Free Sea and Cake mp3 from Salon.

More on why Mister Rogers was so cool.

The Metafilter community's reaction to Mister Rogers' dying has me in tears. I don't know if I can possibly think of a nicer, kinder human being than Fred Rogers and the more stories I hear about him, the sadder I am about it all.

It's not such a beautiful day in the neighborhood today. Mister Rogers died of cancer today. (link via Freakgirl)

My boss just showed me this, yet another awsome piece of flash from Dancing Paul, it's Create a Band! Get ready to waste hours on this. The combinations are endless.

Good day at work today. I launched the site that I've been working on for the past couple of weeks: FairTradeAction.org. It's a consumer campaign to put pressure on Procter & Gamble to start using Fair Trade coffee, and also has plenty of links for places where you can buy really great coffee that you can feel good about drinking because the farmers are paid a living wage and it's grown in a way that is better for the environment. Check it out, buy some coffee and send the action letters!

More on Ashcroft's bong patrol: Tommy Chong's home and glass pipe factory have also been raided. I wonder if Sgt. Stedenko served the warrant. Perhaps they should change the codename of this operation to lard ass. Stedenko over the CB: "This is codename Hard Hat." Cheech: "Lard ass?" Stedenko: "Hard hat, hard hat." Cheech: "Lard ass, lard ass!" It helps if you've seen Up in Smoke, I guess.

As if you didn't already know what a fascist pig John Ashcroft is, Check this shit out. I am so glad these people have nothing better to do than bust headshops. I'm sure with bongs becoming harder to get now, people will stop doing drugs and start going to church and all the terrorism will go away. And besides, anyone who watches TV knows that headshops are just a front for Al Qaida. Thank you, valiant morality police, for protecting us from ourselves and the terrorist-funded devil weed! We might have gotten the munchies or something. (via metafilter)

While blogsurfing during a slow patch at work today, I came across Live Journal Drama, not just another blog about blogging, but a compendium of some of the more interesting personal drama that Live Journal sites have come to be known for. While it may be a bit meanspirited, it sure is fun! They're also pretty good about labelling stuff NSFW. (link via little.yellow.different)

Fun with referrers! Did you know that this is the first page to pop up under a search for "latino girls gone bad?" People get to this page in some of the most unusual ways, like searching for a download of "Everybody's Working for the Weekend," to "pictures of naked peace protests," to "pictures of breast implants gone bad."

Monday morning is here again and I'm back in the office after a long weekend of wrangling with the sound mix of Washington Interns Gone Bad. What a pain in the ass! Defragging drives, juggling audio files, trying to get everything to sound good, while I should have been helping with wedding planning and move planning and basically anything but working on the damn movie. This film has been fun and I'm very proud of it, but it has been extremely taxing on my relationship with Anne and I'm sick and tired of our relationship being put under such constant strain. It really sucks, because the worst part of it is pretty much over and now it's all about getting showings, selling tapes, getting into festivals and hopefully getting some distribution and finally getting paid for all of the work and bullshit. This should be the most exciting time, but it's just more stress which I don't fucking need. I have enough to be stressed out about, taking the plunge and leaving a steady job and a cheap apartment and a vibrant community of friends and connections for the great unknown in a new city with no job and no prospects and nothing.

Speaking of filename spoofing on filesharing networks, I should also cut a new trailer for Washington Interns Gone Bad and call it "Britney Spears Fred Durst home sex video" and watch a zillion people download that. Of course, that would mean I would need time to actually cut another damn trailer which I so do not have time for right now.

Well, Milkmachine is quite possibly the coolest band ever. They put on an incredible show last night. I met Russ during the summer of '99 on alt.music.ween. Somebody was looking for a bassist in Minnesota and I posted some wiseass thing about how he should just move to DC so I could play. Russ emailed me and said that he played keys and was in the area, so we jammed out a week later. Then he got his friend John to come play guitar and we became Dirtpatch. Dirtpatch rocked for about a year with a couple different drummers and eventually broke up. Russ and John pretty much each needed to have their own band (I always compared it to J. Mascis and Lou Barlow just beeing too strongly creative in different ways to be in Dinosaur Jr. together), so John started Cricket in Times Square and Russ went solo with Milkmachine, eventually getting Rob to play drums and now with Austin on guitar (Austin also played lead guitar in an early incarnation of Captain Paradox). So anyway, the show last night was really great. It was a CD release party and I've been listening to the CD all morning and it's so damn good. Russ rotated between his Wurlitzer organ to accordion and Austin alternated between bassline-like rhythms and watery leads, all to Rob's dynamic drumming. The guy who played viola on some of the tracks on the CD also showed up and played on one of the songs. I could see these guys building a serious and dedicated following if more people heard about them. I think I might make mp3s of their CD and rename them to something that is a big hot download but leave their name and URL in the ID3 tag and slap them in my kazaa shared folder.

Firewire drive STILL defragging 3 hours later at less than half done. I'm going to go catch the Milkmachine CD Release party at Staccato which is going to be some insane accordion rock wackiness. Milkmachine is Russ on accordion and keys and Rob on Drums. Rob and I were the Captain Paradox rhythm section and before that, Russ and I were in a band together called Dirtpatch. Milkmachine and one of Rob's old bands both have songs on the Washington Interns Gone Bad soundtrack.

Crazy rock & roll stories. I found this one on a message board attached to a story about that Fire at a Great White concert that killed 95 people.

So this rabbi walks into a Starbucks and...

Well, I'm getting close to being done with this sound mixing business and the playback was getting so choppy that I had to stop and defrag the firewire drive. It's almost completely fragmented. Other than that, things are going pretty well. There are definitely some things I'll need more help with but I think I've got some decent levels and everything is audible, which is really the minimal expectation for sound in a no-budget film. Hopefully whoever picks us up for distribution will kick in for some serious remastering, but for now, I think this will do just fine. So while I've been doing that, Anne and Karen have been going through our closet and getting rid of everything that we don't want to move with. It's amazing how much junk people can aquire over the years. I found my old brownie super8 camera which someday I might actually try to shoot some film with. I also found my mini reel to reel that I bought on ebay a couple years ago when I was on my big reel to reel kick. I bought it because it's really tiny and the plan was that I was going to put some of my records on the little tapes and listen to them at work that way. Sure, I could have just recorded them to my hard drive and burned a CD or recorded into my minidisk recorder, but I really wanted to be the only one at work listening to music on a mini reel to reel. Anyway, this thing came with a bunch of little tapes, and they turned out to be a guy's recorded letters home to his wife and kids from Vietnam. Ever since, I've wanted to get them recorded and put them online and I've just never found the time for that big of an undertaking, let alone figured out how or where or in what way they would be presented online. Hell, I've never even listened to all of them. It's always felt kind of too voyeristic to just sit and listen to them by myself, though sharing them with others seems more appropriate. But of course, nothing's going to happen with them in any way any time soon what with getting this movie done, moving across the country, getting a new job, getting married, and getting settled in a whole new city. Hell, the older they are, the more intersting they'll be.

Funniest music ever! This is the music that we play in the film whenever the congressman is being sleazy. It's real 70's porno soundtrack stuff.

OK, I've been up a while, on my second cup of coffee, and about to embark on the second half of sweetening the sound for Washington Interns Gone Bad. Tomorrow my sound guy is coming over to help put the finishing touches on and then I still have a few visual things that need taking care of. That and a couple of overnight renderings and I'll be ready to make a master tape. Just like the art-o-matic showings, we'll have something to show at the zero hour. Ahhhh, the fun and excitement of DIY film.

Latest sound update: things are going along rather smoothly. I've just been playing the film with all of the tracks laid into Premiere, finding the trouble spots and fixing them in Sound Forge and so far it's working pretty well. It's not going to be as good as the professional job that was done and lost since I don't have a well trained ear or decent speakers, but it's going to be a vast improvement over the rough cut. I also got to lay in a bonghit sound effect that I grabbed from Paul's Boutique (track 2 - Shake Your Rump) and some halfassed foley effect files from some cheesy sound website. So once again, the film has been salvaged from a bad situation.

Look out, J-Lo, it seems that you no longer have the most talked about ass in the world.

OK, update on the sound situation. His drives are toast but he's figured out a workaround so we can improve the sound of the dialogue in the spots where we really need it without losing all the great incidental music that he laid down below it. My fingers are crossed that this works because the fate of the entire film is resting on it. I've only been awake for about an hour but my head is already pounding over all of this.

It's days like this that make we want to just pack it all in and give it all up. Things started OK. The commute in to work was jam packed and slow thanks to there still being a bunch of snow, but I got there without incident. Morning at work was ok and uneventful. I had lunch with Ann of Grandma's Mini fame who also works just around the corner. Got back to the office and dropped an email to my sound guy to arrange picking up the remastered sound that he had completed right before the snow hit. Aparently there was some electrical surge at his house which fried his motherboard and possibly the hard drives containing all of the work he's done. He had burned the first half of the film's sound files onto a CD, but not the second half which was the half that needed the most work. We definitely lost the mixing and mastering he did on the second half, and might have lost the rest of it. So now we're hoping that we can recover SOME of that, leaving me having to do all of the remixing and remastering which I know jack shit about. Not to mention, we're showing it at Visions in less than two weeks and in less than a month I'm moving across the freakin' country so I've got a fuck of a lot that I need to do and was counting on having minimal work on the film at this point in order to do it all. The term "completely fucked" certainly comes to mind. Any data recovery specialists happen to read this thing? So, as always, I'm left to pick up the fucking pieces of another goddamn fiasco with this film. Somebody just kill me now. Paging Dr. Kevorkian.

Apparently some folks have been having trouble with the commenting on this blog. Could folks give it a try and then if there's an error message, please copy and paste it to me on my contact page? Thanks

Last night I registered a new domain for what I'd like to become a group blog, possibly with open membership. That domain is notsafeforwork.org (nothing there yet, don't bother). The dotcom and dotnet were both taken, as well as any domain that was just nsfw. NSFW.org seems to be some sort of British film site while nsfw.net is definitely nsfw. Anyway, the idea of this blog is going to be for posting stuff that is, you guessed it, not safe for work, but not just gratuitous T&A but things that are worthy of discussion but might happen to include naked people, gratuitous profanity or other things that you just wouldn't want you boss to see over your shoulder. I'm thinking it should have a vibe more like Metafilter and less like Fark. If done right, this could become hugely popular and maybe even make a few bucks (I'd be happy if it paid for itself and my other hosting though).

Anti-Bush T-shirt banned at Michigan school. Bretton Barber, if you're reading this there's a free Washington Interns Gone Bad t-shirt with your name on it if you contact me.

The best anti-war campaign yet: Masturbate for Peace! Won't you all please lend a hand?

Ladies and Gentlemen, Washington Interns Gone Bad has been accepted into its first film festival!!!

Salon has a great article today on the Return of musical films. "At long last, an American movie musical gets it right. Will the "Chicago" breakthrough bring a return to the glory days, or just a new onslaught of inflated Broadway schmaltz?" I'll admit, I surprisingly loved Chicago. I know, the idea of Gerbil-boy Richard Gere singing and dancing sure wasn't a selling point for me, but that movie just sucks in the audience and you can't help but love it. I can't even get the soundtrack out of my head. Anne and I bust into "All That Jazz" every time we see Catherine Zeta Jones hawking cellphones on TV now. So I've been inspired not only by Chicago but by more subversive musicals such as Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Cannibal the Musical, as well as the recent documentary on the Cockettes, and I want my next film to be a musical. Hey, if Hollywood can do it with big budgets, people like me ought to be able to do it better with no money!

This is so messed up: "Hundreds of screaming guests rushed the exits of a crowded nightclub Monday after someone used pepper spray or Mace, and at least 21 people were crushed to death or smothered in the panic, officials said."

OK, day 3 being snowed in and there's not much to do but sit around and post links to all the great coverage of the worldwide anti-war protests from across the blogoshpere (though I'm tending to find more stuff from NYC than most other places). It's starting to look like 16th St and the Rock Creek Parkway are both almost cleaned off, though anybody who was unfortunate enough to be parked on the street is burried uder feet of snow. We're going to attempt a trip into the great white outdoors later, perhaps for a movie.

More first-hand blogging accounts from the NYC march.

More blogging on the NYC protests at DistributeThis.org

Signs at the NYC Anti-War Rally from Free Dartmouth.

More NYC Photos.

Aerial photos of the estimated crowd of 1 million marching against the war in Rome.

More blogging and photos from the NYC protests from World New York.

170 Pictures for over 110 Feb, 15 Anti-war Protests!

Photos of anti-war protest in San Diego.

Anti-war march photos and commentary from a blogger down under: sydney peace rally.

More pictures from the NYC anti-war march, February 15, 2003

More on the NYC protests, this time pictures from Wacky Neighbor!

People hit this blog in some unusual ways: Google Search: zoe implants before and after