Gesnarf

I'm always searching for new musical horizons and it ain't always easy, but I can't keep on listening to Bach, Beethoven, Dark Side of the Moon and Led Zep 2 forever. So I discovered there were TWO sides to every Fleetwood Mack albums, and an excellent post-punk rock group called My Chemical Romance

But it finally paid off when my daughter introduced me to Parov Stelar. I discovered Electro Swing!

Since then I found Caravan Palace and I'm still scouting for more Electro Swing groups. I just love this stuff.

I love the sax. I love the long overlooked clarinets delivering diabolical solos that inspired the nascent electric guitar way back when. I love the girl that sounds like Betty Boop singing inside a tin can!

I'm absolutely convinced that Bioshock's Big Daddies always listen to Electro Swing inside their diving helmets...

Praytell, are there any more Electro Swing groups I should know about?

Can I get sociological answers across the spectrum? No sexual activity required here, just the olfactory perception of an unscented, clean person met in a public place. Could be in a lineup for a movie. Could be in a bus. Keep it clean, people!

I think guys smell like the inside of brown corrugated shipping boxes. Women smell a bit like vanilla with an edge, but nice.

What do YOU perceive?

I recently read an article by a lady reporter for Vogue who traveled to the middle east and who stated that anywhere west of Egypt, like Syria (where she happened to be), you don't eat the salad because of the untrustworthy water quality the salads are washed with.

Can you add some whimsical culture traits, very interesting and possibly life saving caveats for aspiring world travelers?

OK. I hate it when a political contender, or a contender's mudpile maggot, diverts a very good question by declaring : "That's a distraction!", and then keeps on blathering about his party's usual official lies.

Disgusting! You just know from there on in that they're lying and that they hope people will forget about it by the time they manage to set up the next (friendly) interview.

"That's divisive!" comes a close second.

These people just have no honor!

So what are your favorite or most hated dismissive/dissembling/obfuscating/slimy tactics?

This is a question, a puzzle and also, I hope, an interesting little story.

As an ex-field archeologist, I saw a few weird sights in my day. But I was only about thirteen when I saw the one thing that stuck with me and still has me puzzled.

I was a Cemetary Kid (Cemetary Kid, archaeologist, and now horror fiction writer; see a pattern here?). We were a bunch of kids living in the big city with this humongous, sprawling cemetary right next door. It was great! You could walk around in there for a week and still not go by the same spot twice. Guess where we spent all our summers playing cowboys and Indians? I still remember that place inside out.

The cemetary was beautiful, as you'd expect. Rolling hills of grass, big wonderful trees, flowers everywhere, birds, squirrels, skunks, raccoons and lots of exquisitely carved charnel houses from another era. The place allowed us to not be city kids anymore, all summer long, and there actually was nothing morbid about it all, excluding our occasional "Bang! Bang! You're dead!"

We left the dead alone and they pretty much left us to our own devices too, except for the occasional gristly sight or a whiff of death. But hey, it was THEIR home, after all.

The cemetary dump was an entirely different story.

Hidden in the back part of the cemetary behind a hill there were hundreds of rotting white paper mache flower baskets, heaps of dessicated wreaths, tarnished brass coffin handles, broken planks from those same coffins, and skeletal body parts; some still in tattered pieces of the clothes they had been buried in. Most of it was bulldozed into mush.

Of all the summers I spent in that cemetary, I only went there once or twice. It was a sad, sad place. There, I realized that even the dead had to pay the rent or they'd get evicted, literally thrown out in a dump with the garbage. I realized there was no sanctity for the poor, the forgotten people. This might be small potatoes for a kid who happened to survive WWII in Europe, but it was quite a bit to chew on for a thirteen years old in peacetime North America in the mid sixties. Back then, I didn't even know what street Vietnam was on.

And this is where I saw the strange coffin. It was about six by eight feet and 2 feet deep and built of sturdy wood that had turned a dark shade of grey over time. It laid empty and upside down on a heap of thrash, the bottom gone. The inside was separated into eight small compartments on either side of a central "corridor". On the walls of this corridor, a name had been carved in front of each small room in beautiful old timey cursive letters accented with golden paint, and I seem to remember the names could have been Irish. No crosses, no dates.

This was, in effect, a miniature walk-in mausoleum housing eight separate baby-sized tombs. I tried to lift it a bit to take a look at the top in case anything was written there, but I coudn't even budge it. That wood was heavy, man.

What was puzzling to me, on top of this weird architecture, was : where do you get eight dead babies to bury all at once? A fire in a hospital nursery?

Over the years I tried to put this all together and here is my tentative conclusion.

This was a Roman Catholic cemetary and the names could have been Irish. This style of communal coffin might have been common in Ireland at a time when many died during the potato famine. The Irish refugees sailed over on thyphoid ridden ships and upon arrival were interned in quarantine camps. And that's where you get a bunch of dead babies with Irish names to bury all at once.

Any better ideas?

Instead, it does a search in My Documents and "finds" a little txt file called desktop.ini. Sometimes, it thinks it's seeing a blank disk and asks me to add files (which I, of course, can't), or simply crashes.

Help!

The data disks are undamaged and I've copied files from them very often. I have a Dell Inspiron 530 Core Duo with lots of memory running on Vista.

I need a hand from a professional writer or teacher who could help with my peculiar form of writer's block. Magazine editors, who typically publish my short stories, just don't have any time to help a writer, even if he's made a name for himself, on something that doesn't pertain to the job at hand. I can understand that.

Paraphrasing Stephen King: "I got the check, it didn't bounce, and I paid the electricity bill". Quite a few of them, over time. However, short stories just won't pay the rent (I DO have a day job and I'm hanging on to it for dear life like Harvey Pekar).

My main concern when I write is to subtly weave in back story while keeping the reader riveted. I mostly achieve this by writing linearly from the protagonist's first-person view, but I fear the reader might get exhausted after 120 pages of this.

I also write in the omniscient POV and this could allow me to break out of my 20 to 70 page format, but it would almost certainly imply the use of story arks, and story arks completely baffle me for some reason. I once even tried writing 3 different stories and then shuffling them together. The result could have been titled Alphabet Soup. I'll never be a TV writer...

Complicating things is that I write horror and fantasy fiction, but scrupulously avoid all the cliches that abound in those genres nowadays. Although cliches and stereotypical characters might help me move things along, I absolutely abhor them.

I tried books, website, everything. My odd work hours prevent me from attending workshops, which are mainly for beginners anyway. I wouldn't fit.

I paradoxically seem to be too advanced and lacking in some basic skill at the same time... could that be it?

Appearances, appearances!

Any sociologists, philosophers or experts in aesthetics here? This is no placebo-like, navel-gazing effect : I only grew the damned thing for a lark and a change. I didn't expect much of anything from anybody. I just remembered to shave around the damned thing and essentially forgot about it.

But recently women, especially younger and some middle aged women, now engage me in conversations more than ever. I'm really open but not very interested in younger women - they're essentially beautiful trouble and I'm just not the dirty old man type - but even THEY have shown a new willingness to kid around with me, engage with me and laugh at my jokes more than ever before, including those days of yore when I was their own age. This is not a fleeting impression : it's really happening and I'm really gobsmacked by this weird, totally unexpected phenomenon!

I suspect that the mustache may be hiding my major aesthetic fault : I have a small, thin-lipped, down turned mouth a bit like Severus Snape, which may give a first impression that I'm unhappy, disapproving. Could that be it? The reverse is true. I actually try my darndest to be nice and lighthearted even when people are not always nice to me. I'm always thinking that anybody can have a bad day.

On top of this general change in women's attitude towards me, this thing came to a head recently when a gorgeous woman I've known for a couple of years became noticeably (and very unexpectedly) interested in me last week, asking me questions of a personal and somewhat intimate nature. I'm basically freaking out here!. Heck, one of my clients, a straight (like me), athletic and rather macho guy in his late twenties, complimented me on my new mustache right out of the blue. Guys don't usually do this kind of thing to other guys, so WTF? All of this was so unexpected that it still makes me laugh incredulously when I think about it.

Please believe me when I say that I haven't changed an iota. I did not go around wondering how people would react to my stupid new mustache. I just didn't think anyone would really care. This has been, in an incredibly ridiculous and pedestrian way, worthy of Ignatius J. Reilly's personal voyage towards a dubious and almost meaningless self discovery.

So there's something going on with this ridiculous little patch of facial pilosity that's beyond me. All I know is that I can now understand more clearly how unfair it can be that appearances are such a determining factor in our lives, and especially in our relationships towards each other.

Disclosures :

- I'm 6 feet tall, rather trim, 58 but looking somewhat younger (says my excellently wunderbar daughter), I still have all my not-noticeably-graying brown-blond hair, and my brand new R.A.F. pilot's mustache is salt and pepper. Except for my Snape mouth, even though I don't consider myself good looking, I don't think I have any other major aesthetic issues.

- An R.A.F. pilot's mustache (Royal Air Force to you, mate) is a mustache that curls up towards the ears slightly at the ends, slightly and not like a cartoon magician's, and was popular with R.A.F. pilots during WWII.

The quest for THE apple :

These most excellent apples were always small, oval, had dark red skin and extremely white flesh with nice little red veins running through it.

But their taste was out of this world!!! And they smelled so good! Strong smell. You could literally smell one across the room. I'd have to say they tasted somewhere between an apple, a strawberry and a cherry. They were always very sweet; never ever bitter. The perfect, the quintessential apple!

My dad called them "Snow Apples" and they suddenly disappeared from supermarkets somewhere around 1964 -1965. When asked why we couldn't find them anymore, my dad said : "They're sending them to England, now. We won't get them here anymore." with that dark look in his eyes. Although he always tried to hide it, I knew my dad really hated the Brits, so I dunno... but you still can't find them today.

I tried other varieties but ended up simply quitting eating apples after a while. This is not a nostalgia trip. I'm SO not the nostalgia type. I mean, it seems to me that people have no idea how yucky apples taste today because they've never known better. It's hard to believe for someone who has never tasted a Snow Apple, or whatever the heck they were, but every other variety of apple paled by comparison.

To me, that bland, ordinary, processed scrap they try to feed us now tastes more like chewing on the photograph of an apple clipped from the supermarket flier (but then, a lot of fruits and vegetables do, sometimes. Ever get stuck with a bagful of taste bud eradicating, stomach destroying, new-year-resolution-killing oranges? Raisins that seem to think they're wounded limes from the Eastern Front? Carrots that taste like some drywall decided to dye its hair red? It's always a toss-up). Now I sound like a Cracked writer.

I still try to eat an apple once in a while, if it's small and dark red and oval and looks like a Snow Apple. Rarely. Just in case. Nope.

So what's the deal? Any apple experts here?

As I remember it from a particularly fascinating history course (they were ALL fascinating, mind you), Rome's armies were fighting for the Pax Romana all over the frog's pond and there were no soldiers left to face this new barbarian threat.

As the senate was debating what to do, an old senator stood up and said "I'll take care of this!"

He then set out to meet the barbarian horde on a donkey, with but a few slaves accompanying him. No centurions, no cohorts, no centuries. Just him, a broken old dude in a toga.

He eventually met the horde and demanded to speak to their leader. He said :

"Rome orders you to stop right here and go home."

The barbarian king was so impressed that Rome would send a weak old man to stop an army that he did just that.

And thus was Rome saved for another day...

I don't know anybody from down there, can't travel (I have a job) and I obviously can't buy a book about it.

Are there any websites that specialize in this kind of thing? How do actors do it? I don't mean the big time actors who have studio hired coaches, but regular struggling actors.

Maybe a CD collection like a language course? I dunno.

Thanks in advance, uh, y'all...

I read somewhere that Japanese companies used to play British shipbuilding companies this way :

They ordered a ship, let's say a floating factory. The Japanese company then waited until the Brits had finished the plans, and had one of their industrial spies steal them. Plans firmly in hand, they then canceled the order and built the ship themselves at lower costs.

The sting :

The Brits became wise to their deceit. They then demonstrated their shipbuilding expertise by drawing the plans to a ship that worked only on paper. Then, they waited for the plans to be stolen and the ship to be built by the Japanese company.

When the ship was scheduled to be launched, the Brits requested that their ambassador be invited to the ceremony...

... to see the ship sink as soon as it touched water.

Is this a legend or a fact? If it is indeed factual, please include a credible reference in your Answer.

My dad told me this legend one day while it was raining and the sun was shining at the same time, and I never forgot it. Now that I'm the sole survivor, I'm wondering where this little nugget of family wisdom came from, and I can't ask anyone.

Thus this question sent like a message in a bottle. A question in a bottle

To narrow this down : I'm from German and French (as in Normandy) Quebecois ancestry, and a lot of Quebecois have at least some American Indian ancestry, so it may be a remnant of a Huron or Iroquois legend...

Who knows?

The conditions are daytime IFR. Not only is the attitude indicator and its backup system dead, but so is everything else that runs on electricity and gyros and vacuum pumps and whatnot.

And BTW, can this really happen and can a plane's motor even run if the battery's dead?

Is this a teachable MacGyver moment or what?

Do you smell some guy trying to write a well researched thriller that will be largely ignored in favor of Dan Brown's next piece of literary putrefaction?

You do.

You know the stuff, a sort of bluish mirror like glaze on the lens?

After MINIMAL wear, it's starting to come off by itself in places, so that a brand new, cool looking product (the rest of the Ozzy Osbourne sunglasses) looks like something you found in the garbage. Of course, it'll never have the decency to come off completely by itself.

Is there some household product that wipes that stuff off? I'd try rubbing it off, maybe with a pencil eraser and toothpaste like I hear they do for CDs, but I'm afraid to mark the lens, and the glaze seems to leave a milky film behind, probably some kind of base coating on the lens so that the glaze sticks...

Instead of becoming more useful, Yahoo! is becoming uglier and even more irrelevant. The front page has become the web equivalent of the shakycam in movies : a mouseover minefield.

And PURPLE!

This is really the New Coke of the internet age. Who the heck IS behind this creepy/sad attempt at rebranding? I'd really like to know so that I can keep him/them and whatever vision motivates them the frig away from MY company!!!

I thought Webcrawler had the ugliest main page on the net.

Well, Yahoo! just awarded itself the ugly trophy. Hands down!

PURPLE!?!

This is an assault This means WAR!

Advertising is designed to brainwash you. Why not brainwash yourself in order to resist all that intrusive advertising?

That's what I have done. I channeled the rage I felt at being subjected to all that crap by finding ways to resist. I call it my anti-ad guerrilla war.

For the internet, I have that wonderful, bandwidth saving program called FlashBlock . For those annoying animated image ads that FlashBlock can't block, I simply slide the part of my navigator window with the ad off screen and read around it (fixed image ads don't bother me). Too much advertising on a website? I bar it from my monitor. A site has placed ads strategically so that I'll click on them by mistake? I bar it from my monitor. A site has an ad flying across the screen or demanding attention by preventing me from viewing the page? I bar it from my monitor. This is an assault This means WAR!

TV : Of course, I use the mute button for TV a LOT. I also make it a point of looking at the lower part of the screen until the ad is over. It's easy to tell when the crap avalanche is finished : the whole screen become black for a second. I wish there was a program that would automatically blank out TV banner ads too. People paid extra to get ad-free TV and now, oh-so-predictably, they still pay extra AND get ads. This is an assault This means WAR!

And don't you get taken in by that stupid blanket argument that high quality cable TV needs ad revenue. WE'RE ALREADY PAYING FOR IT! NOW WE'RE PAYING TWICE! This is an assault This means WAR!

Cinema : I come in 10 minutes late at the cinema, just when the noisy crap avalanche is over. If there are still some ads left, I look up at the ceiling and listen to my mp3 reader. I already paid to see the damn movie, for God's sake! This is an assault This means WAR!

Above all, above all - I can't say this enough times - above all else :

if an ad manages to get past my filters, I make it a point NEVER to buy the brand advertised. In my ad-rarefied life, it's actually extremely easy to maintain a personal black list because, hey, ads are DESIGNED in such a way to make the brand hard to forget. So I never forget NOT to buy any given product that makes it through.

Have you got some tricks of your own up your sleeve? Please share!!!

I have no very specific theory as to why. I just find it very strange that they'd cut off South America whilst expanding into Europe, that's all...

War on drugs, maybe?

I dunno...

I'm running Vista on an Inspiron 530.The Dell Multimedia keyboard my girlfriend gave me is a PS/2 (the one with a volume button on the upper right corner) and I bought a USB adapter for it. It works fine as a keyboard, better than the pared-down piece of crap that came with the Dell, but the VOLUME switch doesn't work. I NEED that volume switch to function properly because I come home from work late at night, and being a gamer and a music lover, I sometimes I have to lower the volume in a hurry...

I just wanna get rid of it. No wussy workarounds.

Permanently, no Crazy Glue constructs.

I want it to become impossible to lock the capitals on my friggin' computer.

What a useless, dangerous, yet all too accessible key. Just like the INSERT key. Who the penetration NEEDS them so close to the main keys that you can hit them even if you don't want to? This crap has been driving me crazy for years!