Last night I saw NEUNG PHAK at Cafe du Nord — a bunch of white dudes from Oakland ( who play “classic” Southeast Asian pop music (like from the late 1960s and early 1970s). One of these guys was in Negativland. They were great, as always.

The “Thai Molam Band” from the Berkeley Thai Community Center was there playing a bunch of unidentifiable instruments.

Also playing was Sumatran Folk Cinema, a short movie focussing on pop music in Sumatra. Pretty cool.

There was also a short film called “The Golden Voice” which was about the final years of Cambodian pop star Ros Serey Sothea, who was killed by the Khmer Rouge. Kinda depressing!

BG: I once got a friend an inflatable goat for his birthday.
BG: I wasn’t there, so I told many of our mutual friends to watch him open it,
BG: and for them to force him to open it in front of everyone.

BRAIN: Heh heh.

BG: He later told me that “he thought he’d show me” by actually …
BG: inflating and copulating with said inflatable goat.

BG: But then he felt dirty, and wanted to throw it away.
BG: But he couldn’t just throw it away, because it was inflated.
BG: And he couldn’t deflate it because it was nasty.

BG: So he took out his knife and slashed its throat.

BG: And there it was, he fucked it, slashed its throat, and put it in the dumpster.

BG: For obvious reasons, I didn’t introduce him to my cousin when he asked.

Bawdy Caste did a special showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show on Friday at Shoreline Century Cinema (not Shoreline Amphitheater!), which is weird because that theater is a muliplex that never shows Rocky. No one knows why they decided to show Rocky suddenly. Also no one knows why they decided to show it at 10pm.

Because they obviously didn’t have a home cast, Bawdy Caste stepped in and was a “guest cast.” I helped a little with costume changes.

I was thinking it would be cool to have the crew dress as kuroko, those guys in kabuki who change the sets, who wear all black with a black bag over their head so they are “invisible.”

• Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity on accused shooter’s reading list
• Overcompensating: The Media

This dude shot up a church in the name of fighting “Liberals.” He shot a bunch of people.

Adkisson is accused of killing two people and injuring seven others. He is charged with first-degree murder in the death of Greg McKendry, 60. Also killed in the shooting was Linda Kraeger, 61, who was visiting the church from Westside Unitarian Universalist Church.

Injured were Joe Barnhart, 76, and Jack Barnhart, 69, who are brothers; Betty Barnhart, 71; Linda Chavez, 41; John Worth Jr., 68; Tammy Sommers, 38; and Allison Lee, 42. Jack and Joe Barnhart are brothers, and Jack and Betty Barnhart are married.

It’s time to recognize that these so-called Conservative writers are just sponsoring fear and hate. It is unacceptable. They are unworthy of “debate,” the entire notion of “balanced” news or coverage is flawed.

They have a right to express themselves, but they don’t have a right to your time. If someone insisted we were all made of raspberry jam and there is a conspiracy of goldfish trying to control our brains, would you give them air time? No.

Just stop listening.

Write down all the commercials that appear during material from these hatemongers. Stop buying those products; intentionally buy a competitor. Send an email or letter to the station and the sponsors to tell them what you’ve done. We can consume our way out of this problem.

Am I missing something? Is it really fashionable to kill female members of the military? What is going on here?

• Spc. Megan Lynn Touma
• 2nd Lt. Holley Wimunc
• Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach

CTO: I need to talk to you!
BRAIN: Ut oh…
CTO: Why aren’t we finished with the R47 project?!
BRAIN: We are finished with the R47 project.
CTO: Oh. Uh… okay never mind.
BRIAN: Bye.

OJ: what is sin of 0?
BRAIN: 0
BRAIN: er no
BRAIN: that’s cos(0)
OJ: oh oops
BRAIN: it’s 1
BRAIN: sin(0) = 1
OJ: math is hard
BRAIN: ha
BRAIN: UNIT CIRCLE I CHOOSE YOU
BRAIN: I got this backwards
BRAIN: hey looky google does it
BRAIN: cos(0) = 1
OJ: lol
OJ: yay google
BRAIN: ok we suck

What messes me up is the shorthand of the unit circle sine being the y and cosine being the x… somehow about half the time I mix those up… sowwy. If I had been less lazy and actually thought about it for half a second I would have gotten it right.

So I guess don’t ask me to design bridges for you.

Take that naysayers!
Farms in the sky gain new interest

in other news looks like I need to come up with more zany futurism ideas since people seem to be implementing mine already.

Okay so mine was a vertical sustainable forest. But this is pretty similar!

How else are all the people in the arco going to eat?

8-track tape is very weird.

The tape is “endless”– it spools around a single reel, and unrolls from the center of the reel. Kinda crazy. A side effect of this is you cannot rewind the tape. There’s a fast-forward, but no rewind. Since the tape is circular, you don’t have to wait for the tape to rewind; once the last song on your track is over, you will already be back at the beginning.

There are 4 (stereo) tracks on a single tape. Each track is considered a “program,” and all 4 programs are playing simultaneously, sort of like having 4 radio stations playing at the same time. Since there is no rewind… if your favorite song on Track 3 is in the same place as your favorite song on Track 4, you’re going to have to do a low of fast-forwarding. My deck has a “program” button on it which switches between tracks/programs.

A “Repeat” button makes the track play over again instead of going to the next track.

There is no “stop” button, nor a “play” button. The closest you get is a “pause” button. The way you start playing a tape is you shove the tape in. The way you stop playing a tape is you yank it out of the player.

So I asked my friend Steve
BRAIN: how do you know where you are in a program?
STEVE: You don’t. You just wait for the song you want to play again. 8-Track is sort of based on you knowing the songs on your tape already.
BRAIN: This sucks!

I’m listening to a tape my grandparents used to listen to.

BRAIN: so wait what is the allegation here?
BRAIN: with the inhaler?
OSCAR: i don’t know
OSCAR: I stopped reading pretty quickly
OSCAR: it’s just sometimes good to remember what real crazy is
BRAIN: this is a good exercise in the device of “unreliable narrator”
BRAIN: because there’s enough clues you can piece together what is “really” happening
BRAIN: example:

I now work at a vitamin store where I met a chiropractor. She offered to help me. I went in for one session and experienced a great improvement.

She has since, mysteriously, refused to see me.

BRAIN: GEE I WONDER WHY
BRAIN: IT MUST BE THE CONSPIRACY
OSCAR: wow, too insane for chiropractors
BRAIN: can you imagine that session?
BRAIN: lady’s on the table
BRAIN: the chiropractor sort of wondering how she can gracefully never talk to her again
OSCAR: gracefully?
OSCAR: i suspect the key is “hopes this person doesn’t have violent tendencies”
BRAIN: yeah like you are in a little room with someone
BRAIN: it suddenly occurs to you that they are bugfuck insane
OSCAR: that’s only happened with people I’ve dated

This site seems a bit misleadingly named. I was hoping for a directory of countries that had Mad Cow outbreaks or a rating system of the safety of beef in those countries.

The diatribe also reminds me of Alex Robinson’s “Tricked.”