concentrated, however, you have to get out your coloring pencils and alter the map, because all the hatching patterns are very similar.

Compare that map to this one, created the same year as the first, showing black slaves as percentage of population, for the same region only 30 years earlier.

It tells you what you wanted to know: Slaves were mostly used in Wharton county, so much so that 80%+ of the population was owned by someone else. And along the rest of the mostly-unpopulated agricultural Gulf coast region.

So here’s my question to you: Why are these maps so different when they display nearly identical information? They seem to have been drawn by the same person. Why is one clear and the other not? Does the latter unfairly point the finger at Wharton county, when neighboring counties also had a high percentage of slaves? Could the blandness of the former be a statement on the evils of slavery, which had been abolished by 1890 and similarly abolished from the map? Is the difference between these two maps a condemnation or a celebration? Or does it seek to hide some kind of racist shame? Or maybe it only shows that the former map’s artist could only draw one kind of hatching.

These are the things I get caught up in thinking about from time to time.

I really hate spam. I really do.

But what I love *about* spam is being able to critique it without sentiment. For instance:

Family member() has created Birthday postcard for you at hallmark.com.

To see your custom Birthday postcard, simply click on the following link:

http://213.67.13.171/

Send a FREE greeting card from hallmark.com whenever you want by visiting us at:
This service is provided and hosted by hallmark.com.

See, what you’re looking at is someone trying to pretend they’re hallmark.com, and linking through a URL that doesn’t go to the hallmark.com domain.

The four numbers separated by periods is called a ‘dotted quad,’ and is what you get when you take a domain name like ‘hallmark.com’ and figure out which machine it resolves to. For instance, hallmark.com resolves to 72.247.171.78, which is located in Cambridge, MA.

It turns out you can also do what’s called a reverse-lookup to get the domain name for a given dotted quad. 213.67.13.171, to which the spammer links us, turns out to be, h171n2fls34o828.telia.com, which is located in Sweden and is blacklisted by SORBS, appropriately enough. Nowhere near Cambridge or Hallmark, which is why they didn’t link directly to hallmark.com.

I also like the bit about ‘Family member().’ Yes, my parents are parens.

I’ve been getting a proverbial shitload of these ‘Your friend has sent you an e-card’ spam. Maybe 5 or 6 a day. So if you’re a friend or relative or acquaintance or whatever, you’re on notice: Don’t send me e-cards. I won’t look at them. Mostly. This most pathetic one, while being so very pathetic, somehow evaded my anti-spam filter.

BLDGBLOG reviews a book called ‘Beneath The Neon,’ about people who live in the massive drainage tunnels below Las Vegas. Makes me want to go spelunking.

Bill Moyers talks about Regent University and all the right-wing patriots being slotted into government. Also talks to some interesting folks critical of this development. When Mitt Romney gives a commencement speech at Pat Robertson’s Regent, you know what’s coming next.

And speaking of theocracy, Tom Tomorrow catches right-wingers trying to say that Islamists aren’t creationists, and neither are liberals. Tomorrow also bemoans the loss of Karl Rove, because he’s a political cartoonist and where will the jokes come from?

I’m really amused by this catfight between Atrios and Shadi Hamid. The Democratic party hawk/neo-cons are having a real hard time wearing their shame.

Which I guess will segué into Dennis Perrin taking on the liberal ‘blog superstars, with completely valid criticism.

And, presented without comment (via boingboing):

Does Bush need to ask Congress before he goes to war with Iran?

In a sane world, the answer would be: Yes, of course, because that’s what the Constitution says. However, the sanity train has long since left the station. And ya know what else? Democrats made it happen.

I think I might have posted this before, but…… LAURIE!!

Laurie! Laurie! Laurie! Laurie! And, of course, Laurie.

And, because it contains quite possibly the funniest single joke ever (the e-card):