Blue

Pretty much every author on the history of punk rock writes books that chronologically go from like MC5 to Black Flag then from Nirvana to, I don't know anymore, the present, My Chemical Romance? Fall Out Boy? Skipping most of the nineties as if nothing happened. Arguably, that is when a lot of punk went metal and punk rock (which was always dead) broke up into a million different genres. There were a bunch of labels with great bands like Amphetamine Reptile, Touch and Go, Wax Trax.

I went to college in Philadelphia so a lot of great bands like The Jesus Lizard, The Cows, Butthole Surfers, The God Bullies, etc. would come through town and there were a lot of great Philly bands during the nineties. I didn't realize until I left Philly the only bands anybody has ever heard of from that time period are the Dead Milkmen and G. Love and Special Sauce. I don't know how this happened but I sat at the bar and cringed with my PBR at the Khyber Pass every time I saw G. Love open.

Here are a couple of songs from Blue. Two from the Angels on Hogs / Evil Snake 7" and their "hit" song, Big Black Boots which is not on this seven inch. Blue never played Big Black Boots live. I think it was because they always played everything different and either they could never play that song live the same way they recorded it or they weren't very good musicians and they forgot what notes were in the song.

Sharpie, the lead singer / guitarist would never use a pick so by the end of the second song everybody in the front would be covered with spatters of blood from his fingers because he would be flicking it all over people as he played. They played at the Khyber Pass this one time and (all of this information may be wrong because this was like three life times ago but...) somehow somebody in the band started knocking the acoustic tiles out of the drop ceiling which were being stacked up and stuck on the sink in the back by the door. My friend Andrea was dressed in some kind of Goldie Hawn / Laugh-In Ghett-outfit throwing raw fish at the audience which prompted fish fights and everyone in the bar is covered in raw fish. The lead singer decides after his set to take a bath in the sink so the acoustic tiles get stacked up blocking the back door. Someone calls the cops, probably because it was too loud in there after all the acoustic ceiling tiles get knocked out. The cops show up. The rear exit is blocked which is a fire hazard. The bar gets shut down by the police for a couple weeks.

The raw fish clogs the drains at the bar. My friend Mike is hired to replace the pipes and gets dysentery.



Angels with Hogs


Evil Snake


Big Black Boots

Jimmy Carter as Robotoid

Everything I am about to write is heavily documented on the internet. Do an internet search for any of these facts and you will get plenty of hits if you don’t believe me. This is pretty much the funniest story I’ve heard in a while.

In October 1969, Jimmy Carter saw a UFO while he was the Governor of Atlanta and reported it to the International UFO Bureau. He was 44 years old. He said, “It was the darndest thing I've ever seen…If I become President, I'll make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the public and the scientists.”

That’s when it started. After that encounter, Jimmy Carter didn’t last too much longer. During his presidency, Jimmy Carter was replaced with a humanoid that was made of cow parts. The technology was not too good and the FBI had to use a lot of cows to maintain the humanoid. That is the reason for the increase of cattle mutilations during the Carter years.

The media started to catch on so the technology had to be upgraded. In 1979, Jimmy Carter the humanoid was replaced by a robotoid. The robotoid was much easier to maintain.

It sounds like it is a pretty intense process building the robotoid, according to Audio Letter No. 46. By Dr. Peter David Beter, “Robotoids are "manufactured" first by copying the memory of an entire brain. A holographic image is made of the host’s brain and that is transferred into the biological matter functioning as a brain of the robotoid, but adjustments have to be taught and programmed into the mind of the robotoid since the body and brain of the robotoid are not identical to the original person being copied.”

Still the greatest opening sequence to any film ever

How Do These Stories Go Under The Radar?

Invisibility cloak one step closer, scientists say.

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
Sun Aug 10, 6:55 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists have created two new types of materials that can bend light the wrong way, creating the first step toward an invisibility cloaking device.

One approach uses a type of fishnet of metal layers to reverse the direction of light, while another uses tiny silver wires, both at the nanoscale level.

Both are so-called metamaterials -- artificially engineered structures that have properties not seen in nature, such as negative refractive index.

The two teams were working separately under the direction of Xiang Zhang of the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center at the University of California, Berkeley with U.S. government funding. One team reported its findings in the journal Science and the other in the journal Nature.

Each new material works to reverse light in limited wavelengths, so no one will be using them to hide buildings from satellites, said Jason Valentine, who worked on one of the projects.

"We are not actually cloaking anything," Valentine said in a telephone interview. "I don't think we have to worry about invisible people walking around any time soon. To be honest, we are just at the beginning of doing anything like that."

Valentine's team made a material that affects light near the visible spectrum, in a region used in fiber optics.

"In naturally occurring material, the index of refraction, a measure of how light bends in a medium, is positive," he said.

"When you see a fish in the water, the fish will appear to be in front of the position it really is. Or if you put a stick in the water, the stick seems to bend away from you."

These are illusions caused by the light bending when it moves between water and air.

NEGATIVE REFRACTION

The negative refraction achieved by the teams at Berkeley would be different.

"Instead of the fish appearing to be slightly ahead of where it is in the water, it would actually appear to be above the water's surface," Valentine said. "It's kind of weird."

For a metamaterial to produce negative refraction, it must have a structural array smaller than the wavelength of the electromagnetic radiation being used. This was done using microwaves in 2006 by David Smith of Duke University in North Carolina and John Pendry of Imperial College London.

Visible light is harder. Some groups managed it with very thin layers, virtually only one atom thick, but these materials were not practical to work with and absorbed a great deal of the light directed at it.

"What we have done is taken that material and made it much thicker," Valentine said.

His team, whose work is reported in Nature, used stacked silver and metal dielectric layers stacked on top of each other and then punched through with holes. "We call it a fishnet," Valentine said.

The other team, reporting in Science, used an oxide template and grew silver nanowires inside porous aluminum oxide at tiny distances apart, smaller than the wavelength of visible light. This material refracts visible light.

Immediate applications might be superior optical devices, Valentine said -- perhaps a microscope that could see a living virus.

"However, cloaking may be something that this material could be used for in the future," he said. "You'd have to wrap whatever you wanted to cloak in the material. It would just send light around. By sending light around the object that is to be cloaked, you don't see it."

Hang 'em High in the TV Sky - Part II

thanks to the anonymous comment from Part I.
The answer to Hey, where did everybody go? has been received.


....and of course, don't forget where the prices are always insane.


I don't think I have ever been to an ideal in my life but this jingle from gets stuck in my head a couple times a year especially while taking a shower.
The Ideal Jingle

Garage Sale Find Of The Week! 7/19/08

Phyllis Diller's I Was Born To Sing LP!

Hilarious! Have a listen to (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction.
Price: 10¢

i dont know whats going on

but i am totally having a yummy fur cant seem to stop kind of day.