:: January 30, 2002
Today we announce another new Excitement Machine section. It is dedicated to the drawings of Bryan Kight, genius self taught outsider folk comic drawing artist. More to be thrown into the random mix as time progresses. ::
"I feel that I may be one of the many sons of Mr. Screamin because I enjoy climbing in and out of coffins as well as shaking around skulls on poles. Thank you."
"I think he's my poppa and that I was put up for adoption and given to the parents I have now. You see, I am very creative. I write, act, sing and produce and none of my parents do this. They work in industrial factories."
"I'm 73, white and of Swedish ancestry, but I feel I am one of Jay's kids! "
If I didn't know about this site till now, despite it having been written up in just about every major American media outlet (see especially the the New York Times Magazine piece), then maybe you didn't either. Jayskids.com, a gathering-spot for the scores of kids allegedly fathered by legendary blues/soul/voodoo maniac Screamin' Jay Hawkins. ::
:: January 29, 2002
Roger "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" Ebert is such a smartie! ::
SUPERPOWERS THAT REALLY AREN'T ALL THAT MUCH TO ASK FOR.
Conscientious Flosser
Lard Radar
The Cord/Tape Untangler
Perfect Message Leaver ::
100 Great Story Ideas brought to you by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in preparation for the Winter Olympics. They do all the work, so journalists don't have to! ::
:: January 28, 2002
A buncha nice links today.
People Cards: Trading cards of regular people. For real. In a store near you. Commie flavor.
Dream Chimney: A dream site to add to the list of nice dream sites. They make little animations of dreams people submit.
Jerry Hill Presents Names [via BoingBoing and Metafilter] Links to a billion sites about names, such as "Natural Phenomena Named After Frank Zappa," "Root Beer Brand Names," "Naming Patterns of the Ga People," "Names for Your Pet Frog," "Hmong Child Names," "Yo-Yo Stage Names."
Sim Sandwich: Build and register a custom sandwich. I like that you can choose chips as one of the ingredients. They also review carrot cake around Austin and pay some attention to Fanta beverage. ::
:: January 25, 2002
Journey Arcade Game, 1983 (Yesterdayland link)
"The instruments of each Journey member have been stolen. You must locate each band members equipment, once you have obtained the instrument you must return to space ship while avoiding alien obstacles. Once all instruments and band members have returned to the ship, the band blasts off and plays a concert at the galactic stadium. At this time the internal tape deck kicks off and play the Journey Song "Separate Ways" the band members are up on stage jamming, and you assume the role of the body guard. You must hold back the fans as long as possible. Once the fans rush the stage, the instruments are confiscated, and the game plays restarts at a harder level." ::
:: January 24, 2002
My new desktop picture. Mister Pants is your friend. ::
Everyone's chattering about the recently announced SXSW Interactive Award Finalists. They always introduce me to some mighty fine sites: dizzzamn, look at Thinkcollective, Bambino's Curse, All My Life for Sale (and its new incarnation, Temporama), Bubblesoap, and Teddy. It's sad that SXSW killed this year's interactive art exhibition -- the sites they choose for that tend to make even the award-takers look like little bitches in comparison. You can still see last year's show, fortunately. ::
:: January 23, 2002
Oh cool! Snopes.com has filmed a pilot for a possible series covering (re-enacting?) urban legends. (via Travelers Diagram.) ::
Nothing more boring than dream stories and drug stories. Don't know about the drug stories, but dream stories can be astounding ...
with a specific focus: witness Hungry Ghost's Sept. 11 Dream Project.
in comic form: Jesse Reklaw's Slow Wave.
in comic form with a specific focus: The Stranger's post 9-11 experiment called "And Then I Woke Up."
with the magic of Flash: TCUP: The Collective Unconsciousness Project lets you "travel through [a] dream database in a fluid and exploratory manner."
If anyone knows of anything similar, please alert me. ::
:: January 22, 2002
Reader Mail.
Hi!
I came across your journal, very interesting reading. I am writing to ask if you will put a link to OprahCallDave.net in there too!?
I'm new, just put my site up this week, but the petition is doing really well, over 150 signatures in the first few days, and all the links out there help a lot. Anyhow, just thought I'd ask, hope you have a nice day and thanks for your consideration!
Stacie
. . . . . . . .
Dear Stacie,
Yes I shall link to your site. Together, we can WILL make a difference.
Love,
the Excitement Machine
. . . . . . . .
There's a .com version too, of course. ::
:: January 21, 2002
The Slate Diary this week is by Matt Gaffney, a fellow who writes crossword puzzles for a living, and fanices himself part of a new breed of iconoclastic constructors:
... for entire generations, American crossword puzzles were pretty much a bowdlerized art form. BREAST was frowned upon, even when harmlessly referenced as a piece of chicken. Diseases were definitely taboo. CANCER, for example, was a no-no, even if clued as "Sign after Gemini" -- and in many papers, the horoscope appeared right next to the crossword. AIDS became similarly verboten in the '80s, even if clued as "Lends assistance." ::
:: January 20, 2002
When you're as down as we are, send in the dumb funny shit. ::
:: January 16, 2002
Houston's Art Car Museum (and other gentle hippies) investigated for anti-American activities. Chilling! (Thanks, JR!) ::
For all you Austinites and other IH-35 hayterz out there: Texasfreeway.com has lots of historical photos of our town before that roaring, gaping hellmouth was installed and during the roaring, gaping hellmouth's construction and expansion. It's fun to play "Identify the Buildings That Still Remain":
Southward along East Ave. around downtown, December 1959: IH-35 replaced East Ave.
Southward along East Ave. in the vicinity of MLK Blvd. (formerly 19th Street), date unknown
Southward from just north of First Street: During construction.
38th Street looking north, 1971: The building on the left with the tree sticking out the top is the present day offices of the Austin Chronicle, where I am right this very moment! Note the pre-Hancock Center Sears. This is during construction of the upper deck.
::
:: January 15, 2002
A cookbook dedicated to macaroni & cheese ... enough recipes for one variant a week for an entire year. Oh mommy. ::
If it isn't turning out to be an obscure wacky music sort of day. You can download whole entire albums of said genre at the The Interstellar Cafe (this week it's something called Product Music, with songs such as Exxon's "Up Came Oil" and Clark Equipment's "Hooray for Human Engineering"), read the proprietor's weblog called Otis Fodder's Funderland, and listen to streamy web radio show Friendly Persuasion. (Gracias, se–or Scrubbles!) ::
Driving back from San Antonio a couple weeks ago I heard a year-in-review edition of a radio show called The Lost Tapes, on which the host, George Gimarc, paid loving tribute to many obscure musicians who died in 2001. Well howdy, turns out Gimarc is the co-author of a book that I happen to own, Hollywood Hi-Fi, about celebrities who made records. Some sample chapters on Gimarc's website include Robert Michum, Herve Villechaize, and Hugh Downs. Comedy gold! ::
:: January 14, 2002
I looked for a website dedicated to paintings on the sides of vans. You'd think there'd be something out there, but if it indeed exists, I failed to locate it. And yet it seems that there are billions of pages dedicated to Dr Pepper knockoff brands, which I get behind fully, but. Where are the van paintings? ::
:: January 13, 2002
Space Ghost participates in a celebrity round table on the Survivor Africa finale. I'll just go ahead and quote his contribution here so you don't have to actually visit E! Online, but if you want to, knock yourself out.
"Well done, Ethan, well done. It appears you've won -- for now. Your aluminum teeth and your distinct lack of elbow and knee joints may have fooled the rest of America, but it did not escape me. I saw you hover. Did you really expect us to believe that the jet-wheels on the bottom of your feet and the base of your skull were simply decorative? I know how your kind craves the blood of the cow. It is a well-documented fact that robots use cow platelets in their bizarre mating ritual. Fortunately for CBS, television isn't documented. It's recorded live before a studio audience. What am I insinuating? I think you know. Don't make me spell it out." ::
:: January 12, 2002
THINGS TO BE AFRAID OF.
Bugs in walls
Bugs in shoes
Things flying off speeding trucks (esp. potatoes, mattresses)
Christmas lights
People who decide the only way they're ever going to have an impact on this world is to finally take action on those urges to turn their table over in a restaurant or ram everything in sight on the freeway
Doll attacks ::
:: January 10, 2002
If you've ever wanted to know what your name or your favorite passage of literature sounds like in Morse Code, well, be my guest. ::
:: January 9, 2002
Hoo boy, this one's a doozy. Suddenly my Baby Animals 2002 calendar seems so uninspired. Peace Dividend, I thank you. ::
:: January 8, 2002
The Mark Lewis documentary The Natural History of the Chicken airs on PBS tonight. The film features the story of Miracle Mike, the headless chicken, among stories of other headed chickens. Lewis is the man behind Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, the story of Australia's misguided attempt to introduce the giant amphibians as a pest-control measure. Which contains a very memorable scene of a guy driving down a lonely road that's rotten with hopping cane toads, and he's swerving all over the road trying to squash as many as he can. Anyway, back to chickens. Look at these sites!:
Random Chicken: Chicken jokes, recipes, and a random chicken picture server.
Backyard Chickens: All the information you need to raise, keep and appreciate chickens.
The American Egg Board: The Incredible Edible Egg people are also your source for School Foodservice Recipe Contest Winners. ::
:: January 7, 2002
Keeping good on my promises. The lists section is now up, with some stuff from the old Excitement Machine, the list-poetry of Chris Weige, and a little something new. ::
:: January 6, 2002
THINGS THAT ALMOST RHYME WITH MACARONI.
Zamboni
Bologna
Tripoli
Mustafa
Marcone
Manischewitz
Car
Da Mack
Rice a Roni
Calzone
Mark & Al Capone
Gotta Score Some Smack ::
:: January 4, 2002
Today, let's talk about pneumatic tubes. Is there anything more terrific than pneumatic tubes? Hardly. My only first-hand experience with pneumatic tubes (beside bank drive-thrus) was at the University of Washington hospital, where I temped for a while back in '95. Their system was used to transport documents around the gargantuan, sprawling building. They aren't just vestiges of the pre-computer age, though. The newly built Austin Costco has a pneumatic tube system, which I'm pretty sure is used to whisk away large bills from the point of sale to a secret central location. Yes, that is kind of Orwellian, but don't blame the tubes, dude! Isn't Costco Orwellian enough without them?
A hundred years ago, visionaries like Postmaster General Charles Emory Smith envisioned tubes leading to every residence in the U.S. for the purpose of mail delivery. It never got that far, but smaller systems were in place in Manhattan, Paris, and other large cities.
Others dreamed on a larger scale: Scientific American editor Alfred Ely Beach proposed a pneumatic mass-transit system for New York City in the late 1800s. After being denied a permit to start building, he did it anyway -- the New York City Subway FAQ has that wacky story. Beach's vision lives on in Zapatopi.net's modern paranoid-utopian blueprint for a pneumatic individual transport system which "operat[es] on Internet-based protocols." I would be happy with a pneumatic sandwich-delivery system.
And maybe that's a possibility -- according to this Wired article, "the very things that helped kill off demand for pneumatic tubes may be responsible for bringing them back." That is, if the various pneumatic tube companies can quit their infighting and unite in their common goal of re-tubing the world. ::
:: January 1, 2002
Here's what a bunch of British weirdos (like Clara Greed, Member of the steering group of the British Toilet Association; Anne Dray of the British Hamster Association; Bob Whalley, Co-ordinator of policy for the National Council for Metal Detecting) forecast for the ought two. Brought to you by the Guardian, brought to me by Metafilter. ::
There's a new section as of today: Click on "mp3 machine" to your left and for your troubles you'll get a nice mp3 from my vast pirate booty. The selection will be rotated frequently. This is so totally illegal, so don't tell anyone.
I also quietly added a picture log a while back -- it's where I'll be depositing finds in the clip arts, weird publicity art that finds its way to my desk, photographs of my doing, and so on.
In the near future, you might expect those non-working links to your left (features, lists, advice) to actually go somewhere. I've got the content, but not the code, know what I'm saying?
Just a little New Year's looking-ahead time from your Excitement Machine. ::
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