[dovate.com] » 2008 » February
Today’s post comes via Geekadelphia. Since the post there isn’t anything I can improve on, I’ll just steal the text directly. The only thing I have to add is that this is possibly the funniest thing I’ve ever seen:
Whoever is behind Garfield Minus Garfield… I applaud you and your brilliant mind. By taking Garfield out of the Garfield comic strips, this blogger manages to create a new, even better comic, that shows off the true nature of Jon Arbuckle. A mad, lonely, and schizophrenic man living in suburban America. It’s what I picture people living on the Main Line to be like.
Enjoy, and laugh at Jon’s expense.
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I’ve got 2 hours between jobs, so this post will be short and sweet… just like this freakish piece of fruit. Thursday’s contribution to weird week is this conjoined banana. What secrets might be hidden inside? I’ll find out in a couple days when I fry it up plantain style.
I’m pushing on with week of the unexplained here with one of my favorite topics: UFO’s. I believe that the alien visitation stories found on the internet represent the source texts of a future class of religions.
Already, people have started to hammer together Christian creation stories, Buddhist and Hindu ideas on pantheism and reincarnation and mix it up with a little quantum theory pop-science and a dash of psychotropic inspired pattern recognition and present it is an ideological belief system. In a century or so, I guarantee that there will be open churches. (and not just cults like the Raelians and the Scientologists)
But anyway, my favorite UFO story has nothing to do with any of this. My favorite story is about the poor dumb alien that had the misfortune of landing in New Jersey. Every new religion needs a little absurdity. Here’s a dramatic retelling of the actual events.
It was the blackest dead of night in January, 1978 and the New Jersey State Police were in hot pursuit of a UFO. Sirens blazing, they ordered the alien craft to land, but the vehicle refused to comply.
The UFO was first spotted hovering near Fort Dix and the adjacent McGuire Air Force base. Having lost track of the target somewhere near McGuire, the pursuit was handed over to United States Armed Forces.
A Military Policeman cornered the object at the end of an airstrip. Stepping out of his car, he squinted into the pre-dawn NJ darkness. It was January 18th, the dead of winter, and the height of the Cold War. The air was still and except for the idle of the MP’s jeep, perfectly silent. Stepping carefully forward, he unclipped his holster, and placed his hand on his .45 semiautomatic. Suddenly, through his frozen breath he spotted a child-size form just a few meters in front of him. Apparently assuming it wasn’t a wayward toddler, he opened fire, hitting the being 5 times.
The alien, shocked and mortally wounded, mustered enough strength to turn from the gunfire and stagger towards the perimeter fence, before collapsing – dead.
A smell of ammonia hung in the air… which to me says that aliens either bleed ammonia or are physically capable of pissing themselves.
Apparently after this all happened, the alien body was whisked away to somewhere secret and examined by government doctors. Fortunately the aliens did not respond by coming down hard on New Jersey. Apparently when push comes to shove, aliens are just a bunch of bitches that piss themselves.
That’s all for now.
I’ve wanted to post these photos for a long time, but was never quite sure how to present them. As this site continues down its week of the bizarre, I thought today would be a good opportunity.
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Spiritualism reached its height of popularity in the United States between the Civil War and World War II. The tremendous pain of loss coupled with the nearly limitless promises of science, opened the mind to all sorts of new ideas.
If the electrical energy emitted through a radio frequency could carry a human voice through the ether, why couldn’t it also tune into the spirit world? If a camera could capture a moment in time, why couldn’t it be adjusted to photograph angels or ghosts? In the early days, the power of scientific discovery supported religious claims and was believed by many to have the ability to eventually prove them.
It was a hopeful and deeply interesting time that I find endlessly fascinating. Anything was possible and little was discounted as beyond the limits of reality.
But there were also a lot of frauds.
By the 20th century, the fad of ectoplasm was popular in the spiritualist community. Many photographs of mediums producing this “spiritual substance” were made and distributed. What look today like crude Photoshop jobs, or just clear fabric-ation. (sorry) were accepted by many as legitimate proof of the spiritual realm. Either way, I love these photos and regardless of their authenticity, think that they deserve a look.
Here are a few. Google can produce many, many more:
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This week this site will revert to the non-pron roots of the internet: craziness and paranoia. Yesterday I presented the world’s only conspiracy that links prophecy, Toynbee Tiles and 9-11. Today I take on some of those same topics myself. Enjoy:
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Recently, Sunday morning brunch talk turned to 9-11 conspiracies. Since the dovate.com juggernaut of public opinion hasn’t gone on record one way or another on this particular common myth, here’s what I have to say about all that:
I highly doubt large-scale government planning in the attacks and generally accept that the conspiracy was planned and carried out by extremely well connected terrorists. At the same time, the commonly accepted belief (Saddam Hussein and bin Laden sat in a cave with 19 evil-doers and hatched their evil Muslim plot to overthrow the United States and behead every Christian from Omaha to Boise) is at least as much myth as any conspiracy. The official account isn’t a whole hell of a lot better.
Here’s my best guess:
At least some (and probably most) of the terrorists had connections to intelligence agencies in the United States, Pakistan, Europe and the Middle East. This doesn’t mean that these governments were complicit in the 9-11 attacks…
Think of it like this.
I don’t believe that a group of 2 dozen military, political and financial elite meet in a secret chamber every August to plan out the course of human history. That’s just stupid.
But think about it. How many people really are on the world stage with their hands on real power? Ten thousand? Twenty thousand? Fifty thousand? Even if it’s twice that, it’s still not a substantial number. Think of it as what it is… a community. All together it’s small town’s worth of people.
So let’s think of it as a small town. No one trusts anyone else and all are out for money, power and resources. It’s a small town, so money comes from the bank, power from the police and resources from the landowners as well as from the gas station just outside of town. Interestingly, the gas station is the only thing that’s not owned by the Americans.
The 9-11 terrorists were the local drug dealers. For years the chief of police ignored them in exchange for information about the gas station owners.
They were never friends, but they did help with the old Soviet town and with the gas station. At a point, they could do whatever the hell they wanted without the police even looking at them. And not only wasn’t anybody looking, in 25 years of working as town assets, they learned how to play the system.
They knew the passport office that gave passports to anybody. The agents working there assumed that whoever came through had business being there and gave them what they needed, no questions asked. They knew how to operate in the open without raising alarms. When alarms did go off, they were quickly suppressed. You can’t touch assets. So they plotted, they planned and then one day they blew up the police station and robbed the bank.
Of course I can’t prove a word of this, but it makes much more sense to me that 9-11 was a really, really bad case of blowback rather than the perfect plot hatched, planned and executed from a cave in Afghanistan. Since it’s embarrassing, since it would expose the nasty underbelly of intelligence work and since it might compromise state secrets to reveal, only future historians have any chance at verifying any of this. Unfortunately I’m guessing that all record of Mohammad Atta as CIA asset were shredded long, long ago. O’well.
Since that’s not a gratifying conspiracy theory, here’s a crazy conclusion:
9-11 was a conspiracy. Terrorist planned or not, it was a conspiracy. All in all, it must have involved a few dozen people. Conspiracies leak. Is it possible that it people outside the terrorist circles caught wind of a plot? It’s almost impossible to imagine that they didn’t. Is it possible that someone in a position of power in Saudi Arabia knew about the attacks and didn’t say anything? Pakistan? Israel? The United States? Stranger things have happened.
If you don’t believe my general thesis, listen to Michael Springman, the man who once worked at the place where 15 of the 19 hijackers got their passports:
Culled from the Toynbee.net (sadly, now defunct site) email archives. You know maybe he’s onto something:
from what i can gather it looks like the 3 cities the plaques were in Washington D.C., Philidelphia, and New York these 3 cities were all attacked on 9-11-01. Kubricks movie was called 2001, the year that 9-11 happened.
he was alluding to the future when he put these plaques in. remember…our idea of the future writes todays present history.
maybe he knew that 9-11-01 was going to happen waaaaay before it happened and he was trying to warn us.
also maybe he knew that NASA was going to crash the Satellite into Jupiter that will be happening on Monday 9-22-03.
looks like in the major cities, he laid these plaques on certain streets in succession Example: Philadelphia 4th - 13th st. New York 36th - 57th st.
Ever get pissed at the obscene amount of money Canon charges for their remote shutter triggers? Why not make your own for $5, or less. At this point, most of us have the raw materials for this project gathering dust in a drawer somewhere.
I’m not sure if this will work on more advanced DSLR’s, but this is a pretty neat trick that will work on most Canon models.
Thanks to Lifehacker.
It was a beautiful 70 degree February day, but Rittenhouse Square was deserted. Why? A cold blooded heartless killer has been stalking the park for months. Next time you’re there, take note of the eerie absence of so many familiar faces.
They have good reason to be on edge. Since the autumn, many park regulars have been attacked in broad daylight, pinned to the ground with bone crushing force and brutally disemboweled. The twisted killer then finishes his brutal ritual by eating the warm, raw flesh of his victim.
Why has this gone unreported? Put simply, no one is talking and no one cares. The victims don’t live in any of the swank apartments around the park. They feed on the scraps of others and go largely unnoticed by all but a few eccentrics. When approached for comment they simply scuttle away.
It also doesn’t help that they’re pigeons and squirrels. But seriously… since the autumn I’ve spotted a hawk in the trees of Rittenhouse, or soaring around on the currents above the park nearly every time I’ve passed through it. As a result the pigeon population has been displaced. The Rittenhouse pigeon Diaspora generally congregates on the roof ledge of the Barnes and Noble building across the street until the raptor threat abates. Unfortunately for them, the threat is nearly constant.
I believe the killer to be a Cooper’s Hawk, quite possibly the same Cooper’s Hawk I witnessed eating a squirrel in my back yard. A Red Tailed Hawk has also been spotted, (and best of all heard) but much less frequently. While it’s nice to see wildlife reassert itself on the urban landscape, it’s a shame to watch as the predatory gentrifiers force out old, established residents.
That’s all for now.
Not incredibly, but incredible.
The scene: the streets of Philadelphia, 3AM.
The game: Lasertag
The objective: Be the last man standing. (I doubt there would be any women involved in this)
This wasn’t my idea, I actually stole it from Ben at geekadelphia.
But why is it a bad idea? I figure that in a team of 20, 5 would be arrested, 14 would escape and 1 would be shot by police. But until that happened, think of it. Running through empty streets, ducking into dark alleys, tripping over rats and prostitutes as you take cover from laser fire behind a dumpster. What a great time!
About a decade ago, I actually, sort of did this. It was one of those slow summer evenings and a group of 7 of us were looking for something to do. After a short deliberation without any good ideas, it suddenly came to me. I suggested combining our resources and buying a couple sets of lasertag. Between the game and batteries, it was only about $10 each.
We agreed and it was off to Toys R’ Us. After buying the guns, we descended into the woods of Northwest Philadelphia. For hours, we ran through the dark forest and battled like idiots. It was actually a whole lot of fun and a hell of a lot cheaper than the lasertag arcade that used to be down in South Philly. No cops in the woods either.
Yeah I know it’s Valentine’s day and February is half over, but I figured better late than never with last month’s search awards. Why the delay? To tell you the truth, January was pretty weak. I thought maybe google improved their software… but after a couple weeks of February hits I promise that next months awards will be better. With that said, there are some good ones in here.
In case you’re unaware of what search awards are, every month I pore over my search stats and pull out the most bizarre. At the beginning of the month (usually) I post the best of the best. Here’s January:
30. dovate storm troopers
29. what is it for dovate ointment
28. george w bush child as a baby
27. charles darwin as a kid
26. blueball pain
25. pigeon shit kid
24. prescription underwear
23. chubby fucking horse
22. pictures of dogs with erected penis
21. free hi res gorilla pictures
20. coloration of penis\
19. alpha sterol
18. noblesville cocksuckers
17. easily confused words rob/steal travel/ trip
16. hot amish girls
15. horse vagina
14. retard running
13. cramp in the groin
12. molly pitcher wedding photography
11. curly haired celebrities
10. bigfoot sightings in berks
9. beautiful mary demons
8. i shit you not it was this big cat
7. the man with the giant penis
6. retard hands
5. disadvantages of mastrubating
4. harmful effects of a netti pot
3. crossing human and ape
2. celebrity genetalia size
1. mummers pissing
So I’m watching this show. It’s pretty damn good. It’s about a city with a skyrocketing murder problem and the corrupt, cash strapped and incompetent government that’s trying to deal with it. It’s very realistic. Although the downtown and surrounding neighborhoods are seeing a lot of condo construction and gentrification, the middle class is largely fleeing.
The police chief is more a political appointment than an effective leader. He’s tied in with the mayor, who despite all the corruption all around him, is somehow clean. Together, they “lower” crime by cooking the books… basically downgrading crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. It still doesn’t hide the escalating murder rate and even though the local paper has been eviscerated through buyouts and layoffs, no one buys it.
The Democratic party is entrenched, but one of the most powerful State Senators is facing multiple indictments right in the middle of the mayoral primary. He’s doing things like funneling money through his various nonprofits and giving no-show jobs to associates. A long shot candidate, fueled in large part by dissatisfaction with the corrupt mayor and police chief runs and somehow wins the primary on an anti-crime/reform platform. Without a viable republican base, the general election is a joke.
Although the chief resigns quietly, the reform mayor inherits a budget mess. The School District – for example – has been running millions of dollars in deficits for years and is facing a state takeover.
Meanwhile, murders continue. The show spends as much time among the endless blocks of red brick rowhouses as it does in government offices. Many of them are abandoned. Drug culture and fear rule. The mayor can’t afford to fully finance the police department and pay off the school deficit. He looks for a construction project to put his name on. He considers slots or a convention center expansion.
Did I mention this was an east coast city between New York and Washington?
In closing, I think The Wire is an excellent show, but you might only understand exactly how excellent it is if you live in Baltimore or Philadelphia… or maybe D.C.
I’m way too busy to post anything so I’ll just copy/paste an “I love you, I hate you” notice from the City Paper. It’s epic. Amazing. It has twists and turns. It’s hate, love and everything in-between. Enjoy:
FUCKING DICKHEAD
To the young immature kid because you are not a woman. to made an accusation that all men at the mass transit system think that you or any woman only want our money is absurd. and with the profanity that you have displayed it seems to me that you have actually been turned down by one of those old ass men as you have put it. and to request that we should have respect for a real woman PLEASE!!!! real women do not act and carry on like you have done, real women with class do not talk with such vile and putrid language as you have done. I can only assume that you still eat with your feet and hands.. and as far as coming out of a nasty B*#@! P*$#@ as you have put it . you just might want to check yours out. because if your mouth is foul then I know for sure your P*&$! is very very foul!!! and you can take that to the bank….. sound like you are mad because you cannot get a old ass man from the transit system. actually who in their right mind would want you???? so from all the old ass men at the mass transit system as you have put it. here is a greeting to you KISS OUR ASSES!!!!!! and a good FUCKING year to you too. and if you feel that you need to carry on further my e-mail is Gymmht@yahoo.com maybe after teaching you some manners i’ll let you off the leash because you are and sound like a four legged animal.
Work demands my time, so once again it’s time to dig deep into the archives and pull out something sweet. Here is a short list of helpful driving tips I originally put together in September 2000.
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Driving in the city teaches you a lot about human nature. Just a few hours on the road can turn an introverted, geeky little bookworm into a snarling, profanity spewing madman. To keep your calm on the big city streets, there are a few helpful hints to remember:
1. If you find yourself stuck in traffic, honk your horn repeatedly. This will encourage the gridlock to break up and traffic to begin flowing again.
2. If someone cuts you off, pull up next to them and flash a gun. This will make them think twice before cutting you off again. If you don’t have a gun, tousle your hair and gesture like you do have one, and mouth the word “pow” several times. This usually works just about as well.
3. If you’re caught in traffic on a large, multi lane road make use of the shoulder. No one ever uses the shoulder. Usually you can stream right by all those other saps at about 60 mph.
4. Similarly, if you miss a yellow light and are forced to drive through a red one, turn on your high beams and honk your horn to alert other drivers.
5. If you are pulled over, do not be polite to the officer. Police don’t like being sucked up to and would usually prefer a physical confrontation. Their jobs are mostly paperwork; every cop likes getting the blood going a little bit. If you are pulled over, leap from the car before it comes to a complete stop and start running for the cruiser screaming like lunatic. You’ll both appreciate the excitement.
6. If someone on the road really gets under your skin, put on a pair of sunglasses and follow them around for a while.
7. If you are male and you encounter someone you think is hot do all of the above, but exchange all violent and/or lude gestures with sexual innuendo. Romantic pursuits via car to car flirtation, are often successful. Using all of the listed techniques will prove to the female that you are a masculine creature capable of pleasing her in every way. Shout sweet nothings into her window at red lights to increase probability of copulation.
Well, you get the idea. These are just a few helpful hints that will aid you in your travels. I hope they work for you as they have worked for me.
Long ago, I conceived of dovate.com as a platform for my photography. As time went on I added writing. As the hard-coded site became more cumbersome and difficult to maintain, I begrudgingly installed “blog” software.
Complaining about the idea of blogs on your own blog is kind of like complaining about the brutality of hunting while eating a big mac… but still. It’s taken a long time for me to come to terms with the fact that yes, this is a blog.
Recently I had a conversation about this dilemma with Brad over at phillyskyline.com. Brad’s site is still in a hard-coded state, but will have to move to some MySQL based, RSS enabled, permalink having, comment-friendly format if it wants to survive under the weight of its own swelling archives.
But even if it makes sense, going blog is a hard move. First off, it’s a stupid word. Blog. Secondly, it’s conceited and self-important. Why would anyone want to read about me or you or anyone else? Why would I want to tell you? I mean seriously, who are you?
All in all, that’s why I write about things like octogenarians flashing their implants, crazy search hits or human neoteny: the theory that human evolution was driven in part by the retention – into adulthood – of juvenile traits in some early hominid species.
You see none of these things is about me personally. I have no emoticon mood indicators. I hardly mention politics. I rarely talk about music or movies or love or fear as they relate to my subjective experience. And I never post recipes.
I talked with Brad about the recipe thing. For him it’s not as big a deal, but for me it’s a bellwether. Recipe posting is one small step away from looking at myself in the mirror just to remind myself how beautiful I am. I love to cook, I love to share food. Sharing food here though? I’m just not comfortable with all that. It’s sort of weird and I don’t exactly know why.
But anyway, what was I talking about?
I was at a superbowl party the other night when conversation turned to the no-knead bread made so popular by a recent New York Times article. Although I didn’t bring it up, I had just days before made a variation of the bread from a recipe I saw in Cooks Illustrated. In the CI version, less water is added. To prevent the texture from deteriorating as a result, about a minutes worth of kneading is required. Why only a minute? Because between making the dough and kneading the dough 8-18 hours is required. Letting the dough sit this long allows autolysis to occur without kneading.
To add flavor a little lager and some white vinegar is used in place of a starter. (use only a lager, I of course used ‘lager’) The bread is then baked in a preheated dutch oven. I made my second loaf on Sunday/Monday and it tasted even better than it looked:
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…and for a special surprise, click on the first picture.
beh.
This post thanks to the good people at Awful Plastic Surgery dot com.
Joel Osteen preaches at the largest, fastest growing “church” in the United States. It’s in Texas and it holds more than 30,000 people. Here, look:
I put church in quotes because it’s one of those weird new churches that doesn’t get hung up on denomination or religious symbolism. From the outside it looks like a Target, or a suburban office park. Although Christian, they don’t prominently display the cross or Jesus or any of that mess.
All in all though, the most frightening thing about Osteen and his church is this:
