ClearChannel sucks

Listen to the radio much? I don’t — it seems there’s rarely anything worth listening to anymore. Why? Easy answer — ClearChannel owns a ridiculous amount of the radio stations in this country, and seems intent on driving them all down into blandness and mediocrity. The obvious conclusion: ClearChannel sucks.

(via DayPop)

Emperor of the US

I first read about Norton I, Emperor of the United States of America in one of the Sandman graphic novels by Neil Gaiman. He was also mentioned in the book I’m reading now, The Schroedinger’s Cat Trilogy, by Robert A. Wilson. Quite the interesting — and very real — character, he declared himself Emperor of the United States in 1859. Lots more information about him in his archives — could make for some very interesting reading.

(via MeFi)

Music industry wakes up

It’s about time some of the music companies started realizing that, cliched as the phrase may be, “if you can’t beat ’em — join ’em!” According to a story in the LA Times, Universal and Sony will be offering low-cost, unencrypted music downloads over the ‘net. Individual tracks for 99 cents, albums for $9.99 — and they can be freely (and legally) burned to CD once they’re downloaded. Hopefully it will work well enough that the other studios will follow suit….

Gambit

I just took one of the many “What [random thing] are you?” tests that are floating around the ‘net — this one focused on X-Men characters. Here’s the results: I’m Remy LeBeau/GambitWhat X-Men character are you?

Look out and lock up your daughters, everyone, we’re in the presence of Remy LeBeau. That’s right, you’re that smooth-talkin’ Cajun boy with a flare for making women swoon and a great love for all things shiny and steal-able. Sure, you’re forever on the run from your past, but there’s no reason why you can’t run from it in style, oui?

Boxing

Boxing is an interesting sport. You start with someone who’s dumb enough to get the snot beat out of him on a regular basis, and then punch him 5,000 times in the head.

pervertkiller2015, during a Yahoo! chat session

Needles and bottles and junkies, oh my!

Cleaning up around this building gets all sorts of interesting at times.

Section 8 of the National Housing Law Project is “housing assistance, in the form of direct payments to private landlord, secured from a local housing authority that low-income people can use to rent apartments and homes on the private market.” There are various Section 8 buildings around Seattle, the residents of which form your usual mix of welfare recipients — some who are using welfare as intended, to get back on their feet and get life together, and others who are some of the less reputable members of society. Fairly standard stuff, really.

Dead televisionWell, one of these Section 8 buildings happens to be the Jensonia Hotel, directly next to my building. Part of today’s project was sweeping out our part of the alleyway between the two buildings — while not quite up to the level of Hercules cleaning the Augean stables, it certainly wasn’t a quick and simple task, either. Apparently, some of the tenants next door feel that using garbage cans is more trouble than it’s worth (after all, once they fill up, you do need to take them to a dumpster — what a chore!), and prefer to toss a fair amount of their garbage out the window and into the alleyway. It’s an interesting, if disturbing, mix of garbage, to say the least — everything from smashed TVs to used syringes, all mixed in with a generous helping of broken glass bottles.

More of the detriusOn the bright side, I was able to get our part of it swept up without getting stuck with anything — most of the trash is actually on their side of the divider, so I didn’t have to wade into the real thick of things.

After the sweepI think the most disturbing part of the whole project was just that while I was down there sweeping things out, I’d occasionally hear the soft ‘thud’ of something else landing on the ground. The things that were being tossed were landing on their side of the building, though, which I was fairly happy about. I kinda figured the last thing I needed was some cracked-out junkie deciding to use me as target practice for their bottle, needle, or whatever other implement of destruction they’d just lost any use for. Kinda creepy.

It’s things like this that keep driving me home that no matter how much of a “big city boy” I thought I was after growing up in Anchorage, it’s really a whole different world out here. I’m enjoying it, even with the creepy bits…but the more I live down here, the more I realize just how tiny Anchorage really is!

Something worth saving

This next bit came out of a chat session today…I thought I’d save it. Wasn’t bad, for right off the top of my head.

Me: lol hey…I’m a geek…but I found a personality somewhere along the line, and can generally bury my geek-ness enough to cope with society fairly well…lol

dorkgoddess_ack: LMAO
dorkgoddess_ack: I thought the geek part was normaly devoliped as a coping device to deal with society

Me: yeah, I’d agree with that…but it generally happens with people who have weak personalities — which leads to both the societal problems, and the adoption of the geek persona — which is where i used to be…then I realized that I not only could, but did have my own, fairly strong personality, and managed to reconcile the geek with the non-geek
Me: wow…and that was one hell of a paragraph…lol

dorkgoddess_ack: lol
dorkgoddess_ack: do you realize you just sumed up your teen years and mid 20’s all in one paragraph

Me: lmao
Me: damn…I did, didn’t I?
Me: I should save that

dorkgoddess_ack: lol yes you should

So I did. :)

Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy

Conspiracy theories amuse me to no end. I think they’re silly, fairly ridiculous, and don’t believe a single one of them, though I do enjoy playing with them from time to time. However, a couple years ago I read The Illuminatus Trilogy, and by the time I was done, I was almost ready to believe every conspiracy theory out there. Great, bizarre, wacky stuff.

An online conversation got me remembering that, and so I picked up the companion volume, The Schroedinger’s Cat Trilogy. While not quite as good as Illuminatus, it was still much of the same style — bizarre, confusing, and entertaining, with a wonderfully twisted sense of humor throughout.

The only thing that would worry me would be if Wilson actually took any of this stuff seriously…which I’m thinking he just might, given the results when I do a search on his name on Amazon. I’m not quite sure what to think of that.