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Ben Wilson

Ben Wilson

ben wilson This is the blog of a one Ben Wilson, a Louisville, Kentucky native who enjoys baseball, beer, music, bikes, things that fly and good food. By day he pushes pixels and makes the Internet happen for a local advertising agency. His wife, Kelly is an Ironman, and his baby Amelia is the cutest thing ever.


seriously, no mercy

David’s own rock-album cover.

photo credit: geoff noles

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Jul 1 2004 ~ 12:36 pm ~ Comments (3) ~
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Checking my gmail email address (hamsandwich AT gmail DOT com) today, I noticed I had a piece of mail! Exciting!

Hi Ben,



I thought you might be interested to know that I used some of your Creative Commons licensed photos as part of a presentation that I did recently on wikis. In case you might be interested, here is a link to the presentation “slides” (click on the photos to advance):



http://www.minezone.org/wiki/MVance/Introduction


And here is the “thanks” page:



http://www.minezone.org/wiki/MVance/ThanksTo


Thanks for making your photos available.



- Matt

http://www.minezone.org/wiki/MVance/AboutMatt

Well, I must admit that I didn’t even think about the Creative Commons and my photography — but yeah, it’s in the footer, and yeah I don’t mind if you use it! Matt’s a true champ, though, by A) giving me credit and B) letting me know! Thanks a bunch, Matt.

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Jun 30 2004 ~ 9:41 pm ~ Comments Off ~
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I’ve had this story rolling through my mind since last night whilst I was making spaghetti (the tie-in is later revealed, dear reader). It is a story of innocence and odd mental pathways of our elders, oh yes. I was probably 13 or 14 at the time, so this is probably riddled with half-truths and filled in with egregious lies. But I bid you read on…

{more}

So, I was in the Boy Scouts as a young man — an experience I very much value to this very day. (Ed: It should be noted that the lowest levels of the BSA are quite OK, but the upper levels of administration have shown themselves to be homophobic and exclusionary). But that is neither here nor there. Up until I was about 14 we lived in Middletown, a suburb in Eastern Jefferson county (now Metro Louisville) and I was a member of Troop 71 which was sponsored by the Epiphany Catholic Church. One Thursday, at our weekly meeting, we had a visitor from another Troop — an elderly man whose name escapes me, but suffice it to say he had been scouting since the 20′s or 30′s. I remember him as a slightly Wilford-Brimleyesque man replete with white moustache. He was here to talk to us about the stamp collecting merit badge as he was apparently quite the philatelist. We quickly went through our weekly points-of-business, and then we all congregated around this gent (who also reminded me of Teddy Roosevelt) to have him talk to us about the ways and means of the philatelic hobby.

As we all settled around him in a semi-circle with his back to one of the windows in the youth center we called home, he began to explain to us that anyone and everyone collects stamps. Old, young, black, white, rich, poor. He could have left it alone with that, but no, gentle reader, he did not. He began scuttling down a side-road of conversation that I’m sure we’ve all encountered. We being young Scouts had no reason to wonder why we started to turn down the grisly road that I am about to explain, so we followed the leader.


“You see, young masters, that I sometimes work with retarded and otherwise slow children. Some of them have been abused by their no-good parents or perhaps just neglected by people of the same sort. One of the sorrier examples of these children is a young child that we have taken to referring to as the ‘dip baby’. You see as a young babe he was often inflicted with cholic, a malady that haunts many a young child. Cholic causes a child to be most cantankerous and will cause the child to cry for hours upon end. As you could imagine this can be most irritating.”


“One unfortunate day, the mother of this child had reached her pitifully low tolerance for the bellowing of this sorry child, and decided to attempt to soothe this child of his contemptuous malady. Normally, this can be achieved by running a vacuum-cleaner or a trip in an motor-car. This mother, however, chose a method of cessation known only prior to medieval torturers and the cannibals* of Darkest Africa. She chose to dip this child into a pot of boiling water.”

Needless to say, we were taken aback at where this old man had taken us! We had somehow strayed off of Main Street, Anytown, USA into some horrible and macabre back-alley. Why had he brought us here? What was to happen next? He continued…


“Children, you see the mother was quite possibly insane — Perhaps she was syphilitic or had forsaken proper child-rearing instinct for the lure of some chemical retreat — I cannot say. The mother was quickly imprisoned, and her child made a ward of the state. He has since made a very painful recovery, and lives everyday in near-constant agony. His one love in this terrible world? Stamp collection. I hope this goes to show you that anyone, even a child dipped in boiling water, can enjoy the wonderful world of stamp-collecting.”

So, there we were finally were, back onto the safe road, having been dragged through the twisted wood of this man’s horrifying yarn. We were all fairly shocked, I think, but he continued on to explain to us the ins and outs of stamp collecting, and soon enough it was all over. I don’t remember much of what he said about stamps that night, but I certainly learned a lesson about innocence and the odd mental pathways of our elders. Perhaps you have as well.

* – it should be noted that he had, many years earlier while I was a Cub Scout, stood in front of a large audience of Cub Scouts, ranging from Tiger Cubs (6 to 7 years of age) to Webelos (11 to 12 years of age), and detailed the process by which he had seen Congolese cannibals make shrunken heads.

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~ 11:31 am ~ Comments Off ~
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It would appear that WOXY will shortly be continuing it’s webcasting, according to an article in the Cincinatti Enquirer forwarded to me by long-time lurker (and Cinci resident) Kevin McCarty (sup Kev!).
This is also backed up by WOXY‘s frontpage.

To quote:

Kind fate has sent us two dedicated listeners with the vision and courage to step up as partners to fund the continued broadcast of 97X The Future of Rock and Roll over the Internet.

These magnanimous folks want to remain anonymous, but they feel passionately about “doing the right thing” and “doing good work,” and we are the lucky recipients of their generous spirit.

Like Phoenix rising from the ashes, 97X – just as we have always loved it – will be returning soon. It will take us a few weeks to get set up for the future, but be assured that Mike and Barb and Shiv and Bryan Jay are already hard at work to bring it all back.

Keep checking woxy.com for updates … we’ll announce an air date just as soon as we know it.

Give a little shout of thanks to our “angels” – and stay tuned!

Awesome!

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Jun 28 2004 ~ 12:13 pm ~ Comments (2) ~
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Gary gets his suds


Mayumi the human bonsai

That I think you should check out. Gary makes a trip to Okinawa with friends, and also some photos from the Wedding/Hawaii trip. Check out gallery #1 (wedding) and gallery #2 (okinawa).

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~ 10:02 am ~ Comments Off ~
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Some of you long-time visitors to thelocustDOTorg may remember the “tribute” I did for the CONET project from Irdial Discs. It is a four-disc set of recordings of shortwave “numbers” stations, and I originally heard about them from the title of Wilco‘s excellent “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” album. The title sprang from a clip they used from the CONET project at the end of their “Poor Places” track of a young girl repeating “Yankee… Hotel… Foxtrot…” (the lead-in for the “Phonetic Alphabet NATO” track on the CONET discs). Kelly and I originally heard this track on our honeymoon, whilst in a rainstorm in St. Louis. It was hella creepy! (but awesome). Later, my interest was piqued and I set up my CONET tribute.

Fast-forward two years, and we see that after a two-year legal battle (previously unknown to me), IRDIAL is being reimbursed by Jeff Tweedy for royalties. I had assumed that Wilco had cleared it, but apparently not. Wired has a good article summing this up, entitled Wilco Pays Up for Spycasts .

It should be pointed out that Irdial has put some of their assets into the public domain under their Open Content system, and you can download their entire catalog (if you can find a mirror) for free personal, non-commercial use. I have mirrored the 4-disc CONET set and accompaning PDF in my CONET tribute.

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~ 8:26 am ~ Comments (2) ~
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In honor of Kelly’s 26th birthday, this the 23rd day of June, two-thousand and four, I present “Kelly throughout the ages”.

Kelly in 2000

2000

Kelly in 2001

2001

Kelly in 2002

2002

Kelly in 2003

2003

Kelly in 2004


2004

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Jun 23 2004 ~ 9:52 am ~ Comments (2) ~
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After a couple of weeks of floating around the bus-station outside of the Coolsville known as GMail (Google’s web-mail venture), I was finally invited aboard by Louisville’s own Jason “Fluffy” Clark. Rad. You can now email hamsandwich AT gmail DOT com, and I shall be there, awaiting your communique from Dorksville.

You see, GMail is still in “beta”, so the only way to get an account is to be “invited”. This inevitably sparked a bit of a caste system among those people who follow such webnovations™®. Even just last night I was feigning sadness to Najati over my lack of GMail. True to American form — I have lusted after it, but really, I don’t have much use for it, as I lease my own colocated rack server. In any case — the skinny on the invitations is this: invitations are sent from existing GMail users to friends, and those invitations pop-up randomly as a link in the GMail user’s inbox. So, make friends or be shunned — shunned I say!

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Jun 22 2004 ~ 9:26 am ~ Comments (1) ~
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Scaled Composite’s SpaceShipOne rocketed into history today, piloted by veteran test-pilot Mike Melvill, becoming the first civilian-funded craft to enter space, some 62 miles above the earth. How was this historic occassion marked, you ask?

[Pilot] Melvill said once he reached weightlessness, he opened a bag of M&M’s in the cockpit that floated around for three minutes while the ship sailed high above California.

That’s right — M&M’s! Maybe it’s a bit of a crack towards the Mars mission, I really couldn’t say. Either way, it’s a terribly important achievement. I can’t say I ever thought I’d see this day.

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Jun 21 2004 ~ 1:11 pm ~ Comments Off ~
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Pluot

A Pluot® is actually a plum/apricot hybrid and are seriously tasty little fruits. They won’t be ursurping the plum in my fruit landscape, but will most likely sidle up and take a role in the wings. They are crisper than a plum (yay!), but the skin isn’t quite as tart (boo!). They have a more complex (yay!) and slightly sweeter taste (boo?) than a plum, owing to it’s apricot heritage. The skin is a little tougher, too, which is nice. I would like to know what a dried pluot would tasty like, as I don’t care for prunes, but I adore dried apricots.

It should be pointed out that the pluot (I haven’t said so, but I think it’s a terrible name, in a way) is not genetically modified, but is actually a hybridization of the two fruits. Therefore, it does not conflict with Mendicino County’s Measure H, which bans the “propagation, cultivation, raising and growing of genetically modified organisms in Mendocino County”. Huzzah!

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Jun 17 2004 ~ 3:58 pm ~ Comments (2) ~
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