One More Nightwatchman Video

Here he is playing “House Gone Up In Flames” on Jimmy Kimmel Live (4/25).

I’ll try to make this the last one for awhile, but I’m not promising anything.

It’s Amazing; The Things You Find When You Aren’t Even Looking

Yesterday I was perusing some cycling newsgroups (as I am wont to do) and came across a link to Specialty Outdoors:

THE outdoor gear sewing and repair expert. Alterations, modifications and problem solving of technical clothing and equipment are my specialty. Visit the About Specialty Outdoors pages for more information, including photos, prices, and samples. We can do technical clothing repair and alteration, Gore-tex repair, tent repair and modification, backpack modification, and custom work too, just to list a few things. Be to sure to check the photo galleries as new items are added all the time. Factory authorized by The North Face Inc. for modifications and alterations to their gear.

In addition to tents, backpacks, and skiing gear, they also do cycling gear. Not only that, they actually have tips for sewing your own jerseys and shorts! (Oh how I wish I had a sewing machine and a talent for sewing). Anyway… I have this jersey, one of my all-time favorites (here’s me wearing it); a few (~5?) years ago this jersey (which was still relatively new at the time) was spending the winter resting, while the long-sleeved jerseys had all the fun. Imagine my horror when, come spring-time, I discovered that all of its elastic had gone all crunchy and lost its elasticity.

I emailed Specialty Outdoors with some questions and immediately heard back from Penny Schwyn. A few emails back and forth later, and the deal is as good as done. I’ll be shipping my beloved jersey off and a few weeks later getting it back good as new better than new!

If you want to find out more, here’s the Outdoor Specialty FAQ

Toe Overlap

I mentioned in a comment earlier that the new bike has a fair amount of toe-overlap. If you aren’t familiar with the cyclist’s dilemma of toe-overlap, and for some unfathomable reason would like to be, click here.

Anyway, on with the story. The other day I was heading out for a ride. Just as the light I was approaching turned red, the SUV behind me decided to squeeze by. Not wishing to be squeezed, I eased over and asserted my claim to next spot in the queue at the light. Putting my left foot down, I lifted the back wheel and positioned my right crank at about 10 O’clock-ish, ready to rock and roll as soon as the light changed. So far so good.

Then the light turned green and I was inexplicably stuck… frozen… immobilized. Before the realization dawned that I had managed to turn the wheel far enough to jam my toe against it, I had really, firmly planted my toe. My first instinct was just to unclip my foot and get myself loose, but so thoroughly stuck was I that this wasn’t possible. Long story short, Mr. SUV man had to wait through an extra cycle of the light while I, feeling like an ass, wished for a hole to crawl into. Thankfully there was no horn-honking, no angry words were exchanged, and I didn’t topple over like a complete spaz, though I did do one heck of a convincing spaz impersonation, in 5 O’clock traffic.

Ain’t life grand?

Stupid Blogger Tricks (that no one cares about)

Somehow when publishing my previous post, I inadvertently set the post status to “private”. While I was logged in to WordPress and looking at the blog everything seemed fine. It wasn’t until just a bit ago when I pulled up the blog on my laptop that I discovered that my last post wasn’t showing up. A few minutes of head-scratching later I found the problem and fixed it.

Duh!

Countdown to The Nightwatchman’s “One Man Revolution”

If you’ve been here before, and you’ve been paying attention, you know that I’m really excited about the pending album release by The Nightwatchman (Tom Morello’s alter-ego).
That release date (April 24) is almost upon us! Run! Go pre-order it from Amazon now! (I have.) The Nightwatchman will be performing on Jimmy Kimmell Live on April 25, so be sure to set your TiVos for that.

In the mean time, enjoy this trio of Nightwatchman videos:

This last one is more a slide-show set to music, but still very much worth your while.

Stripping language of meaning in the name of “correctness”

Let me just say from the start, I’m irritated. There are so many things going on in the world that irritate (and sicken) me right now I don’t even know where to begin. What the media tries to convince us is (and isn’t) “news”, irritates the piss out of me, but more on that later.

Society’s asinine, lemming-like allegiance to “political-correctness” irritates me. I’m all in favor of inclusive language, up to a point, but that point is a rapidly vanishing dot on the horizon behind us. Allow me to illustrate. I was accidentally watching the Fox “News” channel earlier. You know how they run the crawl across the bottom of the screen with news headlines and snippets of news? Well, one particular item caught my attention. Something about a “homicide” bomber blowing up a car and killing 10 people in Baghdad.

What they mean, of course, is a “suicide bomber”, but because some group (I vaguely recall this discussion a few years back) took umbrage at the use of that term, some in the media have adopted the phrase “homicide bomber”. Here’s what’s wrong with that:

Isn’t anyone who uses explosives to blow people the fuck up, thereby killing them, a “homicide bomber”. Yes, of course s/he is. What makes a suicide bomber different is that they go along for the ride, not unlike (well not really like, either) Slim Pickens’ character, Major T.J. ‘King’ Kong, in Dr. Strangelove. The point here is that they blow up too; on purpose!

When someone says “suicide bomber”, everyone knows what they mean. “Homicide bomber”, on the other hand, doesn’t really carry much more meaning than the word “bomber” and leaves the listener/reader to guess at the meaning.

On FMNC (the Foul-Mouthed News Channel), we’re going to call them “Blew themselves and some other people right the fuck on up bombers”. Kinda catchy, don’t you think?

Kurt Vonnegut on The Daily Show

In my previous post I mentioned Kurt Vonnegut’s appearance on The Daily Show. Comedy Central has it available on their website. Click here to find it.
Trust me, it’s well worth your time.

And here is the list he speaks of, “Liberal Crap I Never Want to Hear Again”, a brilliant morsel of Vonnegut-style satire.

RIP Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 1922-2007

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., photo dated April 8, 1992.
Doug Elbinger, Elbinger Studios.
Another of the great ones has left us. Kurt Vonnegut has been a favorite (and hero) of mine since I first saw (but didn’t really understand) the movie “Slaughterhouse-Five” on late-night television as a kid. I’ve been reading and enjoying his books for over 25 years. I had resigned myself to the fact that there would be no “new” Vonnegut books back when he retired ~10 years ago. However, seeing him recently on The Daily Show (promoting a new book!) rekindled my hopes that there might yet be one more great Vonnegut masterpiece. Sadly that hope too is now gone.
The list of Mr. Vonnegut’s titles is a long one, here in no particular order (and by no means complete):

A Man without a Country (His latest, and one would presume, last)
Breakfast of Champions
Slaughterhouse-five
Cat’s Cradle
Deadeye Dick
Welcome to the Monkey House
Mother Night
Galapagos
God Bless You, Dr. Kervorkian
Fates Worse Than Death
Slapstick: Or Lonesome No More!
Player Piano
Jailbird
Bluebeard
Bagombo Snuff Box
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Hocus Focus
Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons
Vonnegut Omnibus
Sun, Moon, Star
Timequake
The Sirens of Titan
Canary in a Cat House
This last one isn’t a Vonnegut book, per se, but a book about Mr. Vonnegut.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Crusade Or, How a Postmodern Harlequin Preached a New Kind of Humanism

I’ve read all but a couple of these. I suppose I need to fill in those blanks. Of course, several old favorites I don’t mind re-reading, time and again. Do us both a favor, click one of the links and buy the book from Amazon, thereby helping to feed my book/CD/DVD addiction while fueling your own.

Fare thee well, Mr. Vonnegut, fare thee well.

Comment Spam Redux

Using the previously mentioned plugins, I have handily won this round against the spammers. Since I installed it just over 24 hours ago Bad Behavior has blocked 50 attempts by spam-bots and such to access the site. Meanwhile, Akismet has only had to deflect 1 ’spamment’, rather than the 100+ I’ve been seeing every day for weeks now. Victory is mine! For now, anyway.

It will be interesting to see how much of an impact keeping out the bad bots will have on my server load.

Hooray me!
Boooo! Spamming scum and your robot minions. Boooo!

Comment Spam

Evidently, I’m under siege. Less than two weeks ago, I noted to myself that Akismet had blocked 200 spam comments since I converted the blog to WordPress (two and a half months ago). As I write this it is telling me:

Akismet has caught 1,626 spam for you since you first installed it.

That means that I’m now getting more than 100 spam comments per day! Thankfully, Akismet blocks these comments before they appear on the blog, but I still feel compelled to look them over, just in case a legitimate comment has somehow been flagged (so far, none have). As you can imagine, this is a bit of an ass-pain, so I’m now incrementally raising my defenses, hopeful of reducing the amount of ’spamments’ which are generated in the first place. The first phase of my plan was to install the Comment Timeout plugin which

automatically closes comments on blog entries after a user-configurable period of time.

Right now that ‘period of time’ is set at 60 days. This should vastly diminish the volume of ’spamments’. Fewer targets: Less spam.

I’ve also installed Bad Behavior which should keep the spam-bots from getting in in the first place.

I’m crossing my fingers.