chaircrusher

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• Commented on Paul Revere & the Raiders - "Him or Me"
  As someone who was born in 1957, I remember Paul Revere and the Raiders as being a pretty big deal about the same time as the Monkees in the 67-69, and being very popular with kids my age. It may...
• Commented on Cab Calloway, Betty Boop and Max Fleischer: "The Old Man of the Mountain"
  There's a delicous subtle weed-related subtext to this all 'the old man of the mountain' was Rashid ad-Din Sinan, one of the Hashshashin, from whom the name "Hashish" came from. You can look it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashid_ad-Din_Sinan...
• Commented on BB Video: "Ssshhh," by Hess is More, dir: m ss ng p eces (music video)
  As a fan of techno, I am vexed by people who use 'techno' to describe any up-tempo beat-driven music. Read the Wikipedia article on Techno, please, and call Hess 'Danish Dance Pop.' Actually if you like Hess, you might not...
• Commented on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: adding much-needed zombies to the Austen classic
  Cory, reading Austen asks a lot of a modern reader. Her books, like Woody Allen movies, are only incidentally about human characters, and are more illustrations of complicated moral situations. That's probably to most people a failing of both Woody...
• Commented on Perfectly Good Names The SciFi Channel Could Have Chosen Instead of The Utterly Stupid "SyFy"
  In a comment on Liz Hand's Live Journal I came up with this new name: "Dumping Ground For Direct-To-Video Shitballs With A Fantastic Plot Point Network." Which is at least accurate, modulo an occasional decent original series, and of course...
• Commented on TNH FTW! A final post and a question for you.
  Three trends will converge -- absurdly increasing digital storage capacity, a realization of the true cost of building and shipping heavy things like books and CDs (and any other number of commodities), and ubiquitous wireless network access. The result? People...
• Commented on Obama and McCain systems were hacked during election run-up
  The Houdini Project (the nationwide voter identification system) was supposed to track which supporters had voted so they could disappear from the databases that fed the 'turf lists': the list of identified supports in a particular neightborhood. Unfortunately the Houdini...
• Commented on 1958 TV show on Global Warming
  Heck they used to have all-school assemblies to show the Bell Labs shows when I was in Junior High in the early 70s. I guess some days the faculty just needed an hour to themselves. There is no underestimating how...
• Commented on Poe's "The Raven," translated into 50s hipster argot
  "A Most Immaculately Hip Aristocrat" was one of my most treasured possessions in high school. When people got tired of Firesign Theater at parties, Lord Buckley could wow them like no other. And while Lord Buckley is funny, he's not...
• Commented on Jack Womack's underappreciated masterpiece, "Random Acts of Senseless Violence"
  Jack Womack is near the top of my 'buy/check out on sight' list. He supposedly has a novel in the works, but the last of his series that started with 'Ambient' was published 8 years ago. I'm in the position...
• Commented on Steampunk city in Second Life: New Babbage
  'm sr th Bngrs mst knw -- thr s stmpnk bcklsh. lv y gys, rlly, bt t's strtng rk m tht ny rndm wnkr cn slp sm brss fttngs nt prtty mch nythng nd rt pst n Bng Bng....
• Commented on Orwell's 1984 as a pulp novel
  This is the edition of the book I first read. It was in my mom's old books that I started plundering when I was 11 or 12, and it might have been my dad's -- I was born in 1957...
• Commented on Little Brother tour-schedule: Chicago, Milwaukee, Seattle, San Francisco, NYC
  Dude no Iowa City, no 'Live at Prairie Lights?' I thought we were on all the cool writer itineraries....
• Commented on "Satan's Ice Cream Truck" prowls Los Angeles
  That's the KLF's Ice Cream Track. All bound for Mu Mu Land! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6YlBAs0Lfo...
• Commented on What Should I Do In Berlin?
  I was just there in November. My favorite things. 1. Flea Market Sundays at the Mauern Parkt (Wall park). I went to all the flea markets on the weekend, and that one is the largest, craziest, and most likely to...
• Commented on Nail assist: concept gadget to keep you from hammering your fingers
  For a Young Inventors contest several years ago, my son and his friend made a gizmo out of a round magnet with a groove in it's face, glued into a short length of pvc pipe. You put the nail in...
• Commented on Cory's Guardian column explaining DRM's impossibility to non-geeks
  Another garbled sentence -- "the only ones who know have the key" "You know that messages can only be read by the authorised sender and the authorised receiver because you are the only ones who know have the key."...