Month: May 2004

Tape Flags

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Finally, a magazine that comes with tape flags.

ShaC loaned me his copy of CARGO magazine which is basically a men’s shopping magazine- “ooh look at all this cool stuff I can buy.” One of the pages is an entire sheet of CARGO tape flags to hold your pages for you. And, fortunately, the page the flags are from is slightly of shorter width than the rest of the pages… so you can flip to it easily. Otherwise, you know I would flag the flags, because I’m crazy like that.

More magazines should do this so everyone can be as obsessive about their magazines as I am.

My only complaint- the binding makes it hard to rip out advertisements and hard to lay the magazine flat while, say, at the gym. Wired and the Utne Reader have this same kind of binding. That’s the first thing I do to Newsweek, Businessweek, or Star- rip out all the stiff ads so my magazine is nice and floppy. Notice none of this has anything to do with the content of the magazine.

Are you afraid yet?

Do Not Throw PowerBook Mmmmkay

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Took the PowerBook into Apple Store to an “Apple Genius”… they say the dent and fractured AirPort is a “Tier 3” which gets us an estimated $900 repair bill.

That is a flat rate for anything involving replacing the case, and they don’t let you opt out of a case repair.

Since the new iBook with comparable capabilities is only a little more than that, I think we’re gonna go ahead and not do that.

My Sweet Satan

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Years ago someone told me that if you played Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven song backwards that you could make out “satanic messages”. It is not my opinion that Led Zeppelin was given the power to make these backwards sounds have a satanic message. And, no, I did not create this to show the evils of Rock and Roll. Instead I made this flash piece for two reasons: 1. I was new to flash and wanted to be better at it and 2. The backwards file sounds cool.

From the too-much-time-on-my-hands department:

The forwards lyrics:

If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow
don’t be alarmed now
It’s just a spring clean for the May Queen
Yes there are two paths you can go by
but in the long run
There’s still time to change the road you’re on

What people heard in the reversed lyrics:

Oh here’s to my sweet Satan
The one whose little path would make me sad
Whose power is Satan
He’ll give you give you 666
There was a little toolshed where
He made us suffer, sad Satan

My mapping of reversed sounds to forwards lyrics:

heard ” Oh ” here’s to my sweet Satan
sounds naah ohrydoahruhtttth zhehhsh o’t mai(t) eeelss et’
mapped on you’re road the change to time still there’s
lyrics There’s still time to change the road you’re on

heard The one whose little path would make me sad
sounds Nrrr Ngone ethni tahb ohg naah’c eeyy sthap
mapped runlong the in but by go can you paths
lyrics paths you can go by
but in the long run

heard Whose power is Satan
sounds ooo t au rer esthsSay’
mapped two are there Yes
lyrics Yes there are two

heard He’ll give you give you 6 6 6
sounds Eyuuuh Qyih yaymeth orrthneac pssats uhst tsih
mapped Queen May the for clean spring a just It’s
lyrics It’s just a spring clean for the May Queen

heard There was a little toolshed where he made us suffer sad Satan
sounds awn d’ma laehb’d woolshdge’ yerr’er nih elst sub seretdhif’
mapped now alarmed be don’t hedgerow your in bustle there’s if
lyrics If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow
don’t be alarmed now

UPDATE 2005-05-15:
After just over a year, the original link is dead. I’ll update it here so people can still hear it backwards… so maybe you can actually listen to it before shooting your mouth off.

Other locations:

Someday when I feel even crazier I should do a phonetic transcription in the IPA… which I believe theoretically should be easier to reverse into something just as legible as the forwards version! -brainWeb link of note: My Sweet Satan
(At http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/stairway.php)

Cause Celeb

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Helen Fielding’s more serious romance. Her main character Rosie is a lot more together than Bridget, but her leading man Oliver is a lot more one-dimensional than Daniel from Bridget Jones’ Diary.

Rosie has a bad relationship with the manic-depressive Oliver, then throws herself into a relief effort in an Ethiopia-like country which is on the verge of famine. She then returns to grab a bunch of celebrities to do a sort of “Africa Aid” thing, and in the end they all learn a very special lesson.

The first half of the book is setup for the African portion (more on that later), but mainly Rosie’s experience being adopted as an accessory to Oliver, a well-connected television producer. All the celebrities know him, and she learns about dealing with “the Famous Club.” However, their antics aren’t as interesting or as depraved as say, Less Than Zero or even Glamorama, both by Bret Easton Ellis.

The second half is mostly the impending locust crisis. At this point the celebrities are more a gimmick and make me want to destroy my television. The celebrities are all slightly traumatized by the famine and by being in a third world country in general… but their “quirky” personalities makes them a constant annoynace. As in the Bridget Jones stories, there are quite a few social situations that could have been solved by raw violence.

I can’t really recommend this book. The crises in Africa are interesting but not very developed… and the celebrities are so lacking in any kind of development they are just not interesting at all. I don’t say this about many books, but Cause Celeb is a book that needed to be longer for what it seemed to be trying to accomplish.

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