Fri May 01 1998 12:00: May is, in fact, upon us. May I once again direct you to the taking-shape geek humor site segfault.org. I have a Philosophy midterm to do this weekend but apart from that I plan to spend a lot of time working on segfault.

    I'm trying to get some kind of track recorder working under Linux so I don't have to buy a 4-track to do OMP!(25K-4)YOPPO with. It's not going as well as it could be. I may call in Andy to assist, in much the same way that a Confederate general at Gettysburg might call in the cavalry to assist, although that's about where the similarities between Andy and Confederate cavalry end.

    Speaking of which, hey Andy, there's a guy named Matt at UCLA whom I suspect of being another clone of you. He looks just like you, and he's a CS major too.

    Crummy is one year old today. It has, fortunately, not consumed my life, but remained a place to put whatever silly articles I come up with. That's the way [uh-huh, uh-huh] I like it.

    There's a NYTSYN article on Newshub right now headlined "Gates Ditches Nerd Look For More User-Friendly Style". I refuse to read it.

    Well, I'm going to go make some more of my secret Pasta Roni stash. It is the only food left in the house (we have brownie mix, but that requires eggs, which we don't have; I may have to pick some up tomorrow since I'm going to need to eat tomorrow as well, and brownies and nothing is better than nothing). James and his friend drank my last two cans of Mist with a Twist (a Mountain Dew clone), and I am angry. I'm going to have to talk to him about that when he comes back. He didn't even drink all of it. He drank about half of it and left the other half sitting in a glass. Yeez!

Later: Cool, Episkopos Al put up the Expanding Foam Dinosaur award I awarded to Hyperdiscordia as per his "Certainly, HyperDiscordia deserves some kind of award for that." remark of Discord 25, 3164, refering to HyperDiscordia's resemblance to an expanding foam dinosaur (not in those words, obviously). Go to the What's Really New page to see the award in all its glory. I got the dinosaur from some site of dinosaur illustrations in Australia. I lost the URL. I'm really sorry. I would love to credit the illustration site but I can't find it again. Iguanadon is such a great dinosaur, don't you think?

Sat May 02 1998 12:00: Adam thinks I should skip getting a 4-track and instead do my recording direct onto computer. There are numerous mixing programs for Linux, but I'd need to get a better sound card and more RAM if I were to go that route. But I could use that technology, and the accompanying frogs, for non-recording computing tasks. It would probably also be cheaper than getting a 4-track, and I would be able to do more funky stuff with it.

    So I have no idea when OMP!(25K-4)YOPPO will crawl out of the primordial muck into reality. If it looks like it's gonna take a while I'll cook up another low-fi karaoke machine bonanza for a summer release in the style of the It's Only Ketchup/It's Only Mountain Dew Jake side-split. I don't know what the word on IOK/IOMD is; we sent Jake the tapes but I have yet to hear from him.

    So here's what's taking shape. Adam and Kris have expressed interest in being a real part of this album, yea, even being actual members of The Open Standards Band. Adam is going to play guitar on Talking Embrace and Extend Blues and my Metallica-bashfest Gravedigger, which song impressed Adam so much with its relentless satirizing of Metallica's inane lyrics that he voluntarily crawled out of the festering pit of Metallica worship (true story!). I need him to do that because Gravedigger includes an excessively long heavy metal guitar solo, and heavy metal guitar solos are not my forte, but they are Adam's. Adam also wants to collaborate on a song with me, and I want him to play Satan's Son Stole My Girlfriend and Crummy, which will entertwine him even further with the album. Kris has the keyboards for the Mentos parodies, and will probably be doing even more stuff. So what's happening is that OMP!(25-K)YOPPO is turning into a monster beyond my control. With the updated recording hardware (whatever that may be) and the collaboration of other musicians on the album, the threat of it becoming an actual independant album release becomes very real, and we all know which road that leads down (hint: ______ is paved with good intentions).

    I wrote another blues song today. It's more of a grunge-bluegrass thing, actually. It's called Saccharine Hillbilly Bluegrass Blues and so far it just goes "Saccharine Hillbilly Bluegrass Blues, I'm not gonna stand here and watch you lose." I may put in more lyrics, I may not.

    Bluegrass is cool. I dig that whole bluegrass/hillbilly thing. It's hard to be pretentious when your instruments are banjos and mandolins and fiddles. The blues are great, too. They're too corny to be pretentious.

    I've written several blues songs. I wrote Talking Embrace and Extend Blues after being inspired by the talking blues songs on the Bob Dylan bootlegs Mrs. Irby lent me which I need to return, and I want to write some talking blues songs the names of which are lame puns, such as Talking Dirty Blues and Talking About Willis Blues. I improvised a blues song once called The Meta-Blues which went something like "I'm so sick of the blues, baby, so sick I could scream (2x)/I hope tomorrow I wake up and realize it was all a bad dream. I got the meta-blues, baby, and the meta-blues got me (2x)/I want to rock and roll, and lose control, but these blues, they won't set me free." I wrote a blues-ish song called I Got Soul, Dammit which explores the protective attitude of numerous people towards that ephermeal quality known as "soul". The Bourbonwitha Twist and Suckered and Stoned both use a sort of blues progression, although I guess they fall more into the category of swing, and Get Down Or Die was designed to copy the sanitized teen blues-ripoff rock of the 1950s created by record company executives so that the youth of America wouldn't be dancing to music played by black people.

    Anyway, back to the recording discussion. Expect something out in summer, but not neccessarily OMP!(25K-4)YOPPO. OMP!(25K-4)YOPPO will be the high-quality tape that Mrs. Irby has been bugging me about making. I don't know what will be on the interim tape.

Sun May 03 1998 12:00: I just whipped up a little mail-viewer CGI so I can just dump mail messages into the mail directory and the CGI will format them the way my mail messages are formatted. Whee. Try it out. Go to the pail mage.

    I updated the Transformer Evolution page with emails from Adam and Jake.

Wed May 06 1998 12:00: Wee-hoo. Lots of new stuff. The amount of homework I have due tomorrow and Friday that I haven't done is astounding.

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    DaveNet is strange today. I've never seen the stupid Taco Bell chihuahua, and I'm glad. Dave Winer is pretty cool, but he tends to like things I would never, ever like.

    I'm in the CSUA lab right now typing on one of the SGI machines. It's got a nice big monitor. The desktop is really weird though. Mp3s of the Doors are being played. The Doors bug the heck out of me. I should probably go look at my CS180 and CS51 homework, since it's in postscript format and I can't view postscript at home. I really oughta get my printer set up w/Linux.

    Jake sent me an inspirational [cellular] pep talk the other day. I don't know if I want to put it up on the page or hoard it to myself, though. There's a mail I sent to Mike Rust the other day regarding my plans for LYH and Crummy which I need to reprint or expound on, as well. Anyway, time to think about going to class.

Later: I just had this hilarious image of Dali sending Picasso the same postcard year after year. And Picasso runs out to the mailbox and reads the postcard and thinks "Aw, crap, it's the oysters postcard again.". Then I guess he'd call up Dali on the phone and ask him if he had Prince Albert in a Can or something. You know what? They actually have Prince Albert in a Can at the Thrifty^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HRite Aid. It's chewing tobacco. I never knew what it was.

    We are officially out of food. I should be able to squeak by until Friday on stuff from the SEAS Cafe, then my mother is going to take me home for the weekend and we'll get more food then. James seems to be able to live on Hamburger Helper and soup. I tried an experiment of not getting groceries to see if I could get him to get a whole bunch of stuff, but for three weeks all he's brought home is enough Hamburger Helper and hamburger and soup and milk to make it through another week. The experiment must now end, as there is no more food, and, like Jeff Lynne, I need food to live. The bright side is that when I get food, James doesn't seem to eat much of it. Just the macaroni and cheese and, of course, the Helper. He doesn't touch my cereal or... argh, I'm forgetting what food there even is. Help me, Spock! Help me!

    David has his own food too, in case you were wondering.

    Oh yeah, I have a second job now. I am tutoring Peter Hodgson, a professor of Russian Literature, in the ways of Linux. It's just a couple hours a week, but it's good pocket money. He's got a system which is really cool, in which all his email and all his ideas are kept in a database. When we have our meetings he'll open up an emacs buffer and keep notes of everything. I'd like to have a system like that.

Fri May 08 1998 12:00: Wang's lawsuit against Netscape has been dismissed. Hooray.

    I bought a copy of Learning GNU Emacs today at the bookstore. I'm going home for the weekend and I want something to read. It looks cool. Plus, chicks dig a guy with a copy of Learning GNU Emacs. That's what Adam says, anyway. Hey, wait a minute! Adam is a vi user! I've ben gypped!

    The Godzilla plot thickens. Kris claims to have seen a television commercial in which Godzilla's foot comes down, Monty Python style, and crushes a full-scale reconstruction of a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton. He estimates that Godzilla's foot is about 4/3 the length of the skeleton. This would put the foot length at (as a guess) 80 feet, much longer than either a city bus or the ad on such a bus (see the 5/06 entry).

    This constant Godzilla size revisionism must stop. Are moviegoers going to appreciate a Godzilla who fluctuates from being really, really, really big to just really, really big? No! They won't stand for it! The American consumer demands a Godzilla of constant size! It's time to let our voices be heard! Send me an email of support and I'll add your name to the following petition:

THE FOLLOWING PETITION

To the presidents of Toho Co., Ltd. and TriStar Pictures

    The American cinema has a long and honorable tradition. In addition to purely domestic films, many foreign films, remakes of foreign films, and American-made films based on foreign stories have seen success in the bijous of this great country. It is in the interest of mantaining this tradition that we, the movie-goers of this nation, submit this petition to you, regarding Godzilla, star of the upcoming Tri-Star motion picture Godzilla.

    The motto of the movie seems to be "Size Does Matter". And indeed Americans like their heroes to be bigger than life. However, the advertisements for the movie contradict each other unequivocably on the matter of Godzilla's actual size. Our best estimates of Godzilla's height, for instance, place him at being anywhere from 40 to 300 meters tall. This public misinformation campaign must stop. There is a place for suspense and secrecy in the movie business, but when it comes to Godzilla's relative proportions, the public has a right to not be kept in the dark by uninformative and misleading advertising campaigns.

    We request the following:

1. Change all Godzilla promotional advertising to reflect Godzilla's actual (on-screen) size and relative proportions.
2. File a report with the American National Standards Institute detailing a hypothetical (real) Godzilla's size and relative proportions, and pledge not to deviate from them during Godzilla.
3. Don't let Godzilla suck.

    Our demands are few and easily met. We thank you for your attention.

Tue May 12 1998 12:00: Time for another update. I got a bunch of books over the weekend from the used bookstore. I got 3001: The Final Odyssey, which was a big disappointment; The Elements of Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction Using LISP, which is interesting; The Simarillion, continuing my tradition of getting cheap Tolkien paperbacks at used bookstores; and a two-volume set of Steven Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb and The Mismeasure of Man, both of which would have cost me $14 apiece, but which I got for $12 total for huge savings. There is a cute panda cartoon on the back of The Panda's Thumb. I have no idea what Louis Agassiz's statue is doing on the grounds of Stanford. I guess it's not doing much, anymore.

    I also got the soundtrack album to Frank Zappa's 200 Motels. It's really rockin', man.

    Oh, I have a Zappa story to tell. I went to this sidewalk record sale for Rhino Records, which is down on Westwood. And I was hunting around and I found a Zappa album. And I said "All right, Zappa!" cause it was a good find. And this old musician-type guy was next to me, probably about 40, and he looked over at my album and he said "Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention." with this sinusoidal intonation that hit its maximum on the syllables "Zap", "Moth", and "vent". And you could tell that this guy knew the score, just by the way he said "Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.". You can't fake that kind of thing. I still haven't heard the album, though. I don't have a record player.

    I scanned Atlas Shilled on Saturday, but apparantly I only uploaded the first two scans. Here is Panel 0 and Panel 1. The guy in the cap is Kris and the guy who kicks sand in Kris' face is Adam.

Wed May 13 1998 12:00: Oh, the pain. Godzilla's dimensions just become more and more confused. I saw two new ads today. "His claw [not jaw, not foot] is as long as this bus." and, over by the Mormon temple, "He's taller than the Mormon temple.". It occurs to me that I could give the Expanding Foam Dinosaur award to Godzilla.

    "A room and a meal and a garbage disposal, a lawn and a hose'll be strictly genteel." -Frank Zappa's Strictly Genteel.

Thu May 14 1998 12:00: I can't think of anything to say right now. I just put stuff up there. Read it.

Sat May 16 1998 12:00: Hi. Kris says that he saw part of the Godzilla script on the net and that Godzilla actually grows during the course of the movie, qualifying him completely for The Expanding Foam Dinosaur Award. This, of course, invalidates the advertising campaign totally. If Godzilla's size increases over time, what kind of excitement is supposed to be generated by the statement that some part of his body is a certain size? When is it that size? Postulating a size zero at Godzilla's conception, and projecting into infinity whatever growth pattern Godzilla exhibits in the movie, we can see that any part of Godzilla's body will take on every discreet measurement of every dimension at some time or another. Why should we care?

    This is freaky. I want to see the 200 Motels movie. Adam wants to see it too. We're probably going to rent it when he moseys on over today, if he ever does. Now, Adam doesn't live in LA. He lives in the Valley, land of the white-flighters. Furthermore, Adam has not seen 200 Motels. Yet, given the name of a video rental place in Westwood, where I live and where UCLA is, Adam can tell you whether or not that place has 200 Motels. He does not make a guess as to whether or not they are likely to have it, he knows. He says it's because he frequents the cult movie section, where 200 Motels is or is not, and he likes the cover so he notices it when it is there, but I dunno.

    I designed a circuit for CS51A which takes a binary number in the range 0-9 and controls a seven-segment LCD display to display the corresponding decimal digit. It uses 16 NOR gates. It's really cool. I never liked CS51A until I got that circuit to work. I still don't like it, actually. But man, that circuit is cool. I doubt you would think it was cool, though, since you didn't design it.

    The Kris-Adam-Leonard entity is working on a rock opera (not the rock opera mentioned in my bio page, which is a separate animal and a solo project) called His Own Platters. Adam doesn't know about this yet, actually, but he'll find out soon enough. It's about the TGI Friday's concoction called Jack Platters, which we're not even sure what they are, and how they are hyped beyond all reason. It begun, as might be expected, with one of our songwriting compacts, in which each person was required to write a song about Jack Platters. The opera tells of Jack and how he becomes disillusioned with his platters. I'll do a His Own Platters page eventually, but here's the outline:

1. I forgot the name of the first track, but it has a really long name. It's a parody of Hot Blooded by Foreigner, in which "Hot blooded" is replaced with "Jack Platters", among other things. It's meant to be a terribly written advertising jingle. Kris wrote it.
2. Second track is called Jack's Lament, in which Jack bemoans having created the platters. I wrote this.
3. The third track is called Fired or equivelant, and in it Jack is fired by the antagonist of the story, the greedy Boss who wants to sell as many Jack Platters as possible, and damn the consequences. We're going to make Adam write it.
4. The fourth track is Citizens, Heed the Call to Action!, which I am writing. It's a rousing march in which Jack attempts to recruit the local citizenry in his fight against the platters he has created, but gives up when the local citizenry begins trying to turn the song into a forum for their own pet conspiracy theories. Jack is eventually run out of town by angry citizens crying "We don't want people like you marrying out daughters, picking out tomatoes, picking up our slack/You've got what it takes to oppress the indigenous masses, but when it comes to platters, pal, you don't know jack!". There's also an amusing part in which one paranoid citizen calls out "What about the flying Jack Platters that crashed in Roswell in 1951?".
5. In the fifth track, probably called Confronting the Boss, Jack, well, confronts the Boss. Kris will probably do this.
6. And in the final track, Jack Triumphant, the platters are defeated and Jack celebrates. We'll probably do something mean to him at the end, though, like have him get run over by a steamroller or fall victim to salmonella. Either Adam will do this himself or we'll all pitch in on it.

    Another thing that came out of the TGI Friday's discussion pertains to the commercial in which a businessman does dull office work and remarks to the camera, "It's Monday.", then enters a TGI Friday's and declares "It's Friday!", before doing a stupid little dance which Kris' brother has adopted. "It's Tuesday. It's Friday!". And so on. Eventually it's going to come to Friday, and it'll be "It's Friday. It's Friday!". Then it'll show him working in the garden. "It's Saturday. It's Friday!" Then sitting in church. "It's Sunday. It's Friday!" And around we go. It never stops for this poor guy. He and his wife must be terrible cooks.

    For all his faults, he loves his Queen, Adam has correctly pointed out that the Atlas Shilled cartoons are in a pathetic state, to say the least. Neither of the two panels I did upload can be viewed in the totality of their pagan splendor. Complete rescanning will have to be done.

Sun May 17 1998 12:00: Did I mention that Godzilla is completely insane? Okay, just so you know.

    The people outside my bedroom are having a block party. Loud rap music is being played. Annoyingus maximus.

    Today I represented at Coffee Junction again with Adam. And, amazingly enough, Sharon (the Coffee Junction lady) offered me a gig there. I'll be playing on July 23 I believe. It's actually a two-hour thing with both Adam and I, so we may be appearing as one act. Pretty cool.

    The time has come to once again worry about school stuff. I have two midterms next week and finals loom on the horizon.

    Adam and I rented 200 Motels last night. It was faaaaabulous. The coolest part is this one-second shot during a dance number in which Theodore Bikel aka Rance Muhammitz has a fake hose with fake cardboard water coming out of it and he's twirling it around like he's watering the lawn. The newts (which the lad searches the night for) are awesome, as well. So far I've watched it four times. Already phrases from 200 Motels are appearing in our vocabulary, phrases such as "You took the mystery x! You were in full posession of... the x!"; phrases like "swell", and "So's your old man."

Wed May 20 1998 12:00: It's Days of Defiance here at UCLA. Come on down to Days of Defiance. Free hot dogs for the kids.

    The theme today was vaudeville. Kris and I did a bit called Addicted to Vaudeville in which I played a man accused of embezzlement and Kris my lawyer.

Kris: Your honor, my client is clearly obsessed with vaudeville. He was in no proper state of mind at the time to have committed the embezzlement.

Leonard [singing]: Ya da da, yadada da da da...

Kris: Even now, he sings those songs of yesteryear.

Leonard: Say Mr. Straub, it seems that that's a new suit you're wearing.

Kris: It certainly is, Mr. Richardson. [Gets hat and cane from briefcase.]

Leonard: How'd you get the money to pay for that suit?

Kris: I sent an innocent man to jail! [rim shot]

Both [singing]: Ya da da, yadada da da da...

    Then I got Kris to draw the mutated lizard who's won the hearts of theatre-goers everwhere, Vaudvilla. His cane is as long as this bus. I'll scan him when and if I go home this weekend. We had lots of fun doing the Godzilla roar while doing the happy little vaudeville dance.

    I read somewhere on the net that the people who did the new Godzilla didn't give him radioactive breath because it was too unrealistic. Excuse me? Radioactive breath is out but sudden size changes are okay? Not to mention that at maximal size Godzilla would collapse under his own weight? Yeesh.

Later: I was bored, and had just done some sprucing up of my system, so I figured I'd get a screen grab of the login-motd-fortune thing I set up. One thing led to another, and I did an around the world thing. Actually, around Los Angeles County, and then only because of Sampo. All the other machines are within a half-mile radius of each other.

    I just got email from Adam saying that his brother saw Godzilla, and that Godzilla does not actually grow during the course of the movie. They just got the proportions consistently and totally wrong. Adam also says that his brother says the movie sucks. In the same fetchmail run, I got this extra-disturbing message from Kris. "See saucy Marla Pennington trip her tongue with Dick Christie!" No. Just no.

    My sendmail daemon doesn't seem to be working. Oh darn. I'm going to have to change the thing I did to it today to make rubberfish boot faster.

    By the way, yesterday Kris wrote an email to KCAL News about how stoplights are not a place at which you have a large amount of personal privacy, and they read it on the air and Kris was commended by Larry Elder, which was pretty cool.

Later still: I'm trying out my start page, which might save me the time I spend typing URLs. I just took mental note of all the URLs I type frequently and put them on one page. We'll see how well it works.

    This week is the 25th anniversiary of Ethernet. Happy birthday Ethernet. Whee.

    Oh my goodness. Check this out. If you do an Altavista search for "microsoft", the Crummy main page is hit #27. That's 27 out of 8476638.

    I didn't Altavista "microsoft" myself to find that out, by the way. I found that in our referer logs.

    Come see Adam at Coffee Junction tomorrow, everybody! Go to Kris' weird Xi Guard page for info.

    Michael was bitching about my .sig, so I made a new one that takes up less bandwidth and is less annoying. Now, my .sig is lightly scented with lemon![1]

[1] Actually, that's a lie.

Fri May 22 1998 12:00: Yesterday and today the theme was Small Wonder, arguably the worst of the bad '80s sitcoms. We tore apart Vicki the incredibly inaccurate and poorly designed robot, then picked up on her habit of taking the last part of someone's sentence and doing something kind of related to those words. I think the set of actions we defined was: spin around, heat up, lift someone up, magnetize an aluminum (?!?!) can, and fly by the arm-flapping method. We did numerous other things as well. This was one of my contributions (the all caps parts are supposed to represent Vicki's monotone:

telnet vicki.fox.com
Trying 143.73.69.48...
Connected to vicki.fox.com
Escape character is '^]'.

Welcome to Vicki
login: rlawson
password:

[rlawson@Vicki rlawson] ls

Vicki: ELL ESS. [begins spinning around]

Spinning around...
[1]+  Stopped                 ls
[rlawson@Vicki rlawson] cat linus.au /dev/audio

Vicki: DEV AUDIO. [begins to heat up]

Heating up...
[1]+  Stopped                 cat linus.au /dev/audio
[rlawson@Vicki rlawson]

    And so on.

    Inevitably the Small Wonder schtick was combined with the vaudeville schtick, and we all performed vaudeville as Vicki. YA TA TA TA TA TA. YA TA TA TA TA TA. So, Vicki, I hear you manage a baseball team. BASEBALL TEAM. They give the players very unusual names these days, or so I hear. YA TA TA TA-- No, not yet!

    Yesterday we went to Coffee Junction yet again to hear Adam play. I made a videotape of the event. Today we're going yet yet again to see Marcella play the piano. Whee.

    Today I took what I believe to be the easiest midterm I have ever taken. Each problem had instructions on how to do it. Yeesh. I finished in half an hour.

Later: We went to see Marcella. Man, she was really rockin'. And what a babe. My, my. Adam, here's the link to Jake's page. I lent Adam my crup tapes to listen to.

Mon May 25 1998 12:00: Agh. OK, I'm gonna start moving everything over to CSUA. I have some cartoons I scanned today up there already. At first it'll just be the standard LYH stuff. Once I get out of school I'll do a redesign and put the Crummy stuff up. I'm acting early on this because I want some time for Sampo to redirect to the new address.