The Smugglers of Pirate's Cove

Indoor pool with diving platform

Sea Breeze Serenade

1. "Four Minutes to Lock Down" (feat. Raekwon & Ghostface Killah) - Method Man and Redman
2. "Holiday" - Pink Mountaintops
3. "Reality" - Carolyn Franklin
4. "Horror Business" - Pajo
5. "Ships With Holes Will Sink" - We Were Promised Jetpacks
6. "Love Vigilantes" - Iron & Wine
7. "Honeybee" - Throw Me the Statue
8. "A Broken Heart Don't Really Break" - Main Ingredient
9. "When I'm Gone" - Groovie Ghoulies
10. "Return Journey" - Ghost
11. "Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers" - Nella Dodds
12. "The Reason Young People Use Drugs" - Abner Jay
13. "Ships Go Out" - Ron Sexsmith
14. "Love Comes and Goes" - Lee Fields & The Expressions
15. "They Done Wrong/We Done Wrong" - White Rabbits
16. "All of the Above" - The Phenomenal Handclap Band
17. "When I Go" - Slow Club
18. "Fuck Christmas, I Got the Blues" - The Legendary Tiger Man
19. "Never Forget You" - Noisettes

This isn't put together as well as I'd like it to be, and but I'm set to go on vacation in a couple of hours, so I figured better now than never. It's kind of all over the place.

Sorry I didn't get to update this more over the weekend, Finals and a small bout of food poisoning have kept me somewhat out of the loop. I'll post pictures of the trip if/when I have reception, but otherwise I won't be able to really post until Friday morning. Hope everyone has a good week!

Download here

Finals: DONE

Yes, I have resumed sleeping, bathing, speaking, etc...

I have a coupla posts and another mix lined up, but first I have to run some long overdue errands. Needless to say, I'm excited to write about bullshit for awhile. So yeah, that's coming.

in the meantime... look at this fucking hipster.

I know I said I was taking some time off, but 2 things happened:
First, I was going over lecture notes about web 2.0 and libraries 2.0 (I am promising here and now that these terms will never appear here again) and there was a passage to the extent of "if you can't find the time to post to a blog regularly don't bother" and then I felt guilty.

Second, CRYPTID SIGHTING!!!!!! This is all over the nerdly realms of the internet, but in case you don't frequent the same dorkish corners of the web that I do, basically what happened is that a Vermont man allegedly caught on his camera phone some footage of the Lake Champlain monster "Champ". One of the great things about camera phones is that things like this are boung to start being mroe plentiful, right? Well, that and and blurry videos of celebrities in airports).

Anyway, this looks to be the first "major" recorded sighting of Champ in over 30 years (see the picture above). So if you live in the Lake Champlain region, get ready for the invasion of sweaty folk and drunk people with harpoon guns.

I've been absent lately because of my impending finals (1 project down, 1 project and 1 exam to go), and I haven't had very interesting things to share. I have about 2 hours a day where I'm awake and not staring at notes, so I try to spend it not doing anything in front of the computer. Anyway, I'll be back by next wednesday, and I have a waist-high stack of emails, correspondence, phone calls, magazines, albums, and comics to peruse, so I should have a whole bunch of stuff to run my mouth off on. So please bear with me. In the meantime, Conan has returned like the milkman in war-torn London, bringing nutricious laughs, so I'm gonna watch the glorious ascension to host of the Tonight Show.


anyway, check out this link I found at Duane Swierczynski's site (which is great for anyone interested in classic hardboiled and noir detective stories and comics). It's a photo set of all these pulpish shots of a beautiful woman shot on old Polaroid stock. Anyway, I just spent plenty of time just imagining low-budget gore and sexploitation flicks based around all of these. Warning: there's some nudity involved.

Neil Krug's Pulp Art Book

Happy Memorial Day

I'm in the throes of wrapping up my first quarter of classes, but take some time off of your Memorial Day to flip through some of these photos taken during World War I of soldiers of the British Empire as they prepare for one of the longest and bloodiest battles in recorded history.

Which isn't to say that they're particularly sad or harrowing, but they are worth taking a look at, especially considering that they've been sitting in a French barn for the past 90 years and that next to nothing is known about them.

For me, I can only look at them and see these people, most of whom were probably younger than I am now when these were taken and many of whom were probably dead 6 months later, these people trying to retain something of themselves in what could only have been miserable conditions. They pose proudly, sometimes smiling, sometimes with local children, putting on a brave face to send back home to their parents or sweethearts or friends.

WWI both fascinates and terrifies me. It conjures the images placed there by people like Owen and Remarque, these horrific images of panic and weariness and death. this is a war in which modern warfare was born, and largely without the sister development of modern medicine that is supposed to accompany it. Never a good combination.

I've never been stupid enough to think I could hack it in a war. But if there is indeed a war that scares me above all others, this is it. War has never been sensible. But as hard to believe, I think it has only gotten more sensible.

Stop and remember that people are dead today. You don't have to agree with their cause or their government. you don't have to pick someone from your country. You don't have to pick the winners or the losers. But just think for a second that millions and millions of people have died for causes that are forgotten by most today. You don't have to remember them. But at least stop and think of them for a minute. It's the least they've earned.

This is a picture, not a painting, of the Forth railway bridge in Scotland. It's apparently the "one internationally recognized Scottish landmark", which is news to me, but looking at this picture, I can certainly see why.

warning: other views are not as glamorous.

Mailbox. Monday afternoon.

1. Tom
2. "Let's Move to the Country" - Smog
3. "Section House" - The End of the World
4. "Je N'Aime Que Toi" - Ludivine Sagnier, Louis Garel, Clothilde Hesme
5. "Don't Be a Rude Boy" - The Rulers
6. "Chances Are" - The Breeders
7. "Silver Threads Among the Gold" - Cheyenne Mize and Bonnie "Prince" Billy
8. "What time is it?"
9. "Pinch Me (Baby Convince Me)" - Chestnut Station
10. "The Boys Are Leaving Town" - Japandroids
11. "And the Hazy Sea" - Cymbals Eat Guitars
12. "The Man Who Played God" (feat. Nina Persson) - Danger Mouse & Sparklerhorse
13. "When Will You Come Home" (Jouhn Peel version) - Galaxie 500
14. "It Just Dawned on Me" - John Doe and the Sadies
15. "What Time it is?"
16. "You Might as Well" - Sera Cahoone
17. "Freeway" - Kurt Vile
18. "Soldiers Take Over" - The Rio Grandes
19. "Loving Cajun Style" - Freddy Fender
20. "But I'm Different Now" - The Jam
21. "If You See What I Mean" - P.P. Arnold

download here.

This is mix I've been playing with for some time now, and I just now slapped some final pieces in and conjured up some artwork. I had to cut a few songs because they were too long, but it's kinda sad because I know I'll forget about them the next time I sit down to this. The new computer either makes it much harder or much easier to make mixes on, I haven't decided which, though.
the picture is of the old Luna Park in the North Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. There were Luna Parks built all over the country, and this one seems only to have operated between 1905-1909, which is surprsing, considering how nice it looks and how much money was in that city at the time. About 85 years after that picture was taken, I lived there, any trace of it had disappeared. There's still a bar named after the place there, one I have only slurry memories of, but recall it as having the drunkest bartenders and most sexually ambiguous bouncer in town. Within 8 minutes of moving to the neighborhood, I locked my keys in the car right in front of the place and had the distinct pleasure of helping a talking to the cop with a beer in my hand as he slim-jimmed my door open (permanently damaging said passenger-side door inthe process). Once, while on a pseudo-date there, I man tried to sell me shopping bag full of pornography.
Good times....

Three separate friends, none of whom know each other, each had children in the past three days. This has to be some weird strike of stork lightning, right? RIGHT?

In any case, my congratulations go out to all of you that might read this. I'm truly amazed by your individual and collective efforts. May your children be strong and beautiful and carry the wonderful qualities that I see in their parents.

As a requirement for one of my classes, I've been working what amounts to an online reference desk at the Internet Public Library. So far, it's been a pretty pleasant experience, and I enjoy it because I get to choose what questions I answer, which means it's usually something that I'm at least mildly curious about. Anything from Philadelphia's role in the Civil War to copyright laws, I've managed to pick up some interesting stuff.
A question I answered today was "Is Hello Kitty from Japan or England". It seemed like a pretty easy one to me, but as always that's a little deceiving (answer: both). Anyway, in my research, I stumbled across news records of the Hello Kitty murder, a case that shocked Hong Kong towards the end of the year 2000. Basically what happened is that a young woman was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered before her decapitated head was stuffed inside of a Hello Kitty doll. Terrifying, right? What's even crazier is that a 13 year-old girl had apparently been dreaming about it before the police there figured out what happened. Yikes. Anyway, I'm sorry if I'm ruining it for you, but I thought it was morbidly interesting.

Hopefully I'll have something a little more positive to report on for my next question...

Not to mention that there seems to be a number of Hello Kitty guns on the market... which I'm not even gonna get into.

The Sword of Victory, Russian

I know I've been scarce lately, thank midterms. I'm too tired to think, and I've been listening to a startling amount of musical theater while I've been studying lately. I think it goes back to the (terrible) study habits I picked up when I once shared a study space with one of my brothers and one of my sisters and in an effort to fool my parents into thinking this setup was effective (it wasn't, but my siblings could smoke cigarettes in the house undetected), they would play Les Miserables while we sifted through notebooks.

In any case, I'll post something later, but in the meantime I need to get back to homework and then seriously try to limp my way over to the gym so I can claim I at least walked that far out of the house.

For now, though, I feel like this little guy.

Captain Chaos R.I.P.

Great, now I got the Golden Girls and Cannonball Run to slough through.

Thru You: Imagine slapping together songs a la Garageband, only with Youtube videos. The result is this hodgepodge of guys pretending to film instructional videos, jagoffs videotaping themselves shredding in their bedroom, distraught girls singing to themselves, etc... The list goes on. It sort of gels, and sort of looks like a bunch of people whose videos were chopped up and arranged into songs on more YouTube videos.

Anyway, it's worth checking out. It's real evidence that with enough pot and editing software, you can truly put something together. I recommend tracks 1,3,4, and 7.

edit: and pets. There seem to be a lot of pets around these people.

One of the more entertaining aspects of David Souter's retirement: I've heard the term "Bork" four times since Friday.

Sure, it's probably more of a name than a term, but it's still pretty awesome.

This is going to be a long, dumb war between ideologies coming up, but I can't imagine it's going to end up all that different that it is now.

hey, That should be a motto for our political system.

Saw this the other day and I can honestly say that it's a pretty decent approximation of the inside of my head.

Brecht Vandenbrouke on Flickr.