Prince, previously known as %$#&, previously known as Prince, has re-renamed himself to Prince. He’ll be returning to his hometown of Minneapolis for a week long celebration, or a brutal pummelling by those who think that “Prince Rogers Nelson” is a wussy name. CNN has the story.

Ever wonder what happens when a geek gets a framegrabber, edits geek movies and adds his own geek text? Wonder no more, friends, Detonate.net has the answer. First up, we have a geek-ization of the Matrix, followed by Star Wars: A New Hope. Be forewarned, geek knowledge may be needed to get all jokes.

This here is a little story about a woman and a miniature vacuum. This article is a litle strange for Salon, but its an interesting read. Continue to page two (2) to read all the gory details. Included is the reference to a clitoris as “the little canoe driver”. Wow. I’m going to towel off.

Check it out! Nigel has arrived, and he’s taking requests. Go here, and read it, and then play with the Nigel demo. I don’t know if he’ll work with multiple people at once. If you use the demo multiple times, and it keeps giving you the same sound file again and again, try the REFRESH button on your browser.

According to this article at CNN, NBC will be debut a couple of new shows, and cutting Dateline NBC from only 8 nights a week to 1 24 hour period. Ok, so that’s not true, but the new shows are. First up is Michael Richards in “The Michael Richards Show,” where he plays, umm, errr… Michael Richards as a wacky private eye. Then we have Steven Weber in the…. wait for it! wait for it! “The Steven Weber Show” where he plays an ex-sitcom star back from banishment or some such junk. Oh well, at least Kirstie Allie isn’t around anymore.

Meanwhile, somewhere in an alternate universe, someone pays attention to critics and fans and cans Jesse, and lets Sportsnight stay on….

According to this article the government, during the height of the Cold War, had plans (involving none other than Carl Sagan) to detonate an atomic bomb on the MOON! Just to one-up the Russians, at that. Apparently the Armed Force (namely, the Air Force) were more concerned with some show of astro-might, rather than destroying one of the most pristine areas man has ever set foot on. It’s a good read and a good example of the ludicrous notions that thankfully never came to light during the cold war.

Well, i’ve been concocting plans for theLocust.org Auto Radio, a completely automated, web enabled, user centric radio station o’er the weekend, and i just finished installing some text-to-speech software (TTS for those in the know), and its pretty good. This streaming radio-thing will allow users to request songs, upload ones they want to hear, view the current playlist, and every three songs or so, our lovely announcer, we’ll call him Nigel (you’ll find out why) will tell you what has been played and for whom. Yee-ha. Here is a sample of Nigel at work. Quoting Beastie Boys, nonetheless. The clip is in MP3 format, so if you don’t have an MP3 player, you are a loser. Ok, so maybe you’re *not really* a loser. Go to WinAmp to get one.

It is an interesting paradox. I pay a lot of money ($60) for BellSouth’s ADSL service. Most of the time it is well worth it. This morning was not one of those times. As most of you may or may not have noticed, theLocust was down this morning due to an outage from BellSouth.

I would hope that my $60 a month is going towards a little more stability, but I can’t say for sure. Anyway, all systems are go.

Speech synthesis has always been something I had an interest in, ever since I got my first SoundBlaster (an 8 bit card), with Dr. Sbaitso, a really bad speech synth program. So! I went off to look for some today, and i re-discovered Bell Lab’s Speech Synthesis Web demo. Damn. This thing is pretty good. Especially when compared to the others you find on the web.

“So what?” you say. Well, I’m thinking about setting up RealServer here, and playing Mp3s or whatever from my machine, and I wanted some station breaks, and possibly dynamic stuff (maybe even breaking news), so i thought “How would i automate that? SPEECH SYNTH i thought”. So, that something that might be coming up. I think it would be neat. Every fifteen minutes, a new story or something. Cool. Anyway, here are two audio clips I made with the demo of the Bell Synth: Website Ad and Radio Blurb

Update 5/11/00: Open this address in WinAmp to hear the glory of theLocust Auto Radio (limit content as yet, more later) https://thelocust.org:8000

Finally, that 10 minute clip from the White House Press Correspondence Dinner featuring President Clinton and a cast of dozens has made its way to the web. AdCritic has the film here. It’s a healthy download, but it’s worth it. (Not to mention that Pete from Pete & Pete makes an appearance.