Today’s Required Reading
Absolutely fascinating post from Alex (which is in itself not unusual, but) : The Warre of All Against All. Go, read.
Bruce Sterling gives us some new metaphors to work with, better ones, I’d say : A Contrarian View of Open Source. Go, read.
I forgot completely that I’d gotten drunk one evening recently (in an almost complete turnaround from my customary behaviour on an August evening, I assure you) and signed the old ‘bottle up for Bloghot or Not.
But I saw the URL in my recent referrers doodad over there on the left no, no the other left, went to check it out, and holy crap on a delicious triscuit cracker, I’m rating pretty darn high!
So it’s official. The A-List can bite me†.
Heh.
[I realize that I haven’t written a long rambling craptacular post on anything in quite a while, and that you kind, intelligent, and slightly demented Wonderchicken Irregulars out there are pining, no clamoring for more dammit more!, but, well, I’m trying to write a book. Really fast. (which makes this recent and excellent MeFi thread all the more amusing ) And it’s (in the amusingly outdated vernacular of the recent bubblelicious fin de siecle) ‘occupying mindshare’ for me at the moment. I apologize profusely, but bear with me, I beg of you.
*begs*
Thankee.]
† I don’t take this hotornot stuff seriously, duh, but them Listers Who Are A really can bite me. Take a big ol’ bite of my bum, right here. *points*
Edit : I realize also that this sort of self-referential wankorama could be perceived as distasteful and beneath the elevated station to which I have winched myself, but I just don’t care. Comedy? Comedy gold.
Ladies and gentlemen, a new personal record. It’s been 3 count’em 3 days since I checked this account.
I am feeling gigantically bummed today, left out of all the fun with CD swaps and MeFi/MonkeyMeets and such. What the f–k am I doing here in Korea, living my entire social life through a keyboard? Sometimes I just don’t know.
Somebody want to give me a job sweeping floors or something, somewhere other than here? This place is starting to get to me…
I found this on the site that dare not speak it’s name. It’s funny.
I’ve never been good at mental multi-tasking, and I’ve got this other super-secret double-extra (yeah, whatever) thing I’m working on at the moment, and it’s distracting me away from the posting of the amusing entries at the mighty Empty Bottle.
So go read the archives, my friends. As opposed to the chew-toy mastications of those purist ‘weblog’ wanktards, my old nocturnal emissions actually have some value beyond a pointer to the chronistic equivalent of Mahir or All Your (admittedly amusing) Base… hooo-hah!
No really, there’s some f–king gold back there in the foothills, honest to cheese-topped goodness. Laugh, cry, wet your pants : it’s the Disneyland of Weblogging! Lotta crap too, but Sturgeon’s Law, nicht wahr?
Back in about ’86 or so, the world paused for a moment in its orbit as the musical colossus known as Naked & Shameless spontaneously appeared, boozily clambered to the very apex of the Vancouver musical scene, and then flamed out and disappeared, all in the space of days, if not hours.
Well, what really happened is that my buddy Deviant, who was responsible for the creation and dismantling of various Vancouver bands of moderate success over the decade, decided that it’d be pretty damn cool to get me liquored up in his studio, record one of my infamous spontaneous rants, then put it to music.
Unfortunately, no matter how much Ouzo I swilled, sitting on the stool in front of the mike, it just wasn’t spontaneous. Performance anxiety. I did force it a bit once the booze kicked in, and pulled some ranty stuff out of my ass, but the resulting track didn’t meet the high standards we had anticipated, and after a few plays on CiTR, the UBC campus radio station (“all spaceship and satan music, all the time”), sank into history unremarked.
For the purposes of branding, though (we were ahead of our time, baby), I’d come up with the name ‘Naked & Shameless’ for our two-man band. Myself being Jim Naked, up there under the hot lights, baring my soul, and Deviant being Dave Shameless, the evil rocknroller exploiting my gentle drunken poetic weiner-talk to get chicks and stuff.
That part was good.
Wisely, though, with our first track sucking so heinously, we decided to shelve the project.
Fast forward to a few years ago, and Deviant, who has been living in Chicago and whom I haven’t seen for almost a decade, has restarted Naked and Shameless, with cousin Buck Naked replacing the dearly departed Jim. Buck can actually sing, and play. This is a good thing.
Why am I telling you all this? Besides the usual ‘I’m so goddamn hip I can’t see over my own pelvis’ stuff, mostly ’cause I remembered that N&S have an mp3.com page with some fun songs on, which I’ve been listening to this evening as I get slowly plastered, and they’re currently on tour, and will be playing one of our favorite Vancouver haunts this weekend, the Railway Club.
(The serendipitous thing here being that through completely random chaotic f–king weirdness, one of the owners of the Railway Club, Roger Trentenero, since deceased (murdered on his boat not long after I’d decamped, so to speak, at Playa Los Cocos, by hammer flung headward by his 16-year old Costa Rican girlfriend, is the story that I heard), was the owner of the first sailboat I crewed aboard in the Sea of Cortez, approximately midway, temporally speaking, between then and now…but that, as I find myself saying all too often, is a tale for another day.)
Drinking Song #16 is the one dedicated to me poor old Jim Naked. It’s funny, but not my favorite. C’est la vie.
If you do go have a listen to any of their stuff, don’t miss “Lawrence (Head of Lettuce)“. A true story from our UBC days. Not even the names have been changed to protect the guilty. Rock’n’roll verité, man.
It’ll be my birthday in about 3 hours, Korea time. I will officially be old enough to know better, while continuing to be too dumb to care.
But that hasn’t stopped me so far, so I think I’ll just carry on as usual, noting the gray hairs appearing in the skateboarder-goatee, but reacting to them with a hearty woo-hoo rather than a weedy boo-hoo. This, my friends, is the secret to my success, longevity, and general all-around air of worldly incoherence.
So happy birthday to me. Have a drink for me, won’t you? I’ll be sure to return the favour when your next birthday rolls around…
Fishrush has done some rooting through the archives, and come up with some very interesting evidence pointing to Eli Chanticleer as the inventor of the weblogging machine, and the man responsible for loosing this plague upon the world. 
Circumstantial evidence linking the identity of Mr Chanticleer to a certain well-known Miraculous Fowl should be examined with care, as there are clear indications in the ebb and flow of the blogospheric aether that the game is afoot, and impostors and pretenders are weaving a web of lies to trap the unwary and credulous.
Exercise caution, my weblogging friends. These are dangerous times.
She’s dirty all right, but no more so than the rest of the corrupt scumbags who run this circle-jerk cesspool of privilege.
She was rejected because she’s a woman, pure and simple.
f–kwits. Asshats. Crapclowns. I f–king loathe these self-satisfied, centre-of-everyone’s universe Korean men, and I loathe Korean politicians, who are not coincidentally almost without exception male, with a special nauseated red-eyed hatred that makes my head hum like a generator. Line these wrinkly old upper-caste cocksuckers up against a wall and mow them down, say I. The greedy old boys’ networks in this country will guarantee that it remains the sh-thole that it is for anyone who’s not part of their cadre. Slaves and their overlords, right down the line. The threadbare whip of Confucianism coupled with the half-understood yoke of transplanted Christianity keeping the poor poor and the rich rich, and anyone who’s not a high-born male in a position of eternal subservience.
f–k ’em.
It reminds me, at this early stage, of a hardboiled Chandleresque quantum-physics detective novel (yeah, before Dirk Gently) that me and a couple of guys I lived with in university were writing (and erasing) in installments on the messageboard of my dorm room. That was fun, and so is this.
But I had no idea what to do with Bea Arthur suddenly appearing…