This June Will Be the Best June Ever

George Romero + Dennis Hopper + zombies = I am so there!

Watch the trailer for "Land of the Dead," due out June 24.

(Thanks to Greg for the heads up.)

Ann Arbor Photo of the Week

Does your city have a Zen Buddhist temple? Yeah, that's right, I didn't think so, tough guy!

News Flash: Corporate Radio Still Sucks

Alice Cooper's new radio show will debut tonight on WCSX, one of the crappiest of Detroit's many crappy radio stations, reports the Detroit News. It seems as if some corporate execs are starting to cop to the fact that no one listens to their worthless stations anymore because they play the same 50 songs over and over again and can't resist interjecting self-promotional chatter and commercials after every single tune:

The irony is that when radio stations tightened formats to very limited music play lists and neutered air personalities, ratings dropped and helped spur the explosion of satellite radio and iPod downloads with an infinite variety of songs. Now, to bring listeners back, FM radio is forced to add personality and life to what listeners view as boring, repetitive fare.

No shit. Anyway, Alice has the right attitude (though not an example of a decent band):

"I tell listeners look, you want to hear AC/DC? I would love to play AC/DC," Cooper says. "But they have 10 albums out. There's 10 songs on each album. I don't have to play 'Dirty Deeds Done Cheap' every time! E-mail me something different, and I'll play it!"

Well, more power to him. But even though his show may be cool, I don't see an "FM radio renaissance" coming anytime soon -- or ever. The money people (tools who use words like "leverage" and "proactive") are firmly in charge of the traditional airwaves, and the folks who actually like music have long since moved on to greener pastures.

Still, I'll give ol' Alice a listen.

Zombies in Cambodia

Someone made an imitation BBC site to report on an outbreak of zombies in a small Cambodia village. WHAT IS THE GOVERNMENT HIDING?

For the Love of Scottie McMullet

We all know romance book covers are dumb, right? Right. But instead of just talking about it, this guy actually did something about it. You gotta love PhotoShop.



(Shamelessly cribbed from DataWhat?)

Stupid Beer News... To Go!

Cause a traffic accident and smash up your vehicle? Don't forget to grab your beer before you flee from the scene. That way you have something to drink while the cops look for you.

(Thanks to Verd for the link.)

Friday Was Earth Day

And today there's snow on the ground, with more coming down. We could use some of that global warming right about now, eh?

Ann Arbor Photo of the Week

A car on Liberty Street:

The Elusive Sense of Place

Here are two brilliant quotations that express something of what I'm always fumbling toward when I denounce subdivisions, strip malls, planned communities, and the like in the course of my ramblings about Ann Arbor, Midland, New Orleans, and the general idea of Place:

"Mine was not an Enlightened mind . . . it was a Gothic mind, medieval in its temper and structure. I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful. I despised sophisters and calculators; I was groping for faith, honor, and prescriptive loyalties. I would have given any number of neo-classical pediments for one poor battered gargoyle."

--Russell Kirk

"I suppose we are all wrongly made up and have a fallen nature; else why is it that the most thrifty and neat and orderly city only wins our approval, and perhaps gratifies us intellectually, and such a thriftless, battered and stained, and lazy old place as the French Quarter of New Orleans takes our hearts?"

--Charles Dudley Warner

Extremely Long Post About Ann Arbor

I began this as a comment on Ann Arbor Is Overrated, but it quickly spiraled out of control and turned into a long-winded discourse of near-essay length, so I decided to post it here instead and invite comments from others.

I can probably speak for plenty who grew up in suburban Detroit when I say that Ann Arbor has always held a certain mystique for us. Some little place in the middle of nowhere that managed to thrive and aggressively assert its own weird and separate influence despite being in the shadow of the state's largest metropolis. A small town with big-city pretensions, home to a world-class university with all that that entails, a haven for oddballs and misfits as well as the rich, powerful, and influential. Land of mom-and-pop, do-it-yourself outfits and Fortune 500 companies. And so on.

Anyway, Ann Arbor is what it is, so without further ado, here is my like/dislike list on this city:

What I Like About Ann Arbor:

• First and foremost, it has a sense of self. Oh, that self may often be smug, self-important, and even cold, but I consider this to be better than the many self-less Nowheresvilles that increasingly populate Michigan and many other places in the United States -- places where people seriously argue over which is the best restaurant in town: Bennigan's, Applebee's, or TGI Friday's. (It helps your understanding if you've lived in such a place for an extended period of time.)
  
  
• As part of its sense of self, Ann Arbor seems to exhibit a genuine concern for its history and heritage, which finds expression in a preservation-oriented mindset. This mindset can be maddening and misguided at times, and it certainly does nothing to keep rents and property values down, but the positive result (in my mind) is the fact that so many older homes and buildings have been saved (at least downtown). I know I am bigger on history and tradition than a lot of people and also my love for the old and rundown is far from a universal aesthetic, but, well, people are free to go live in pristine McMansions with manicured lawns if the "lived-in" look is not their thing. (Long live couch porches!)
  
  
• A certain literary, artsy-fartsy bent.
  
  
• There is, so far as I know, no street here named "Warbler's Way." (There is a street in a McMansion development on the edge of town called "Partridge Path," but I'm talking mainly about the older part of the city.)
  
  
• Again speaking about downtown, you don't need a car to visit a variety of pubs and bars and even theatres and concert venues. (Obviously, you need a car to get downtown if you don't live there, but I do live there and this is my list, eh?) And as an inveterate people watcher, I love all the foot traffic and the sidewalk dining and drinking in the warm months.
  
  
• The university and all the prestige, money, sporting events, and interesting people it brings to town (and I say this even as one who thinks the U's lefty political stands suck).
  
  
• In some cases, a more relaxed attitude toward things like drinking and pot-smoking. I'm not a smoker and hippies mostly annoy me, but sometimes they're entertaining, whereas police-state Puritans are nothing but a menace to all of us. And as for drinking, well, you read this blog so I don't need to comment further.
  
  
• But I can't resist one more comment in that vein: Arbor Brewing Co.'s IPA, as well as all-day happy hour on Mondays.
  
  
• Thanks largely to Tom Monaghan, there's a vibrant Catholic undercurrent in the city. Most folks would probably consider this a negative, but once again, this is my list. Plus, within walking distance of my place is a Catholic church built in 1899, and it seems like a pretty groovy parish.
  
  
• The local area has a strong, interesting, and friendly online/blogger community. And they do more than just kvetch: there's currently talk about putting together a local rock and roll festival and it's being driven solely by regular Joe Schmoes like me. That's refreshing, even to this aggressive nonparticipant.
  
  
• I'm 30 minutes away from where I grew up and where my family currently is -- just right for easy visits without any "Everybody Loves Raymond" situations.

What I Don't Like About Ann Arbor:

• The aforementioned smugness and self-importance can be annoying, but even this can be turned into a source of mirth a la blogs like AAIO.
  
  
• Ditto the loopy far-left politics. There are some genuinely thoughtful left-leaning people here willing to consider other views, but they seem vastly outnumbered by breathless, self-righteous, intolerant pinkos who huff and puff and get "offended" if you express the slightest disagreement with one of their prescribed orthodoxies. Although, again, politics aside, it can actually be fun to mock people who take themselves so seriously.
  
  
• Sky-high rent and the alarming number of overpriced but ultimately disappointing restaurants
  
  
• The increasing chain-ification of downtown
  
  
• All the stupid yuppies*
  
  
• All the damn hippies*
  
  
• All the fucking bums**

Wow. So, anyway, in conclusion, and speaking temporally, I consider my ultimate "spiritual home" to be New Orleans, so it is perhaps no surprise that many of the things I like about Ann Arbor apply tenfold to the Crescent City. But I'm a long way from New Orleans and so Ann Arbor will have to do. Overall, I feel very fortunate to be where I am now, but am in no way threatened or shocked by the fact that others don't share my point of view. One thing we can probably all agree on is that life's too short to spend much time living somewhere you can't stand.

* By themselves, either of these groups is annoying. However, for an ordinary average guy like me who doesn’t really belong in either category, the presence of both groups is important. Sort of a like a harmonious yin-yang thing. I wouldn’t want to see either the hippies or the yuppies take over the whole city, so I hope that one group can serve as a check and balance on the other so that the positives of each can be enjoyed without the negatives.

** No, I don’t have any change for you to go buy another bottle of Thunderbird with, asshole.

Dogfooding Your Methods

Want to write your own highly technical computer science paper to present at an "academic" conference, but don't know the first thing about the subject?

No matter! Use "SciGen" to generate a random "research" paper complete with gibberish text, nonsense graphs, and bogus citations.

The creators of the program used it to submit a randomly generated paper to a conference, which accepted it. Hilarious.

Stayin' Alive

I know the updates have been a bit spotty lately, but I'm still alive and kicking -- or alive and drinking, anyway. Although I am rather bummed that my life as a desk jockey prevented me from making it over to Mark Maynard's "Beer with Bloggers" event last night. I regret missing out on a great opportunity to meet other local bloggers and possibly even more folks who read my drivel here. (By the way, for anyone who went, how did it go?)

As intimated, I've been busy with my job and working somewhat late (a trend I do my utmost to discourage), so that's my best excuse for my current round of blogathy. But let's just get back on track with this here link to help you with your monkey butt problems. (Fellow desk jockeys can surely relate.)

(Thanks to my idjit bro for the idjit link.)

Brrrraaaaiiiinnnnssss!

It's been a while since I had a zombie update, so here's a link to a "zombie infection simulation." Yeah, I don't know where some people get all this spare time, either.

(Thanks to Greg for the link.)

SWM ISO STF (Toothless)

So it seems I've been going about this whole "dating" thing wrong. I just need to wait for the Wal-Mart singles idea to catch on in the United States and then I'm golden. Because Wal-Marts are just full of people I wanna hang out with.

(Thanks to Verd for the link.)

Are Tiki Assaults Felonies or Misdemeanors?

According to the Ann Arbor News's Police Beat, the cops arrested a guy for pounding someone with a tiki torch on Saturday night. Sometimes those arguments about umbrella drinks get out of hand.

(Thanks to AAIO for the link.)

Ann Arbor Photo of the Week

...will return when I take some more photos.

For now, enjoy this picture of New Orleans:



(Thanks to Verd for the pic.)

Dude, That's So Money

"Swingers" was on IFC tonight, and I watched it for what, I think, was the first time I've seen it since it came out in 1996. Forgot how much I liked it (and who wouldn't guess I'd like a movie based around cocktails and lounge music?). Even though I still want to punch Jon Favreau's character for being an even bigger whiny loser than me, it was still so on!

These Are a Few of My Favorite Things

Last night's "Books and Beer" event at Arbor Brewing was pretty cool. Four first-time authors read excerpts from their novels while I quaffed IPA. I even bought one of the books afterward. (I'll let you try to guess which one.) The books and authors were:

• Responsible Men by Edward Schwarzschild
  
  
• The Effects of Light by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore
  
  
• The Center of Winter by Marya Hornbacher
  
  
• Serpent Girl by Matthew Carnahan
  

The event was co-sponsored by Shaman Drum. Hopefully they'll do another one of these sometime. Maybe one of these days I'll be one of the authors. Maybe I need to have another beer and keep dreaming....

Yo, Biotch, Do Y'all Recizzle?

There are now actually idiots going around knocking on doors and pestering people to recycle more, according to this Ann Arbor News story. Fortunately, I don't live in one of the targeted neighborhoods and even if I did, I probably wouldn't be home when "Brandon" came calling to deliver his "recycling rap."

And, oh yeah, I often throw away my plastic pop bottles. So there, Ann Arbor!

(Cribbed from Ypsi~Dixit.)

The End of a Papacy

Joe Sobran has a nice tribute to Pope John Paul II on his web site.

Update: Non-Christian Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com also has a great article on the Pope and some of the warmongering hypocrites now pretending to mourn him.

Pope John Paul II

Requiem aeternam dona ei Domine; et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace. Amen.

My Name Is Homie, and I Have a Problem

I'm not sure who is the biggest dope in this Ann Arbor News story about a guy who made the front of his house look like a face and used it to harangue drunken pedestrians: the guy or such geniuses as "Jackie":

Finally, it dawned on Jackie she'd spent several minutes talking to a house.

"This is what I get for going to U-M," Jackie said. "I'm talking to a sheet!"

And this is what I get for leaving town for the weekend. I miss out on witnessing ridiculously stupid scenes like this.

Plus Ca Change...

The efforts of lifestyle totalitarians never cease. We have on the left an anti-alcohol poster from the early Soviet era. On the right is a poster from a contemporary neo-Prohibitionist outfit right here in the U.S. of A. I'd say that, hideous as the Soviet stuff is, it's not as awful as the neo-Prohibitionist junk. (I should probably not mention I used to work for the agency that produced the neo-Prohibitionist stuff.) Click on the images for more propaganda from both camps.