Letter Never Sent

Karen sent me a cool link especially for any Sopranos fans out there. It’s a mob name generator. You type in your name and it gives you a mob nickname. I will henceforth be known in the underworld as Chris “Dreamboat” Sivori. Not bad. I could’ve gotten something awful like, “Banananose” or “Pizzaface”. You can get your own nickname here. Ouch, I typed in Karen’s name and it spat out “The Self-Toucher”. Hmmmm.

I remember seeing a Wu-name generator too. It would give you a name like a member of the Wu-Tang Clan.

I’ve been having some major computer problems and it’s been taking up a lot of time. On the upside I upgraded my hard drive, on the downside I lost everything on my largest hard drive. You have to be prepared for these sorts of things. Unfortunately, I lost all my sopranos episodes and the movies I had on my drive as well as a few other things that I could’ve backed up had I known what was in store for me. I think I’ll be doing something on the old Saban cartoon, The Mysterious Cities of Gold. Listen to the theme music and see if you can remember it. It’s about these kids who have adventures trying to locate the seven cities of cibola, the mysterious cities of gold. They fly around in a badass golden condor airplane of some advanced Aztec or Incan origin. It’s a neat show. I’ve been trying to locate episodes of it on IRC.

In the next few weeks I will be adding more to the comics page. Unfortunately since I’ve moved I haven’t set up my scanner yet so I can get this done. I have so much stuff I could be putting up, but scanning and editing takes a lot of time.

Today I read some interesting things about scientology. It’s like a cross between a corporation, a cult, a religion, a self-help organization, and a secret society. The Church of Scientology has tax-exempt status, but there are also shell corporations that are run by The Church. The CoS also has/had a creepy an intelligence agency that attempted to bug the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation, the american secret police) and they stole documents from the american government. They have a weird symbol like this:

With all of the news of Mad Cow and Hoof and Mouth disease spreading all over europe, meat consumption has declined by up to 50%. Wired News has a good story about it here. I think this might be good in some ways. People forget that meat is actually dead flesh and has the potential of containing dangerous bacteria and parasites. That’s not to mention the chemicals present in animals that underwent extreme stress immediately prior to their deaths. Of course, there are numerous reasons to go vegetarian.

My guess is also that if meat consumption declined you would have more people living longer, healthier lives. The hamburger based fast-food diet introduced in the 1950’s has created a world of bubble butts.

If you haven’t seen the movie Network you need to leave right now and go get it. I was thinking that it was going to be something similar to the 80’s film Broadcast News, but Network, directed by the late Sydney Lumet, is something entirely different. It’s a movie about television but only to show the larger role that television plays as a vehicle for propaganda. And not only propaganda, but how television separates people from the reality around them and destroys their humanity. How it takes culture out of the hands of people who would normally produce it. The way that it separates human beings from one another and reduces them to consuming, obedient ‘humanoids’. One of the most chilling parts of the movie is in a darkened corporate boardroom where Mr. Petersen (played by Ned Beatty) gives a speech about how democracy is an illusion, national governments are an illusion, freedom is an illusion, there is only the unalterable, immutable, natural law of global capital. Although released in 1975 this movie is just as relevant today.

I’ve recently rediscovered IRC. It’s been a while since I spent a lot of time on there, but I’ve found it useful for a lot of things lately. With the problems Napster’s having it’s nice to be able to just trade stuff online with another person and not have to worry too much about a company or agency monitoring what sort of stuff you’re trading. Lately I’ve been downloading and watching a lot of television episodes in ASF and MPEG format. Shows like Seinfeld, the Simpsons, Star Trek, Futurama etc. The best part is that there are no commercials and you can pause whenever you like. It’s similar to trading tapes. I’ve also been checking out so-called ‘bookwarez’ these are books, of course, either audiobooks in mp3 format or books in some sort of document format like acrobat, word, or text format. There are actually people who go to the trouble to scan each page of a particular book into an ocr (optical character recognition) program to transfer the information into a digital format and then they go back and double-check the manuscript. You have to admire that dedication! I downloaded the audio book edition of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. I’ve always wanted to read that. It would be nice to take along something like that on a long plane trip.