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Man who once managed Tiny Tim hopes to open museum for 8-track tapes
03.11.2010
09:37 pm
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James “Bucks” Burnett is a “collector.” He used to write the Mr. Ed Fan Club newsletter and he managed the one and only Tiny Tim. Now he wants to open an eight-track museum.

From the WSJ:

“There are only two choices. A world with an eight-track museum and a world without an eight-track museum,” he says. “I choose with.”

Shortly after the show, the planners of a music conference in Denton, a music-loving college town about 40 miles north of Dallas, made Mr. Burnett an offer. They would find him a vacant space and pay $4,000 to build a temporary museum for a one-month run beginning Friday.

Mr. Burnett accepted and is readying his collection for another display, this time in a former lingerie factory in Denton. He plans to showcase and play a few hundred tapes, including a baby-blue copy of The Who’s “Tommy,” a copy of the “Easy Rider” soundtrack with sun-bleached cover art signed by Peter Fonda and a rare copy of Lou Reed’s 1975 avant-garde homage to noise called “Metal Machine Music.”

Play It Again: Promoter Has One-Track Mind About Eight Tracks (WSJ)

[Pleased to say I own a copy of Metal Machine Music on 8-track. Displayed proudly on my book shelf. I think it might be the first or second oldest possession I have, dating to when I was probably ten years old. I think it cost a dollar, still sealed, at a white trash department store my mother shopped at in Wheeling, WV.]

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.11.2010
09:37 pm
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The Situation in Greece
03.11.2010
08:46 pm
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This is the second major strike this week. All news broadcasts and public services—including schools and all public transportation—were canceled and even the police and fireman—who cannot strike—let it be known that their sympathies were with the people. Additionally there was a huge protest last Friday that involved tear gas and a lot of property destruction. Keep it up, Greece!

More on the riots in Greece from the Telegraph:

The strike grounded all flights and brought public transport to a halt. State hospitals were left with emergency staff only and all news broadcasts were suspended as workers walked off the job for 24 hours to protest spending cuts and tax hikes designed to tackle the country’s debt crisis.

Riot police fired tear gas to disperse rock-throwing protesters at one point of the demonstration as more than 10,000 strikers and protesters marched through central Athens, banging drums and chanting slogans such as “no sacrifice for plutocracy,” and “real jobs, higher pay.” People draped banners from apartment buildings reading: “No more sacrifices, war against war.”

The demonstrators included a group of about 100 youths wearing crash helmets and ski masks, some of whom smashed windows of a department store and bank, and sprayed riot police with brown paint. Shopkeepers along the demonstration route scrambled to roll down their shutters, while a few blocks away, people sat at outdoor restaurants, continuing their meals.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.11.2010
08:46 pm
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Robocop vs. Fried Chicken
03.11.2010
07:48 pm
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Posted by Jason Louv
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03.11.2010
07:48 pm
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Glenn Beck is losing more and more advertisers
03.11.2010
07:11 pm
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Why in the world would any respectable company want to associate their product with a sociopathic sack of shit like Glenn Beck? And what ad buyer at which advertising agency would be dumb enough in 2010 to tell their client they should be purchasing advertising on the Glenn Beck show?!?! Whoever sold TurboTax on the idea should be drummed out of the advertising business for good. What fucking idiocy.

Nice work over at the StopBeck blog. Note how fast it was for TurboTax to pull out:

On March 9th, TurboTax advertisements began running on Glenn Beck’s show on the Fox News Channel.  Participants in the StopBeck effort promptly sprang to action.  Less than 24 hours later, TurboTax announced that they would be pulling their advertisements from Glenn Beck’s show.

This brings the total number of advertisers to drop Glenn Beck to 120.  On a related note, the broadcast of Glenn Beck’s show in the U.K. has been running without any advertisers for over a month now.

TurboTax’s statement:

Thanks everyone for your feedback, & for reminding us of what we value. We’ve pulled advertising from the Glenn Beck show.

 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.11.2010
07:11 pm
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Awesome Towel
03.11.2010
06:49 pm
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Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.11.2010
06:49 pm
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Archbishop: Priestly Celibacy Leads to Sexual Abuse
03.11.2010
05:21 pm
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The Archbishop of Vienna has linked priestly celibacy to the rampant sexual abuse which plagues the Catholic Church. You think? As some weirdo or another said… “A god ignored is a demon born.”

In an article for Thema Kirche, his diocesan magazine, Christoph Schonborn became the most senior figure in the Catholic hierarchy to make the connection between the two and called for an “unflinching examination” of the possible reasons for paedophilia.

He wrote: “These include the issue of priest training, as well as the question of what happened in the so-called sexual revolution.

“It also includes the issue of priest celibacy and the issue of personality development. It requires a great deal of honesty, both on the part of the church and of society as a whole.”

Schonborn is not the first person to suggest a link between celibacy and paedophilia – the theologian Hans Kung has made the same assertion.

(Archbishop: Priestly Celibacy Leads to Sexual Abuse)

(Related: Chief exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth says Devil is in the Vatican)

Posted by Jason Louv
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03.11.2010
05:21 pm
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Paging the Association for Autonomous Astronauts
03.11.2010
03:14 pm
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The Association for Autonomous Astronauts was a group dedicated to the individual, autonomous exploration of space, and wresting control of the right to space exploration away from NASA and giving it to the masses. Started, I believe, by Temple of Psychick Youth stalwart John Eden, the group was a situationist response to the militarization of space in theory and practice. They apparently had a lot of excellent parties. Stewart Home wrote about them in his anarchist compendium “Mind Invaders” back in the day.

Now that Obama has scarpered NASA’s manned flight plans, it seems like we need the AAA more than ever. Yet according to the web, their five-year-mission ended in 2000.

Does the Association for Autonomous Astronauts still exist? If any members happen to be reading this… what’s the status update?

Here’s their Wiki data:

The Association of Autonomous Astronauts is a worldwide network of community based groups dedicated to building their own spaceships. The AAA was founded 23 April 1995. Although many of their activities were reported as serious participation in conferences or protests against the militarization of space, some were also considered art pranks, media pranks, or just an elaborate spoof. The AAA had numerous local chapters which operated independently of one another, with the AAA effectively operating as a collective pseudonym along the lines of Luther Blissett (nom de plume).

The Association’s ostensible five-year mission, a reference to Star Trek, was to “establish a planetary network to end the monopoly of corporations, governments and the military over travel in space”. Artists who became involved were often connected to the zine scene or mail art movements. The five year mission’s completion was marked at the 2000 Fortean Times conference, although some chapters have continued activities to the present day. Several AAAers have experienced zero-gravity training flights.

Writer Tom Hodgkinson described them as “a loose bunch of Marxists, futurists, and revolutionaries on the dole”, going on to explicate their mission as “reclaim[ing] the idea of space travel for the common man”. To the AAA, he said, “space travel represented an ideal of freedom”. Annick Bureaud of Leonardo/OLATS viewed their work as “space art” that “combine[d] freely space, cyberspace, raves, esoteric things, techno-music, etc.”, calling attention to “how they recycle ... key images (the MIR Space Station, the astronauts on the Moon, etc.) ... mixed with science-fiction (and specially Star Trek) buzz-words or images” and then subject these “sacred icons” to “iconoclastic treatments”

Theorist Brian Holmes commented the AAA like this : “The ideas sound fantastic, but the stakes are real: imagining a political subject within the virtual class, and therefore, within the economy of cultural production and intellectual property that had paralyzed the poetics of resistance.” in his book “Unleashing the Collective Phantoms”

(The Association for Autonomous Astronauts)

(Mind Invaders: A Reader in Psychic Warfare)

Posted by Jason Louv
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03.11.2010
03:14 pm
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Open Mind: Magic Potion
03.11.2010
03:02 pm
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Classic, lost psychedelia revamped for YouTube. See, this is what life should be like all the time.

(Via Witch Mountain)

(The Open Mind)

Posted by Jason Louv
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03.11.2010
03:02 pm
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Goat Bagpipes
03.11.2010
12:27 pm
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Update: It was removed! Enjoy this version instead.
 

Posted by Tara McGinley
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03.11.2010
12:27 pm
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Husbands and Husbands
03.11.2010
11:53 am
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Here’s a heartwarming video of a little boy trying to grasp the concept of “husbands and husbands.”

This moment was captured the day after Thanksgiving. We bought our flip cam two days before and were testing it out. We were on our way to the kitchen when Calen stopped us to ask for help washing his hands.

 
(via HYST)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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03.11.2010
11:53 am
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