The Lightsaber Spoon you get in a box of Honey Smacks with Samuel L. Jackson on it. Highly recommended. Props to rpkrajewski for the tip.

Mac OS X does have Java 5, they just don’t have it on the Tiger disk.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301073

Maybe they should have used the “Communicating Bad News” template

http://www.defensetech.org/archives/001559.html

http://www.military.com/ppt/iraqi_insurgent_sniper_training.htm

The actual PowerPoint is here: http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/ppt/iraqi_insurgent_sniper_training.ppt

via Defense and the National Interest.

Sandra Bridewell, the world’s most successful sociopath.

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/features/artistlists/c/cross_david-05/

Ostensibly about a young girl who loses her shoes in a cockfight she mistakenly attends during Thanksgiving 1959, it’s really about the universal themes of loss, angst, candy and damp clothing. Taking its cue from the early commercial work of Deloite and Hughey and filtering it through the “I cut myself shaving” piousness of Throm Tillson, Pillow Logic re-works early sock hop chop flop and allows people like me to enjoy enjoying it.

Russian lake disappears, baffling villagers
19 May 2005 16:56:21 GMT
Source: Reuters
MOSCOW, May 19 (Reuters) – A Russian village was left baffled on Thursday after its lake disappeared overnight.

NTV television showed pictures of a giant muddy hole bathed in summer sun, while fishermen from the village of Bolotnikovo looked on disconsolately.

“It is very dangerous. If a person had been in this disaster, he would have had almost no chance of survival. The trees flew downwards, under the ground,” said Dmitry Zaitsev, a local Emergencies Ministry official interviewed by the channel.

Officials in Nizhegorodskaya region, on the Volga river east of Moscow, said water in the lake might have been sucked down into an underground water-course or cave system, but some villagers had more sinister explanations.

“I am thinking, well, America has finally got to us,” said one old woman, as she sat on the ground outside her house.

Scholar, translator, critic, friend. She’ll be sorely missed. How many experts in French surrealism and artists’ books did we even have? We couldn’t afford to lose one. Not going to dine with her and Judd at Pescadou now.

http://www.hnet.uci.edu/frenchanditalian/faculty/rhubert/index.html

There’s a prize in her name for best Women’s Studies graduate paper of the year at UCI.

This Star Wars season, make your pet your slave girl.

“courtesy” do_not_lick

Don’t drive your race car on a race track, even though we use the word “track” a lot in the ads.

I’m almost glad I don’t have the sixty grand to buy one. Almost!

Boredoms tonight at the Knitting Factory Hollywood, courtesy genericus who had the foresight to get tickets.
IT WAS AWESOME.

Three drummers in perfect discipline who never stopped. Crazy guy yammering and making synths go woop. Loud as hell. The drumming was precise and powerful and it hit me in my face, pushing said face backwards. Insane dreadlocked Japanese guy capered about like a demon from a Lafcadio Hearn story, making shrieks and feedbacky noises and hurting the synthesizers. Occasionally he duetted with the woman drummer. He also played an instrument that appeared to be a set of lighted balls connected to a thing and another thing, that he juggled around, also dancing on some kind of DDR platform, making sounds and lights consistent with fatal electrocution, fire, and amplifier destruction.

The audience was about 20% Comic Book Guy, 20% Music Freak, and 60% hipster. There were a lot of guys there that I collectively call The Boyfriends, because every time I’ve met one of them it’s because it someone’s boyfriend. Tall skinny clean-cut white guys with glasses, collared shirts, shortish hair. I hate them all because they are boyfriends and I’m not. You could totally tell who was there for the music because they were funny looking and way too focused, and who was there because they felt they had to be there.

I only had to shove a couple of them to keep them from rolling over and crushing the_silent_one. By the way, it was she that pointed out that the Knitting Factory made the mistake of Having Nice Things in a rock ‘n’ roll bar, and then fixed this mistake by taking out the Nice Things. All of the very sophisticated lounge atmosphere of the place is scraped and gone, and it’s all caution tape and security guys and concrete and fuck you and a vague smell of urine. Still sounded pretty good and there was sufficient oxygen.

We had to go by the Star Wars Wrong Line morons on Hollywood Blvd. both ways. The second time there was some Dorkus McGorkus in a Darth Suit waving a lightsaber around on top of some structure, causing traffic confusion and also causing the locals to point and laugh.

DID I MENTION THAT THE SHOW WAS AWESOME? It was almost as loud as Glenn Branca at Schoenberg Hall in 1983. I really wish I had remembered my earplugs.

I didn’t understand the opening act very well, but I liked him. He was doing something between Moroccan trance music and Eno’s ambient, with lots of drumming. He shouldn’t use the guitar, because it just sounded like he was trying one at the shop, but I liked his drumming and ululation.

This is the second show in a row that the floor has been flexing for most of the time.