Archive for August, 2010

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I Was A Punk Before You Were A Punk Part I

[ 3 Comments ]Posted on August 21, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture

Saturday, August 21st, 2010

How Gutter Punks, Crusties, and Travelers represent a conformist and freedom-motivated lifestyle “brand” that isn’t Punk at all.


Has Anarchy Become A Brand?

That’s not only a song by The Tubes that I really don’t care for, it’s also a simple truth. It was all kind of an accident really. In 1977 I didn’t mean to be a teenage punk. I just had the misfortune of having a British hairdresser and a predilection for buying my clothes at resale shops at the same time that bands like the Sex Pistols were first making a splash. Suddenly, and for almost a decade, I was “punk”. Which was annoying, because the fact was that in spite of my appearances in the early eighties, I HATED most punk bands, and just about everything else that was officially punk. My friends and I were just arty types who liked drugs, had weird haircuts, wore a lot of black clothes and makeup, and didn’t want to be Ronald Reagan’s suggested version of a young adult, i.e.: a YUPPY. All of which is why I have a sort of anthropological fascination with contrived American urban tribes and subcultures like Gore Lolitas and Juggalo Furries, body modders, self-cutting emos, and most recently “Gutter Punks”. You may have noticed more of these kids lately; while they’ve been annoying people in hipster havens like Williamsburg or the Haight in San Francisco for quite a while, they’ve more recently been invading more middle American towns as well. I was actually spending time with a few of them recently to write an in-depth piece, but got tired of being stood up by them over and over, so have shelved the idea for a while. Which was kind of a relief in a way. Because although some of the kids I talked to were witty, reasonably intelligent, and had some interesting things to say, they really, REALLY smelled awful. And I’m not the kind of person that needs everybody to smell “Zestfully Clean” or anything; I’ve been around all kinds of people who don’t have the same hygiene standards as an urban American. The natural smell of a healthy human really isn’t unpleasant. But almost every crowd of these kids I’ve spent time with smells like some horrible collision of urban grime, petrol, beer, patchouli, urine, feta cheese, and Cool Ranch Doritos™. Not necessarily in that order. That may sound superficial, but try spending an hour with it. In any case, what I really find intriguing about this kind of “tribe” is that these kids have made a serious lifestyle choice, and usually possess refined hoboing, trainhopping, and grifting skills that are all wrapped up in a hybridized cookie-cutter countercultural brand that borrows from beats, hippies, punks, and rastas to create a new lifestyle that is “off the grid” and seems rebellious, but is ultimately based on conformity. It’s like “anarchy as a brand”. Which is why I cracked up when I learned that there was a The Decline Of Western Civilization: Part III for sale on Amazon for 200 bucks . The first film in that series was considered a little shocking by the mainstream when it came out in the eighties, but Part III? How long is this decline going to take? I’m still going to try to meet up with some of these kids to explore their attitudes firsthand, but if you want to learn more about these roving packs of dreadlocked punks and their dogs, they’re often referred to as Gutter Punks or Crusties, and have been around long enough as a definable subculture that you can find references like this 1998 Phoenix NewTimes piece which goes into considerable depth. The kids themselves may prefer terms like “traveler” or no label at all, and although sources like Wikipedia will suggest they often have some link to Anarcho-punk culture, I quite often find that they simply don’t think much farther than the next drink or where to hang out. Which IS pretty punk, but c’mon. How punk are you REALLY if your band Capitalist Casualties is on iTunes? Read the rest of this entry »

The Biomethane Industry Is Booming

[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 20, 2010 by admin in Clean & Green

Friday, August 20th, 2010

Toilet powered Volkswagens, dual fuel trucks, and refugee camps powered by porta-potties. If we could just get all the politicians that are in the pocket of big oil to pull their heads out of their rears, we could double our alternative energy resources.


This little baby gets about
143 MPT (miles per toilet)

When I was in grade school, I would – as I know many young boys probably still do – joke about how if we could just harness my friend’s seemingly never-ending compulsion to break wind, the world’s energy problems would be solved. As I grew older, this joke found new life in reference to the hot air of politicians who promote the myth of hope for America’s energy independence (see Robert Bryce’s Gusher of Lies. Well, at least the former is becoming a reality. We’ve talked before about reducing America’s carbon fatprint, the methane assprint of cows, and how people shouldn’t poopoo Norway’s buses, but there have been some interesting new developments in the world of human waste as fuel in recent months. The UK organic waste specialists GENeco, for instance, have developed a fully functioning Volkswagen Beetle that runs on human waste. Well, not directly on human waste; it runs on the methane produced during the sewage treatment process, but the developers claim it can travel 10,000 miles on the waste from just 70 British toilets. No specs were available on American toilet performance as of this writing. In economically devastated Flint, Michigan, students at Kettering University are proving that the Midwestern work ethic and resourcefulness that once made the US auto industry a global force is still alive, by working with Swedish Biogas International to produce a dual fuel Chevy Silverado truck that can run entirely on biomethane. The truck is an exploratory project; Flint is also apparently considering biomethane as a mass transit fuel. And in Germany, a team at the University of Weimar is developing a project involving portable lavatories that recycle waste as fuel. Their hope is that this can solve two problems of the burgeoning number of refugee camps around the world in one stroke, by creating energy for the camp from the waste it produces. According to the UN Refugee Agency, 300 refugee camps around the world are home to about 2.4 million people, and one third of these refugee camps have inadequate waste disposal and energy resources. Now if only we could get all the politicians who are in the pocket of the oil industry to pull their heads out of their rears. If a car can travel 10,000 miles on the waste from 70 toilets, imagine how far it could go on the hot air from just one campaign speech.

Righthaven LLC: Suing Bloggers For Fun & Profit

[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 19, 2010 by admin in Editorial & Opinion

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

Although the music and film industries seem to have eased up on suing as a business model, an opportunistic lawyer has filled the gap by doing the same for online news.


Mickey Isn’t The Only One
Shackled By Copyright Law Abuse

Sometimes I wonder if poor Sonny Bono ran himself into a tree while skiing on purpose, to punish himself for his part in helping drive forward the endless onslaught of frivolous and abusive lawsuits and copyright trolling of the past decade or so. We’ve touched on issues relating to this before, mostly in reference to the RIAA or MPAA, but it appears there’s a new copybully on the block, and he’s here to save the world from all the money-grubbing bloggers that are apparently solely responsible for the continued demise of the news industry, with their felonious linking and article-citing practices. That Wired article just linked to sums up the story pretty well, but if you want to keep up to speed, visit RighthavenLawsuits.com, which is NOT the website of Righthaven LLC, but rather a site set up to track the insane number of lawsuits being served up by these greedy bastards. I say “greedy”, because the main guy behind this all has stated publicly that he’s doing it primarily for profit, and I say “bastard” because I think anyone could tell by looking at the bloated, smug, self-satisfied jerk in this photo that he is one. Interestingly, Righthaven doesn’t seem to have a site themselves, unless they’ve sued into oblivion everyone with a link to it. If you want to be sure you avoid any of the many news organizations being represented in these actions, a list of Stephens Media Newspapers can be found here, and Clayton Cramer’s Blog has a simple Firefox-based solution here. And to “avoid their wrath”, see this blog post by Las Vegas trademark and intellectual property attorney Ryan Gile.

Scientist #1: Blah, Blah, Blah. Scientist #2: Nuh-uh!

[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 18, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

It’s interesting how two scientists with the same information available can arrive at diametrically opposed positions. Is science just another religion? Ray Kurzweil says we’ll reverse engineer the brain in 20 years. PZ Myers says “nuh-unh”. Oh yeah, and the web is dead. Or it isn’t. Or it is.

No it isn’t.

I would like to clarify that I am not an expert in any of the areas I’m about to discuss. This is obvious to most intelligent people whenever I start to speak, but I just want to make sure that you know that I know. In spite of my lack of expertise (some may call it actual ignorance) in the fields of science, technology, religion, and philosophy, I have a great deal of enthusiasm for learning about and discussing them, which is why I love it when a real scientist or expert makes a broad, bold assertion, and another immediately refutes it. This happened twice today in the tech press, and in one instance, the contested “science” veered dangerously close to the metaphysical. The more mundane example was when Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson (who most recently got a lot of attention for his book Free) expressed his agreement with pop star Prince’s assessment that “the web is dead”. Other experts immediately turned his own pretty graphics against him, or did more in-depth treatises that were more about how you should never say something is “dead”, being careful not to actually say “you should never say…”. The debate that I found much more interesting though, was the one that started when Ray Kurzweil (author of The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology) suggested that the human brain will be reverse-engineered by 2030. It wasn’t long before developmental neuroscientist PZ Myers intellectually carpet bombed Kurzweil’s prediction back to the stone age. Which I took special delight in, because Myers himself is a self-proclaimed “godless liberal”, and here he was deconstructing the arguments of a guy that has so much faith in his science that he’s willing to believe we’ll become god-like and fully understand the universe and the brain using science as a tool within just a few decades. It’s only at times like this that I’ll resort to quoting Donald Rumsfeld poetry, but these guys seem to have a hard time understanding The Rumsfeldian maxim Read the rest of this entry »

Why You Need To Stop Uploading Photos From Your iPhone To Facebook. Now.

[ 2 Comments ]Posted on August 17, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

With over 2 billion photos uploaded to Facebook each month and 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every MINUTE, when will we have time to enjoy it all? And where will we keep it until then?

As I bemoaned the fact the other day that I had nothing I wanted to listen to in my music collection, I had to pause and laugh. I have what some of my friends consider to be a rather puny collection at about 14,000 song files. Really? Nothing to listen to? If I DID choose to listen to it all, I just did the math, and it would play non-stop for just over 48 days! And my collection is only about 0.001% of the 13,000,000 songs on iTunes. This reminded me of a discussion I had years ago when I worked in a bookstore and I asked one of the more seasoned bibliophiles on staff when he thought was the last time a person might have read all the books in print, and without hesitating he replied “around the time of Voltaire”. I guess book store employees have time to ponder these things. Today, if you were to read a book a day, it would take you 355,794 years to accomplish the same feat, at least based on Google Books’ count, which is 129,864,880 books. Things get worse when it comes to user-generated content. If you wanted to watch all the videos uploaded to YouTube from JUST TODAY, it would take you about 94 years. Of course, somewhere in there you’d be watching a few thousand versions of Keyboard Cat, but that’s how much video was uploaded today; 24 hours’ worth every minute. And things are for all practical purposes just as hopeless if you have any intention of trying to keep up with feature films; this source says that globally, there were 6,324 made by major studios in 2009, and if you include indy films submitted to major festivals, the number jumps to 50,000 each year. Even if you stuck to only watching the major releases, that’s still 17 movies a day. So where do we store all this media? And when will we have time to consume it? Well, the answer to the first question may soon become a problem; 2008 was the first year in which the data we generated exceeded our available storage space. Thank God we delete old e-mails, right? And the answer to the second is up to you. Personally, this all made me realize that with an estimated 37 years to live (according to this MSN calculator, who knows how much storage space it uses) I probably need to select my media more carefully, and maybe read a book before years’ end. That hour on YouTube, 3 hours on Wikipedia, and 2 hours sharing it all on Facebook last night was probably time better spent. Read the rest of this entry »

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