Trumpeter Chet Baker, who had the angels scared from his face by heroin.
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Tags: Chet Baker
"She has a strong food drive."
Emmi the bed bug dog – $7000
Emmi the bed bug dog is certified and ready to go to work with you. She has a strong food drive and a high level of energy which makes her the ideal detection dog.
I am selling her because as it turns out, we just don’t have enough of a bed bug problem in my area (Arkansas) to support her as a business. I will ship her to you.
Please contact me with your phone number so we can visit about her and how much she can help you earn.
Thank you,
Tony
Tags: Emmi
Adorable, until someone gets eaten.
"Most of the time, the old electronics end up in the garbage, despite holding plenty of reusable material." (Image by AvWijk.)
As the production of gadgets grows, e-waste only increases. Some people see an opportunity to profit the world and themselves by mining the mess. An excerpt from Scientific American:
“Each year, new electronics hit the market and capture consumers’ attention, giving them reason to throw away the old VCR or standard television and engross themselves in state-of-the-art gadgetry.
Most of the time, the old electronics end up in the garbage, despite holding plenty of reusable material. But a push for recycling them has gained ground in recent years through both new state laws and a developing “e-recycling” industry.
Imagine a fleet of miners flocking to landfills and disassembling the dated electronics for their batteries and power supplies. John Shegerian uses the term ‘urban mining’ to describe this process. Shegerian is chairman and CEO of Electronic Recyclers International, one of the world’s largest electronic waste recyclers. To him, urban mining is a budding global industry that encompasses essentially anything that’s recyclable.
‘Urban mining goes way beyond electronics,’ he said. ‘It’s everything that goes into a landfill that can be taken out.'”
Tags: John Shegerian
"Avoid the 'cloud’ at all cost!" (Image by Saperaud.)
Professor Steffen Schmidt of Iowa State University provides an historical perspective on cloud computing, even though he fails to mention that the cloud has given us endless storage and much better stability than old mainframes ever did. His take:
“When computers started appearing at the university (Iowa State University in my case) they were large mainframes in a big building. We worked in a small ‘computer room’ down the hall. All there was in that room were a bunch of ‘dumb terminals,’ CRT screens and a keyboard that connected to the VAX mainframe computer (see picture). We used FORTRAN as I recall. Nothing was processed or stored in our ‘computer room’ it was just a connection. When the mainframe went “down” everyone at the university was down.
Also, everything was at turtle speed because someone in the mainframe center had to upload ‘your’ data tape (yup just like old school tape recording reel to reel only bigger) onto the computer which was a pain.
We were so glad when desktop computers appeared and later laptops (and now iPads and other devices). FREE from the tyranny of the mainframe!!! Self reliance and rugged individualism (albeit often crashing locally instead of at the center). Celebrate!
Now these fool idiots are selling us ‘back to the future’ mainframes again and calling them ‘The Cloud.’ Thank God for old timers like me who remember what a disaster that was! Avoid the ‘cloud’ at all cost! The end is near! Flee for the hills and take your laptops and iPads!”
Tags: Steffen Schmidt
"We had to stand there and watch it burn." (Image by Magnus Mertens.)
In a new article in Texas Monthly, Pamela Colloff tries to make sense of a recent rash of church burnings in the Lone Star state and the unlikely culprits behind the blazes. An excerpt:
“Two weeks passed uneventfully. Then, in the predawn hours of February 4, Russell Memorial United Methodist Church, in Wills Point, an hour’s drive west of Tyler, went up in flames. The church stood directly across the street from the local volunteer fire department. Four nights later, smoke was seen billowing from Dover Baptist Church, in a rural area northwest of Tyler. Not long after firefighters arrived, word came over the police scanner that another church, five miles down the road, Clear Spring Missionary Baptist, was ablaze. Texas Ranger Brent Davis and ATF special agent Larry Smith, the probe’s two lead investigators, raced from one fire to the next. Davis, a former trooper who had earned his Ranger badge two years earlier, and Smith, a veteran fire investigator who had worked the crash scene at the Pentagon after 9/11, looked on helplessly as Clear Spring’s roof buckled and fell, illuminating the night sky. Firefighters, who were still struggling to suppress the blaze at Dover, had not yet hauled their water and equipment to Clear Spring. ‘We had to stand there and watch it burn,’ Smith said.
The two lawmen finally caught a lucky break on Valentine’s Day, when a customer reported some unusual graffiti in the rest room of Atwoods Ranch and Home, a Tyler hardware and farm supply store. Etched into the metal partition of the handicapped stall was an inverted cross crowned with crudely drawn flames; above it, someone had scratched the words ‘Little Hope was arson.’ Davis and Smith were elated: Because the blaze had been thought to be accidental, Little Hope had never been mentioned in news reports of the church fires. Only someone intimately familiar with the crimes would make such a claim.
On the grainy footage recorded by Atwoods’ security cameras the previous day, one man seen entering the restroom was immediately recognizable to investigators: nineteen-year-old Jason Bourque. ATF agents had visited the chubby, curly-haired teenager just two days earlier, following up on a tip from a friend who believed he was involved in the fires. Bourque had been under surveillance ever since, though his graffiti had escaped the attention of the federal agents who were trailing him. A former honor student, Eagle Scout, and state debate champion, Bourque hardly fit the profile of a church burner—he had, in fact, been a devout Baptist for most of his life. But Davis and Smith were certain they had found who they were looking for.” (Thanks Longform.)
Tags: Brent Davis, Jason Borque, Larry Smith, Pamela Colloff
This week marks the 50th anniversary of Wide World of Sports, ABC’s great anthology program that introduced closed-in Cold War Americans to cities around the world, from Moscow to Monte Carlo, and made Muhammad Ali and Evel Knievel even bigger stars. And where else could you see frog jumping and drag racing and wrist wrestling in the same 90-minute span?
From ABC’s anniversary program in 1978:
“Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport… the thrill of victory… and the agony of defeat… the human drama of athletic competition… This is ABC’s Wide World of Sports!”
Tags: Evel Knievel, Muhammad Ali
From the color newsreel, “A Street of Memory.”
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Tags: Thom Anderson
My Life Story (Brooklyn)
The first 10 chapters of my life story.
A very unique tale about a depressed male obsessed with atheism and black women.
Send for more details.
Some search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:
Afflictor: Not mentioning that Willie Nelson looks like crap, since 2009. (Image by Joel Telling.)
- Classic Film: Being There (1979).
- Recent Film: Marwencol (2010).
- Old Print Articles: Stowaways are caught (1888-1902) + Window cleaners get hurt (1859-1902).
- Classic Photographs: Buying cakes and pies at the Automat (1936) + Italian woman carrying dry-goods box (1912).
- Featured Videos: California woman gets hand transplant + Klaus Kinski’s homage to Jesus Christ + Marshall McLuhan and Tom Wolfe talk literature (1971) + Phil Donahue squares off with Jerry Rubin (1970) + Millie Brown’s art makes her want to vomit + Autonomous DogBot climbs rocks + Timothy Leary and Art Linkletter speak by phone (1977) + Historic Haight-Ashbury home with hidden garage + Satirical commercial for human augmentations + Frank Serpico’s many faces + Short humanoid robot talks and listens + Rolling Stones Rice Krispies jingle (1965) + Sexploitation flick with Chuck Norris and an evil clown (1973) + Trying to make Domino’s Pizza look edible + Looking back at the world’s first computer + Autonomous automobiles explained + Robots dispensing medicine in California + Google Map Maker recruits crowdsourcers + First low-cost persoanl robot.
- Recently posted on NYC’s Craigslist: After a great career, I’m retiring from collecting celebrity hair + Buy a snow globe with my urine in it + I think someone will pay me five million dollars for a camel skeleton + Guy who believes his own bullshit thinks he can make you a billionaire + For some reason we want to put the name of your business on a missile + Looking to get back into the wig business.
- Barack Obama’s mother was many things, including a blacksmith.
- Robert Earl Hughes was the heaviest man in the world.
- Before ESPN and the Internet, there was Sports Phone.
- Philip K. Dick remembers the first story he ever wrote.
- Recalling the cult of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.
- David Owen points out the environmentally sound nature of NYC.
- British investor tries to revive the Cosmos soccer brand.
- David Grann goes on a great squid hunt.
- Dr. Franckinstein was a quack and bootlegger in 1880s Kansas.
- Figuring out how to get people to click Internet ads is a waste of genius.
- The Ethiopian newspaper-rental business.
- A brief history of communications hacking.
- Buckminster Fuller is reborn in Beijing.
- Hotels using new technology to prevent towel theft.
- Brazil’s national library has few book, many massage chairs.
- The Handsome Family explore childhood’s end.
- This week’s Afflictor keyphrase searches.
The opening of “The Squid Hunter,” David Grann’s exciting 2004 New Yorker account about the search for that inscrutable underwater creature, the giant squid:
“On a moonless January night in 2003, Olivier de Kersauson, the French yachtsman, was racing across the Atlantic Ocean, trying to break the record for the fastest sailing voyage around the world, when his boat mysteriously came to a halt. There was no land for hundreds of miles, yet the mast rattled and the hull shuddered, as if the vessel had run aground. Kersauson turned the wheel one way, then the other; still, the gunwales shook inexplicably in the darkness. Kersauson ordered his crew, all of whom were now running up and down the deck, to investigate. Some of the crew took out spotlights and shone them on the water, as the massive trimaran—a three-hulled, hundred-and-ten-foot boat that was the largest racing machine of its kind, and was named Geronimo, for the Apache warrior—pitched in the waves.
Meanwhile, the first mate, Didier Ragot, descended from the deck into the cabin, opened a trapdoor in the floor, and peered through a porthole into the ocean, using a flashlight. He glimpsed something by the rudder. ‘It was bigger than a human leg,’ Ragot recently told me. ‘It was a tentacle.’ He looked again. ‘It was starting to move,’ he recalled.
He beckoned Kersauson, who came down and crouched over the opening. ‘I think it’s some sort of animal,’ Ragot said.
Kersauson took the flashlight, and inspected for himself. ‘I had never seen anything like it,’ he told me. ‘There were two giant tentacles right beneath us, lashing at the rudder.’
The creature seemed to be wrapping itself around the boat, which rocked violently.” (Thanks to The Electric Typewriter.)
Tags: David Grann, Olivier de Kersauson
Robonova-1 at your service. (Thanks Singularity Hub.)
Not so long ago in America, when privacy was still an option and TV was the dominant medium, we feared that maybe this box could prove us idiots, that it could be used to dupe us at the highest levels, that Trilateral Commissions could fool us with Manchurian Candidates, that we could elect a President who was a propped-up simpleton or even an enemy among us. Now, of course, with the Internet’s constant flow of information and crowdsourcing vetting each candidate, all of those fears should be banished. But, of course, they’ve just been heightened. Hal Ashby’s picture-perfect realization of Jerzy Kosinski’s rich 1971 novella, Being There, written during the era when television was considered the problem with us, provides some clues to this phenomenon, though probably not the ones it intended.
Chance (Peter Sellers) is a mentally-challenged gardener who’s worked his entire life at the Washington D.C. home of man who has just passed away. Chance, who’s never left the grounds or learned to read or write, has learned all his life lessons from watching television. (“I like to watch,” he tells all he meets, often having has mantra to passivity misunderstood.) Since he’s not mentioned in the old man’s will, he’s evicted by lawyers. Forced into a spinning world he’s previously encountered only on the static tube, the bewildered man has unlikely good luck when he is hit by a limo carrying the wife of a political power broker. His injury is slight, but Eve (Shirley MacLaine) takes Chance in, and she and her sickly kingmaker husband (Melvyn Douglas) are enchanted by him, mistaking his opacity for wisdom, believing through a series of misunderstandings that he is a financial hotshot named “Chauncey Gardner.” Soon, Chance has met with the President (Jack Warden) and been quoted on TV by the beleaguered Commander in Chief. A lonely nation turns its eyes to Chance, and in addition to advising the President, he is soon being considered a potential candidate himself for the nation’s highest office.
George W. Bush was essentially the final TV candidate, so why have conspiracy theories been trumped up in an age when so little can be hidden? Perhaps if there is no unknown to fear we create it. Perhaps, like Chance, we like to watch, but what we really love is to see what we want to see.•
Tags: Hal Ashby, Jack Warden, Jerzy Kosinski, Melvyn Douglas, Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine
This classic photo by the great Berenice Abbott was taken in 1936 at the 977 Eighth Avenue Automat, a cafeteria-like restaurant which sold food and drink from coin-operated machines. From a 1991 New York Times article:
“Automats were a home away from home for New Yorkers who did not have money to burn — songwriters waiting for a break on Tin Pan Alley, actors dreaming of Broadway. ‘The Automat! The Maxim’s of the disenfranchised,’ the playwright Neil Simon wrote in 1987. But people who did have money to burn ate there too: Walter Winchell, Irving Berlin’s socialites, celebrities.
‘You used to have movie stars who were poor there, making it their home base,’ said Michael Sherman, an executive vice president of Horn & Hardart, the company that owned the Automat. ‘But then things changed. It was more successful for its catering and its parties. It was losing money as an Automat.'”
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Adam buys his own meal at the Automat, during the eatery’s obsolescence:
"The RFID chip will trip an alarm that will instantly alert the staff." (Image by Jessica F.)
Swiping towels at check-out time just got tougher as hotels have begun embedding in their linen radio-frequency chips that sound an alarm if the items are removed from the premises. From Endgadget:
“For many travelers, stealing hotel towels or bathrobes is more pastime than petty crime. Hotels, on the other hand, apparently take it more seriously. So seriously, in fact, that some have begun embedding specially crafted RFID tags within their linens, just to help us avoid ‘accidentally’ stuffing them in our suitcases before heading to the check-out desk. The chips, designed by Miami-based Linen Technology Tracking, can be sewn directly into towels, bathrobes or bed sheets, and can reportedly withstand up to 300 wash cycles. If a tagged item ever leaves a hotel’s premises, the RFID chip will trip an alarm that will instantly alert the staff, and comprehensively humiliate the guilty party.”
Water bubbles that are carbon neutral. (Image by Eriikson Architects.)
Buckminster Fuller famously designed unorthodox, environmentally friendly edifices and automobiles that were rarely realized. Finnish architects Eriiksson are, however, currently making a Fuller-esque vision come to fruition, creating an eco-city outside of Beijing from a cluster of geodesic domes that marries futurism to a sustainable future. An excerpt from Inhabit.com:
“The Miaofeng mountain area, located about 30 km west of Beijing, is slated to be reborn as a gorgeous new ‘Ecological Silicon Valley.’ Located close to the urban metropolis of Beijing, the new city will combine research institutes for modern science and innovation with environmentally friendly and eco-efficient urban living. The master plan for the eco-city was laid out by the Finnish firm, Eriksson Architects in collaboration with Finnish ecological experts Eero Paloheimo Eco City Ltd. With goals of carbon neutrality, respect for the environment, water and energy conservation, renewable energy, and housing and amenities for all employees and visitors, the Mentougou Eco Valley aims to reduce its environmental footprint to one third that of a typical city of similar size.”
In his 1978 essay, “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” Philip K. Dick recalls the first short story he ever wrote:
The two basic topics which fascinate me are “What is reality?” and “What constitutes the authentic human being?” Over the twenty-seven years in which I have published novels and stories I have investigated these two interrelated topics over and over again. I consider them important topics. What are we? What is it which surrounds us, that we call the not-me, or the empirical or phenomenal world?
In 1951, when I sold my first story, I had no idea that such fundamental issues could be pursued in the science fiction field. I began to pursue them unconsciously. My first story had to do with a dog who imagined that the garbagemen who came every Friday morning were stealing valuable food which the family had carefully stored away in a safe metal container. Every day, members of the family carried out paper sacks of nice ripe food, stuffed them into the metal container, shut the lid tightly—and when the container was full, these dreadful-looking creatures came and stole everything but the can.
Finally, in the story, the dog begins to imagine that someday the garbagemen will eat the people in the house, as well as stealing their food. Of course, the dog is wrong about this. We all know that garbagemen do not eat people. But the dog’s extrapolation was in a sense logical—given the facts at his disposal. The story was about a real dog, and I used to watch him and try to get inside his head and imagine how he saw the world. Certainly, I decided, that dog sees the world quite differently than I do, or any humans do. And then I began to think, Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. And that led me wonder, If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn’t we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe, it’s as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can’t explain his to us, and we can’t explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown of communication… and there is the real illness.•
Tags: Philip K. Dick
"We do it the WTF (What The Fuck) way!" (Image by Paul E. Reynolds.)
Promote Your Business On MISSILES – BLOW THEIR F*&KEN MIND OFF!! (Bay Shore)
No Joke – We do it the WTF (What The Fuck) way! – no one will forget your name or product!
We have the largest collection of Fighter Jet Cockpits and Missiles all mobile on trailers –
We do it with the WOW effect. Check it out – you will be surprised – I guarantee it!
••••••••••
Jerry Rubin had morphed from Yippie to Yuppie by the time he was struck by a car and killed in 1994 while jaywalking near UCLA. Here he is in all his mad glory in 1970, sassing Phil Donahue.
Tags: Jerry Rubin, Phil Donahue
"The members, who adopt handles 'Berkeley Blue' (Steve Jobs) and 'Oak Toebark' (Steve Wozniak), later go on to found Apple Computer." (Image by rebelpilot.)
In 2000, Robert Trigaux of the St. Petersburg Times put together a timeline of communications hackers, who apparently began to do their voodoo the second the telephone was invented. An excerpt:
“Hacking has been around for more than a century. In the 1870s, several teenagers were flung off the country’s brand new phone system by enraged authorities. Here’s a peek at how busy hackers have been in the past 35 years.
Early 1960s
University facilities with huge mainframe computers, like MIT’s artificial intelligence lab, become staging grounds for hackers. At first, ‘hacker’ was a positive term for a person with a mastery of computers who could push programs beyond what they were designed to do.
Early 1970s
John Draper makes a long-distance call for free by blowing a precise tone into a telephone that tells the phone system to open a line. Draper discovered the whistle as a give-away in a box of children’s cereal. Draper, who later earns the handle ‘Captain Crunch,’ is arrested repeatedly for phone tampering throughout the 1970s.
Yippie social movement starts YIPL/TAP (Youth International Party Line/Technical Assistance Program) magazine to help phone hackers (called “phreaks”) make free long-distance calls.
Two members of California’s Homebrew Computer Club begin making ‘blue boxes,’ devices used to hack into the phone system. The members, who adopt handles ‘Berkeley Blue’ (Steve Jobs) and ‘Oak Toebark’ (Steve Wozniak), later go on to found Apple Computer.”
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Not ruining the facade was an architectural marvel. (Thanks Reddit.)
From Aaron Saenz on Singularity Hub: ” In a quest to bring high-quality digital maps to every corner of the globe, Google produced Map Maker, a crowd-sourced cartography project that allows users to fill in the blanks on Google’s digital atlas of the world. With Map Maker, Google claims that the amount of the Earth’s population with detailed online maps of their regions went from 15% to 30% (with 187 nations and territories included). Now, Google is bringing Map Maker to the US, with an emphasis on making the existing digital maps better and more detailed. Make an improvement to Google’s maps, and it could be seen by billions of users around the world.”
Tags: Aaron Saenz
David Owen’s excellent 2004 New Yorker article, “Green Manhattan,” convinced the masses of something that many urban planners already knew: Large cities are more environmentally sound than suburban and rural areas. It’s common knowledge now, but it was contrary to the prevailing wisdom just a few years ago. An excerpt:
“My wife and I got married right out of college, in 1978. We were young and naïve and unashamedly idealistic, and we decided to make our first home in a utopian environmentalist community in New York State. For seven years, we lived, quite contentedly, in circumstances that would strike most Americans as austere in the extreme: our living space measured just seven hundred square feet, and we didn’t have a dishwasher, a garbage disposal, a lawn, or a car. We did our grocery shopping on foot,and when we needed to travel longer distances we used public transportation. Because space at home was scarce, we seldom acquired new possessions of significant size. Our electric bills worked out to about a dollar a day.The utopian community was Manhattan. (Our apartment was on Sixty-ninth Street, between Second and Third.) Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of America it’s a model of environmental responsibility. By the most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world. The most devastating damage humans have done to the environment has arisen from the heedless burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric. The Average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid-nineteen-twenties, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. Eighty-two per cent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That’s ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank fifty first in per-capita energy use.”
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David Owen speaks to NYC’s environmentally sound nature:
Tags: David Owen
Sports Phone jingle: "Get all the sports news instantly, dial 9-7-6-1-3-1-3." (Image by Holger.Ellgaard.)
Information is instant now, but for roughly a decade before the advent of cable TV, sports-talk radio and the Internet, New Yorkers routinely called an outfit named Sports Phone and paid a dime to hear updated recorded messages from fast-talking announcers with nicknames like King Wally, who could jam all the latest scores and news into a one-minute call. The company, which received updates from a collection of stringers, was an especially important tool for gamblers. Other cities had similar services.
It wasn’t just sports. Information of different kinds, now disseminated by the Internet, was available via the phone: weather, soap opera updates and pornographic messages. In 1983, Sports Illustrated published a piece about Sports Phone, providing no hint that the whole empire was about to crumble. An excerpt:
“In 57 seconds, Rickey Henderson can circle the bases a couple of times and Howard Cosell can just about get through half a sentence. Fifty-seven seconds is roughly the time unit into which two telephone sports information services sausage the entire major league baseball scoreboard, the results of a couple of tennis matches, the latest on who George Steinbrenner got from whom and occasional micro-mini-interviews. Fifty-seven seconds is what you get when you call from home or put a dime into a pay phone and dial one of three regional Sports Phone franchises. For half a buck you can call Dial-It, the only national service, from anywhere in the country and get a 59-second slice of sports.
Sports Phone and Dial-It have boiled the sports world down into 57 and 59 seconds because the FCC measures message units in 60-second intervals. Both services lop off a few seconds to give the caller time to hang up. And though compressed, the format has been a tremendous success, for both Ma Bell and the two services.New York’s Sports Phone received 40 million calls last year. The Pennsylvania-based Dial-It draws about 350,000 calls a week from across the nation. On one football Sunday last October, Dial-It got about 130,000 calls.”
Tags: King Wally