Steff Ling got my avatar started smoking pipes. She has this really great churchwarden made by a friend of hers. You can click on it and it shows you a menu of options, such as how much smoke to make, whether you want it to animate your avatar, and whether to show a burn cycle that actually glows and reflects off the smoke. It’s really beautiful.

Meanwhile, I made a pipe of my own. And now I sell it:

Not as feature-rich as the churchwarden, but still… A meerschaum churchwarden of absurd proportion, with a smoulder/inhale/exhale cycle.

I’ll have to sell three before I break even on the smoking jacket I got for that picture. Which is another story: I was wandering around Caledon looking for a suitably Victorian place to take a product photo. Along comes a furry named Drake Coalcliff in a hot air balloon who shouts “AHOY! Have a seat and we’ll explore!” How to resist such an offer?

We floated around Caledon for a while, talking in pseudo-Victorian idiom (because that’s what you do there). He offered to help me out with my product shot, and then a little while later, he was giving me the picture and I was giving him a pipe.

Second Life is like that sometimes.

Official Linden ‘blog says this:

Using content, particularly advertising, to deliberately and negatively affect another resident’s view so as to sell a parcel for an unreasonable price, will be deemed unacceptable and dealt with as a violation of our community standards.

And, I mean sheesh… Only a few days after I started buying land to address this problem.

I thought I’d also show off some of our artwork, in order of installation:

The Metaverse HQ of the Association For Whimsical Land Use. Soon there will be a building here which will explain things and link to all the artworks. The plot is basically delimited by the yellow square. It doesn’t include the cross.

Anneliese Swindlehurst’s ‘Perfect Woman’ painting offsets the image of the Nicole avatar ad, somehow managing to scold us for even entertaining the idea. Note the cross. (SLURL)

Nostrum Forder’s untitled object is alive with motion and shifting color, which we can’t see here. The text at the top reads ‘All Your Conceptions About Art Are Wrong.’ (SLURL)

I picked up this freebie thing at Tooter Claxton’s store. It’s an ad farm. It’s not all that clear from the photo what’s going on here, but there’s a little pen with tiny ads growing out of the ground, and in the foreground is a packet of ad seeds with typically excellent graphic design. Plant the ad seeds and watch them grow! One day I’ll work up the courage to ask Tooter to contribute something site-specific. (SLURL)

I installed my own Old, Old Radio on a larger plot in the midst of an ad farm. It used to be flat, but I made it into a more grassy ravine with trees. You can barely see the cross in the background. (SLURL)

Steff Ling decided to go with the full-contact criticism. She wanted to have it make sex noises, but I thought that might be counter-productive. (SLURL)

I’ve written about Ken Nordine before. Even more than that tag listing shows, because I wrote about him before the tag system was in place, and haven’t gone back to mark them.

Anyway. I found him on YouTube today. And since I have a YouTube account, you bet I subscribed.

So now I’m as giddy as I’m gonna git, cuz, well….

…he wrote.

Update: My response:

Once upon a you-know-what, at the age of twelve, I was going to an animation festival screening with my friend Dee Dutton. Just up the street a ways in suburban Houston, Texas, at the local cinema. This was back before YouTube or the internet or even cable TV. Back in time when in order to see the surreal Levi’s ad where some brain-meltingly hyper-resonant male voice said, “There was something different about him… It was his pants…” was to go to an animation festival. For some reason the ad had never aired in our market.

Anyway. For a week after that, whenever I saw my friend Dee, he’d say, “There’s something different about you… Your pants!” in as deep a voice as his pre-pubescent voicebox would allow. And then we’d laugh.

A little later, age 18 or so, listening to the radio. KPFT, Houston, TX, someone is playing ‘Flibberty Jib.’ “There was something different about him…” Aha! Dutifully I wait through the rest of the DJ’s set, and he tells the tale: Ken Nordine’s Word Jazz.

Now. I think if I were to run into Dee Dutton, he might start to greet me, but then stop. He’d look at me, not quite sure… Maybe he was about to say that there was something different about me, my pants. But as he looked at me, he realized there was something different: I had gotten a personal message from Ken Nordine. He’d somehow sense it, unable to understand how he knew.

Thank you, sir, for the message. You have made my decade.

From: service@irs.lv.gov
Subject: Tax Notification
Date: February 12, 2008 8:36:31 AM CST
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Reply-To: service@irs.lv.gov

Internal Revenue Service (IRS)
United States Department of the Treasury

After the last annual calculations of your fiscal
activity we have determined that you are eligible
to receive a tax refund of $184.80.

Please submit the tax refund request and allow us
6-9 days in order to process it.

A refund can be delayed for a variety of reasons.
For example submitting invalid records or applying
after the deadline.

To access the form for your tax refund, use the following personalized link:

http://0xCA.0×80.0x1D.0×2/www.irs.gov/

Regards,
Internal Revenue Service

Document Reference: (0xCA.0×80.0x1D.0×2).

It takes some serious cojones to spoof the IRS.

I keep hearing ‘blogs and noozmeedja and people in grocery stores talking about whether the US is ready for a black or female president.

The answer is: Of course we are ready for a black or female president. What a stupid question. The cynicism implicit in taking race and gender into a strategic realm as many have makes the baby Jesus weep. Imagine an opinion-shaper going on a Sunday TV politics show and asking, “Is it a mistake for Democrats to run minority candidates?” Because we all know that question has been asked, and if it isn’t stated outright it’s the assumption that underlies most of the other analysis. Even if taken at face value, this question assumes that racist and misogynistic Americans have more political power than those who don’t hold those biases.

A better question is this: Are we ready to quit throwing away our potential because we think such barriers exist? No one who is racist or misogynist should be taken seriously. The barriers they raise are false, phantom.

Some folks doing an all-electric Vanagon conversion.

Results: Less than stellar. They’ve had problems with the ‘fuel’ gauge not showing actual charge, and thus they’ve been unable to really test the range. The tiny electric motor bolted on to the transaxle looks kinda cool, though.

I got to this because I’m shopping for a vehicle. I found a Honda Element with a Flex Fuel conversion for sale on craigslist, and I wanted to research the cost of that sort of conversion. It turns out Flex Fuel International will sell you a conversion for ~$400. You plug it into the engine’s injector leads, and then you’re done with the conversion. Of course it works best for newer cars, but I wondered if anyone had put one in a Vanagon. FFI sells a special kit for ‘Kombi/H,’ which might count. Maybe I’ll email and find out.

There’s a company called Bostig that makes turnkey engine replacement kits for Vanagons. They now offer E85 compatibility out of the box, from a Zetec engine.

But here’s the rub: There’s no place to buy ethanol or E85 in western Washington State.

There’s only one publicly-accessible pump, and it’s in Richland. The WA legislature has given tax breaks for growing/producing/selling biofuels, which is good. The market hasn’t jumped, though. It’s easier to get biodiesel. On the other hand, a couple of military bases in the area have switched their fleets to flex fuel.

So this makes me wonder what’s involved in running a retail fuel station… Haha!

I also have to mention Clean My Ride, which is pretty well done, and comes from the CAP Action Fund. Yay think tank!

This is one of my newest properties on Second Life.

I own the little tiny strip from where I’m standing (on the right) to the tree that pops up in the middle.

It’s 32 square meters on the mainland, in Spinylor. Yes, Spinylor. I have no idea who named it.

The point here is to tell the story of ad farms.

What you see is an ad farm. It’s a double-dip form of asshole capitalism: On the one hand, you sell ads to clients who are too stupid to understand what you’re doing. In SL, you see huge poles with ads on the side sticking up into the stratosphere. They’re the visual equivalent of billboards, except they’re much worse, because there’s no zoning, and no restrictions on content.

The other part of this is that it’s a kind of extortion. For instance, here’s an overhead shot of my neighborhood:

It is, basically, a world of banner ads. Now, you can’t see it very well in this pic or the other one, but if you look closely you can see the property lines. This is basically a neighborhood of 4×4 meter properties, all with various scams going on. The tallest banner, you can see at the top of the screen, is on a property that’s not for sale. Other properties are for sale at prices between L$200 and L$1400. The most expensive ones are the ones with the most annoying ads.

And why is that? You can guess.

Anyway. My mission here is to create public sculpture on these tiny properties. I’m buying up a few here and there that are cheap, and then installing works of art to edify, rather than detract. At least that’s the plan. We’ll see how it goes.

A Second Life bud of mine is doing this: Fake album reviews.

Recommended.

It turns out I’m ‘Xanga True.’

That’s good, right?

Perhaps it means I’m a Xanga dinosaur:

But whatever it means, truth is still worth more than pride. And in an ideal world, I would provide you with a video or audio of Neil Finn’s song ‘Truth,’ but helas, the internet doesn’t have everything. So instead, there’s a smile between us, and it’s going on: