| 7 Deadly Sins - Wrath |
[20 Jul 2009|07:40pm] |
Wrath is blind. Wrath is red as it builds up, but white when unleashed. Unleashed, wrath is rage.
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[20 Jul 2009|05:28pm] |
And as frightened as i was so am i aware, and full. Still reticent to believe but easy to please.
As the mouth keeps explaining and analyzing the worst, the subtlety escapes the faithful mind but is not lost on me
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| hey hey hey |
[20 Jul 2009|06:14pm] |
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LMC-Boys & Girls |
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Helloww, Im new in here~!
hoho so I finally decided to post something in here
since I have been watching it for some time
so here it is :O
Be ready for more~! :3
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| Sex and Drugs with Senator Al Franken |
[20 Jul 2009|06:23pm] |
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http://www.disinfo.com/content/story.php?title=Sex-Drugs-with-Senator-Al-Franken As a young man, future-Senator Al Franken was strip-searched for drugs at the Canadian border. And Franken once asked future-President Ronald Reagan about decriminalizing marijuana. (At a 2004 book-signing, Bill Clinton greeted Franken by saying ""My hero's here.")
These funny "Secrets of Al Franken" include the fact that he lights a joint in the 1986 movie "One More Saturday Night." (Franken's movie about a Minnesota town was filmed entirely in Illinois, after Minnesota's Film Board deemed its script too obscene...) "I'm gonna get laid! I'm gonna get laid." sings the future Senator. ("Hey, I can't help it," he explains. "I'm a lesbian trapped inside a man's body.")
The Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia produced some of the movie's music - and it ends with Franken's character taking Percodan and Demerol for a punch in the jaw!
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[20 Jul 2009|03:55pm] |
for some reason this photo has been Viewed 4,056 times! it shows up on the first page of google when you search "big forehead" ha!
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| 308/365 |
[20 Jul 2009|06:51pm] |
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Furr -- Blitzen Trapper |
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If you could go here & read the caption, and maybe help me out a bit, I'd appreciate it tenfold!:) |
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| Hot Tub Rental |
[20 Jul 2009|03:49pm] |
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Does anyone know where one can rent a hot tub for a decent price?
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| Gates arrested in his own home |
[20 Jul 2009|02:46pm] |
Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the nation's pre-eminent African-American scholars, was arrested Thursday afternoon at his home by Cambridge police investigating a possible break-in. The incident raised concerns among some Harvard faculty that Gates was a victim of racial profiling.
Of course, the real joy is in the comments section. Literally, Al Sharpton is mentioned in the first comment: Here we go. Let's blow this out of all proportion. Let's not wait until we hear the full story....bring on the Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton circus.
Moving on to some other winners:
Enough of throwing down the race card ... we have a Black President now, so that tired old ship has sailed.
If he wasn't loud and obnoxious then he probably would not have been arrested. I love how the Globe only tells one side of the story.
We don't read about every white person mistakenly arrested or cited. The problem here isn't racism. It's horrible cops and the media's insistence on running this stuff.
Be nice if the Globe actually printed the arrest report. A bit of a different story, I bet. I bet my life on it.
I am not saying this isn't racial profiling-- it may be something like that. But there's definitely more to this story. Maybe it was a domestic issue between him and his wife.
Police do have to protect themselves. Did he threaten anybody? Or did the cops show up and there was no sign of entry and they knocked on the door, asked for id and then arrested him? were there any african american officers at the scene? what caused his tumultuous behavior? why was he throwing a fit?
Come on it's 2009, stop it with breaking out the race card! I wish I had a scapegoat to use everytime something happened to me with which I wasn't pleased. God!
Lets stop this racial prof thing. I think we need to take responsability of our own action and move ON.
This paper HATES all law enforcement.
Again, my comments do not get published. The truth hurts. Herald had more substance, less flourish, of course. [Psst, refresh your browser!—NK]
Does it matter that he was respected? I am sure Bernie Madoff was once respected.
He is some overpaid professor who (and I work in the "Harvard community") undoubtly opened his mouth in an "unprofessional" tone and that's what got him arrested.
All the guy had to do was declare himself an illegal alien, and the Cambridge Police would have left him alone. [This one was signed "Manuel Labor"]
Gee, do you think Mr Gates thanked the police officers for responding to a possible house break at his house, or do you think he got arrogant and uppity and brought it on?
Perhaps Cambridge cops are simply fed up with Harvard people pushing around the community? Since when has Harvard been a good neighbor? Now, please take down those giant cranes in my neighborhood.
Anyone who claims racism is a tad ignorant. How many racist officers cuff the person in the front for their own comfort? Offer multiple times to make sure the residence is secured? Obtain a cane for the professor to walk with more ease?
How the hell do you justify being called victims??? 250 years ago maybe, but get the hell over yourselves! We all bleed RED! I don't give a damn about your skin color. Get God back in the picture you bunch of hipocrites!
This might be a way to get people reading print newspapers again. "NOW WITHOUT MORON COMMENTS!"
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| Come Volunteer for The Weekend to End Breast Cancer! |
[20 Jul 2009|02:57pm] |
The Weekend to End Breast Cancer is a 2-day, 60km walk with one night of camping to raise money for BC Cancer Foundation and for the fight against breast cancer and other women's cancers throughout the province. Participants will start on Saturday August 15th at Rocky Mountaineer (near Main and Terminal) and walk 30km to Killarney Park (near 49th and Rupert). They will spend the night in our tent village and then walk another 30k back to Rocky Mountaineer!
We need volunteers to help with this fantastic event... volunteers like you! We have the following shifts available, so please email me at mwhitney@endcancer.ca as soon as possible if you are interested in any of them!
- August 15th, Rocky Mountaineer, 5am to noon, Lots of admin type shifts, lots of participant interaction
- August 16th, Killarney Park, 8am to 1pm, You will be taking down sleeping tents on this shift (great for large or small groups and families)
- August 16th, Rocky Mountaineer, 5am to 1pm, Set-Up/Admin Type Shifts/Closing Ceremonies
- August 16th, Rocky Mountaineer, 1pm to 8pm, Tear Down/Admin Type Shifts/Closing Ceremonies
Thanks in advance!!! For more info on this event you can visit www.endcancer.ca
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| Come Volunteer for The Weekend to End Breast Cancer! |
[20 Jul 2009|02:57pm] |
The Weekend to End Breast Cancer is a 2-day, 60km walk with one night of camping to raise money for BC Cancer Foundation and for the fight against breast cancer and other women's cancers throughout the province. Participants will start on Saturday August 15th at Rocky Mountaineer (near Main and Terminal) and walk 30km to Killarney Park (near 49th and Rupert). They will spend the night in our tent village and then walk another 30k back to Rocky Mountaineer!
We need volunteers to help with this fantastic event... volunteers like you! We have the following shifts available, so please email me at mwhitney@endcancer.ca as soon as possible if you are interested in any of them!
- August 15th, Rocky Mountaineer, 5am to noon, Lots of admin type shifts, lots of participant interaction
- August 16th, Killarney Park, 8am to 1pm, You will be taking down sleeping tents on this shift (great for large or small groups and families)
- August 16th, Rocky Mountaineer, 5am to 1pm, Set-Up/Admin Type Shifts/Closing Ceremonies
- August 16th, Rocky Mountaineer, 1pm to 8pm, Tear Down/Admin Type Shifts/Closing Ceremonies
Thanks in advance!!! For more info on this event you can visit www.endcancer.ca
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[20 Jul 2009|02:44pm] |
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I was wondering if there is anywhere downtown where I can get fries and vegetarian gravy? Like miso or black bean gravy or something like that. Thanks!
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| Marina Gorbis signs off from BB |
[20 Jul 2009|02:15pm] |
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/8h3KQ9j-5pY/marina-gorbis-signs.html Guestblogger Marina Gorbis is executive director at Institute for the Future.
Thank you so much for allowing me to engage you in a conversation. Our signature process at the Institute for the Future is what we call "Foresight to Insight to Action." We don't predict the future, because nobody can do that. Rather, we create provocative but realistic visions of the future. We use those forecasts to engage people in conversations about what this particular future might mean to them and to their organizations, what is important, what they need to pay attention to, what challenges they might be facing. Those are the insights that they can then use to develop action steps to achieve a desirable future.
Your generous comments were full of insights that I found really interesting and helpful. Here is what I learned from you in response to posting Socialstructing, Dead Souls on Social Media, Socialstructing: Statement of Social Currency, and Dushechka:
• Socialstructing -- organizing around social relations and not against them -- has the potential to humanize our economy. At the same time, substituting social capital for money as the new currency can bring in new challenges and new social divisions. We can end up with whole new classes of rich and poor based on new social capital metrics.
• Social networks can be exclusionary (secret societies, clubs, cliques), again something to watch for.
• The drive for accumulation may be as harmful with regard to social capital as it is with regard to money. People may engage in all kinds of unsavory practices to build up social capital (just as they do with financial capital).
• Any single metric of a person's reputation is bound to create a crooked mirror of someone's worth. Humans are too complex to be reduced to one measurable metric. What isn't the metric measuring? What perverse incentives for accumulation it is creating?
• Finally, and most importantly, as my son leaves for college, I need to watch out lest I develop new passions much less savory than bluegrass and baseball (thank you, @samuraizenu).
I want to leave you with one of my favorite short clips from an exercise IFTF did at the 2008 Maker Faire Bay Area. As visitors passed our booth, we asked them to record 30 second videos outlining their visions of the future. Great wisdom from the mouth of the babe, completely spontaneously.
Make a Better Future!
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| License Agreement for a Public Park |
[20 Jul 2009|02:16pm] |
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/6kre2KN_GDI/license-agreement-fo.html Now, this is nice and insane. So, apparently HSBC has "bought" the normally-public Madison Square Park in New York for today, and to make sure everyone knows it, by just setting foot in the park today is the equivalent of clicking the "I agree" box on something you'd probably never agree to.
This Awl article has details.
And what exactly is HSBC advertising? HSBC seems like one of those companies you end up doing business with because you have to-- does anyone seek out HSBC products? How would one even try to be excited about them?
I did a parody of these agreements for Carrie's Illegal Art exhibit; it looks like reality's hell bent on catching up. I'm sure in a couple of years, after Mountain Dew owns the now fluorescent-yellow moon, we'll be used to these kinds of things popping up everywhere.
Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture, that he hopes you'll want to buy. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist, started a webcasting company, and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.
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| Science Fiction Writers React to Moon Walk Anniversary |
[20 Jul 2009|04:28pm] |
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http://www.disinfo.com/content/story.php?title=Science-Fiction-Writers-React-to-Moon-Walk-Anniversary This magazine collected responses from NASA and other scientists -- plus some science fiction writers -- on the 40th anniversary of the first walk on the moon walk.
There's some fun quotes from Timothy Leary's archivist, and science fiction writer Chris Nakashima-Brown describes the moonwalk's "convergence of Nazi technology, American pulp, and Cold War geopolitics in the toolmaking hands and fevered imagination of the nomadic naked ape."
And Bruce Sterling laughs at the 13 people in orbit right now on the International Space Station, saying it's "just as mixed-up and globalized as any subway car in London, Paris, Munich, Moscow or New York." He argues "That polyglot crew of space techies doesn't seem to quite know what they're doing up there. They have no visible purpose and no business model.
"Then again, down here on Earth, neither do we. Looks like everybody gets the space heroes they deserve."
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| History of the US-USSR hotline |
[20 Jul 2009|12:20pm] |
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/6yaNkYBYYkw/history-of-the-us-us.html Here's a pieced-together social and technical history of the Kremlin-White House hotline, a fascinating story of crypto, diplomacy and wicked hardware:
The method to be used was one-time tape. Section 4 of the annex to the memorandum stated: "The USSR shall provide for preparation and delivery of keying tapes to the terminal point of the link in the United States for reception of messages from the USSR. The United States shall provide for the preparation and delivery of keying tapes to the terminal point of the link in the USSR for reception of messages from the United States. Delivery of prepared keying tapes to the terminal points of the link shall be effected through the Embassy of the USSR in Washington (for the terminal of the link in the USSR) and through the Embassy of the United States in Moscow (for the terminal of the link in the United States).
For its one-time tape hardware, the US would employ the ETCRRM II, or Electronic Teleprinter Cryptographic Regenerative Repeater Mixer II. One of many 'one-time' tape mechanisms sold by commercial firms, it was produced and sold for about $1,000 by Standard Telefon Kabelfabrik of Oslo, the Norwegian subsidiary of International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, the same company which installed the American terminal in the National Military Command Center deep within the Pentagon. It has four teleprinters -- two with English alphabet and two with Russian -- and four associated ETCRRM II's . In Moscow, the terminus was installed in the Kremlin, near the office of the Premier".
The Washington to London portion of the link was carried over the TAT-1 (Transatlantic No. 1), the first submarine transatlantic telephone cable system. It was laid between Gallanach Bay, near Oban, Scotland and Clarenville, Newfoundland between 1955 and 1956 and was inaugurated on September 25, 1956.
THE WASHINGTON-MOSCOW HOT LINE
(via Beyond the Beyond)
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| Radley Balko on NY Times photo: " I can’t really conceive of a scenario where it wasn’t staged." |
[20 Jul 2009|12:09pm] |
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/mjOdgY2hqtI/radley-balko-on-ny-t.html 
Radley Balko wrote on his blog, The Agitator:
I’m trying to figure out how the photo for this NY Times scare story on distracted driving was taken. I can’t really conceive of a scenario where it wasn’t staged. Which means the caption is misleading. Also, who does this? I’ve never been in a car where the driver asked the passenger to hold the wheel so he could use both hands to send a text message. Does this actually happen?
It's a good question. What *did* the photographer talk about with the kids in the car?
UPDATE: PDN Pulse asked the photographer, Dan Gill, about the photo. He says he took it last year when the NYT assigned him to hang around with a group of teenagers. He didn't stage the photo, he says.
"In the course of doing the story in which I was hanging out with or shadowing three high school students I made the picture.
"I met them at their high school after classes and spent the evening with them. I told them I would be with them but to forget I was there. It did not take them long for them to forget I was there. We rode from school to one of their houses and down an inter belt highway. The driver was constantly texting 'his girls' throughout our travels. At one point on the eight-lane inter belt either the driver suggested his friend hold the wheel or his friend suggested it...and they did it.
"Were we safe? Probably not.... As journalists, we are not here to judge or to direct, but only to observe and tell the story."
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[20 Jul 2009|02:54pm] |
I dated a girl who was young and cute, but not much going on in the brains department. Real ditz. Real immature.
Then I dated someone older who was a real sweet person, and intelligent too, but not much to look at. I lost attraction very quickly.
I was honestly happier with the cute young ditz. At least she looked good on my arm.
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| chlorinated |
[20 Jul 2009|01:45pm] |
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underwater camera fun....
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| deer |
[20 Jul 2009|09:32pm] |
*digital art
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| FAQ: RED |
[20 Jul 2009|05:41pm] |
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http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=7573 Yes. I wrote a short graphic novel — really more of a novelette or short story — called RED. It was illustrated brilliantly by Cully Hamner. It was a creator-owned work. Summit Entertainment acquired the film rights last year.
And, yes, according to Variety, Morgan Freeman is now in talks to co-star in the putative film adaptation alongside Bruce Willis.
And now you know about as much as I do. Heh.
Wasn’t expecting this to pop up the day before I leave for San Diego. Check the previous post for my San Diego FAQ.
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| Words of the day-- cretonne to shagreen |
[20 Jul 2009|07:31pm] |
cretonne
/kreton/
• noun a heavy cotton fabric, typically with a floral pattern, used for upholstery.
ORIGIN French.
oriflamme
/orriflam/
• noun literary a scarlet banner or knight’s standard.
ORIGIN Old French, from Latin aurum ‘gold’ + flamma ‘flame’.
shagreen
/shagreen/
• noun 1 sharkskin used for decoration or as an abrasive. 2 untanned leather with a rough granulated surface.
— ORIGIN variant of CHAGRIN in the literal sense ‘rough skin’.
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| Trail Of Carrot Bombs Across Sweden |
[20 Jul 2009|12:48pm] |
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http://www.disinfo.com/content/story.php?title=Trail-Carrot-Bombs-Across-Sweden A Swedish artist has spent months on a mega-project involving the public installation of faux-bombs, made of carrots, alarm clocks, red and blue cables, metal wire and tape, in the Göteborg area of Sweden. Called "Bunny Project," the concept is "rabbit as symbol for subversive activities, activities outside the reach of the control system. The rabbit has an almost unmatched ability to reproduce and spread uncontrollably and given the right conditions it can be almost impossible to stop." The carrot bombs have caused panic and disruption at golf courses, parking garages, and public speeches by government officials. I think they're kind of adorable.
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| Worshipping The Saint Of Death |
[20 Jul 2009|12:28pm] |
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http://www.disinfo.com/content/story.php?title=Worshipping-Saint-Death-1 GlobalPost has a fascinating photo series documenting the popular worship of St. Death in Mexico's toughest barrios. A mixture of Catholic and Aztec religious elements, Santa Muerte, often depicted as a skeletal reaper cloaked in a tunic, has an increasingly large religious following in Mexico. The nation's most famous St. Death alter is found in Tepito, a portion of Mexico City ruled by drug cartels that control who enters or leaves the neighborhood, including the police. Gang members and ordinary citizens pray at the alter, and worshipers will crawl for miles on bloodied knees before breaking into tears upon reaching it. Tales abound of reformed former gang members who renounced their lives of crime in order to devote themselves to Death worship.
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| Top Ten Cruelest Anti-Homeless Cities in the U.S. |
[20 Jul 2009|12:15pm] |
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http://www.disinfo.com/content/story.php?title=Top-Ten-Cruelest-Anti-Homeless-Cities-in-U-S- The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty (NLCHP) has a released a report detailing a growing trend in U.S. cities: the criminalization of homelessness. How do places make life (more) miserable for the shelter-less? Via "quality of life" laws making it illegal to sleep, eat, or sit in public spaces. Even as the ranks of the homeless have swelled over the last year or so of recession and foreclosures, the number of anti-loitering regulations in U.S. cities has shot upwards. Of course, people often don't have a choice about sleeping or wandering outside; most cities and towns don't have adequate shelter space or affordable housing to meet demand.
So, where are America's most homeless-hostile cities? Seven out of the top ten are located in California or Florida, with Los Angeles taking the number one spot, followed by St. Petersburg and Orlando, FL; Atlanta; and Gainesville, FL. So, if you're riding the rails, you may want to steer clear of those towns and try Milwaukee or something.
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| Girl with Mr. Moon |
[20 Jul 2009|09:13pm] |
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Yazoo — Only you |
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Maybe that's just sketch…
:)
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| Lunar rocks are a controlled substance |
[20 Jul 2009|09:51am] |
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/5hq2c7ZwCxQ/lunar-rocks-are-a-co.html 
US law forbids private citizens from possessing any of the 842 pounds of moon rocks collected by astronauts and brought back to Earth.
Nevertheless, the allure of moon rocks is strong enough to have created a black market where moon rock fragments and dust are sold for astronomical prices.
One way to obtain a moon rock is by purchasing a plaque that the US government sometimes gives to famous people and to politicians from other countries. They contain tiny slivers of moon rock. Some of these gifts have drifted into the collectors' market. A 1998 CNN article, "Customs agents seize 4-billion-year-old moon rock," reported that a Florida man was arrested for trying to sell a "fingernail-sized moon rock, weighing barely more than a gram" for $5 million. The rock was originally given to the Honduran government in 1973 by then-President Richard Nixon:
Customs agents, postal inspectors and NASA launched "Operation Lunar Eclipse" in September with an advertisement in USA Today seeking moon rocks, officials said.
A Florida man identified as Alan Rosen called to offer a moon rock for sale. He told undercover agents he had bought the rock from the retired Honduran military officer, officials said. Agents viewed the rock at a suburban Miami bank and seized it on November 18, officials said.
Walter Cronkite got one of these plaques in 2004. Now that he is dead, I wonder where it will end up?
There's also an underground market in moon dust taken from dirty spacesuits. From a 1993 Omni article:
Upon the Apollo astronauts' return from each mission, NASA shipped the spacesuits to their manufacturer for inspection. According to unpublished accounts, workers sometimes ran loops of scotch tape across them, picking up small amounts of moon dust.
One of those moon-dust tapes, purportedly made off of an Apollo 14 lunar spacesuit, showed up in a for-sale newspaper ad early in 1992. A man named Steve Goodman had found the tape among the papers of his late father, whose company manufactured spacesuits. After consultation with Goodman and his lawyer, NASA decided it wasn't worth the effort--or the bad publicity--to confiscate the contraband moon-dust sample.
According to Antiques Roadshow, Christie's sold a moondust-on-tape sample for $300,000.
Also from Antiques Roadshow:
At a Superior Galleries sale in Beverly Hills in October 2000, one lucky collector named Florian Noller spotted a bag used to store artifacts collected on the moon that was taken from the Apollo 15 command module Endeavor. He bought the bag for $2,300. When Noller looked inside the bag, he found a previously unnoticed sprinkling of moon dust along its seams. He put scatterings of dust on little thumb-sized white cards and placed them on photos of astronaut James Irwin saluting the American flag, and then sold them in 2001 through Spaceflori, the German space memorabilia dealer he formed. Compared to the Irwin patch, this serendipitous moon dust was a bargain: the 12 larger cards sold for $2,495, the 50 smaller ones for $995.
One perfectly legal way to own a moon rock is by finding or buying a lunar meteorite. Here's a New Scientist video (and article) on how to tell if a rock is from the moon:
eBay currently has five auctions offering moon rock meteoritese. The one shown here has a Buy It Now price of $34.90 and is guaranteed by the International Meteorite Collectors Association to be authentic.
My favorite is this "Rare Moon Rock 'Metal' Piece" selling for $2000:
MOON ROCK "METAL"
I'M NOT SURE HOW TO EVEN DESCRIBE THE ITEM.
A GENTLEMAN OWNED A METAL BUSINESS IN THE MIDWEST BACK IN THE 70's & 80'S, ONE OF HIS CUSTOMERS SENT HIM THESE PIECE WITH AN UNUSUAL REQUEST.
HE WANTED THIS PIECE OF MOON ROCK "METAL" MELTED DOWN & PUT INTO ONE OF HIS BATCH OF STEEL.
I'M NOT SURE OF THE REASON IT NEVER GOT DONE BUT HERE IT IS ON EBAY.
COMES WITH CERTIFIED LETTER WITH THE DATES OF THE REQUESTED WORK TO BE DONE. THE NAMES HAVE BEEN "DIGITALLY "WHITED OUT TO PROTECT THE NAMES..
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| Couple from iconic Woodstock photo still a couple |
[20 Jul 2009|09:43am] |
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/dZSvkxwodvg/couple-from-iconic-w.html 
On Saturday, I posted about a new gallery show of Burk Uzzle's Woodstock photos, including the iconic shot seen above left. Turns out, the couple in the photo who had only met a few months before the concert are still together 40 years later. From the New York Daily News (photo Harbus for News):
(Nick and Bobbi Ercoline, now 60,) say they remember nothing of the original shot, taken by Burk Uzzle. "We weren't striking a pose," Nick says. "We were as surprised as everybody to see that photo on the album cover."
They discovered it while at a friend's house listening to the album and passing around the gatefold jacket. First, Nick recognized the famous yellow butterfly staff in the left corner. "It belonged to this guy Herbie," Nick says. "We latched on to him that day because he was having a very bad experience. He was tripping pretty heavily and he had lost his friends. After I saw that staff I said, 'Hey that's our blanket.' Then I said, 'Hey, that's us.'"
Bobbi, then 20, wasn't overly impressed. "Woodstock was over and done with at that time," she says. "It didn't seem like a big deal. The only thing was that then I had to tell my mother I had gone. She didn't know. But by then, she didn't mind."
"Woodstock concert's undercover lovers, Nick and Bobbi Ercoline, 40 years after summer of love" (Thanks, Richard Metzger!)
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| Barry Greaves (1977 - 2009): the unsung twitterer |
[21 Jul 2009|12:00am] |
 It is with great sadness that we report the death of Barry Greaves, the author of the satirical Twitter feed Twit Opera.
Greaves (32, unemployed) lived with his parents at Newfield Drive, off Selby Road in Garforth, Leeds.
"We noticed something was amiss at about six o'clock on Friday evening," Mary Greaves (58), Barry's mother, told Echo reporters.
"He hadn't taken in his lunch. I always leave it outside his door on a tray. Barry likes -- liked -- his privacy."
"Aye, he wasn't banging around like he usually does up there," echoed Barry's father Greg Greaves (62, retired). "I went over to the computer to see if he'd updated Twit Opera that day, and he hadn't. That's when we realised something was very wrong."
Since April, Barry -- a graduate of Leeds University's Engineering department -- has been writing a daily micro-parody of Click Opera, the blog of Scottish artist Momus. He became a master of Twitter's unique capacity to boil complex, interesting things down to 140 characters or less and make them look trivial and superficial.
"Twit Opera became the focus of Barry's day," Mary told reporters, "especially after he lost his job at the car wash."
"Barry tended to be restless and edgy until Momus posted. He'd reload the Click Opera homepage over and over murmuring 'Come on, come on, post, you bastard!' His day's work couldn't really start until Momus published something, you see. When the blog went up, he'd spend a couple of hours just thinking about how to make it look small, silly and self-serving. He'd compile lists of the most withering summaries he could come up with and read them aloud in different voices and accents, dressed up in front of the mirror."
"After he'd polished five or six of the most vicious summaries, Barry would take the momentous decision on which one to finally tweet. He'd do that by tossing coins or invoking spirits using his ouija board. Then he went live before his audience on Twitter. At that point there'd be a couple of minutes of euphoria -- we'd hear him punching the wall, calling out 'Gotcha!', and opening the door a few inches to take in his food."
"Then the whole process would start again."
Emergency crew were called to the scene when Greaves failed to answer prolonged and persistent knocking by his parents at his bedroom door on Friday evening. They found Greaves stretched out on his bed, dressed as the poet Chatterton. Medical staff quickly determined that his feed was tweeting feebly and his RSS was flat-lining. He was rushed to St Benedicts Parish Centre, but ceased to twitter in the ambulance. No amount of reloading could revive him.
"The thing you have to realise about Barry," said his mother Mary, "is that no matter how much he may have seemed to be slagging it off, he really loved Click Opera. He didn't intend to hurt or disparage Momus in any way."
"In fact, deep down Barry aspired to be Momus. He took everything he said to heart. For instance, when Momus declared oblong-shaped glasses had been superseded in 'a spectacles paradigm shift', Barry was devastated. He burst into the living room that day, threw his 1990s-style 'designer' spectacles -- the ones he'd worn at uni -- down on the carpet, and stamped on them repeatedly, uttering gruff shouts as he smashed them to smithereens. The next thing we knew, he had a pair of retro Raybans. He wore them when he was sleeping."
"He even had his room papered in wood-effect wallpaper to make it look like the background behind Momus's LiveJournal. Click Opera was his whole world."
"Aye," echoed Greg Greaves, "he started dressing in packing blankets and wearing them daft plastic Birkenstocks with no socks. Then he demanded to know where the greatest concentrations of Turkish guest workers were to be found in the greater Leeds area. I told him I didn't think there were any. Once I caught him looking -- with one eye covered -- at pictures of naked pregnant Japanese lasses in a dirty book. I told him 'You're just turning into a shorter version of that tosser Momus, you are!' He didn't like that one bit. He didn't like it when you said he was short, or made fun of Momus. That was his job."
Mary interrupted: "The last week was very hard on him, very hard. Momus ran a poll which revealed that most people disagreed with Barry's big theme that Click Opera was too personal to be interesting. The final straw was discovering that 30% of Click Opera readers thought that Momus wrote Twit Opera himself. Barry was crushed. Even an anonymous twitterer needs some kind of recognition, you know."
"That's why we've decided to make all this public now in the Leeds Echo, and give you the pictures to print. It's what Barry -- God rest his feed -- would have wanted."
Reprinted from the Leeds Echo, July 20th 2009
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| Virgin Music Fest |
[20 Jul 2009|09:32am] |
Hey everyone,
I've got 2 tickets for the Saturday of the Virgin Music festival, but we'd rather go see the Sunday show now due to scheduling conflicts. On the off-chance - would anyone happen to have tickets for the Sunday show and want to switch? Or do you know if they might let us do an exchange anyways?
If you miraculously do want to switch with me, please contact me at jtsoung@hotmail.com
Thanks!
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