Letter Never Sent

I want you all to know that I’ve been busy, busy encoding video and saving chunks of television history. My first endeavor is to capture the entire run of The Mary Tyler Moore Show which is something like 6 or 7 seasons of twenty or so episodes per season. It’s a tall order and it’s taking a lot out of me. Luckily, I tape the shows before I capture them and the episodes also come on twice a day per episode so it’s hard to miss them. It’s been occupying a lot of my time and at this rate it will take me several months at the very least to capture the entire series. I may also start on the show Freaks & Geeks, but that only comes on once a week which kinda sucks. That means it would take me a year to capture all of them. At some point in the near future I may upgrade to a better capture card which might help this whole process since I could more easily capture and encode in real-time. Also, I think many of the newer cards have timing features to use your computer as a vcr. This would require me to buy yet more hard drive space. Anyway, that’s enough about that.

It’s weird the things you notice when you watch the same syndicated shows day after day. I’ve noticed that the same commercials play again and again, day after day. I couldn’t miss it because I’ve been having to edit them out everyday. It’s Hooked on Phonics, Tarot readings, and that orange peel cleaning liquid stuff. Advertising is so irritating.

I wrote a little bit of stuff here before but someone’s dumb website caused internet explorer to crash on me. How incredibly lame. If you’re going to put a load of flash on your website don’t make it crash web browsers. Ack!

As if you needed one more reason to stay away from McDonald’s (or MekkieDees as we say), try biting into a nice maggot cheeseburger. Geez, that’s pretty gross.

I hope everyone had a happy 4th of July. The fireworks on town lake were great this year. I could see them very well from the end of my street.

My website has been registering a large number of hits from keyword searches involving some permutation of: download sopranos vcd divx etc. There are no Sopranos episodes here although I have downloaded and watched a few of them since I don’t have HBO. I will say that I have seen many places to download Sopranos episodes online and they’re really not hard to find. You just have to keep looking. Every show in tv history is probably available somewhere. Just the other day I downloaded and watched an episode of this old 50’s show, The Bickersons. It was interesting to see a fossil of tv past kept alive thanks to the help of a dedicated fan and the internet. Hopefully, the free dissemination of ‘intellectual property’ will cripple the the corporate entertainment machine. I’ve had a little too much of bad music, bad books, and bad tv shows. And I’m very tired of commercials.

The thugs in the Defense Department are gearing up to throw lots of money around for high-tech geegaws and to maintain american military preeminence. I think war will be harder to wage as people all over the world come into contact with one another and as different types of people live together peacefully. Education is the key to tolerance and understanding.

A good read about some Anarchist youth in Provo, Utah.

I just got done watching a great PBS show called Store Wars. The show depicts the struggle of a small town dealing with the decision to allow the construction of a Wal-Mart superstore. Needless to say, the pro Wal-Mart forces win. The story really hits home. It captures that odd feeling of discombobulation when someone disagrees with something that you believe which seems so obvious and logical. For example, the notion that Wal-Mart is beneficial to small towns and communities when in fact it utterly guts small town businesses. On an ominous note, by 2004 Wal-Mart plans on building a new store every day. That is seriously fucked up.

Some anti Wal-Mart links:

Wal-Mart or Wal-bad?

Wal-Mart Memoirs This guy had his site censored by the FBI. Two FBI thugs showed up at his house and tried to intimidate him. That’s another funny/scary/sickening story.

Yes. He is our president believe it or not. I wish Bill Hicks was still alive. *sigh*

I know I keep writing about stuff involving the government, but it always seems to be what pops into my mind when I want to update the page. On a lighter note, guess who’s on vacation this week. You guessed it. I may even go to Schlitterbahn or Barton Spring’s pool to take the edge off the heat. I may even go tubing. Or is it toobing?

Did I mention that Caravaggio is one of my favorite Renaissance artists? You can see his work and a lot else at the artchive. Or just have a looksee below. I use many of these as backgrounds.

Ecce Homo

Judith beheading Holofernes

Cena in Emmaus

Narcissus

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (my current favorite Caravaggio painting)

I’m not sure what it is exactly I like about his paintings. They just capture some essential human quality that is fascinating.

In a weird twist to the Robert Hanssen story, I was surprised to read in the New York Times that Hanssen was a member of the secretive, right-wing, catholic organization Opus Dei (God’s Work). I’ve read some weird conspiracy stuff about Opus Dei. One thing was a purported coverup of the murder of Princess Diana. According to this theory, the wife of French president Jacques Chirac used her Opus Dei contacts to cover up the assassination of Diana. I’ve also heard of Opus Dei in conjunction with the Calvi affair which is definitely worth a read. Roberto Calvi’s body was found on June 18, 1982 dangling from an orange rope under Blackfriars Bridge in London, England. His pockets contained pieces of brick and rocks and $15,000 in various foreign currencies. The Calvi affair is too complicated to go over here and honestly I don’t understand the whole thing myself. But read that link. Awhile back on Napster I found a spoken word piece by Robert Anton Wilson regarding the Calvi murder.

Oh, I almost forgot. Louis Freeh is also a member of Opus Dei, one of the few in the Clinton administration. Supposedly, during the Reagan administration many Opus Dei members were brought into various positions in the government. This might be why Freeh seems to get along so well with the Bush administration. He’s already got the right-wing credentials. The Bush’s are no strangers to elite secret societies. Both big and little Bush are well-known members of the Skull & Bones fraternity. And, Prescott Bush had ties to the OSS (The precursor to the CIA) and his son, George H.W. Bush ran the CIA for some time. In a related situation, Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker (Dubya’s grandfathers) operated banks and shipping companies that were later declared by the US Congress to be fronts for the Nazis. In 1942 shortly after the US entered WWII the assets of these Wall Street companies were seized by the US government under the Trading With The Enemy Act. This stuff will make you think twice about things.