*Snicker*

Stop the Attacks on Rumsfeld!

YES, I want to sign my name to RightMarch.com’s FULL PAGE pro-American ad in USA TODAY!

I want to FIGHT BACK against the Socialist-led “blame-America” crowd, and show America — AND America’s elite liberal media — that the citizens of our country SUPPORT this modern-day American hero!

I understand that the cost for this ad is very high: $73,100. You can count on me to help pay for that ad, and to get the word out to others to help, too. Then NO ONE will be able to IGNORE us at that point, regardless of whether the liberal media tries to cover their eyes and ears. WE WILL BE SEEN AND HEARD!

Socialist-led? American hero? When did Rumsfeld become a GI Joe? And you’re going to put it in McNews? If you want to hit the “liberal media” why not buy space in New York Times or the Washington Post?

(If we can’t raise the full amount or we’re rejected by USA Today, we’ll still run the ad: either full page in just one region of the country, or a smaller size ad nationwide.)

Which means you’ll probably end up putting it in the Washington Times, preaching to the choir and doing nothing to further your cause except get people who are already on your side to go “Yeah!” and make no progress.

I don’t know. If you guys do get this ad, I hope it has more details than this little begging for money thing because I have no idea what you’re defending him from except people questioning how he’s handled the war in Iraq and, well, some of what they’re questioning is right. Calling for his resignation or firing though, eh, that may be a tad much, true. Oh well, you guys are going to look like nutcases and no one new is going to fall in ranks behind ya, so save your money and just throw the man a kegger.

Oneword is an interesting writing exercise. There’s a word that pops up, you have 60 seconds to write something. Today the word was “Roses”

Roses

Dead flowers seem like useless gifts when they’re supposed to be the sign of ones love. “Thanks, they’re dying…” And they have thorns. Tough love, I guess.

Okay, so it’s not all that good, but I haven’t been very creative in a long time so there.

I’m famous… Look at the fourth song down…

Now, I have no idea who “David_Guett…” is, but why would he be interested in me singing a horrible rendition of a horrible song that I recorded in an attempt to brighten up someone else’s day? Oh well, to each their own. I wonder how many copies of that are floating around out there.

You can get your own copy over at the very defunct J’s Voice under 1/28/02 - Sing a Little Song. It’s bad. Really.

Though I’ve been thinking of restarting an audioblog lately….

Thanks to Jac for the heads up.

Congrats to the damn Marlins for doing what the Red Sox can’t and beating the Yankees. I must admit, Josh Beckett is a damn good pitcher.

DC, Marvel Go For the Book Trade

Marvel is entering that field with a Marvel Manga format that it will introduce in November: digest-size books, printed in color, with a price point of $7.99 or $8.99. Sentinel, Mystique and Runaways are self-contained stories with ties to the X-Men and Spider-Man lines, appropriate for school-age audiences. The company is also making a play for teenage girls with YA prose book adaptations of top comics series: Judith O’Brien’s Mary Jane, a prose story focused on Spiderman’s girlfriend, was very successful (it will appear in paperback soon), and O’Brien’s Mary Jane II will appear in time for the Spider-Man II film’s opening in early July 2004.

It’s good to see Marvel taking more steps to go mainstream. I think they need to tap into the prose market more than just for girls, though. Push out more novels in both young adult and sci-fi and hype them for boys and girls, kids and adults. It’s an open market, really.

Bad ass!

‘ICEMAN’ WRESTLES SHARK

An Icelandic fishing captain, known as “the Iceman”, wrestled and killed a 300kg shark to stop it attacking his crew, according to witnesses.

Captain Sigurdur Petursson was on a beach in Kuummiit, east Greenland, watching his crew processing a catch when he saw the shark swimming towards his men.

The skipper of the trawler Erik the Red, ran into the shallow water and grabbed the shark by its tail with his bare hands.

He dragged it off to dry land and killed it with his knife.

My new hero…

goodbye elliott Elliot Smith committed suicide Tuesday night at the age of 34.

This is particularly troubling as I’ve been listening to his song “Needle In the Hay” (off of the Royal Tannenbaum’s soundtrack) almost non-stop since, well, Tuesday night. Jenn and I were even talking last night about how we needed to buy more of his CDs and about what a great musician he was. If you haven’t heard of him before or any of his music, you’re missing out. And now the world will miss out even more.

Elliott Smith Dead at 34 (Pitchfork)

Elliott Smith has died at age 34, according to an obituary posted late Tuesday on Sweet Adeline, Smith’s official website. Rumors had been circulating on the Internet yesterday afternoon about Smith’s apparent suicide; by early evening, the overwhelming traffic from well-wishers and fans was crashing Sweet Adeline’s discussion board. A handful of posts indicated that representatives from Smith’s label, Dreamworks, were attempting to contact Charlie Ramirez, the webmaster for Sweet Adeline.

Within hours, Ramirez posted the following: “As you probably realize, I’m pretty devastated about having to say goodbye to Elliott… it’s never easy to put into words what someone means to you… Elliott was such a lovely man… I will always have his love, kindness, intelligence, humbleness, creativeness, greatness and so much more in me forever because that’s what he was and i’ll always love him for being who he was… I’ll miss you so much. We will all miss you. See you in heaven, Elliott.”

Kill Rock Stars, who released Smith’s 1995 self-titled solo album and 1997’s Either/Or, changed their website’s splash page to a pensive photo of Smith this afternoon in silent tribute to the beloved songwriter.

“We are deeply saddened by Elliott Smith’s tragic death and send our condolences to his friends and family,” read a statement posted by Dreamworks late this afternoon on the label’s website. “He was perhaps his generation’s most gifted songwriter. His enormous talent could change your life in a whisper. We will miss him.”

Elliott Smith dies, aged 34 (Guardian)

US singer-songwriter Elliott Smith has died, according to reports. Websites and various radio stations are reporting that the singer passed away yesterday (October 21) at the age of 34. A statement from the Los Angeles County Department of the Coroner’s office states that his death was apparent suicide. MTV.com reports, “A single knife wound that appeared to be self-inflicted was evident on the body, though police detectives are investigating the incident for foul play and/or other possibilities.”

Born in 1969 in Nebraska, Smith started his music career as a member of Portland, Oregon band, Heatmiser, in the early 90s. He earned plaudits for his 1994 debut solo release Roman Candle, with critics comparing his stripped down, melancholic melodies to the likes of Nick Drake and Neil Young.

His 1997 album, Either/Or, brought him wider acclaim, though his greatest mainstream success followed the same year’s Oscar nomination for the song Miss Misery from his score for Gus Van Sant’s Good Will Hunting. His music has since featured regularly on other movie soundtracks, including Wes Anderson’s New York disfunctional family drama, The Royal Tenenbaums.

Amazon.com hailed his second self-titled album “one of the most understated and incredible albums to emerge from the indie-rock scene in the 1990s.”

Singer/Songwriter Elliott Smith Dead, An Apparent Suicide (MTV)

A cornerstone of the indie-rock scene in Portland, Oregon, in the mid-1990s, Smith gained critical acclaim with 1997’s Either/Or and 1998’s XO, albums that best demonstrated his ability to delicately deliver poetic, emotional lyrics and beautifully dark, lush pop melodies. “Miss Misery,” his contribution to the film “Good Will Hunting” that earned him an Academy Award nomination in 1997, brought mainstream recognition to the artist regarded as a figurehead of the indie-rock underground, and who influenced such artists as Bright Eyes and Dashboard Confessional.

Smith’s friend and longtime collaborator Rob Schnapf said those bands may have still existed without Smith’s influence, but “they’d be missing a big chunk of what they’re doing.”

“We had a lot of fun together,” he continued. “And it was extremely rewarding. Sometimes [working with Elliot] would be intense — it could be extremely intense — but there was always a payoff.”

Kill Bill is an excellent movie, by the way.

So while at Blogger Forum I found….

Lazy guide to the internet

Blogging has been the most sustained internet craze since the dot-com bubble burst in 2000.

Lots of experts, especially those who like using the word “meme” - meaning a contagious idea that replicates like a virus - more than is decent, have made much of the web log phenomenon.

Thousands of column inches - or their web equivalent - have been sacrificed to the blog cult. Votive offerings such as “democratisation of the web” and “the next great direction of the internet” have been sprinkled liberally on the blogging altar.

For the uninitiated, blogs are essentially online journals that contain links to sources of information.

WARNING, HERESY AHEAD: Despite the hype, in terms of their content, blogs are also essentially indistinguishable from the kind of personal websites that existed long before the term “blogging” was coined.

Before blogging, people with websites would post items that interested them and - gosh - link to other sites. All that has changed is that it has become easier to get your own slice of the web - for instance, you can set up your own blog at sites such as blogger.com.

The main blog-hosting services are simple to use, require little or no technical expertise and enable you to start your own journal within five minutes.

Millions of other people have done the same, and now blogs are evolving into other forms. There are b-blogs, which are business blogs, or to use pre-blog terminology, corporate message boards. There are k-blogs, knowledge blogs, aka information sites. Of course, there are spam blogs. Lord help us, there are even blawgs, lawyers blogs, or - to use a more appropriate term - achingly dull wastes of cyberspace. However, one section of what is nauseatingly known as blogosphere appeals to me in particular: x-blogs.

Millions upon millions of people have created x-blogs.

What are they?

They’re dead.

The “blogosphere” is littered with blogging roadkill: blogs that were set up using the easy to use blogging software and then hastily abandoned as it became obvious A) no-one was reading them; B) they’re a lot of work to maintain; and C) you very quickly run out of things to say about your cat or pot plant or conspiracy theory.

I will admit to being partially guilty of doing this myself, though not for the reasons stated. Well, a bit for them, but also because I’ve used Blogger to experiment with some designs and such. But, overall, yeah, it’s a lack of readers and interaction through group blogs that has killed some of my past experiments. But this problem also exists for websites in generall. It’s just compounded by the ease of publishing with Blogger.

And in related news…

‘Blogosphere’ to reach 10 million, almost all dead - report

The “blogosphere” will number ten million souls by the end of 2004, but almost all of them will be dead. That’s the conclusion from one of the first comprehensive studies of weblogging conducted by research company Perseus, which has analyzed over three thousand weblogs.

Perseus finds that the fad is most popular amongst teenage girls. More than half of the weblogs surveyed are run by teenagers and 91.1 per cent are under 30. “Blogging is many things, yet the typical blog is written by a teenage girl who uses it twice a month to update her friends and classmates on happenings in her life,” the report notes. (We had noticed).

However, parents can breathe easy. Unlike many varieties of hard or soft drugs enjoyed by today’s teenagers, weblogging isn’t habit-forming.

No less than a million of the 2.7 million weblogs surveyed had been abandoned after a day, and 132,000 would-be webloggers gave up after a year. So like the Hula Hoop, the Pogo Stick or the skateboard, most teenagers will experience but a brushing pass with weblogging, and will continue unscathed to develop normal and healthy lives.

Whew. For a second there I thought I was going to have to start watching out for bloggangs roaming the streets with bats and stuff.

So I’ve made the top ten Blog*Spot sites over at Blogger Forum. Which is pretty sweet as it gets more people to come here and experience the joy and delight that is the world of J~. Or not. I guess I should update more often…

Scientists make electricity from tap water

Scientists have discovered a new way of generating electricity using water, the first innovatory method for 200 years.

A team of Canadian researchers has found that an electrical current can be produced between the ends of a microscopic channel when a fluid flows through it.

The technique offers a potential source of clean, non-polluting electric power with a variety of possible uses, ranging from powering small electronic devices such as calculators or mobile phones to vast stations that can contribute to the national grid.

The method, which harnesses the “electrokinetic” properties of liquids such as ordinary tap water when they are pumped through microscopic channels, is described today in the Institute of Physics publication Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering.

Skeptics suggested he was being given more than water and may even have been getting nutrition from a coating on his box.

Girls With Hearses

Tomatoes Are Evil

Christian Urban Legends

French high school students are up in arms over a drive by teachers to ban some of their most cherished items, ranging from cigarettes to G-strings.

Born Magazine is an experimental venue marrying literary arts and interactive media. Original projects are brought to life every three months through creative collaboration between writers and artists.

Accesskeys: Unlocking Hidden Navigation

WHO CAN USE YOUR WEBSITE? People with limited mobility may have a hard time controlling a mouse to click on links, and tabbing through menus can be slow going. The W3C introduced the accesskey attribute to enable users to select the appropriate key on their keyboards and navigate to a particular link.

Accesskeys can also be useful to people who have no trouble controlling the mouse and clicking on links. Experienced users of desktop applications learn to use keyboard short-cuts to save files, open new windows, or copy and paste text. Assigning accesskeys to menu items adds “Hot-Key” functions to a website, letting frequent users spend less time less time moving and clicking the mouse. This solution, however, has been largely underused because it almost always fails due to two major flaws.

The first problem is that visitors to your website have no way of knowing that you’ve assigned accesskey attributes to your linked elements. Even if they suspect you have, they would have to guess which accesskeys assignments you’ve created. In this article, we’ll look at how to solve this problem, enabling you to clearly but unobtrusively let your visitors know which accesskeys correspond with the links on a page.

A further problem that has delayed the adoption of accesskeys, is that several otherwise excellent, standards-compliant browsers still do not support accesskeys at all. (See “Accesskey Denied” for a list of non-accesskey browsers.) We can’t solve that problem here, but by pointing it out, hope to encourage browser makers to improve their support for this important web standard.

I love this shit. There’s actually a script I found that you type a word and it will direct you to another site. I have to dig that up. But mouseless browsing is a neat little trick to play with.

Draft Wesley Crusher

Ensign Crusher is the perfect candidate for 2004. Serving for years with his mother on the U.S.S. Enterprise, this Starfleet cadet has what it takes to defeat Bush. If he ran, Crusher would be the only candidate to have intergalactic combat experience. Crusher can get people and aliens of all colors and races together, even those who have never voted before.

We need your help. Join DraftWesleyCrusher.com in supporting Ensign Crusher’s bid for President in 2004.

Get out the vote!

Thanks to Jericho doing the same thing, I feel the need to have some sort of fire sale on my comics. Bunch of different reasons, but the big ones are my need of a big influx of money so I can buy lots of Christmas presents for everyone and have a good nest egg going for when I am able to go off to school, but also because I don’t read them anymore and they’re taking up a lot of space. I have a ton and just really don’t need that much, so I may make a list of stuff I’m willing to part with and post it somewhere. Not go through E-Bay because that’s just too iffy overall and I’d rather make deals with people, hook them up and the like. Kinda feel like I’m running some sort of shop. So, yeah. Maybe I’ll start selling my stuff.