For your viewing pleasure, a random collection of photos that I took over the past month or so.
Here’s Wendy on the night we took her out on the town (Bosotn, that is) for her birthday. This was taken just after her transformation into Drunkie the Birthday Girl:
Here I am, apple picking with Wendy. I was feely particularly jovial as Wendy had said “yes” to my marriage proposal the night before:
And here’s Dave “Logan’s Dave” Ahrens, promoting his special cure:
(I wasn’t going to post until tonight, but Wendy told me that the story I’m about to tell appeared on Copyfight. I’m not going to get scooped by BoingBoing this time, especially since I’m much closer to the story than their resident copyright guru, Cory Doctorow, is.)
Chris “Turner” Turner is an old friend of mine from our DJing days at Crazy Go Nuts University’s engineering pub, Clark Hall Pub. He is also an award-winning magazine writer and recently release his first book, Planet Simpson, a 450-page thick book that takes both a scholarly and a personal look at The Simpsons as both the reflector and director of popular culture. On a blog bearing the same name as his book, he (or more often, his wife, Ashley Bristowe) chronicles his adventures in the wild world of book publishing and promoting.
Turner has one entry that’s caught the interest of Copyfight. In the
entry, he talks about how he had to pay US$350 to Warner Brothers in order to quote a couple of
lines from a handful of Radiohead songs in Planet Simpson, while not
having to pay a single dime to Fox for the zillions of quotes from
Simpsons characters. He also notes:
“…of all the TV shows and movies and books and rock & roll songs I discuss in Planet Simpson (a vast, vast, vast
number), the only artists I’ve met personally are Radiohead. In other
words, I’ve had to pay to discuss the work of the only people cited in
the book who, in theory, I actually could’ve asked in person for
permission to use their work.”
To
my mind, quoting portions of lyrics and attributing them to the artist
should be considered fair use. However, the record companies don’t
think so, and this isn’t the first time this sort of thing has
happened. Pete Abrams had to change some strips of his webcomic, Sluggy Freelance, after being spanked for usiing — and attributing — the lyrics for James Taylor’s Fire and Rain.
We really need to spank the record companies.
As you can see, I’m in the middle of renovating The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
The ol’ blog badly needed a little sprucing up, and I thought that this
weekend would be the perfect time. There’s still some work to be done
over the next couple of weeks, and I hope the end result will be both
usable and pleasing to the eye.
The renovations have given me a chance to trying out some ideas that
have been percolating around my head for a little while. Many of these
are Blogware-centric, so if you have a Blogware blog, resell them or both, I’ll have some goodies for you over the next couple of weeks.
Guile just told me that Accordion City has been designated to get its
very own Apple Store. I don’t know how local Apple retailers —
especially long-time non-chain Apple dealers like CPUsed and Carbon Computing — feel about this.
Apple Stores tend to be way funkier than your typical computer retailer. Pictured above is the Ginza (Tokyo) store.
(By the way, single geek guys: unlike most computer stores, Apple Stores are frequented by women, and often cute artsy ones.)
Urban Medium’s T-shirt design, DJ-D2 is pretty sweet…
…but in my opinion, the AG-D2 version is superior and even more ready to get the par-tay started:
I found a full copy of the Lois Lane comic I Am Curious (Black), which was recently referred to on BoingBoing and am sharing it with you, since:
a) I love cheese
b) I’ve recently rediscovered my old love for comic books
Here’s the whole comic, stored as a set of JPEGs in a zip file [5.1MB zip file]. If you
have one of those programs that can read .cbz files (like CDisplay for Windows or FFView for Mac OS X), change the filename extension of the file to .cbz.
Why can’t we all just get along? Lois Lane decided to do a story on
what it’s like to be black in Metropolis in 1970 (that’s when the comic
was published). She goes to Metropolis’ black neighbourhood, “Little
Africa”, where she finds that everybody steers clear of honky.
Oh, that whitey!
Back in the seventies, before we had blogs, you had to find a nice
concrete block, stand on it and start ranting. “Look at her, brothers
and sisters! She’s young and sweet and pretty!” This guy says the exact
same thing Tony Pierce says in his blog!
(Of course, like me and unlike the dude above, Tony doesn’t mind the miscegenation thing.)
Because we aren’t the woman for whom Superman has the super-hots, we
would probably have to take the boring tack by say, phoning up a
community leader or civil rights activist and schedule a phone
interview or invite them down to the Daily Planet and ask them about
the black experience. Or perhaps ask a black reporter to go cover the
story (assuming the Daily Planet had black reporters in 1970).
However, Lois Lane is that woman, so she has Supes take time out of his
busy schedule to fly her to the Fortress of Solitude (his base in
Antarctica) and put her in the race-changing machine that he oh-so-conveniently happens
to have.
You must remember that this was 1970, and we didn’t have the skill for
technobabble that we do now, several Star Trek televsion series later.
“Plastimold” and “Transformoflux Pack” just don’t have the same ring as
“Warp Core” or “Structural Integrity Field”.
Wait a minute…a machine that turns you black, invented by a scientist
named “Dahr-nel”? Did he have an assistant named “Mont-el” too?
This is just too painful. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say the Wayans Brothers scripted this comic.
(The “El” surname is popular on Superman’s homeworld, Krypton. His birthname is “Kal-El” and his father’s name is “Jor-El”.)
Supes takes black Lois back to Metropolis. She tries to hail a cab
driven by her friend Benny, but he passes her by, preferring to pick up
a white fare. One can imagine a young Lenny Kravitz reading this comic
and getting inspired.
(I think Lois looks much prettier as a black woman.)