KMFDM at the Fenix Underground

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Just got back from tonight’s KMFDM show. Very good, and very loud (but then, this is KMFDM we’re talking about).

I skipped out on the two opening acts — I’d been given a free CD from the first act, Charlie Drown, a while ago at a Pigface show and wasn’t terribly impressed; and whoever the middle act was simply made a lot of noise. I poked my head in from time to time, but decided to just stay downstairs.

When I headed upstairs to find a spot to watch the show, I ran into Ron again, along with Angel, a friend of his, and spent the rest of the evening hanging out with them. We worked our way into a spot underneath a staircase that had a fairly good view of the stage, and chatted while waiting for the show to start.

WWIII (off the album of the same name) and Blackball opened the show, and Sascha and company were in fine form. Unfortunately, as I was afraid of last week, I’m no great fan of the Fenix for a show like this. While it worked decently enough for a smaller show, there were just too many people this time, and it quickly got far too crowded and hot, and the three of us bailed to stand outside the bar about halfway through the show. We could still hear everything fairly well, though, so we didn’t feel like we were really missing much of anything.

We did wander in to catch the encores, though, and the night closed out with Godlike — very, very nice.

All in all a good night, though I’m no great fan of the Fenix as a concert venue. I still wouldn’t mind going again at some point on just a standard club night to see how it fares, so I’m not entirely writing it off — I’m just going to reserve concerts there for shows that I really don’t want to miss out on.

iTunes: “Dogma” by K.M.F.D.M. from the album XTORT (1996, 4:06).

Websurfers urged to avoid using IE

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Wow — another big reason to move to a better browser:

Users are being told to avoid using Internet Explorer until Microsoft patches a serious security hole in it.

The loophole is being exploited to open a backdoor on a PC that could let criminals take control of a machine.

The threat of infection is so high because the code created to exploit the loophole has somehow been placed on many popular websites.

Experts say the list of compromised sites involves banks, auction and price comparison firms and is growing fast.

Sounds pretty nasty to me.

iTunes: “Voices” by Bedrock from the album Essential Chillout (2000, 9:09).

Going down

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A plane is about to crash. There are five passengers on board, but there are only four parachutes.

The first passenger says: “I am Ronaldo, the best football player in the world. The football world needs me, and I cannot die on my fans.”

He grabs the first parachute and jumps out of the plane.

The second passenger, Hillary Clinton, says: “I am the wife of the former president of the United States; I am the senator of New York and I have a good chance of being president of the United States in the future.”

She grabs a parachute and jumps off the plane.

The third passenger, George W. Bush, says: “I am the president of the United States of America. I have huge responsibilities in the world. Besides, I am the smartest president in the history of my country and can’t shun the responsibility to my people by dying.”

He grabs a pack and jumps off the plane.

The fourth passenger, the Pope, says to the fifth passenger, a young school boy: “I am old. I have lived my life as a good person and as a priest should and so I shall leave the last parachute to you; you have the rest of your life ahead of you.”

To this the little boy says: “Don’t fret old man. There is a parachute for each of us! The smartest president of America took my schoolbag.”

(via Len)

That’s a big basement, and a lot of dust

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The Browning pistol that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and sparked the crisis leading to World War I has been discovered gathering dust in a Jesuit community house in Austria.

Interesting enough in itself, but what really caught my eye was the headline that FARK used when they linked to this story. It’s apparently been edited to add some much needed clarification, but the version that showed up in my news aggregator this morning was as follows:

Pistol responsible for deaths of 8.5 million people found gathering dust in Jesuit community house in Austria

I actually had to read this three times before I could parse the sentence the way it was actually intended. I kept reading it and picturing a house with a basement big enough to hold the 8.5 million dusty corpses that had just been discovered.

iTunes: “Lessons In Love” by Lords of Acid from the album Lust (1991, 4:21).

Voices of the Beat: Burroughs, Ginsberg, and more…

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The Naropa Institute has just released a large number of recordings of lectures and classes to the Internet Archive. Included are recordings of William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and many, many more beat-era poets, writers, and personalities. Incredibly cool. Right now, I’m downloading a 1980 William S. Burroughs lecture on public discourse.

A lecture by William S. Burroughs on public discourse, with an introduction by Allen Ginsberg. Topics included are nuclear weapons, disarmament, the Equal Rights Amendment, aliens, dreams, function of the artist, mind-altering drugs, reincarnation, space travel, television, and economics. Keywords: beat generation, literature and the state, technology and literature, literature and society, protest literature

(via MeFi)

iTunes: “Empire Strikes Back (Medley)” by Meco from the album Best of Meco, The (1980, 4:05).

Seattle Storm Lauren Jackson in the buff

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See what I get for not paying attention to sports? I almost entirely missed hearing about the latest overblown controversy involving an adult choosing to pose naked for a magazine being sold to adults (though not an “adult magazine”, i.e., porn).

From her statements in this Seattle Times article, I think that Seattle Storm team member Lauren Jackson has exactly the right attitude about her photo shoot.

Storm star Lauren Jackson, after being asked in 2000 and again in 2002, finally agreed to bare all for an artistic Australian photo magazine called Black+White. Jackson appears on the cover, with the title “The Athens Dream,” in tribute to the upcoming Summer Games in Greece. Wisps of Jackson’s bleached-blond hair dangle over her creamy skin. Inside the magazine, Jackson, 23, reveals everything except her, ahem, down under.

[…]

“Do you really think it’s that big a deal?” she pondered when asked about the nude pics after practice yesterday.

[…]

Feeling too young at 18 to participate in 2000 and too busy with her Storm season during the 2002 shoot, Jackson mulled over the idea for this year’s magazine with her family in the offseason.

She wasn’t paid to pose, but she was flown to Sydney to work with award-winning photographer Steve Lowe and a makeup artist in a private session that took about seven hours. Jackson handpicked her pictures, getting complete control over the process.

After the Olympics, all the photos used in the magazine will be auctioned to benefit charities.

“I feel really comfortable with my body and shape I’m in, and I know I’m not going to be like this forever,” Jackson said. “I was really nervous at first, but it was conquering one of my fears. I felt very much empowered at the end.

“It’s me all over and I’m really happy with the photos. As athletes you work so hard to get in shape for competition. This celebrates the athletic body and how much work you put in. We do it the right way; we don’t starve ourselves.”

Jackson said she doesn’t view the shots as objectifying women, either. Especially because the magazine, which will sell for $40, is equal parts men and women.

[…]

“I really did it with the Australians in mind,” Jackson said. “It’s a prestigious thing in Australia. Believe it or not, but my mom and dad (Maree and Gary) loved it. My dad saw it the other day, called me and said he was so proud of me.”

Jackson’s teammates share the sentiment. Bird loved Jackson’s hair, and fellow Australian Tully Bevilaqua adored the cover shot.

“She looks sensational,” Bevilaqua said. “The human body is nothing to be ashamed of.”

Damn skippy.

I just may have to do some shopping before work tomorrow.

Purely for research purposes, of course.

Buffy and Angel?

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Some questions for Buffy/Angel fans…

Never having seen any of the show before now, I’ve been slowly working my way through the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series, renting the DVDs one by one from NetFlix. At the moment I’m about 2/3 of the way through Season Three and just found out while bouncing around old episode reviews that I’m coming up on the spinoff point for Angel’s series.

Firstly: is Angel as good of a series as I’m finding Buffy to be? Should I start working my way through this series also?

Next, assuming that the answer to that question is a “yes”, my question is simply how best to proceed. Given that there were four years of overlap between the two series, did they relate to each other in any major ways than sharing characters? While I certainly don’t expect that the two series would be sharing events and plot lines back and forth every week, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they occasionally at least referenced each other, if not outright sharing a common story line from time to time.

I figure I’ve got two basic methods of watching both shows: continuing my run through the end of Buffy and then starting to work through Angel (jumping back four years in the timeline in the process), or alternating renting discs of Buffy and Angel in order to make an attempt at following both shows concurrently in an attempt to keep the respective timelines as close as possible.

At the moment, I’ve got all of Buffy lined up in my queue, with all of Angel (at least, the three seasons that have been released on DVD so far — I’m just hoping that by the time I make it through those three, at least one more season will have been released, if not both) queued up afterwards. If enough people think that it would be worthwhile to mix the two together, it would be easy enough for me to do so.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

(And please — no spoilers on upcoming events! As I mentioned at the beginning, I’ve never watched these shows before now, so aside from bits and pieces of information that I picked up over the years as they filtered into the popular consciousness (for example, I know that Willow comes out as a lesbian at some point, though I don’t know when, how, or with/to whom; I know that there’s a musical episode sometime towards the end of the series; and I know that Jim Morrison dies at the end (sorry…in-joke with my friends)), I’m very clueless about where things are going as the series progresses, and I’d like to keep it that way. Thanks!)

iTunes: “Sweet Soul Sister” by Cult, The from the album Sonic Temple (1989, 5:08).

I think I saw a porno like that once

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Not quite as good as Troy in 15 Minutes, but very nearly so, and still damn funny: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in 15 Minutes.

The Shrieking Shack

RON: Help! Help!

HARRY: We’re coming, Ron!

RON: Don’t help! Don’t help! It’s a trap!

HARRY: eye roll

BIG BLACK DOG: turns into Sirius Black

HERMIONE: If you want to kill Harry, you’ll have to kill us first!

HP FANS: OMGWTF THAT WAS RON’S LINE! YOU CHANGED THINGS FROM THE BOOK!

LOTR FANS: What are you, new?

And as it turns out, Cleo’s had such success with her ‘…in Fifteen Minutes’ series that there’s now a m15m LiveJournal community dedicated to them. Worth keeping an eye on!

(via Ryan)

iTunes: “Tide is Turning, The” by Company from the album The Wall Live in Berlin (1990, 7:21).

SpaceShipOne makes history

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Very cool: SpaceShipOne makes it into space!

SpaceShipOne left the Earth behind on Monday morning and made its indelible entry in the history books as the first private spacecraft to carry humans into space. It touched down safely at Mojave Airport at 11:15 ET.

“It looks great,” said Burt Rutan, chief of Scaled Composites, which built the craft. He gave a thumbs up on the runway as he squinted into the sun at the aircraft he designed.

At 10:51 ET, Mike Melvill ignited the rocket engines and piloted SpaceShipOne into the blackness of space. His trajectory took him more than 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, above Earth’s atmosphere, according to Scaled Composites flight officials.

“It was a mind-blowing experience, it really was — absolutely an awesome thing,” Melvill said after landing.

iTunes: “Armed Forces” by Manufacture from the album Nettwerk Decadence (1988, 4:16).