JesusH

Some guy who changed his name to Jack Ass in 1997 is suing the makers of the show Jackass for defaming his character, according to this CNN article. Mr. Ass is asking for 10 million.

Regrettably, Mr. Ass loses some style points because he’s bringing the case for some convoluted reason involving drunk driving prevention, and not merely to be hilarious. Thus, his lawsuit is denegrated from witty satire to just being frivolous.

If I was him, I would change my name to Charles Incharge and bring suit against Scott Baio. That would be at least moderately redemptive.

There were a couple of fun Slashdot posts that I didn’t comment on during the hiatus. Actually there isn’t a whole lot to say, aside from that these posts struck me as rad. Hopefully, they strike you as rad, too. Because otherwise, you’re a dummy.

Personal Jet-Pack For Xmas!
Disney to Create Animatronic Walking Dinosaur

I got a 3.0 GPA this semester (A in International Health, B+ in Latin American Culture, B- in my asinine Finance class, and C in Human Heredity). That’s my best semester in a while, but I see Jeff pulled it out at the end and bested me. Ah, well, he still owes me for the destruction of Mister Peanut, I suppose.
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Uncle Jack and Aunt Penny got me a book called Digital Electronics Guidebook for Christmas (thanks, guys!). I’ve put a longer review on my other website at www.peasej.com (due to its technorifficness), but the short answer is that the book was really, really good.

If anyone is interested in getting into hobbyist electronics (even with no previous electronics experience), this book is the best I’ve seen.

Jack and Penny are rad!

I got a 3.33 last quarter (A in my computer class, B in electronics, B in alien movie class). It’s kind of funny how that works: I wasn’t feeling particularly good about most of my final projects, but I guess they were good enough.

Considering the fact that I’m in my umpteenth year of college, I’ve certainly had it go the other way plenty of times, so I feel pretty lucky. I guess the prudent message to take from all this for next quarter to not rely on karma where my projects are concerned, since all my goodwill with the Gods may be used up. Looks like I may have to deliver some projects that actually work…

I got Mark Knopfler’s new album The Ragpicker’s Dream for Christmas, although I haven’t got a chance to hear it enough to really comment. Anyway, I was just reading an interview with Knopfler (it contains lot of guitar gibberish that I don’t really understand, and is posted on the at the Gibson guitars website) that had an interesting tidbit:

TB: You used a Les Paul Standard for some of the tracks on the 1985 Dire Straits LP Brothers In Arms. Were you after a new sound?

MK: [...] I was trying to recreate the sound of ‘Money For Nothing’ for [king of parody] Weird Al Yankowic when he did his version of it. I had to do the music for him, to recreate the whole thing somehow. We got so far, and I knew there was something missing. I had the Marshall all cranked up, I had the Les Paul, but I thought to myself: there’s something not quite right. Then Guy Fletcher said didn’t you have a wah-wah pedal? And I said that’s it! It was a wah just set in a particular position, and it added that certain thing to it. Maybe it was also going through a little box of something or other too, but that was it. Soon as the wah was plugged in it was right there.

So, wait: when Weird Al is doing a parody of a song, he actually goes and gets the original guys to waste an afternoon trying to recreate the original sound for him? I always thought he just redubbed the original track or something. That’s kind of impressive in a weird way. That guy has some serious pull I guess.

It’s amazing how quickly “real-live” nudists can take all the fun out of people being naked. It’s kind of like “real-live” lesbians, who generally dress like normal women, drive mini-vans, don’t engage in pillow fights, and are generally unspectacular people. I mean really: how dare they?

Anyway, just to demonstrate my point, here are some fun nudist sites I’ve come across on the internet (with pictures! ooh la la!). Check ‘em out — they’re kind of like free porn, only very, very different…

David and Jo’s Nudist Nomads
Jim and Stephanie’s Nudism Pages
Kevin Christopher’s Naturist Pages

Umm, I could have probably found more, but I stopped looking for what should be fairly obviously reasons. Namely, *yeccch* and *rooolf*.

Hola amigos. I know its been a long time since I rapped to you, but between decking the halls and fixing shit on my car, this Christmas has been a serious yuletide ball-cracker, if you catch my drift.
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BBC Article

First cars, now big dogs (although they wussed out by using slipcovers instead of giant stickers, IMO). Really, can toddlers be far behind?

This is me before taking Accounting 321 at San Diego State:

This is me after taking Accounting 321 at San Diego State:

I hope I passed this class.

Now keep in mind I am not a doctor, but I think I’m onto something here. So people often talk about how caffeine is bad for you. It gives you the shakes, it keeps you up nights, it screws with your blood pressure or something. Countless times, I’ve seen people opt for the caramel-colored water known as “Caffeine Free Diet Coke,” only to utter the sad admonition “The doctor’s got me off caffeine.”

Well, boys and girls, I think that may be bunk.
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I just saw this factoid while randomly scooting around the internet. This is something I’d never heard of. It’s kind of one of those things that forces you to question everything you believe.

“Before he launched a solo career with 1971′s Cold Spring Harbor, Billy Joel was part of Atilla, the only heavy metal organ-and-drum duo in rock history. The cover of the group’s lone album pictured Joel and drummer Jon Small, dressed as Huns, standing in a meat locker.”

…stupid final projects…

Arg Arg Arg.

Greetings from Peanut Heaven Jeff.
I sure do miss you.
Tell Dave he is a dick!

Take Care,
Mr. Peanut

Deb and I are taking Fundamentals of Finance on Thursday evenings, and last Thursday’s class was something truly out of the ordinary. I’ve been in classrooms for thousands of hours over the last 20 years, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it.
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Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but Jesse Jackson is being retarded again. Now he’s calling for Trent Lott to step down as Senate majority leader, after Lott spoke in glowing terms of Senator/corpse Strom Thurmond’s 1948 segregationist presidential campaign.
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My friend Chris got this in the mail recently and was kind enough to think of me. He brought it into electronics class today and we all had a good guffaw.

In a completely unrelated note, here’s the unedited picture Dave posted of me when he was trying get me all embarrassed for my birthday.

Ha ha ha… bunch of jerks…

Isn’t it weird how William Shatner and Adam West are essentially the same person (monotonous has-been stars of campy 60s TV shows), only William Shatner is cool and Adam West is just a wierdo?

That’s so weird…

These guys make Beck seem coherent, and their lead singer is awful, too.

A shame, because some of the music is pretty interesting, and at least they have the excuse of being Eurotrash.

Since we brought this up in a previous post, there’s this series of jokes that I enjoy about The Man (categorized here as straight white males). I think these are a much better litmus test of sense of humor than the garbage the Brits are coming up with in their research.
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I have an exciting development for those who enjoy not listening to me live over their computers. We’re streaming the UCSD Basketball game tonight starting at 7:00 PM. That’s all well and good if you like basketball, but if you’re like me, you might want to tune in RIGHT THIS SECOND, since we’re playing a Greatest Hits of 1985 compilation cd in lieu of having an actual pregame show, which is terribly exciting, too.

Huzzah!

I awoke the day after Thanksgiving with high expectations. I had recently learnt (through this awesome website that I am always on) that this was known as Black Friday, and it was by far the largest shopping day of the year. As I’ve been known to enjoy getting a good deal–even on something I don’t really need, because it probably satisfies some sort of subliminal primal urge to put something over on The Man–and since Christmas was approaching, I was all over that action.
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Fox just recently unveiled the details on their latest reality series, Joe Millionaire. Basically, the show crosses ABC’s The Bachelor with Fox’s Who Wants to Marry A Multi-Millionaire in that a bunch of women go on a bunch of dates with a guy worth $50 million. Women face elimination each week (receiving gifts of increasingly expensive jewelry instead of roses as their consolation prize), with the last woman standing hoping for a marriage proposal. If it plays out like other reality shows, these women will profess their love for the bachelor as a beautiful person with a beautiful soul whose financial assets are irrelevant, yada yada yada.

The catch is that just before the proposal at the end, the bachelor will reveal that he is really a broke construction worker earning $19,000 per year. Truly inspired, though the potential for an Al Capone’s Vault style television moment is fairly high.

Oh, I just wanted to mention that Jimmy had dinner with us last night, so I can cancel that “Jimmy is a dick” APB that I put out earlier. Heck, I’m even willing to concede that he has been legitimately busy, given the fact that he has been involved with freakin’ rewrites of his freakin’ screenplay with freakin’ production companies.

Incidentally, here are some fun Jimmy links that I haven’t put up yet:
Fun Jimmy Link 1
Fun Jimmy Link 2
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A while back, Phet was doing some random searching on Laos on eBay (trying to better connect with her roots and such), when she stumbled across an issue of Time magazine from the sixties with a cover article on the country and its relationship with the US. She bid on the thing, won the auction, and a week later, she got her crisp, well-preserved magazine in the mail. She and I read the article with interest.

Now, when I saw this issue of Time (March 17, 1961) with its giant portrait of the King of Laos on the cover, I suppose I expected something of a puff piece about a proud country with a somewhat strained relationship with the US (at the time, US and Russia were both jockeying for dominance in the region, and exerting a push-pull sort of influence on Laos and an insignificant country called Vietnam). What we found instead was a spectacularly vicious, unimaginably racist diatribe about the general worthlessness of the Laotian people and their culture. Frankly, I had never seen anything like it.
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Slashdot is reporting that an alpha for the free, open source rewrite of Star Control 2 (previously reported on JesusH here) is now available. The alpha allegedly will successfully run the entire original game (with no added frills) on any of several operating systems (including MacOS and native Windows — no more DOS bootdisks…)

The installer download is a whopper at 144 Mb. I am presently downloading it, and will post more when I’ve had a chance to mess with it. In the meantime, check out the development site for more info (and gawk at a screenshot of the cool unix text terminal port of the game here).
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