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:

If you were of a mind to organize an opposition to a developer-friendly ring-road around New Braunfels, which would cut right through golden-cheeked warbler habitat, ruin local property values, and generally torch whatever remains of the natural beauty of the area, you might do well to follow some of these links and make some noise.

In no particular order, and updated as new items are discovered. Please comment with other contacts or information or whatever.

New Braunfels Outer Loop Planning Site (TXDoT official site)

Texas Sierra Club

Article from American Rivers on the threat to the Guadalupe

Guadalupe-Blanco River Trust

New Braunfels City Council

All about the meeting we went to yesterday, from a blog covering issues in New Braunfels and the nearby Guadalupe watershed

Guadalupe Chapter, Trout Unlimited

Comal County Engineer’s Office, featuring a map of development since 2000. Notice that there is little development in the region where the proposed road would run…

Greater Edwards Aquifer Alliance, many excellent articles

Friends of Canyon Lake, including joint stakeholder coalition (which is a useful list of other regional stakeholder groups)

Guadalupe River Association *above* Canyon Lake, but a good list of government agencies.

Hill Country Water, concerned with all sorts of water issues above Canyon Lake, lots of data, most tangential.

Audoubon Society article on Golden-Cheeked Warbler, a threatened species, further threatened by the outer loop

Was Homer run off a cliff-hugging mountain road by a pack of wild hyenas bent on world destruction only to die a horrible death in a firey conflagration caused by hunters who mistook his destroyed van for a moose and shot the shot that hit the gas tank?

No.

There were no hyenas involved.

My excursions into Second Life have absorbed the responsibility for avoidance and denial that writing here used to take on. My little avatar has a social life, meaningful work, good friends, and can sit around thinking about the philosophical implication all day.

So much so that there are two little avatars. Most of you already met Cinco, but here’s Solo:

Solo is building a piano. Solo is an old Japanese man. Why do I have an old Japanese man as an avatar? Initially, I saw the skin for sale, and I had to have it, because it’s a work of art. It’s advertised as ‘charming old man avatar.’

Here we see Solo in some cliff-edge ruins within the wonderful Forest of Kahruvel, about which more later.

But after wearing it for a while, I discovered that it’s fun to watch people’s reaction to an older person on SL. I go to sandboxes and newbie landing points. People ask me who I am… *really?* They ask me for advice, usually in IMs. The secret is always to look like you know what you’re doing.

And this is true in many ways, of many things. They say that clothes make the man, but what about skin and beard of inscrutability? Plus, there are very few ‘old’ avatars on SL. Mostly they all look like 25-year-old supermodels. It’s more unusual to be old than to be a monster, a zombie, a vampire, a soul-sucking ghoul, or even a hooker.

What this says about society at large, as reflected by the SL demographic, isn’t all that pleasant, which is one reason I enjoy wearing this particular skin. It gives me plenty of opportunity for subversion.

The other side of Solo, of course, is that I’m not Japanese. I go places and people start chatting with me in Japanese. They’re charmed, too, but then I’m the bad guy for pretending to be something I’m not. Just as Homer isn’t Japanese, but Solo looks like he is, Homer also isn’t wise, but Solo looks like he could be. It’s all a big lie, but I’m up-front about it. Solo’s profile says: I’m not Japanese, and I don’t speak the language.

By the way… MacCaching has improved a great deal. Namely, it implements everything I wanted to do in my own scripts, and all I had to do was wait.

It goes like this: Make a pocket query on geocaching.com. It arrives. Unpack it. Import it into MacCaching. Plug in the GPS and iPod. Click ‘To GPS…’ Locations appear on the GPS, notes appear on the iPod.

Rawk.