On the Fritz

I received this email solicitation from DFA this morning and it took me several minutes to figure out why they’re asking for a donation of $20.08.

Dear Fritz,

You and I have seen this attack before.

Yesterday morning, the Miami Herald quoted Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart calling Joe Garcia and his supporters “left-wing extremists.”

“Joe Garcia continues to align himself with left-wing extremists. The latest to join the ranks is Congressman Charlie Rangel,” reads a statement from Diaz-Balart’s campaign.

“He has a long and well-known history of supporting a radical left-wing agenda including supporting higher taxes on working families and appeasing our nation’s enemies. Left-wing birds of a feather, tax and spend together.”

I know we will not just stand aside and let these attacks go unanswered. Let’s show this Bush-Republican machine what we can do when “birds of a feather” really flock together, contribute $20.08 to Joe Garcia right now.

http://www.actblue.com/page/supportjoe

Ryan Seacrest: What America really wants to know Simon, how did your chihuahuas react tonight?

Simon Cowell: Ah, I actually don’t have any chihuahuas, Ryan.

Seacrest: Take a tight shot, you’ll see.

Paula Abdul: (Clapping) Ah, ha, ha, ha!

Randy Jackson: Whoa!  Whoa! Whoa!

I’m willing to bet this was done for the benefit of The Soup’s Joel McHale. Look for a special appearance from Lou the chihuahua on Friday.

What is a Rickroll?  

For those of you who haven’t yet encountered the Internet phenomenon known as the Rickroll, here’s the Wikipedia entry:

Rickroll

Rickrolling is an Internet meme involving Rick Astley’s music video for his song “Never Gonna Give You Up”. In a Rickroll, a person provides a link they claim is relevant to the topic at hand which actually takes the user to the Astley video. It can also mean playing the song loudly in public in order to be disruptive.

The practice began as a variant of an earlier prank called duckrolling, in which a link to a popular celebrity or news item would instead lead to a photoshopped picture of a duck with wheels. By May 2007, the practice had become widespread, and it eventually began to garner some coverage in the mainstream media.

More…

The Popularity of Rickrolling

While the original Rick Astley video was reported to have received 17 million hits earlier this year, Rickrolling gained a huge leap in popularity on April Fool’s Day 2008. I added up the hits of Rick Astley videos on YouTube and they total up to well over 25 million.

In March 2008, an online entertainment reporter for the L.A. Times interviewed Rick Astley about the Rickroll fad.

Web Scout exclusive! Rick Astley, king of the ‘Rickroll,’ talks about his song’s second coming

01:37 PM PT, Mar 25 2008

Astley talks about discovering the “Rickroll”

On a frosty Canadian morning, a masked crusader tromps across a parking lot, over a snow bank and onto the sidewalk. He has a loudspeaker strapped ominously to his chest.

He halts, aiming the speaker toward the building across the street. “This is a song by some dead guy,” he says. And then, music booms forth:

“Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you.”

More…

“A Song By a Gay Guy”

What isn’t discussed in the L.A. Times and Wikipedia articles is how the Rickroll started and why it is so popular with young people — mostly young men and boys.

Rickrolling started in 2007 when the Rick Astley song Never Gonna Give You Up was introduced on an episode of the Fox cartoon show Family Guy with the line “And now here’s a song by a gay guy.”

Soon, bloggers were adding links to blogs and forums with the phrase “Here’s a song by a gay guy…”

Here are a few more examples:

The Manic Savant: And Here’s A Song By A Gay Guy.
The Maudlin Press: Heres a song by a gay guy
Democratic Underground.com: Here’s a song by a gay guy
silent_r_infork: Here’s a song by a gay guy!
Mess+Noise: Here’s a song by a gay guy

As evidenced in the L.A. Times web article, many people are now white-washing the phrase Here’s a song by a gay guy and replacing the word gay with dead or lame or something else less offensive.

However, that doesn’t erase the homophobic origins of the Rickroll — or change why young men find Rick Astley so hilarious.

Last year, Frank Black returned to using the performance name Black Francis with his album Bluefinger. His new EP sv n f ng rs (seven fingers) is a nice little follow up that harkens back to the artist’s days as frontman for Pixies.

If you’re a Pixies/Black Francis/Frank Black fan, you’ll enjoy these seven tracks. My particular favorites are Garbage Heap, I Sent Away and When They Come to Murder Me.

All of the tracks are light on the screaming vocals that have often earned Francis/Black harsh reviews. I was glad to hear the familiar guitar work that made me a fan of Pixies back in the late 1980s.

Garbage Heap will undoubtedly be the most popular track on this EP. It is the most Pixies-like, with Francis/Black drifting from dreamy falsetto to an almost Bowie-esque croon. He also displays his talent for using guitar noise as an almost organic part of the song. 

The EP is just a few tunes short of being a complete album and is priced at only $5.99 on iTunes. So how can you go wrong?

Track List

1. The Seus - 3:42   
2. Garbage Heap -2:50   
3. Half Man - 2:33   
4. I Sent Away - 2:04   
5. Seven Fingers - 1:47   
6. The Tale of Lonesome Fetter - 3:57   
7. When They Come to Murder Me - 3:24

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve been having trouble with iTunes lately. Several months ago, iTunes launched iTunes Plus, an upgraded version of the service that offers higher bit rate, unprotected music files.  Music that is available as iTunes Plus is clearly marked as shown in the illustration below.

If my experience is not unusual, many iTunes customers aren’t getting what they’re paying for with iTunes Plus. The last two albums I purchased, The B-52s’ Funplex and Moby’s Last Night were both advertised as iTunes Plus. However, what iTunes actually delivered were the inferior standard DRM versions of the albums.

I would have rather ordered CDs from Amazon.com had these album been advertised as standard iTunes.

Obviously, iTunes Plus purchases are larger files and cost iTunes more to deliver. It is also quite probable that iTunes pays higher licensing fees for the non-DRM versions. Certainly, by offering iTunes Plus and then delivering smaller DRM versions, iTunes is saving a lot of money.

If you’ve ordered music from iTunes lately that you thought was going to be iTunes Plus, you should check the file properties and make sure you got what you paid for. Make sure that iTunes is set up to display “Kind” in the files details display.

Those songs that are iTunes Plus will be labeled “Purchased AAC audio file” and those that are standard iTunes will be labeled “Protected AAC audio file”.

If you thought you purchased iTunes Plus and the song is labeled “Protected” you were ripped off by iTunes, too.

I was given a refund for The B-52s album that I ordered. However, how many people are being ripped off by iTunes and don’t even realize it? You can’t tell me that this was a simple mistake. The files are either iTunes Plus or they aren’t.

WrestleMania’s lead-in: ‘Nipplegate’

Scott Maxwell
TAKING NAMES

March 28, 2008

But the wrestlers featured on a massive sign in downtown Orlando look even more unusual.

They’re missing nipples.

Yep. John Cena, Triple H, Randy Orton and even Big Show. All nipple-less.

And Ken-like.

Even more unsettling is the fact that government is partly responsible for the missing areolas on the banner that hangs on the side of the Lynx office building, facing Interstate 4, and promotes this weekend’s WrestleMania.

Mayor Buddy Dyer claimed to have the, um, skinny.

“Apparently there’s an ordinance that prohibits them from being displayed,” he said.

More…

I remember when I was a kid the first thing I did when I got a G.I. Joe doll was remove his shirt and draw a pair of nipples on his chest (yeah, I know how gay that is). And just for good measure, I’d add a nice patch of chest hair.

I really did find the sight of a nippleless male chest to be very disturbing. And I never understood why they made G.I. Joe and Ken without them.

I think that Orlando is doing a disservice to all of the little boys in their community who are going to grow up to think there is something wrong with their bodies for having nipples. 

H/T Joe.My.God.

Talk about promoting an agenda! I was very disappointed to see the following article on the front page of my local newspaper, The Monterey County Herald, a few days ago.

It is about a real estate millionaire in Carmel Valley, California named Larry Scholink who claims to be the victim of hate crimes because he put a large wooden cross on display on his property. The “hate crimes” that Scholink describes in the article are — get this — receiving junk mail!

CROSS CONTROVERSY IN CARMEL VALLEY

By JIM JOHNSON
Herald Salinas Bureau

Carmel Valley resident Larry Scholink wants to find the people he says have persecuted him for nearly three years because of the 12-foot-high cross he erected on his remote ranch.

Larry Scholink of Carmel Valley speaks about the wooden cross
he put up seven years ago. (ORVILLE MYERS/The Herald)

The cross is a symbol of his personal religious faith. And if he ever catches the people who have been flooding him with anonymous junk mail and intimidating messages, he’ll treat them with grace and mercy.

Not that it’s going to be easy. “The Bible tells us to deal with everyone with grace and mercy, and I aspire to that,” said Scholink, a real estate broker. “It depends on their attitude. I harbor no ill feelings toward them.”

But the born-again Christian isn’t about to just roll over and accept the harassment he said he has experienced since he put up the cross several years ago.

He has already contacted the U.S. Postal Service and the Sheriff’s Office, seeking an investigation into possible mail fraud, hate crimes and other incidents he believes may have been committed since he began receiving thousands of pieces of junk mail with the words “Scholink Remove Bigot Cross” and the like.

A colleague contacted the FBI after Scholink’s elderly parents and business associates began receiving the junk mail. And, he said, he won’t be intimidated into removing the cross…

More…

What disturbs me most about this transparently slanted article is that Scholink’s claims are not investigated by the reporter. No proof is given to support the man’s specious claims that he is being harassed due to his Christian faith — or that he’s really being harassed at all!

It could simply be that this man has an enemy or two. Personally, I think this smells like a plot to make Scholink appear to be a persecuted Christian — an image the Christian right has been trying to invoke for the past few years.

While The Herald article claims that Scholink’s story of religious persecution has received “national attention,” I have not been able to find any national stories online. A couple of days ago, local TV station KSBW did an on-air editorial in which they repeated the claim of national attention — without citing any sources to support it.

Editorial: Bigots Target Rugged Cross
March 28, 2008

Last Friday we broke a story about a family in Carmel Valley suffering anonymous harassment because they put up a simple wooden cross on their remote property high above the valley floor. The story has since received national attention and this last Wednesday, even the local Monterey paper picked up the coverage.

The Scholink family set up the cross using two-by-fours seven years ago. At 12 feet high, it certainly has a lower profile than many flagpoles and telephone poles that dot the valley ridgelines. Their closest neighbors are over a quarter-mile away. But for the past three years, they’ve been getting flooded with junk mail addressed to “Scholink Remove Bigot Cross.” Some person or group has systematically arranged this nuisance mail to attempt to intimidate the family…

In a era in which LGBT people and other minorities are being murdered in the streets, their schools, and their homes, I can hardly feel sympathy for a member of the white Christian majority who has received a few pieces of unwanted junk mail.

I am outraged that my local newspaper and TV station has chosen to publish Scholink’s claims of religious harassment — characterizing them as a hate crime — without any credible substantiation.

I am afraid that this trend of Christians portraying themselves as victims of discrimination is gaining momentum. Perhaps it is paranoid to suspect that it is part of an organized scheme. You tell me.

UPDATE: I found another article on the KSBW web site that contradicts the one in The Herald on a couple of points:

Cross Owner Defends Placement

POSTED: 9:39 am PDT March 26, 2008
UPDATED: 10:59 am PDT March 26, 2008

CARMEL VALLEY, Calif. — A man who built a wooden cross on his ranch in Carmel Valley presented his case to the Monterey County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday.

Larry Scholink has been dealing with what he called a relentless attempt to intimidate him into taking the cross down, after someone filed a complaint with the county, Action News reported.

Scholink said he asked the board of supervisors to do away with the discretionary permit the county has required for his cross and to do their part in finding out who’s behind the thousands of pieces of hate mail he has received.

A close friend of Scholink asked county supervisors not to overlook his motivation for building the cross. The friend said Scholink erected the cross in the wake of the January 2007 slaying of Mel and Elizabeth Grimes. Their neighbor, John Kenney is currently on trial accused in their killings.

The board of supervisors referred what they heard on Tuesday to the county Planning Department. Supervisors said the situation is an administrative matter and will be handled from there.

Ah, what a tangled web. There are two significant inconsistencies between the article in The Herald and the one on the KSBW web site:

When was the cross erected?

The Herald reported that the cross was erected seven years ago. KSBW reported that the cross was erected in January 2007 in honor of a Carmel Valley couple who were murdered.

When did Scholink begin receiving “hate mail”?

The Herald reported that Scholick began receiving junk mail addressed to “Scholink Remove Bigot Cross” three years ago. KSBW reported that Scholick began receiving the mail shortly after a neighbor complained about the cross and Scholink’s lack of a permit last year.

There are far too many inconsistencies here. It seems much more plausible that the cross was erected in January 2007 and one of Scholink’s neighbors doesn’t like it obstructing his view of the valley. So, Scholink has decided to make it appear that he’s being persecuted for his faith — rather than being a bad neighbor and putting up an illegal cross without a permit.

Just 10 days after a lawsuit was filed to prevent a lab in Geneva from conducting experiments using a controversial giant particle accelerator to smash protons together and recreate the Big Bang, the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) has reported a serious accident.

The lawsuit, filed March 21 in Federal District Court, in Honolulu, sought a temporary restraining order prohibiting CERN from proceeding with the accelerator until it has produced a safety report and an environmental assessment. However, it has now been reported in the European press that scientists at CERN rushed to begin their experiments before the court could make a determination.

CERN giant particle accelerator outside Geneva prior to this morning’s accident.

James Gillies, head of communications at CERN, said the laboratory as of yet can provide no specific details regarding the accident. “It’s apparent that there have been several fatalities, including the key scientists involved in the experiment,” Mr. Gillies said.

“Unfortunately, without their input it is difficult to gage what impact this will have on the surrounding areas — or even the planet. It is highly unlikely that a miniature black hole or tear in the time-space continuum as described by critics of the project has occurred. If that were the case, all life as we know it would already have been destroyed,” he said.

This story is being updated every few minutes. Check back for new developments.

UPDATE: There have been reports of massive power failures and disruptions in communications throughout Switzerland, Germany and France. Several international flights in these regions have lost communication with the ground.

UPDATE TWO: It is now being reported that a giant black cloud has appeared over Western Europe. A squadron of NATO reconnaissance planes have been dispatched to gather additional information. 

It is time once again for Bunnytude’s RCFMHD (Random Crap From My Hard Drive) Monday! Remember that to play along all you have to do is visit Bunnytude at the link above and leave the URL of your blog post in the comments.

OMG! Weren’t 1970s fashions the absolute worst?!

Blake Lewis — Hiding hickies?

This was the invention that was going to change the world? 

Another Sign America IS NOT Transcending Race: The Niglet

University of Alabama student Elizabeth Dennis recently changed her Facebook profile image from Piglet, a Winnie the Pooh character, that was in blackface with one hand holding a watermelon and the other holding a bucket of KFC Fried Chicken, with the word “Niglet” underneath.  After it got around that the photo was up she posted a new pic and added the confession “the profile pic was a joke … Sorry if I offended.”

But after looking at all of  the photos that she posted of herself in blackface, I am even more disappointed that she was apparently supported by other brothas and sistas to do what she did. 

Elizabeth must have missed the big speech yesterday because these photos were up TODAY.   

But America’s transcending race and blacks need to get over it. Yeah right!

I wonder what’s the percentage of white college students dressing up in blackface to black college students dressing up in whiteface and then being stupid enough or smart enough, depending on how you look at it, to post the photos on Facebook or Myspace.

More…

This made me wonder just how difficult it would be to find pictures of college kids in blackface costumes on a photo sharing site like Webshots.com.

So, I did a little searching and found the following photos in about 10 minutes — they were in seemingly endless supply, folks.