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Your friends will like you better

Intrigued by the vibrant packaging and promise of FIVE different kinds of seafood, we cooked up a batch of Tiger Bay Seafood Mix.


Here's from the copy on the back of the packaging:
The top 10 reasons to eat Tiger Bay Seafood Mix:


1. It tastes good.


2. It is good food.


3. Your friends will like it.


4. Your friends will like you better


5. People are better looking when they eat Seafood Mix


6. Seafood Mix makes an average party that much better.


7. You will never have leftovers after a party. (But you might run out)


8. You can impress people with your sense of style.


9. Most famous people have eaten Seafood Mix at least once.


10. You can take credit for catching them yourself.

We didn't know a secret item, a surprise ingredient if you will, was added to the mix: a long, black human hair. I'll bet most famous people have eaten Seafood Mix no more than once. It hurt throwing away two pounds of seafood, but not as much as eating hair.

Negatives from the sixties

I turned my flatbed scanner into a juryrigged negative scanner (by leaving the lid open) and scanned a bunch of negatives I found in an abandoned house in Kansas. Once I get them all separated and processed I'll post a Flickr stream but in the meantime I can't resist sharing other people's photographs.



Also, I'm itching to play with the recolored beta. Come on, OS X version!

Edit: Broke down and did a quick-and-dirty hand-tint in Photoshop. I think computers are amazing insomuch as a person can turn a black and white negative from 40 years ago into a color picture then put it somewhere that people around the world can see it and that basically the process to do so is not much more than "screwing around on a winter's afternoon".



Another Edit: If you haven't seen the Library of Congress exhibition of color photography from the 1940's... it is spellbinding.

I want to hum that rock and roll.

Here's the plan: get one of these electric kazoos and hook it up to my Cigarette Pack Amp. Then I'm sure I'd be the king of rock and/or roll.

Also via Music Thing: the latest incarnation of silophone: a large concrete tank that you can upload sound files into. Then you can download the echos of whatever you uploaded. Tank-fx. Try a duck's quack!

Don't Mess With Pokemon

Cleaning out the garage and stumbled across my copy of The Denver Post from August 14, 1999 (linked here). A snippet:

Pastor calls Pokemon 'poison'

By Erin Emery

Denver Post Southern Colorado Bureau

Aug. 14 - COLORADO SPRINGS - A minister used a blowtorch and a sword during a church service this week to drive home his belief that Pokemon games and toys are only sugar-coated instruments of the occult and evil.

At a church service Wednesday at Grace Fellowship Church, children's pastor Mark Juvera told 85 children ages 6 through 12 that Pokemon is evil.

To make his point, Juvera burned Pokemon trading cards with a blowtorch and struck a plastic Pokemon action figure with a 30-inch sword. Juvera's 9-year-old son then tore the limbs and head off a Pokemon doll.

During the demonstration, the children chanted: "Burn it. Burn it," and "Chop it up. Chop it up."

Also of note are the National Weather Service Casualty Statistics (here)

1999 August 19th, 1700 mst, El Paso county, 8 injured, 0 fatal:
8 football players from the Grace Fellowship church were affected by a nearby lightning flash. One recieved a concussion.


Anti-knitted robots

Here's the opposite of the knitted robots I linked to before: what not to crochet. Some of the items are obviously such a labor of love, but otherwise really awful.

I have to move to Seattle, it turns out.

A 80's style arcade that serves beer, has free WiFi and turns to a dance club late at night? That's worth changing time zones for.

Ground Kontrol

USB Turntable... Another afternoon wasted?

I've been scanning all my boxes of random newspaper clipping, comics and such so I won't have to tote them around. While I donated the vast, vast majority of my vinyl records to a DJ friend, I've got a handful of unique records I want to archive for future generations. These include a couple of hours of the Dr. Demento radio program (as it was distributed to radio stations), New England Traditions in Folk Music, Jackalope (This one's on CD, but I'm very fond of the album cover), my arch-enemy Tom Paxton on The World of Folk Music... that sort of thing. So I've been on the lookout for a used record player with a decent needle and then I'll have to hook the record player up to the computer and on and on. It seems like more trouble than is really worthwhile. On the other hand, I'll be really pissed at myself if these irreplaceable records accidently get left out in the sun.

Enter the iTTUSB, the USB Turntable.

Not only does it hook directly up to your Windows or Macintosh computer via a USB port but it can stream your records to the included software at HIGH SPEEDS. I thought that was a pretty neat idea until I realized, first off: the included software is freely available. Secondly, any record player can stream the record at a faster speed. It's called 78 rpm. Just rip it chipmunk-style and the run it through you standard slowanator software. Still... USB.

Silly Putty. I must have lots...

Everyone knows you can order Silly Putty (or Dow Corning Dilatant Compound 3179 if you wish to use the generic term... dilatant refers to something that changes viscosity when stretched or put under pressure) directly from Dow Corning but the minimum order is a hundred pounds. And it costs around eight hundred bucks. But now crayola.com has just five pounds for about eighty bucks, as Binney & Smith hold the trademark. Available in colors too!

What would I do with that much Silly Pu... I mean Dilatant Compound? Probably shape it into a ball and throw it off a parking garage like these guys did.

Also, magnetic Thinking Putty. And clear putty.

Archives are fixed.

Eep... Sorry about that everybody. What good is having content if you can't get to it.

Anyway. More random links I've bookmarked!
The Grand Illusions Toy Shop for all sorts of scientifical wonders.
Vintage Mobile Sportsman Restoration blog.
Tellmi (the robotic cartoonish hedgehog)
Do-it-yourself 110,000 volt Taser Cannon
After a short wait I received Jess Hutch's illustrated guide to knitting robots. I hate to toss a term like "supercute" around loosely, but in this case I have no choice.

My Little Golden Book About ZOGG

This link's been around for awhile, but after scouring second-hand stores for Little Golden Books and making my own copy I forgot about the original Little Golden Book About Zogg.