New Machine Blues: "Quiet Pants," Qi Gong TV and The Paintball Channel
I decided to spend a few minutes getting acquainted with my new Winamp 5 internet TV and radio stream viewer today, taking advantage of a little "quiet time" with my zippy network connection. I browsed:
Chinese-language video streams, including the Qi Gong Channel and the Chinese Prophecy Channel
WEEN-TV (the band's tv and video appearances looped), REM and Björk videos
Saltwaterchimp.com, with streaming Sifl and Ollie, South Park, Monty Python and the Simpsons. Sweet!
A few odd German cable and public access streams, and a Hungarian pirate radio station with overmodulated, outdated dance music and a webcam staring at a messy, unoccupied studio desk.
ranttv::tv worth watching," and showed a man in full camo gear holding an automatic rifle, with his voice and face disguised, discussing a CIA's employee's very comfortable used camo Goretex pants - and where one can buy a pair. I learned more about camo pants that I ever thought I needed to know - including how to find the quietest pants, that lets you sneak up on people without them hearing you. Now, who would make good use of information like this? Yup. That's who.
Amateur streams, one consisting solely of a poorly-focused webcam trained down a dark office hallway near the coffeepot, so viewers can occasionally glimpse a head-and-shoulders silhouette of some guy standing around sipping a cuppa joe. The caption read "new machine blues". Reminds me of when I heard of the first-ever "webcam," the now-defunct CoffeeCam set up at Cambridge University's Trojan room.
FreedomTV had a man and woman lecturing on the dangers of allowing a company like Monsanto to internationally manufacture lock-and-key combos - herbicides and complementary genetically modified food crop seeds that are resistant to the chemicals - which they contended was a scenario akin to a poisoner selling you your own antidote.
TV McGill, streaming student-run TV from the Canadian university of the same name: the fare included a news story of a Catholic priest discussing same-sex marriage, followed by "Party Central With Tara and Gert," two young McGill ladies interviewing fellow students about their favorite watering holes about town.
And most quintessentially free-access-internet of all, there's The Paintball Channel - endless, poorly-edited home video of paintball competitions with an incessant death-metal soundtrack.
Try it sometime: there's so much bizarre, banal, but occasionally intriguing material from around the world to choose from, like the Oughties equivalent of CB and ham radio. Still, it's a heck of a lot more fun than network TV.
Speaking of strange, surreal experiences...last night around midnight, as I was blissfully in the throes of sleep, I heard a very odd noise outside our partially-open bedroom window. It sounded like an aluminum ladder being open and dragged across the ground, exactly where I couldn't tell.
I think I was starting to have a weird dream where I was in the military with a group of Native Americans, and I had to drive some heavy machinery. A bulldozer, I think. It was one of those back-in-high-school time-shift dreams that seem perfectly normal until you wake up, astounded and bemused by the nonsense that your brain conjures at night. I heard something rattle in the dream. Squeak rattle squeak. Have you seen the X-Files episode called "Badlaa"? It's about a short-statured, vengeful Hindu ascetic who gets around on a small squeaky platform, controls people's visual perceptions and travels around the world in a most gruesome manner. The squeak rattle squeak sounded exactly like that, and believe me, that's not an image you want to conjure up in the middle of the night.
Not being fully conscious, I didn't pay too much attention. Then, a few minutes later, the sound returned, and it was getting closer. What was it? As I started to wake up nervously, it occurred to me it might be someone outside the apartment window trying to get in with a ladder - not the most comforting of thoughts on an otherwise quiet urban midnight.
My better half, who tends to wake more easily than me (then again, probably most of the world wakes up more easily than I do) also heard the rattle rattle squeak and popped up out of bed, put on her glasses an went to window to have a look. As the blinds lifted, the room glowed bluish-orange from the streetlights.
"Oh, my god - do you know what that is?"
"Mmmmh. What is it?" I reply, half-asleep, half-curious.
"It's a dead body!"
I didn't even want to speculate how a dead body could be making that weird sound; the possibilities were just too horrible.
"They're carrying it across the ground!"
"A dead body?" I say, incrementally more awake but somehow not entirely surprised.
"Two guys are out there, and they're taking away a body and putting it in a hearse. It's kind of a big body, and it's covered in a brown blanket."
The squeaky metallic sound were the wheels on the gurney the men were using to wheel away the deceased. We're still not sure if the body came from our apartment complex, and because of the leisurely speed and lack of alarm displayed by the hearsemen of the Apocalypse, we speculated that it might have been one of our neighbors - a large older man who has cancer, and who has looked very poorly in recent days. What a way to end up - being wheeled down the sidewalk on a squeaky gurney in the middle of the night. I suppose there are worse ways to go, at midnight in the city.
I never got up out of bed to have a look at the scene outside my window: the descriptions and my imagination were quite sufficient, thank you. It also reminded me of a truly creepy scene in the 1976 movie Burnt Offerings, where Oliver Reed is tormented by nightmares of a skeleton-thin, pale hearse driver in shades who bangs and drags a coffin up the stairs to his bedroom.
Now, if we see "Bob" walking around tomorrow, we'll know he hasn't given up the ghost; and we'll probably never know whose body was under the brown blanket on the squeaky gurney.
Now, here's a sad story - it seems that a local child therapist, one who's been entrusted by families in distress, youth at risk, and society, may have been using his position as confidant and advocate, as a vehicle to sexually molest the very children he's supposed to be helping.
I'm not sure why this story is having the profound effect that it is having on me, I think it perhaps has to do with the fact that I have 2 daughters and a niece that are of that age, and I (perhaps naively) believed that they were safe in our neighborhood... "not in the North Country!"
Or, thinking about it farther, it may be that if these allegations do turn out to be true - that if these children (who are in therapy because of other issues) have been sexually molested, by this "professional" within this particular field... one who's "there to help"... well, that there's a real chance that these children may ruined for life... and will probably never trust again, and have at the very have least lost their childhood.
I guess I can say "thank god it didn't happen to my kids" - but, you know... when you get right down to it, that's a pretty awful statement to make, because it's absolutely devoid of empathy and sympathy for those damaged children, and besides, now I realize that it could happen to my children, right here in the North Country.
I think I'll say a prayer for those kids tonight... can't hurt, right???
...And hope that the truth, and justice for the guilty (if guilty) can heal.
Hi there... well, it's been a while! I've posted what I've titled Revisionist History - Part Deux, over at my blog, Multifarious Musings... why not come over to my place, have a read, and speak your mind on my latest musing???
"NEW YORK (Reuters) - "Sun City" Texas just became Sweat City U.S.A.
El Paso, Texas, with average summer temperatures above 93 degrees Fahrenheit and relative humidity over 70 percent, is the sweatiest city in the United States, a study released on Tuesday found.
Research scientist Tim Long calculated heat indexes and relative humidity levels to come up with his top 100 sweatiest cities in America list.
By Long's calculations, in just four hours, El Paso's residents produce enough sweat to fill an Olympic swimming pool, with individuals shedding more than 36 fluid ounces of perspiration an hour."
"We've been banging our heads against the wall trying to figure out what numbers they used or, rather, how they misused their numbers," said Mike Hardiman, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service's El Paso office. Old Spice said El Paso had an average relative humidity of more than 70 percent from June to August last year. The real average, according to the National Weather Service, was half that.
Old Spice said the numbers came from the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration's database. The company, which is, after all, primarily in the consumer goods business, went with the most readily available numbers, said Tim Long, a Proctor & Gamble researcher and "sweat expert."
"If it wasn't accurate, we apologize," he said....Following El Paso in the rankings were Greenville, S.C.; Phoenix.; Corpus Christi; and New Orleans. Texas remained among the sweatiest states in the third annual rankings, with seven cities in the top 20.
Officials at the San Antonio Convention & Visitors Bureau could stay dry knowing the Alamo City did not top the list. The city is still hurting from having been named one of the fattest cities in the country. "Yeah, I guess this is one case where we don't want to be No. 1," said Robert Salluce, a spokesman for the bureau. "It is not an accolade we are seeking."
San Antonio may not want the honor, but New Orleans does. Brent Miller, an Old Spice spokesman, said residents of the Big Easy "always go to town" on the ranking. "They are so mad they are not No. 1," Miller said. "They should not want it. It is not an honor."
What? Cities are fighting for the right to be fat and smelly?
A Colorado animal-welfare organization called the Dumb Friends League is sponsoring the Kitty Karnival in Denver this Saturday. Among the events - you can dig in the World's Largest Kitty Litter Box!
I kid you not. I may get airline tickets and fly out to Denver just for this.
"NEW YORK (Reuters) - "Sun City" Texas just became 
