RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER

Please read this. All I can say is that for whatever good it does, follow the advice at the end of the article. Just to explain why I’m posting this, Daren is the brother of an old friend. Daren and his family are good people. I can’t imagine what they’re going through and it upsets me to try to imagine.

Tragedies like this happen hundreds of times a year to hundreds of families in Philadelphia. It’s been said so many times by so many people, but it’s got to stop.

So this weekend I decided to kick back and relax out in Amish country. The whole trip was precipitated by a craving for sliced ham, pickled eggs and tapioca pudding. Sometimes there’s nothing better.

Once I was full though, my thoughts turned to sex.

I did the usual, cruising the streets of Paradise, PA, whistling at Amish girls and looking all flashy in my motorized vehicle, but for some reason I wasn’t having any luck. Cruising for Mennonites can be rough. Full on Amish girls are even harder. In a change in strategy, I drove down to Route 23. I’d had some success there in the past. One time I met this inbred dairy wench that could churn butter back to cream.

But anyway, after being struck down in Churchtown and neighboring Goodville I drove over to Blue Ball. I hadn’t run into Blue Ball since high school. I’d even forgotten the uncomfortable feeling I used to get from Blue Ball. But there I was. Even though it was a little unpleasant, it was the biggest town around. Getting through Blue Ball was my best chance at scoring so I stopped at the corner bar and ordered a drink. They had Bud, Bud Light and Miller High Life, so I ordered whiskey.

The Blue Ball bar was a desperate place full of desperate men. It didn’t take long to see that life in Blue Ball weighed these people down. The men shifted uncomfortably on their stools, looks of frustration on their faces, nursing their shitty beers in some horrible Blue Ball limbo.

By contrast, the women were surprisingly upbeat. Whatever caused the throbbing, gut wrenching anxiety in Blue Ball, it only affected the men. I chatted with a nice brunette named Cindy. We talked about her hopes, dreams and some other crap. Things were going great and when we hit the dance floor, I thought I’d be busting through that Blue Ball barrier in no time.

Cindy told me to meet her later that night at her house in Intercourse. She promised me apples from her garden and fresh baked corn muffins. She slipped her number and address into my back pocket and told me to meet her at 9PM.

And that’s when things went wrong.

After finishing my last whiskey, I slipped out to my car, ready to hit the road. I felt fine, but for some reason my court ordered breathalizer said that I was too “drunk” to drive. It was bullshit, but I couldn’t start my car without a clean readout. I slammed the dashboard with both fists and fell out of the car into the gravel parking lot.

That’s when I realized that it was 8:30PM and I was stuck in Blue Ball with no way to Intercourse. My map told me that the trip was an agonizing 9.5 miles. I decided to run it. The last time I’d been to Blue Ball was for a statewide track meet. I’d run my way out of Blue Ball before and I could do it again. Unfortunately for me, I was a decade out of condition. With the promise of Cindy’s farm grown apples and the assumption that I would have sex with her also, I didn’t care how out of shape I was.

I hit the pavement. With every step, I drew closer to Intercourse, leaving Blue Ball far behind. But unfortunately, with every dry, pounding motion the pain and cramping just got worse. I started to doubt myself. Could I really get from Blue Ball to Intercourse? As I ran, I called Cindy on my cell and told her the problem. It was so hard I said, and I really, really wanted to come. She gave me a deadline of 10PM. After that, she was feeding her muffin to the dog and going to bed.

At 9:40, just 2 miles from Intercourse I buckled over, a cramp freezing my groin. I couldn’t move. That was it and I knew it. I wouldn’t make it to Intercourse. I lay in the shoulder all night, frustration and pain holding me down. Eventually I masturbated and went home.

Taken directly from the Nasa pic of the day site:

Giant jets of subatomic particles moving at nearly the speed of light have been found coming from thousands of galaxies across the universe, but always from elliptical galaxies or galaxies in the process of merging — until now. Using the combined power of the Hubble Space Telescope and other telescopes, astronomers have discovered a huge jet coming from a spiral galaxy similar to our own Milky Way.

Astronomers believe such jets originate at the cores of galaxies, where supermassive black holes provide the tremendous gravitational energy to accelerate particles to nearly the speed of light. Both elliptical and spiral galaxies are believed to harbor supermassive black holes at their cores.

The discovery that the jet was coming from a spiral galaxy dubbed 0313-192 required using a combination of radio, optical and infrared observations to examine the galaxy and its surroundings. Nearly a billion light-years from Earth, 0313-192 proved an elusive target, however. Subsequent observations support the idea that the galaxy might be a spiral but still were inconclusive.

Image Credit: NASA, NRAO/AUI/NSF and W. Keel (University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa)

Today: The (New) Jersey Wall.

The other day I got my 10-year high school reunion invite in the mail. That’s a story in itself and I’ll write just a few words about its overwhelming incompetence. Apparently my high school – Philly’s Central High – paid a company called “Reunion Central” to put together this magical evening. RC certainly didn’t dazzle my old school with their cutting edge website. Please, please click this link: [link]

Apparently their graphic design department isn’t so hot either. The flier I got in the mail looks like something put together by a promising group of mentally handicapped 3rd graders with an ‘89 Mac and a B&W Xerox. Actually, it looked a lot like the website: [link]

Obviously RC’s strengths aren’t in marketing, but maybe they put on a good event. Hosted at Dave and Busters for a mere $56, I can go observe just how severely the potential once held by last generations next generation has been crushed under the weight of social conformity.

I won’t be going.

But moving on to the point of this post, the reunion didn’t make me feel old. What made me feel old was looking up a long lost friend on myspace earlier today. While browsing through his friends, I saw another familiar name.

But first a little background.

Middle School isn’t fun for anyone and sometimes kids are mean. My friends were the social outcasts. We were too weird and lazy to be nerds. We were too nerdy and weird to be cool. Even if we didn’t necessarily like each other, we stuck together out of necessity. Eventually we got to high school and became cooler than anyone. I have no idea how that works.

But during middle school we were devastatingly mean. I wholeheartedly admit the shame that I feel for my behavior. As social bottom feeders, we tore others down where we could. As sexual maturity began to cloud our perception we – in our confusion – targeted the outcast girls with our ridicule. For example, even though we became pretty good friends in high school, we proudly put the fat girl on medication. Seems that a 200 lb. 13-year-old can’t take constant, vicious, personal attacks about her appearance. We joked about it years later.

While browsing myspace today, I didn’t run across the fat girl. It was someone else from middle school. It was the flat-chested girl. Back then she was thin, snotty and poorly developed. She always made fun of us, so one day when a tissue may or may have not have fallen out of her bra and we smelled blood and attacked. For the rest of middle school, there were relentless verbal assaults regarding her lack of breasts and the tissue incident.

Being a late bloomer, she eventually filled out to Coors Light commercial standards and through high school, always made a point of having us notice her freshly grown breasts. But unlike the fat girl she never forgave us. Considering that the girls were at least as mean to us as we were to them, that’s a shame… but still perfectly understandable.

My memory of her is still in middle school. In my mind, she hasn’t aged. When I search for an image in my head, middle school is what appears. That’s why today, when I saw her myspace profile pic with her lying back with a newborn infant sleeping on her chest, I felt old.

Of course I’m not old, but seeing a person transform in an instant from prepubescent middle schooler to mature and happy mother is a strange and new experience.

That’s all for now.

(John) Kerry, all the while attempting to continue his address, is drowned out by the man’s screams and the clicking of the electrical gun.

I didn’t make this, but hats off to whoever did.

Today’s tile news comes from a small town just outside of Indianapolis, Noblesville, Indiana. Since at least last December, a copycat Toynbee tiler has been hard at work making and gluing tiles all over town. Here’s to you, copycat tiler. Way to keep the movement going:

For Days I’ve had Jan Terri’s “Losing You” stuck in my head. Who is this person? Brian Levake of Jammed Online can tell you better than me. Read it before watching the videos:

For anyone who has ever feared success, or had your personal dreams cut short by rabid insecurities, needs to take a close, careful look at the career of one Ms. Jan Terri.

If you’ve never heard of Jan Terri, don’t be alarmed, as most of the country hasn’t. But for a couple of years in the late 1990’s/early 2000’s, her star burned the brightest in the world of Outsider music, especially in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

Details of her beginnings in the music business are sketchy at best; all that is known for sure was that she, while working as a limo driver, used to peddle (to her customers no less) VHS tapes containing music videos for several of her songs, including the celestial ‘Journey to Mars’, the country swing of ‘Baby Blues’ and her pants-crappingly terrifying ode to Halloween, ‘Get Down Goblin’. The videos, and especially the songs, in relation to contemporary music, are staggeringly horrible. In fact, the videos were horrible in comparison, artistically and technology-wise, to nearly every video that was available during MTV’s formative years.

Yet, upon viewing them, you begin to become drawn to them in a way that you can’t look away from a messy car accident. Oh, and for the record, Jan Terri is, how shall we say it, umm, not a terribly easy on the eyes. She goes about four feet 10, and let’s just say we aren’t dealing with Ms. America in any way, shape, or form.

So why was I and countless others drawn to her art? I surely cannot tell you, other than they are perfect videos to play at parties, as they are so pathetic and half-assed, that nearly anyone with a camera could make something better. Which was the philosophy that former broadcasting great
Harry Caray used when explaining why he sang ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame’ during the seventh inning—he felt that the crowd could relate easily to him, as nearly everyone in attendance could sing better than him.

VHS tapes of her videos began to spread like wildfire, especially around the advertising/media companies in the aforementioned cities. Any company that had access to tape dubbing machines were running off copies of the Jan Terri video collection, and thus her electric rise to super stardom
began. My first personal encounter was when she agreed to play at the Christmas party for the post-production house that I was interning for. And it was unbelievable. As opposed to going through all the trouble of having a band, Terri essentially sang over her own cd through a PA system,
pausing only to play a ‘guitar solo’ on an inflatable guitar, or to throw miniature candy bars during her rendition of ‘Journey to Mars’, which literally sent this pro-Terri crowd into a maelstrom of dancing, screaming, and many spilled drinks.

Apparently, America was listening, as the next thing I know, I get a phone call from a friend who was a confidant of Terri’s. He called to explain to me that by some fluke, Marilyn Manson had gotten a hold of her tape, and had asked her to play for his birthday party in LA, to which she happily
accepted. Which led to her actually opening up for Marilyn Manson at Chicago’s enormous Aragon Ballroom. During this period, which was roughly 1998, there were at least 2 different documentaries being shot about the amazing rise of Jan Terri, and her full-length debut ‘High Risk’ was also
finally available for public consumption. There were also several bootleg copies of her playing a set of her songs, quasi-karaoke style at her father’s bar in suburban Chicagoland.

The last time that I ever saw Jan Terri in person was at a bar opening in Chicago; apparently, her 15 minutes were up, as where before, people would be screaming along with her, echoing the lyrics to ‘IRS’ or ‘Rock and Roll Santa’. This crowd, however, ranged from unimpressed to downright rude.
It was such a heartbreaking scene to take in, as Jan Terri is surely one of God’s gentlest creatures, and someone who should be admired for pursuing her dreams, despite the lack of looks or talent.

And then, that was it—until I turn on the ‘Daily Show’ one day, where they did a feature on Jan Terri, essentially making her look ridiculous, for which they are terrific at. It’s endearing, at least, when she does it to herself; but when those smarmy cocksuckers at Comedy Central do it, they just look
like bullies. At any rate, the episode went down as one of the highest rated ‘Daily Shows’ ever, no doubt providing Ms. Terri with some level of validation.

These days, any evidence of the existence of Jan Terri is awfully hard to find. Her official website has been missing for some time, and hardly any web pages mention her, except the ‘Dr. Demento’ type sites that list her along with Wesley Willis as ‘funny’ or ‘weird’ musicians that happened to
share a hometown. But I believe that despite her musical shortcomings and lack of any real ‘star qualities’, Jan Terri proved to us all that with steady and heart-felt determination, we really can achieve anything that we as humans set our mind to. And, personally, I like to think that as she’s driving her limo, or doing whatever it is that she does, that she’s planning her next move, a step no doubt aimed at the superstardom that she has fully mapped out in her mind.

OJ Simpson armed robbery with gun, Las Vegas. Prison time. suit. wedding. innocent. guilty.

^ I’m just curious how many search hits I’ll get for those keywords. I have no information about the crazy fucker.

This evening I had the pleasure of driving up to the 4400 block of Germantown Ave. to take a photo of a Nicetown mural. For some reason they painted the thing behind a tree, but other than that, the light and atmosphere were nice.

But that’s not what I’m here to write about. This evening, I’d like to get all bloggy and personal and let you know a little about myself. Why? Because today I learned something about myself. Something I never knew before. Actually that’s not true, but it does read with more drama.

But anyway, at the 4500 block of G-Town Ave. is Wayne Junction station and the unofficial border with Germantown. A few blocks on, on the 4900 block is the intersection of Germantown and Logan. Since I was in the neighborhood, I made a left and a quick right onto Royal Street. I drove slowly down the block-long street to a large white twin. The rest of the block was rowhomes. I’d only seen the house a couple times, but I’m pretty sure it was the right one. If it was the right one, it’s the house where I spent the first 6 months of my life.

At the tender age of half, a year my family moved 5 blocks farther Northwest to the 5400 block of Greene Street. I lived there for the next 11 years. I’d be lying if I didn’t say the Royal Street house was familiar. I’d also be lying if I said it had any reason to be familiar. I spent my infancy there and saw it briefly a couple of times after that. I’m not even sure I was looking at the right house… but at the same time, I’m as certain as I can be. All in all, this means little to you, me or anyone really.

What it does do is touch on some bit of significance that humans tend hold dear. Memory and home are powerful things… I guess.

The BBC reported today that homo sapiens edged closer to total victory in the ancient battle for terran ape supremacy. Today’s report notes that Gorilla and Orangutan populations hover on the brink of species collapse and ultimately, total extinction.

Like the Wal Mart of the Great Apes, human beings stand proudly atop a diminishing list of competing species. While human action has led in large part to the annihilation of inferior monkeys, apes themselves are also to blame.

A recent report put the Ebola death toll among Africa’s lowland gorillas at nearly 5,000. Comparatively, a continuing outbreak among humans in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has killed less than 200 individuals. Better understanding, preparedness and post-infection actions undertaken by homo sapiens has spared our species a death toll similar to that of the subordinate loser ape populations.

While the victory against gorillas and orangutans should be praised, today’s triumphs pale in comparison to the ancient battles against competing hominids. Most revered is the human suppression and eventual eradication of the Neanderthal menace some 25,000 years ago. Likely able of verbal communication and equipped with larger brains than modern man, the destruction of the Neanderthals may be humankinds greatest victory.

Other extinct hominids include homo heidelbergensis, homo erectus and homo antecessor. While not a hominid or an ape, the elimination of the Yangtze River Dolphin should also be noted among mankind’s achievements.

Yesterday’s Eagles/Packers game was a horrible pile of shit and I’m glad I missed the second half because of previous commitments. But I’m not here to talk about the game, I’m here to talk about an often-overlooked facet of football culture: the NFL’s clear and overt feelings of sexual longing towards Packers quarterback Brett Favre.

While NFL announcers tend to eroticize players and especially quarterbacks, Favre is in a class by himself. For years I’ve shifted uncomfortably in my seat while announcers like John Madden and Troy Aikman talk with yearning and desire about his “big strong legs” and “classic, gritty face.” Yesterday as the camera cut into a tight shot of Favre staring vapidly out from behind 25 years of repeated head trauma, one commentator stopped to note: “There are those eyes I was talking about.”

Watching a Packers game is like seeing a group of frat boys at a strip club… or maybe more accurately it’s like watching a Republican Senator in an airport bathroom. Now of course there’s nothing wrong with a gay football announcer, in fact I strongly encourage Aikman to come out of the closet. I just feel that sexual desire of any sort has no place in the commentators box. It skews opinion.

When it comes to Brett, NFL commentators see him through rose-colored glasses rubbed with Favre’s ball sweat. He’s been a terrible, terrible quarterback for years. Favre throws more stupid interceptions at more crucial times, in more games than any starting quarterback I’ve ever seen. He also continues to throw them during non-crucial times or in other words, once the Packers have fallen desperately behind. He’s terrible and he should have retired years ago.

It’s the announcers and those like them who through their constant on-air blowjobs have convinced the washed-up Superbowl MVP turned punch-drunk loser Favre, that he can still actually play in the NFL.

Here’s to a better game and that’s all for now.

Google Earth Flight Simulator!

Information:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/31/google-earths-easter-egg-a-flight-simulator/

Instructions:

http://earth.google.com/intl/en/userguide/v4/flightsim/index.html

Occasionally I repost phony product reviews from my brief ‘career’ over at epinions.com. One day while toiling away at work, I wrote this review of:

Home > Hotels & Travel > Destinations > “Hell”

Yes, Hell is a real place. I think it’s in the Caribbean. Here’s my December, 2000 review:

—

I was just a small boy when my stepfather first told me I was going to hell.

“Liberator.” he would say, “You’re nothing but low life scum and if you don’t finish your damn mac and cheese, I’m sending you to hell 60 years early.”

Hell.

I found myself in hell after a brief stint up in heaven. I don’t know how I got there, the last memory I have I was trying to get a bagel out of my toaster with a butter knife. I guess I forgot to unplug it.

The next thing I knew, there I was. Just like in the Family Circus, heaven was a big place full magnificent light and beautiful androgynous beings. It all reminded me very much of the Velvet Underground. But there was something more to it. There was an ever present feeling of overpowering love. A feeling entirely absent from The Velvet Underground and Lou Reed overall. Up in heaven love had form. It had shape and texture. I supposed this was God. Being in heaven was the most spiritual experience I’ve ever had.

And then.

The feeling drained from my body like sand from an hour glass. My strength and understanding fell away as I was transported through a draining of consciousness into some other place of being. There was no sense of falling, there was no sense of movement at all. The change and the shift in perceived time and space seemed to come entirely from within. As love abandoned, my perception changed accordingly. I floated motionless as the world fell away. Ether and essence ceased to be. There was no pain. There was no feeling at all. I just floated, waiting to be thrown into the fiery pits of legend. But it didn’t happen. I prayed to God, begging for forgiveness and for readmittnance into his realm, but my thoughts were dead in nothing.

Without the aid of perception as there was nothing to perceive, I have been here now for what may be an eternity. My consciousness is all that remains. It lives here somewhere, blind, deaf and mute. No one and nothing is here. There is no love, there is no pain, no grand ideal, no emotion at all. No feeling at all. I can only think… I can only think. I’ve relived my life a million times. I’ve recounted every moment. I can do it a million times in what seems like a second. But as many times as I do it, I can never feel it. I can never feel in the memory of it. I can never understand it. I know I should, and I think that I can, But I can’t. I just can’t.

I’ve wondered where my thoughts go. Do they exist at all? I asked the same question on earth, but now I know the answer. On earth there was a purpose. There was a reason for thought and my thoughts were alive there. Thought was transcendent on earth. It lived in it’s own space. Now that I’m dead, I know this. That every thought I had on earth existed elsewhere, but it always tied into my life and myself. Why or how I ended up here I don’t know. I’ve thought of it forever, but just can’t understand. There’s nothing here to understand. Just words and dead thought.

What world do my thoughts end up in? Do they go anywhere from here? Can someone hear my thoughts now? Why am I here? Where are my thoughts now?

These search awards are dedicated to my new readers in the national defense industry. While browsing yesterday’s site stats I saw that ranking in the top 20 requesting hosts were the U.S. Army and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA. So, welcome. If I’ve drawn your attention because of my sharp wit and smart commentary, then stick around and enjoy yourself. If I’ve been assessed as a national security threat, then please move along, because dovate.com is at best a negligible national security threat.

Most likely, I just used the word “skyscraper” and “New York” too many times in yesterday’s post.

But anyway, it’s time for this months search awards. Aside from listing hosts and referring sites, I get a daily list of the search terms that led people to this site. Every month I pick out the top 30-35 and post them here for all to get creeped out by. Here’s August:

35. what birds like cherry blossoms
34. philadelphia buy things with crack
33. how do the amish deal with extreme heat
32. bodybuilding buldge
31. dung ball washed up on the ocean
30. pictures of dogs that live in a dumpster
29. speed skater buttocks
28. what is a thermonuclear attack
27. dead serial killer found in amusement park in manitoba
26. art anus pic
25. masturbating on meth
24. goth hawk
23. christian pumpkin pictures
22. fucking at 19 old dog
21. rubber lifesize mannequins
20. blowjob short story
19. weird tiles on the ground philidelphia
18. gay elephants mating
17. real alien pictures encounter s and videos
16. how to make replica of kelp
15. shock photos what you never see
14. shadow beings found me
13. opossum attacks yearly statistics
12. video clip of my friends vagina
11. cocaine online
10. pictures of fetus after using colon cleanse
9. my broken mind psychosis why
8. is my girlfriend a prostitute?
7. nude pictures of girls hunting grouse
6. how to kick off mastrubating
5. im scared im going to get caught mastrubating
4. how not to get caught mastrubating
3. i saw my son mastrubating
2. saw dad mastrubating
1. how i lost my job girlfriend apartment rabbit food

I’ve got something shameful to admit. I’m jealous of New York’s skyline. Chicago too. It’s an immature jealousy, but it’s there. Next to their crops of big, strong, spires thrusting boldly from the earth, Philly looks like a wee-little toy city.

It’s no consolation that if you drive I-95 from Miami to Boston, Philly boasts far and away the second largest skyline on the eastern seaboard. In my extremely biased opinion it also ranks right up there with Seattle and San Francisco for that number 3 spot. (Excluding Canada/Toronto)

On Friday, Cira Center South was announced. With a commercial tower punching over 600 and possibly even 700’, and with a residential tower big enough to make it’s own mark on the skyline, CCS will help alleviate the festering wound that is I-76 and the Walnut Street bridge. According to Brandywine Realty Trust’s finest renderers, here’s what it will look like:

It’s amazing what’s happened in this latest boom. According to dovate.com, Center City has officially expanded from Spring Garden to Girard in the north, South Street to Washington Ave. in the south and from 23-27th to 33/34th street to the west.

By 2012, center city will flow seamlessly into Penn Campus. Who knows where it will be in another 20 years. Aside from CCS, here’s what could/should happen now:

Mandeville place: Helping to fill that gap between 24th and 30th streets, Mandeville place will go a long way in assisting the Peco building and the diminutive 2400 building with consistency and class. At 21st and Market, the Murano helps pick up the rear. Here’s Mandeville:

Also crucial is Bridgeman’s View Tower. Far away at Delaware Ave. and Poplar and rising over 900′, BVT would stand as an impressive monument to the Philly skyline. Also, behind Comcast and Liberty I, it would be the 3rd tallest building in the city. In 5 years we could see the skyline stretch boldly from the Delaware to 32nd street. Take that San Francisco!

I’m sick of white words on black text. Welcome to the new black on white dovate.com, word blog. I’ve been tweaking the wordpress ‘classy’ template this afternoon. After a few hours, it’s about ready for public consumption. Happy Labor Day.