[liff] Ken:By Request Only – Finally Hear What’s Behind the Awesomest Album Cover Of All Time!

2260.He’s Baaaaaaack …

Ken. By Request Only. The Awesomest Record Album cover of Time, Space, and Dimension. It will never leave the Intartubes:

Have you ever wondered exactly what Ken’s song styling sounds like, though? This album is said to have fetched north of $150 when auctioned off at eBay, but what sort of melodic tuneweaving can Ken Snyder do?

Wonder no more.

Click this link to listen to the album on YouTube (or click on the album cover above), where some brave soul has posted the tracks as a playlist.

Not wholly unpleasant, as it turns out. Corny, mawkishly-charming soft songs about sweet things and nice feelings and God and Jesus and stuff. Not Grammy-material, workmanlike but passionate effort, not mad skillz … but not untalented either.

(H/T to Garrido who left this link in the comments to the article at the end of the first link, and found me via some web search apparently. I have no connection or relation to the fellow otherwise)

Technorati Tags: Ken Snyder, Ken By Request Only, Internet Memes

[net_liff] Win Fawlty Towers For Following Dave At Twitter

2254.As anyone knows, Dave Knows PDX.

Dave knows PDX is built on an ancient unicorn burial ground, and you can trust Dave, because Dave Knows PDX, as I said.

I know that Dave is on Twitter, and Dave knows he wants more followers, and if you follow Dave, then you DM him on Twitter so that Dave knows you’re following him, he will enter your name in a drawing, and once Dave knows he has more than 150 followers, he’ll randomly pick a name and you’ll know whether or not you’ll be the proud owner of a shrink-wrapped set of the complete run of Fawlty Towers, which, as you and Dave and everyone knows, stars the not-yet-late John Cleese.

You know.

So you’ll want to follow Dave at http://twitter.com/DaveKnowsPDX. And then let him know that you’re following him.

If you know what I mean. You know?

Technorati Tags: net_liff, Dave Knows PDX, PDX Tweeters

[design] How To Layout A Comic Book Cover

2241.Ever wondered what it takes to create a decent-looking comic book cover?

Well, it takes Adobe InDesign CS3/CS4, Illustrator CS3/CS4, Photoshop CS3/CS4, and this tutorial from the most inspired design blog. It merges photographs and computer graphics to try to make a surrealistic connection between the comic world and the real world.

The result is this:

Why not give it a try?

Technorati Tags: design, comic book design, mostinspired, adobe indesign, adobe illustrator, adobe photoshop

[art] “Where I Write”: Kyle Cassidy Shows You Where Writers Create Worlds

2184.Anyone who creates has their happy space. I call mine my studio, even though it’s more of an office, because not only do I write there I sometimes draw and sometimes paint.

Kyle Cassidy shows you, through photos, where some of the most well-known authors create what they do. As someone who has a happy place, they all feel right and proper and good and the photos feel comfortable. He’s creating a series called Where I Write, and if you just wonder what some authors look like, it’s something to see.

Joe Haldeman, writing in the early morning by candle-and-lamplight,
by Kyle Cassidy. Used with Permission.

What will you see? Ben Bova, happy in an ordered space with just enough clutter and model planes. Michael Swanwick, looking as though he were frozen in enthusiastic dance. Samuel R. Delaney, in fish-eye view, looking like he’s at the center of a claustrophobic space about to explode (I felt rather the same way after I finally worked my way through Dhalgren). Joe Haldeman (pictured), writing by candle- and lantern-light in the early hou of the day in longhand in sketchbooks. Some writers use computers, some don’t. But everything about them suggests that these are their happy places, the sort of place which is so personalized (and so lined with books/tapes/CDs/personal trinkets) that to enter such a place probably gets the juices flowing.

Kyle has lined up twenty authors so far, and is on the hunt for more. He’ll be at WorldCon looking up some more (I’m, of course, hoping he gets Harlan Ellison). Word is that there is eventually a book to be out of this, and I’m looking forward to that.

The address to explore is http://whereiwrite.org. Kyle’s site is http://kylecassidy.com.

Technorati Tags: art, wriring, authors, Kyle Cassidy, Where I Write

R.I.P. Max Factor, et. al.

2146.Yes, its true: Max Factor is being pulled from the market by the year 2010.

This article (via megaTwitterer iamkhayyam) offers a look at 20 large companies who ended in 2009. Some you’ve heard of; many you haven’t (if you’re an Oregon local anyway) and it all paints this picture of economic Darwinism in action. All of these companies are I’m certain – to anyone who’s heard of them – companies that nobody probably thought would ever go away.

Sic transit gloria. And so it goes.

Technorati Tags: Brand Fails, branding, The Economy

A Bridge To WordPress

2142.This is more a bit of self-documentation of the evolution of this blog, but I suppose it is a fishing expedition for suggestions as well. Also, those who blog tend to write obsessively about what they’re doing with their blogs because we are all the masters of our own worlds (we’ve got to be … otherwise why have a blog? We might just as well continue keeping a diary, yes?).

Anyway, for a while now I’ve been wanting to sharpen my Blogger customization skills. I have a little Blogger mojo but not as much as I want to. Sadly, though, every time I start studying Blogger markup, my eyes just glaze over, and the new regime with widgets – while mad fun and easy to add spiffy stuff – just starts to make my eyes cross.

Not long ago I broadcast an appeal to teh Twitter for any suggestions for good Blogger references that won’t make me want to, say, go out and mow the lawn just to get a break from it. And it was suggested to me that I move my whole operation to WordPress. What I didn’t publicize at that time was that I have had a WordPress version of this for a while – it’s at http://zehnkatzen.wordpress.com – and I’ve been using it as a mirror/backup to this one.

It does have awesome functionality, and I’m exploring it slowly. A move may be in the offiing – and it may be just the thing.

Fortunately, ScribeFire (the blogging plugin for FF) makes it easy to post to both places. So, starting here, that’s just what I’m going to be doing.

Does anyone know of any resources to help me pierce the inscrutable veil around the Blogger markup? Also, is WordPress any easier to customize?

Technorati Tags: ZehnKatzen Times, WordPress, Blogger, ZehnKatzen

An Important Note About Illustrations Here

This version of The ZehnKatzen Times is a mirror of the original blog, maintained since 2004, on Blogger: http://zehnkatzen.blogspot.com.

Since the images on the original blog are hosted at various places, some of them don’t come through at this blog, of course.

I’m, at this time, still evaluating the pros and cons of a move of all my content over here to the WordPress, and many balls are still in play.

The Annual Tax Time Play: Waiting For Kibo

2027.With tax time upon us like something that is really upon us every 15th of April, I realized it was time for our annual performance of the classic play Waiting For Kibo.

This has been a tradition on this blog since its founding in late 1965. You have not been seeing it before  because it has been invisible.

And now, laced with Usenetticisms and recalling a simpler time when all anyone had to worry about was the damage Netcom users would do to the then-character based intarwebs, I give you, Waiting for Kibo.(warning: there a few adult words up in there)

WAITING FOR KIBO
by Spamuel Buckett

[Scene: A deserted terminal room in the math building of a Famous University. It is summer, and students have left in droves. A sign on the door says "Annex Room Keep."]

[On a bright and happy VT-100, someone is logged in. A news agent -- developed in part by funding from a Finnish site - helpfully scans the Usenet feed for new posts from world.com.]

[Two people pace back and forth. One is tall, the other not so. One is well-known, the other not so.]

Estrogen: So, what are we waiting for again?

Vlad: We’re waiting for Kibo to show up. [He yawns.]

Estrogen: But where’s he been?

Vlad: No one knows. [He cracks his knuckles.]

Estrogen: We could go play xtrek next door.

Vlad: Not THAT old thing. Besides, we can’t, we’re waiting for Kibo. [He stretches and farts.]

Estrogen: Oh yeah, I forgot.

[They pace back and forth. Estrogen opens up his backpack and
takes out a sandwich: Spam and Cheez Whiz. He spits it out.]

Estrogen: Didn’t you say he was just on vacation?

Vlad: No, I never said that. [He takes a sip of Dr. Pepper and burps in a pruneful way.]

Estrogen: Oh yeah, he’s using vacation to autoreply. But maybe he really is on vacation.

Vlad: Maybe. [He begins picks his nose.]

Estrogen: Come on, this is stupid! Let’s go troll on soc.culture.welsh!

Vlad: No. [He is not wearing any pants.]

Estrogen: Jesus! C’mon, can’t we post to alt.sex.stories.spiffy?

Vlad: Go ahead, if you want to, but we’re waiting for Kibo. [He eats a lime-flavored mentos.]

Estrogen: Well, I’m not going to sit here and wait for him forever, you know. I got it! We’ll start a huge editor religious war in alt.games.jyhad!

Vlad: But we’re waiting for Kibo. He’s going to post one of these days, and I’m not doing anything else until he does. You can unsubscribe if you want, but not me. [He begins to download a perl primer.]

[A terminal sitting nearby beeps twice, then explodes. It is ignored.]

Estrogen: Did you see this cyberspace thread in alt.culture.usenet?

Vlad: Look, why do you have to say such stupid things all the time? Can’t you just shut up and wait for Kibo? [He composes a new story for alt.eunuchs.questions but doesn't bother to post it.]

Estrogen: Well excuuuuuuse me, geez. I think maybe I’ll warlord Wednesday again.

Vlad: Fine with me. [He types "g soc.singles" but thinks better of it.]

[A lot of silence passes. Sixty-three newgroups arrive in control. All are rmgrouped.]

Vlad: You’re right, fuck it, I’m tired of waiting. Let’s go see that new Keanu Reeves movie. [He types \rm -r * and gets up.]

Estrogen: Now you’re talking! I…want…room…service! And my $10,000 T3 link.

Vlad: We’ll come back tomorrow. [He pulls the Internet jack out of his skull.]

Estrogen: And then the day after tomorrow.

Vlad: Possibly. [He unleashes a webcrawler virus that forces all occurrences of STRONG to become BLINK through server pull.]

Estrogen: And so on.

[They leave. A message, in Finnish, appears on the news agent
screen. But its earnest little message is plaintively ignored.]

Original credit: E. Stephen Mack, estephen@emf.net. All hail Leader Kibo, except Spot, who is Not Allowed and asploded anyway.

Technorati Tags: Kibo, Leader Kibo, Club 91, Spot, Not Allowed, Kibology

I Am All Oregon, Baby, The List Explained: Nos. 11-20

1983.Way back a few months, before the colossal computer failure, I’d reprised the I’m All Oregon, Baby list that I’d revised in Number 1831 of 29 October. At the time, someone somewhere else released a list of you know you’re Oregonian if … trivial points, and I knew I could go that better. And, I did.

I thought that a little more exposition was in order, so I released Number 1841 later on, detailing personal explanations to numbers 1-10. Really, it’s a subjective thing, but there’s cultural commonality that means that some people are just … well, more local than others. And since I was (and still am) unforgivably smug about being lucky enough to be born in Oregon, I think that I ought to walk my talk.

Peforce, we take up again the deep glimpses into the elements of my list, and why I think they really make you The Compleat Oregonian. Let’s take it up with number 11:

11. You remember how the building that housed that Morrison Street store was levelled (this doesn’t happen often in Oregon)

By “That Morrison Street Store”, I’m referring to the legendary Morrison Fred Meyer, the Fred Meyer store that was downtown and about the size of a large drug store–hardly the 1-stop Shopping that Fred Meyer made famous, but a traditional location for a Fred Meyer, being as the original store was located a mere one block south, at SW 5th and Yamhill.

The Morrison Street Fred Meyer was on the first floor of the Corbett Building. What is on that block now is a part of the Pioneer Place Mall, and the Corbett had to go. The method was, as far as we know, Portland’s first (and so far only) controlled demolition implosion.

Emporis has a page with an awesome picture here. The Corbett Building died on 1 May, 1988.

12. You remember what sort of imported car Tom McCall stuffed his 6-foot-plus frame into during his tenure as Governor.

While I don’t remember the model, it was an Audi. I do remember the news photos of it. It was kind of funny, watching this Central Oregonian rancher’s kid stuff himself in the back seat. But that was Tom McCall for you.

13. You consider Tom McCall God. There’s no passes on this one.

He cleaned up the Willamette River, opened the beaches to all, and told everyone to please visit Oregon again and again, but don’t come here to live. Said in earnest jest in an interview with CBS’s Terry Drinkwater around 1970, it defined Oregon as a state of quirky individualists.

They only made one Tom. Ther’re Governors who came close, maybe, since. And maybe Governors of similar stature elsewhere. But if you want the best damn governor Oregon ever had, it’s Tom.

That’s my story, and I’m-a stickin’ to it.

Tom McCall died in 1983, aged 69.

You all know I have terminal cancer—and I have a lot of it. But what you may not know is that stress induces its spread and induces its activity. Stress may even bring it on. Yet stress is the fuel of the activist. This activist loves Oregon more than he loves life. I know I can’t have both very long. The trade-offs are all right with me. But if the legacy we helped give Oregon and which made it twinkle from afar—if it goes, then I guess I wouldn’t want to live in Oregon anyhow.

14. You remember what Tom McCall did to make the beaches of Oregon open to everyone, all the time. You know that, in Oregon, signs that said “Ocean Beaches” was just Oregonian for “This way to the coast”.

In 1967, Tom got HB 1601–the Beach Bill–passed:

In 1967 Governor Tom McCall signed the Beach Bill with great fanfare, calling it “one of the most far reaching measures of its kind enacted by any legislative body in the nation.” The bill granted the public recreational rights to the dry sands of Oregon’s beaches all the way to the vegetation line.

This was kind of an evolution of something Governor Oswald West did in 1913–declaring the wet sand beach portion of the beach a public highway (and it kind of was–Oregon Coasters used opportune sections of beach to get from town to town before there was a US 101). But naturally this left enough leeway for developers to take as much dry sand as they could, and knowing the usual Oregon developer, I don’t doubt they tried.

And it’s true that, all during the last half of the 20th Century, if you were going to the Oregon Coast, you followed the signs reading “Ocean Beaches” which pointed westward from every likely cross-highway access from the Valley cities. Latterly, the signs say “Oregon Coast”.

I mourn the passing of those old signs.

15. You understand that the correct way to say Glisan is seen as incorrect, and the incorrect pronounciation is what everyone uses.

The actual correct pronounciation of Glisan, I am told (and they say there’s evidence to back this up) is as the word glisten. It makes sense. As far as I’m aware, a vowel after two consonants should generally be pronounced “short”. Somehow, over the years, we’ve vowel-shifted it to rhyme with the last name of The Great One.

So you have a choice: say it wrong and be a regarded a local, or say it right and be regarded an anal-retentive goober (and get corrected a lot).

16. You have spent at least one (preferably more) camping holidays at Detroit Lake (or similar reservoirs in the Cascades.

Oh, yes, summers in the Cascades. At the time all I was interested in was Detroit Dam, but the trees, the lake, the stream tumbling down from the mountains … it’s an Oregon thing. If you grew up in Albany or Corvallis you went out to Green Peter or Foster reserviors, if you grew up down in Eugene you went down to Dexter reservior. It’s an east-west-east rhythm that easily rivals any vacation crush to the Borscht Belt.

17. You remember when Bend had a population of about 15,000. Wasn’t all that long ago.

In the mid-late 20th C, before Bend was “discovered”, it was kind of a poky little place of 15-20,000 and grew kind of slowly. As late as 1990 Bend only had about 20,000 people in it, kind of a Central Oregon version of Pendleton.

Then the housing bubble grew, “lifestyle” migrations became fashionable, and Bend was “discovered”.

There are still people trying to recover from that, but nevermind. Statstics show that Bend added nearly 23,000 people between 1980 and 1990, and current estmates of its population put it near 80,000.

Now it’s Central Oregon’s version of Yakima, population-wise-speaking.

18. You know what they Round-Up in Pendleton each year.

Cows. And then they use the cows to round up cowboys, and the cowboys round up spectators. The Pendleton Round-Up is amongst the most famous rodeos in all of Oregon, if not the west.

19. You have eaten frozen food products by Ore-Ida.

Via Wikipedia: Founded in the early 1950s, Ore-Ida was the pioneer of Tater Tots. The company’s name is a portmanteau of Oregon and Idaho. Indeed, the company’s original logo looked like the map silhouettes of Oregon and Idaho fused together, with the name Ore-Ida superimposed on it in italicized letters. Ore-Ida’s primary production facility is located in Ontario, Oregon, and employs over 1,000 local residents.

Yep. OreIda made Napoleon Dynamite necessary, and intoduced us all to the allure of Tots. Life was never the same.

20. You have had earnest discussions with someone east of the Cascades about what Oregon really is.

Everyone knows that there are two Oregons: Us, on the Wetback side of the Cascades and north of about Eugene look around and see lush, green moist climate, growing things, compact cities going through growing pains. Drysiders see ranches, wide-open spaces, not so much rain, beautiful volcanoes rising striaght up from the plains, and, if you’re in the 1/3 of what’s west of the Cascades that isn’t the Valley, beautiful mountainous country that’s dry and hot in the summer and cold and snowy in the winter.

Sometimes it’s as though three excellent states were smooshed together to make one awesome one. And if we argue about what Oregon really is, where the heart and soul of Oregon can be found, we’ll all eventually agree that we wouldn’t want to be any-damn-where else.

We’ll do 21-30 soon … and not wait so long at it! Bis naechsten Mal, schloss für heute!

Technorati Tags: Liff in Oregon, life in oregon, oregon trivia, Oregoniana, Native Oregonians, Oregonians

Kelly Groucutt, Electric Light Orchestra Bassist, Dies at 63

1950.Michael William Groucutt, known professionally as Kelly Groucutt, a member of the Electric Light Orchestra during their signature years, died of a heart attack yesterday in the UK. He was 63 years old.

Kelly joined the lineup, replacing original bassist Mike De Albuquerque, with the Face The Music album (1974) the album which gave us the early ELO hits “Evil Woman” and “Strange Magic”. He remained, with his high-pitched backing vocals and intricate bass work helping to craft the classic ELO sound through 1983’s Secret Message, though more than one source makes plain that he at most only performed four songs on it.

In 1983, Kelly split somewhat bitterly from the group, unhappy with royalty payments, a move which culminated in lawsuits against band managment and group leader, Jeff Lynne.

Post-ELO, he remained active in music, recording at least two solo albums and collecting a small core of devoted fans. In 1989, he joined former ELO bandmates Bev Bevan and Mik Kaminski with a few other players to form the ELO-revival group Electric Light Orchestra Part II. In 2000, ELO Part II became The OrKestra. He also had a small session band which did live gigs around the area he lived.

Kelly was my first favorite bassist, and he’s one of the reasons I remain in love with the bass and consider it integral to any real rock band.

As old as some rock dinosaurs get these days, 63 years seems an extremely untimely death.

He will be missed by many.

Technorati Tags: Kelly Groucutt, Rock bassists, passages, Electric Light Orchestra, ELO Part II, The OrKestra, bassist obituaries