Category: Favourites

After documenting one of my previous haircuts, I thought I’d let you all see this one…

Feel free to talk amongst yourselves….

Just typical, in the back of my mind I had a cool way to celebrate the 5th anniversary of Scam City yesterday, but when the day came I clean forgot about it…

Hard to believe I’ve been running this place for 5 years (and one day) now, how time flies. The Genetically Modified Scam City was originally created so I could post a whole bunch of pictures relating to my NYC trip in September 1999, and it wasn’t until October 2000 that I started this blogging lark. But I didn’t use any fancy schmancy blog contant management system, no siree, each page was deliciously hand crafted (first on notepad, then on FrontPage 2000, and finally on Dreamweaver MX), and it stayed that way for almost 3 years, though I did flirt with Blogger for a little while in 2002… It’s been hosted at a variety of places in the 5 years as well, firstly on Geocities, then on my NTL homepage, then some shitty hosting company who’s name eludes me at this point (they made a great impression, huh?) and finally on RUWebby thanks to a more than generous offer from Erika, this place comes loaded with stuff (PHP, ASP, .NET, ColdFusion to name a few) and I don’t pay a a dime for it, plus I can exceed my 100mb limit and 1GB bandwidth no problem, though the bandwidth can be an issue from time to time…

Incase your interested, this site currently uses up 98.31mb of 100mb space and 884.51mb of the 1GB bandwidth.

In other news, my perfect record at Turner Field continued Friday night as Robyn and I went to see Barry Bonds and the San Francisco Giants play game one of a four game series this weekend. The Braves went on to win 5-3, but not before Barry hit home run number 694, much to most of the crowds displeasure, he’s closing in on Hank Aaron’s all time record of 755 home runs so only 61 to go which he’ll probably break by the end of next season.

It was an enjoyable game, after Barry’s home run put the Giants up 3-0, Atlanta hit back with a Chipper Jones home run to put the Braves 4-3 up and then they added another run in the 8th inning to seal the win. A good crowd was there to, especially around us, which always makes for a good time (even when the mexican wave can only make it round the stadium 3 times).

Maybe we can sneak in another game before the end of the season, but am I willing to put my perfect record (3-0, 1.000) on the line?

Michael Hanscom finds a great article from inc. magazine about Ani DiFranco and her rise and rise from indie folk singer to the all-encompassing empire that is Righteous Babe Records.

I’ve been a big fan of Ani’s music since I first heard “Not a Pretty Girl” back in 1998, ever since then I’ve managed to buy all her CD’s, well, I don’t have “Educated Guess” yet… I even managed to catch her live in Glasgow in January 2001.

While I’m glad that Ani is reaching out to a wider audience, it’s kind of sad too, as for a great long while it was like Ani was my secret… You know? I’d mention her music to people only to be met with blank expressions, now most people have heard of her for one reason on another. Which reminds me, she’s playing at The Tabernacle on the 19th of September as part of her “Vote Dammit” tour to get more people to vote in this coming election, might look into it…

After my rant on Monday, I bit the bullet and ventured over to Buckhead/Lenox to see Garden State last night, only to find out it’s went on a larger release today, dammit!

Anyways, It was well worth the journey to see it as its a great film.

It’s a story about Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff), a budding actor in LA, who comes back to his childhood home for the first time in 9 years after his mother dies. While having been gone, Andrew has been on lithium and other forms of anti-depressant medication all prescribed to him by his psychiatrist father Gideon (Ian Holm). Upon his homecoming Andrew has decided to take a vacation from his medication and take some time to re-connect with himself, there he meets up with an old friend (Peter Sarsgaard), finds other friends doing remarkably different things and he also meets Sam (Natalie Portman) during the few days he’s back.

It’s a strange movie, written and directed by Braff, who’s better known for his part as Dr. John Dorian in TV’s comedy “Scrubs,” it’s part dark comedy, part coming of age, intensely moving. Overall, impressive… And now it’s on a wider release, do yourself a favour and go see it.

Another weekend up at Lake Lanier was needed… Why? Because last week we bought a little Renken Bowrider and it took a little “persuasion” to get going. By persuasion I really mean some TLC… So this long weekend was to be the weekend as Phil’s birthday is tomorrow and Erika’s is later on this month and Adam goes back to England on Thursday so a nice break away was much needed to celebrate these things. As usual we packed the old Explorer to the gills and made our way up on Thursday.

We arrived at the same campground we were at before, we couldn’t get the same site, so we looked about for potential better ones before settling on the one next to it with it’s own beach (which came in handy over the time there). Erika and Adam set up the tent as me and Phil went to get some groceries, after that we went for a swim then played uno before turning in just after midnight, just in time for what sounded like high winds to buffet us all night long.

Friday was the first time we would be able to take the boat out, so we did, we launched it off the ramp and turned the ignition, nothing happened. OK, not strictly true, it sounded like the starter was going, but not a lot else. We put it back on the trailer after 30 minutes of trying, cursing our luck, me and Phil were sent to the marina we bought it from to see if they could offer assistance, they said a new battery was probably needed… So some hours later we’re back in the water and again nothing happens. Erika decides to go under the dashboard and somehow fiddles a few wires and it starts up.

Hallelujah!

And when it gets going, the boat is pretty cool, we just went around a few nearby islands and put it back on land. Again, heavy wind came our way after going to bed. Saturday we put the boat through it’s paces with some tubing and water ski-ing before cruising round the little part of the lake we had and finding a little marina where we could gas it up. We also became well paractised in the art of beaching it at night (thats why the beach was handy) as it saved us going to and from the ramp each time.

On Sunday the first injury occured, a freak accident really, I was on the tube and Erika had slowed down and turned round to whip me round and it was that quick I had to let go, but my arm got caught in the outer layer of the tube dragging me for a few seconds… Leaving me cursing no end and with a set of bruises on my arm (pictured below) that look like I get beaten up regularly…

Today we went on one last trip round Lake Lanier Islands before packing up and heading home…

A nice, fun weekend away, and as I said before, it was much needed.

No panorama shots this time, as it’s pretty much the same place as before, so here’s a little shot of the shoreline instead.

We love Uno. We can’t get enough of it, we can play it for hours on end, it’s such a simple, enjoyable game…

Until we perverted it, just because we could…

Don’t get me wrong, it IS a fun, wholesome game, but we take it to all new levels, levels where bloodshed is almost as regular as a skip or reverse card. Now if you don’t know Uno (and why not?) the rules are simple:

Each player is dealt 7 cards (or in our case, anything up to but not always limited to 30 cards) with the remaining ones placed face down to form a “draw” pile. The top card of the draw pile is turned over to begin a “discard” pile. The first player has to match the card in the discard pile either by number, color or word. For example, if the card is a red 7, player must throw down a red card or any color 7. Or the player can throw down a Wild Card. If the player doesn’t have anything to match, he must pick a card from the draw pile. If he can play what is drawn, great. Otherwise play moves to the next person. When you have one card left, you must yell “UNO” (meaning one). Failure to do this results in you having to pick two cards from the draw pile. That is, of course if you get caught by the other players. Once a player has no cards left, the hand is over. Points are scored and you start over again.

See, simple… But I should mention we play with a stack of mixed decks, off the top of my head we play with regular Uno deck, Travel Uno, Harry Potter Uno, Muppets Uno, Spongebob Squarepants Uno, Peanuts Uno, Seattle Mariners Uno, Hello Kitty Uno, Incredible Hulk Uno, Spider-Man Uno, Care Bears Uno, X-Men Uno and Shrek 2 Uno… Each with their own special rules card, the nastiest being the Muppets Mayhem card (where everyone changes hands, a great way to steal an Uno hand), but since we expanded from the first 4 decks to include the rest, they don’t come up as often anymore…

Now, add in house rules of stacking cards and we have a potent mix, being landed with huge pickups happens all too often. As Erika says:

Since we play stacking rules – meaning if you have say 6 Draw 2’s – you can play all 6 – forcing a pickup of 12 cards.

What we try to do is get that going around so someone gets stuck with picking up 20 cards.

What is evil is doing it as an out. Routinely we try to develop our hands so that we have a lot of skips back to ourself (staking reverses or skip cards) then lay as many forced pickups at a time to go “UNO” and then out. Since the next player in turn has to pick up the forced pickup – they often end up with several hundred points in their hand.

That’s evil

Yes it is… I’ve been left whimpering with over 1,000 points in my hand at the end of a game…

Anyways, why do I mention all this? Cause tonight, for the first time ever, I won my first ligit game of Uno with the 3 hustlers I stay with, and now I formally announce my retirement from the world of unprofessional Uno playing, always best to go out on top…

So, the Cola Wars™ are hotting up again, this time aiming at those unfortunate enough to be on the carb controlled Fatkins Atkins Diet with the introduction of Coke C2 and Pepsi Edge…

Coke C2 is a foul tasting, bordering on disgusting, browny reddish liquid that’s half the carbs, half the calories of regular Coke, or “Coke Classic,” none of the “Coke” taste and 200% more gas… Oh boy is it gassy…

Now Pepsi Edge offers the exact same promises, half carbs and calories etc. OK, that’s all very good and well, but surely Pepsi One with it’s 1 calorie and zero carbs combination would be a much better alternative to Pepsi Edge’s 50 calories and 13 carbs…

Wouldn’t you think?

So what exactly is the point of Pepsi Edge? Selling a product on it’s low calories and low carbs combination doesn’t make sense when you have another product that has next to no calories and carbs…

Or is it just me?

In a very last minute decision, Phil and me went to see “Spider-Man 2” last night… Erika and Adam were in the pool while we were watching The Simpsons, and Phil says “I’ve got a very bad idea that will piss those two off,” the local cinema was showing it at 8:30 pm but we decided not to go, so we watched Stan Lee’s Mutants, Monsters, and Marvels instead. Erika and Adam came in and Erika said if we wanted to go see Spider-Man then we could go see Spider-Man, of course the local cinema showing had long since past so we had to go further afield, all the way to the Cobb Galleria by the Perimeter…

We had to rush to make the 9:15 showing, but an insane amount of red lights on the way hampered our progress, so we made the 10:00 showing, with the queue out the door…

So the story picks up 2 years after the last movie, Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) is still down on his luck, still in love with Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), still taking pictures of Spider-Man for the Daily Bugle and still living the double life as Spider-Man. But something seems to be wrong, his web slinging abilities, while a lot more graceful than the first movie, is cutting out at the most inappropriate moments. Plus a new villain is in town, Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina), who is hell bent on finishing the experiment that created him, add in Harry Osborn (James Franco) who wants Spider-Man to pay for the death of his father in the first movie and life for Spider-Man isn’t so easy…

That’s as much of the story as I’m telling… But if you liked the first one, you will love this. The effects are simply jawdropping, especially in the fights between Doc Ock and Spider-Man… The way they bring Doctor Octopus’ mechanical arms to life is very well done, to the point that they almost show emotion.

There’s plenty of laughs throughout the movie, mostly from J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons), and we’re introduced to a few more characters from the Spider-Man universe, Dr. Conners (who eventually becomes The Lizard) and John Jameson (who becomes Man-Wolf) as well as a hint towards HobGoblin (or Green Goblin 2), so it’s really a movie for fans of the comic book series.

Spider-Man 3 is already a given, infact it’s already scheduled for a Summer 2007 release, so this movie leaves a lot of loose ends that’s surely going to be tied up in 3 years time. Otherwise this is highly recommended, especially if you enjoyed the first movie…

I was able to go see the Braves play the Marlins again at Turner Field last night, yes, same teams as before, this time it was a night game… Literally…

Atlanta has been in monsoon season for the last few weeks, and we (Robyn and myself) were hoping, nay praying for a dry evening at the old ballpark, and for a while it looked favourable, until 10 minutes before the 7:35 pm opening pitch when it began to rain heavily. Where we were sitting (Lexus Level 1st row y’all) offered a little bit of cover from the rain but the wind changed for the worse and we had to move a few rows back to be completely covered. How long the rain delay would last, well no one knew, weather reports flashed up on the big screen saying the rain was moving away to the south but after an hour the rain was relentless, so we went inside to see what the Lexus Level had to offer, and it’s quite a nice area of the ballpark, shame it looked like a refugee camp with everyone inside hiding from the elements.

And thus it went on, it looked like we’d be having a game at about 9:30 when the ground crew came out to rapturous applause and began to lift the covers off, but they got half way before the rain came on again and they got booed out the park.

By now a lot of people, families mostly, had decided to cut their losses and head home as no one knew when, or indeed if, the game would be played. Eventually at 10:30 the rain ceased and it was anounced that opening pitch would be 10:55, the few who had remain were also told that they could sit in any free seat available, so those in the upper deck rushed down to the seats behind the dugouts and home plate. The ground crew came on and made the surface playable and opening pitch was right on 10:55 pm, some 3 hours 20 minutes late…

The game was a pretty speedy one, I guess even the players didn’t want to hang about at that time of night. J.D. Drew hit a two run homer in the third as the Braves cruised to a 6-1 victory in a game that ran until 1:25 am. During the game we had a few close calls with foul balls off Julio Franco’s bat, three or four came extremely close to us only to hit off the nearby scoreboard or drop down into the seats below…

Anyway, here is a few of the 150 odd pictures we took of the game

Quite a few huh? Also… A Turner Field panorama (this time at night…)

Before I begin, I’ll refresh your memory about the controversy surrounding the latest documentary by Michael Moore… “Fahrenheit 9/11“… Basically Miramax were producing it, but parent company Disney didnt want them to release it, so it was sold off to Lions Gate by Bob and Harvey Weinstein, same as what they did with Kevin Smith’s “Dogma” in late 1999, it went on to recieve top plaudits at the Cannes Film Festival in May. This brings us up to this weekend where it opened in the States and, supposedly, raked in $8m in ticket sales on it’s opening day, easily beating the previous record, Moore’s “Bowling For Columbine“.

Now be warned, this is your typical Michael Moore film, don’t be expecting an unbiased view on world events, the man does not like George W. Bush and everything he stands for… That aside it’s actually quite an enjoyable film, though I liked “Bowling For Columbine” and his books “Stupid White Men …and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation!” and “Dude, Where’s My Country?“, both recommended to me by my dad…

It explores everything he wrote in “Dude, Where’s My Country?” which I expected, that being the stealing of the presidential election, his family links to the Saudi Royal Family and the Bin Laden family, his links to Haliburton and Enron, the pointlessness of the war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq… You know the deal surely.

I would advise most everybody go see it, it’s the first film I’ve been to see that got a standing ovation at the end (I kid you not) and that’s the highest recommendation you can get, not just from me, but a theater full of paying patrons in Marietta, GA. who stood up at 9:30 pm on Sunday 27th June and gave this film a worthy round of applause…

Gmail are throwing out invites left and right, we’ve counted that in the office, the 4 of us combine to 60+ Gmail invites…

So in the spirit of Neil Turner, Dawnkeyotie and countless others, I’m giving them away, not to anyone who can amuse me or give me anything, just drop a comment below and biggety bam, it’s yours…

First 10 applicants only as invites are limited… Though I’m sure I’ll have more in a few days time.

I finally… Finally got WordPress installed and working AND got my b2 blog posts converted over with only 5 hissy fits, 3 fresh installations and 7 posts in the wordpress support forum, basically saying “isn’t this supposed to be easy???”

But dammit I succeeded… And for anyone wanting to do the same, here is a few easy steps for you to get up and running…

1. BACK UP YOUR DATABASE!!!!!! This simply cannot be stressed enough
2. Download the latest WordPress release (although I didn’t, but more on that later)
3. change your wp-config-sample so the field prefix says “b2” instead of “wp_”
4. Upload everything to your ROOT directory (again, more on this later)
5. Run the import b2 file, go through each step
6. Login under your old b2 login

The next few steps are mandatory, if not needed skip to step 11

7. Change settings if you have your blog in another directory, like mine is “journal”
8. HOLY SHIT, nothing works…
9. Don’t sweat it kid, delete the WordPress install from the root and reinstall in your blog folder
10. Login again
11. Blog away!

Rough I know but hey, it works…

To make things even more complex, I installed an older version of WordPress and upgraded to the newest one.

So there you have it, after a few aborted attempts I finally come good and have a weblog system thats a bit more up-to-date than the stagnant b2 development

Now just to convert my old template over, that may take a day or so…

Last time out I briefly mentioned:

Now we’re (Phil, Erika, Adam and me) taking the weekend off to go camping by Lake Lanier, we have the supplies in, the fishing rods, the fishing licenses are valid to go with it… Should be fun

And what fun it was…

We’ve been to Lake Lanier before on a day out, and decided that we should go camping once we had the chance, so, as previously mentioned, we got the stuff together and on Friday, we loaded the old Explorer up to the gils with more than enough equipment, 4 people and 3 dogs.

We were booked into the Sawnee camping ground in, what we later found out, was one of the best sites in the ground… We had a huge tent area for our huge 4 room tent, a little BBQ grill, a firepit and a little beachy area where we could go out and swim from… And we did a lot of swimming, and fishing, and kayaking… Mostly a lot of swimming… So we unpack, put up the tent and inflate the airbeds, because we believe in roughing it, and test the water.

After swimming and fishing for a bit we stop to dry off and have supper, later we begin one of the many games of Uno as the moon begins to rise, and it was a gorgeous red moon that showed up about 11pm

So after Phil goes to bed, Erika, Adam and myself sat watching the world go peacefully by before turning in too…

We’re all up early the next morning, and we spent the whole day in the water, and we all ended up various shades of red, we only took breaks for food, games of uno, chess and naps.

Sunday comes and we’re all in various levels of pain with sunburn, Adam is blistering and popping ibuprofen like m&m’s, so we get up late, have one last dip in the water and slowly pack everything away back into the truck before checking out at 3, but not before we scouted out the campsite and agreed we had the best spot in the place…

The obligatory you-know-what.

Current Location: Off the eastern tip of Canada, over the Labrador Sea, en route to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.

Well, the day has barely begun and already it’s been highly stressful and pretty eventful. Where to begin? At the start I suppose, in Glasgow Airport… Checking in for my flight to Chicago and as I get up to the security checkpoint prior the check-in, I’m asked a ton of questions, a TON and one thing led to another and soon I was told I wasn’t getting on the plane…

What???

Yeah, cause the first time I went to Atlanta it was on the one week ticket I bought back in November of last year, so at the start of April I bought a return ticket from CheapAir.Com to take me back to Scotlad and back to Atlanta… I think you can see where this is going already huh? Well, as I was returning on the return part of the ticket, I had no return to return to Scotland (not that I particularly want to) so without a return I wasn’t getting on the plane…

Great!!!

What should I do? I’ve not got enough money to buy a ticket, so I call up Erika, waking her up in the process (not that she really sleeps, but that’s a moot point), and laying down my tale of woe, you know the secenario:

Erika: “What?”
Me: “TheywontletmeontheplanebecauseIhavenoreturnticket… Ineedareturnticket,youguysgottahelpme… Please!”
Erika: “What????

Or words to that effect, So anyways, Erika is on the job like a fly to shit and hallelujah… She’s got me on a flight from New York’s JFK to London Heathrow on the 21st of July and back again a week later… $624 to save my ass… So within 30 minutes of me bricking myself publicly, I’m getting “yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir” off the American Airlines staff, I’m pretty sure they know the scam I’m running, but as long as I had that return ticket, my ass was covered.

So in between the time of phoning Erika and getting on the plane I drank about 3 pints of beer, just to calm my nerves, beer for breakfast… Reminds me of my student days.

But now I have to pay Erika back somehow, I’ll be living off bread & water for the next millennia most likely, but I got her an extra bottle of Bailey’s at duty free as a small token of my appreciation and eternal gratitude, I’m gonna try and get her sainted one day, but in the meantime I’ll just build a shrine in her honour.

The saddest part was Robyn, she’s meeting me in Chicago in about 4 hours time, and all that was going through my head was “damn, I’m not going to be there, she’s wasted all that money flying there for nothing”. I miss her and the thought of not seeing her again made my stomach ache. I think we’ve been apart for too long already, an indefinate seperation would not be good for both of us.

But all that aside, I’m on my way now, almost there actually…

I’ll admit it… I never liked Andy Kaufman. Oh, the Mighty Mouse bit was funny the first time you saw it, and the Elvis/Foreign Man bit was amusing, and Latka was cute on Taxi (though I always preferred Christopher Lloyd’s bizarre Reverend Jim). But overall, I never understood why anyone thought he was funny, or even clever.

I do now. Maybe it’s that Kaufman was ahead of his time. Long before “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, when the WWF/E was just a beginning to evolve into its 1980’s heyday as a bunch of affable clowns, Kaufman was taking professional wrestling over into the realm of hostile aggression when he whipped up an audience of Southern redneck wrestling fans into a frenzy. Long before Jerry Springer’s staged television weirdness, Kaufman was punching out people on talk shows. Looking back at Kaufman’s career, it appears less that Kaufman was the mentally disturbed jerk he seemed at the time, and more that he was on to something.

The tragedy of Andy Kaufman is less that he died at age 35 of lung cancer after being a health nut who never smoked, but more that it appears (and the film “Man on the Moon” makes clear) that there never really was an entity “Andy Kaufman”. He really was just a series of alter-egos, such as the lounge lizard Tony Clifton, and events. But the question has lingered: Did Kaufman stage his own death? Was it just another performance? It would be perfectly in character for him to do so (unlike the late Jim Morrison, for example), and indeed, he did talk at one time about wanting to fake his death. Yet aside from hard-core Kaufman fans, no one really has cared.

Perhaps now they will.

Before Kaufman died (or “died”) on May 16, 1984, he told several friends that he was planning to fake his death, disappear and return in 20 years, precisely. So, on May 16, 2004, Comic Relief, the charity organization Zmuda founded in 1985, will present… something. Something secretive, something at House of Blues on Sunset Strip. Title: Andy Kaufman – Dead or Alive?

More info courtesy of the House of Blues.

Andy stated that were he to fake his death, he would return 20 years later to the day. MAY 16TH, 2004 IS THAT DAY. Over one hundred personal ads will be taken out, across the country and abroad, reminding him of his words. Will he show? This historic celebration will include a special premiere showing, along with star appearances by Rodney Dangerfield, Caroline Rhea, Bob Odenkirk, Paul Rudd, Rich Voss, Jerry “the King” Lawler, Andy Dick and a rare performance by International singing sensation TONY CLIFTON and his CLIFTONES. Also “Man on the Moon” co-screenwriter Larry Karaszewski will be joined by Andy’s closest companions: George Shapiro, Lynne Margulies, and Bob Zmuda . Tickets $99.95. Special $250 VIP tickets include select seating & celebrity reception (hopefully with Andy).

So will he or won’t he?