John’s Crawlspace

Somehow I came across this article on the former rubber plantation Fordlândia. It is located in Brazil along the Amazon river, and was purchased and developed by Henry Ford (get it, “Ford Landia”?) in order to make the millions of tires needed for the hundreds of thousands of cars he was producing. American living conditions were forced upon the native Brazilian workers, who eventually rioted. It turned out to be a bad decision on his part, as it was an awful investment, and even after a second attempt at developing a rubber plantation (”Belterra”) he ended up losing the equivalent to $200 million in modern dollars. The plantations are still standing today - It’s an interesting read. Damn Interesting has a lot of other content that is, well, damn interesting, take a look around - They have articles on Centralia and Love Canal that are worth checking out too.

I think that most people have, at some point in their lives, dialed 867-5309 out of sheer curiosity, if nothing else. I know I’ve done it before, I recall trying that number in several area codes way back in middle school when we used to waste our time making prank calls. Anyway, a better man than I has put together a site that chronicles what happens when those seven digits are dialed in every area code (?) in the US. You can check it out here.

It has always seemed to me that Microsoft is very strongly against software piracy, especially regarding their own products. I own several legit copies of XP and it’s still a pain in the ass to install them, with all the nagging about “Windows Genuine Advantage” or whatever, the activation process is just a total pain in the ass. It seems crazy then that a Microsoft technical support representative would recommend that someone resolve a problem by using a crack in order to get Windows Vista working, but apparently that’s exactly what happened.

Wow… I never thought alcohol could be so confusing. Although I guess it’s possible that it’s not all that confusing and I just don’t have the patience to read that whole article.

I don’t know a whole lot about the stock market, but WallStrip seems like a pretty interesting site - It’s described as “stock culture meets pop culture”. Check it out.

I’m heading out for the weekend but thought I’d put an album on here real quick for you to check out. The band is Trophy Scars, and I actually have no idea where I got the album or how I found out about the band, but it’s pretty decent. Not for everyone, but worth checking out.

There is absolutely nothing funny about this. Have a good weekend everyone.

If anyone is running out of hard drive space (possibly due to OCD-style excessive downloading of music and movies, I’ve got the same problem) or is in the market for an external harddrive, this seems like a pretty good deal. It’s a 500 GB Western Digital “My Book Essential Edition” External USB 2.0 Hard Drive, and you can get one for $149.99 - You can order one from Office Depot. That’s all for now, just thought that’d be worth posting.

The new Modest Mouse album, “We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank”, has made it onto the internet. It took me like two hours to upload because of this ridiculously slow connection I’m on right now, but here it is.

In other music news, Chris Cornell has officially left Audioslave. You can read the MTV.com article here. One can’t help but wonder if this was prompted in any way by the reformation of Rage Against The Machine?

I meant to post this yesterday, but never got around to it. I have a new Nine Inch Nails track for you. I don’t know any details about it, if it’s for an upcoming album or what. I’m not a huge NIN fan (though I appreciate the music) but a lot of people seem to be, so maybe some of you will appreciate this:

That’s all for now - Enjoy.

This lineup may or may not be legit, but I’m pretty psyched about it so I’m posting it anyway. The official lineup comes out sometime tomorrow, so I guess we’ll know for sure, but for now, the highlights of this lineup (for me) are: Tool (obviously), Aesop Rock, Clutch, The Flaming Lips, Spoon, DJ Shadow, Wilco, Ween, Gov’t Mul, Widespread Panic, The Decemberists, Sound Tribe Sector 9, The Hold Steady, Cold War Kids, and Tea Leaf Green. I was really doubting that Tool would be there, so if this is legitimate, it’s awesome. That’s all for now.

Edit II: Da Sequel: The lineup is confirmed as of 2:55 this afternoon… I took a screen shot from my gmail inbox, here it is.

Edit: Added supplemental Billboard.com article concerning the lineup. Additional articles: Jambase.com, Tennessean.com, Knoxknews.com, and uh - Actually that’s enough articles, you’re not gonna read them all anyway.

I’d like to start posting songs and albums on here a lot more frequently. People have offered me storage space in the past, and I didn’t take them up on it as I didn’t have the time to take advantage of it - If you wanna help me out and give me a place to store some mp3s/albums (I’ll use anti-leech so bandwidth shouldn’t be too big of an issue) please let me know. I was actually hesitant to ask, but then I thought about it and people have always been more than willing to donate unused storage space in the past, so it’s worth a shot. Anyway, I’m just testing out an MP3 plugin for Wordpress to see how it works.

Trophy Scars - Yes

Trophy Scars - Apparition Apparitions

Trophy Scars - Alchemist Alchemists

Trophy Scars, a self-described “roving clan of substance abusing ninjas”, is a band I happened upon quite randomly, and I’m digging this album “Alphabet Alphabets”. I dunno if it’s something I like enough to actually make a post about, but it’s what I’m listening to right now and thought I’d use a track just to test this thing out.

I dunno how many of you will be watching the Oscars - I sure won’t, but that’s not saying much, I don’t really watch TV in general. Anyway, Oscar Torrents is a pretty cool site, it has all the nominees by category, with descriptions of each movie, and links to torrent files. I bet this will piss some people off.

Oh yeah, might as well throw this on here: I’m not a huge fan of Sting and/or the Police, but I do like the songs that I know. There were rumors of them getting back together for a tour, and possibly making a stop at Bonnaroo. Well it’s just been confirmed, the Police will be at Bonnaroo this year. Thank god I preordered my ticket, as I have a feeling that this news will really speed up the ticket sales - The official lineup comes out this Wednesday (Valentines Day), and I seriously can’t wait to see who else is gonna be there.

So I had a pretty crazy weekend. I was heading to Shippensburg on Friday and it was raining pretty hard. I was going over a bridge, and the guy in front of me slammed on his brakes. I braked hard but my car slid and slammed right into the back of his. His car was fine, but the front of mine is pretty messed up. It turns our that this guy graduated from Shippensburg as well, and he was really cool about the whole thing. He felt that the accident wasn’t my fault at all, but wanted to call the police just so he’d have an incident number for insurance purposes. So the cops show up, and naturally they screwed me over. Not only did I leave the scene of the accident with what’s probably over $1000 of damage to my car, they also gave me a citation for “following too closely”. This is total bullshit, especially since they weren’t even there to witness the accident, and the other guy vouched for the fact that I wasn’t to blame for the accident. We were going over a bridge and the roads were slippery as hell anyway. So I’m gonna have to fight that… If I get any more points on my license, I’ll lose it.

Anyway, we did make it to Ship. We were hanging out at my friend’s house, and some people went out to bars, while the rest of us stayed and hung out there. The people who went to the bars ended up coming back with Chris Raab (from CKY/Jackass) and the guys from London File, who had played earlier that night at Market Cross, one of the bars in Shippensburg. So that was interesting. I had heard that Raab was back at Shippensburg taking classes, but didn’t think I’d end up running into him or anything. If you’re into jam band type stuff, London File is actually worth checking out, and they seemed like cool guys too. Anyway, I was up until 6:30 AM Saturday morning, and ended up getting about 3 hours of sleep. Later on Saturday, I turned on WSYC (the campus radio station) because I remembered Raab saying the night before that he’d be on there. Literally the second I turned it on, he was talking about his Friday night. It was pretty wierd to hear him talking about being at my friend’s house and all the stuff that was going on there. All in all I’d say I had a good weekend, but now I need to start looking for a new car because it just doesn’t make sense to put any more money into the one I have now.

I’m sure that by now a decent amount of you have heard about the “bomb scare” in Boston. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s what happened. As part of a guerrilla marketing campaign to promote the Adult Swim show “Aqua Teen Hunger Force”, devices were placed at bridges and other landmarks in 10 cities. These devices were basically circuit boards wrapped in duct tape with LEDs that, when lit up, would display Ignignokt (one half of the Mooninite duo from the show) flipping the bird. There were 38 of these in Boston. It is unknown exactly how many of these were placed in the other cities: 56 were confiscated in Philadelphia, and 41 in New York. These were also placed in Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, Austin, and San Francisco. But Boston is special. After someone reported what they suspected to be an explosive device, Boston went into terror-alert mode on Wednesday, and as a result Boston University was closed, as well as at least two bridges and the passage from the Charles River into Boston Harbor. The coast gaurd also closed the river to boat traffic. Police were assisted by bomb squards in scouring the city to locate (and apparently blow up) the signs. These signs had been in place for up to three weeks… I don’t understand how if someone thought these were bombs, it took them that long to report them. I can’t imagine being paranoid enough to think these were bombs, but at the same time being so lazy that it took me several weeks to do anything about it. Peter Berdovsky, 27, and Sean Stevens, 28, have been charged with creating a hoax leading to public disorder (a felony) and disorderly conduct (a misdemeanor) by Boston’s District Attorney. I’m not sure what’s better: Boston’s ridiculous reaction to the whole ordeal, or the press conference given by Berdovsky and Stevens (check out the video here) in which they refuse to talk about anything but 70s haircuts. Anyway… The thought of a bomb being presented in this manner (with a cartoon character giving the middle finger) reminds me of something straight out of Batman. I could see the Joker placing bombs around Gotham City with big evil looking smiley faces on them or something. The cops would gather around the bomb and prod it and then it would start emitting purple gas and put the whole city to sleep. For more details check out the Wikipedia article 2007 Boston Security Scare. Oh yeah, and check out the trailer for the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie. I am doing this as hard as I have ever done it before!

I definitely saw this coming, but it’s worth checking out anyway: The frat guys who sued Borat lost.

I don’t know about you, but this is my idea of a perfect date. Ouch. That’s all for today, folks.