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!

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.

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!

Just a quick link — here is a decent article on Louisville Mojo, a great local web site that has grown quite a bit in the last year or so. Turns out, I have two (tenuous) connections to it. One is Michael Briedenbach, with whom I worked at Corvus, and the second is Chuck Burke, the founder and el presidente of Louisville Mojo and also had a hand in Dance of Shiva, a wildly popular BBS here in Louisville in the early 90′s where I was a member. They had newsgroups there! It was all very exciting. BBS’ing was very much a “community” sort of thing, and it’s taken a while for the Internet to finally find it’s foothold in the culture to support communities. That’s all really, just thought I’d remember them good old days.

As a reminder to myself, and others, I present thee with a list of June birthdays of import:

• June 1 – Katy Dixon, Jeanette Wilson
• June 14 – Chuck Pearsall
• June 23 – Kelly Wilson

A happy birthday to one and all on that list, and to others I may not have mentioned.

Note: There may be many I have omitted, but I consider it a major milestone in my life to go a full year without forgetting someone’s birthday. That milestone, as of yet, has eluded me.

I was reminiscing with Charlie today about the Achewood strip from Friday, and commenced to remark upon one of the many things from this particular strip of which I derived great pleasure.

To quote:

Top of my list of favourite things about the strip is the capitalized “S” in satisfaction. Owing to the idea of the fourth inalienable right [editor: the other three being life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], reserved especially for the South — “Satisfaction” from grevious appellations.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking as of late regarding the duality of love and war and the tendency for a person to choose one or the other, sometimes for the sake of the one not chosen. I must save this thought for later.

A conversation between Jackson and I today:

ben: have you ever wanted to chase tornadoes?
jackson: shit yeah.
ben: as have i
ben: but for the time being, here is your vicarious link.
ben: http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/33345

This would serve as a good point to remind my faithful readers of my “themes” options you can find at the bottom of any page. One of which is the “tornado” theme — in honor of the season.

Today, after the batteries on my Nomad drained themselves playing early (read: good) U2, I decided to tune into WOXY up in Cincinnati via their internet audio stream — but it appeared to be down. Checking out their site, I learned that they A) stopped broadcasting on the web May 13th and B) had been sold back in January!!

Ever since I first tuned in to them back in early 2003, I had been smitten. I kept up-to-date with shows in Cinci, as well as good music in general. While it wasn’t perfect, it was still very independent and played good music. 97X was owned by Linda and Doug Balogh, who had solely owned and operated the station since the early 80′s. Being in their mid-to-late thirties at that time, they are now pushing 60, and would like to find time to enjoy the spoils of their labor. As mentioned on Sledge’s (a WOXY DJ) blog, they very well could have sold the radio station in ’96 or ’97 for triple what they received in the sale this year, but they decided to fight the good fight against behemoth corporations. (Don’t get me started on the 1996 Telecommunications Act which allowed corporations even greater ownership percentages in radio markets, please. It also started the broadband internet revolution, so it’s not ENTIRELY bad.) So alas, one of the very few family-owned/independent radio stations has gone off the air.

There were initially some indications of attempts to salvage 97X as an internet-only stream, but after some calculations it would seem that was made impossible by the RIAA‘s insistance on royalties for web broadcasts. Yay, way to stifle independence in radio. I hope thee choke on your foie gras.

For futher reading, check out Sledge’s blog, and his comments on the sale of 97X. Also, oh-so-apropo, PBS’s Frontline will be airing a broadcast entitled “The Way The Music Died” tonight at 9 PM. I’ll be watching, as should you. Oh, and it should be noted that the image used in this article is in fact, not related to WOXY or radio, but the cover image from Matt Fraction‘s great comic with the same title as this post.

Charlie and I attended the Greater Louisville Bonsai Society‘s “Beginner Bonsai” Course at the Bon Air library. For $40, you got a very nice little bonsai tree, expert instruction, potting and basic trimming and forming. Pretty cool stuff, and an excellent introduction to any sort of gardening, as you can do it indoors. Humble is the name of the game here, folks. Bonsai is fascinating to me because of the humble grace and artistic qualities of the crafting of the tree. It’s one thing to plant some pansies in your front yard — but to craft yourself a beautiful miniature tree! Well, perhaps that is a little too obtuse for some readers, but I dig it and you don’t have to, and I guess therein lies the beauty of bonsai. In any case, I would suggest viewing the Bonsai gallery.

I’ve always had a thing for strange things — ghosts and UFO’s and all sorts of odd things. Early memories of Halley’s Comet and space shuttles and stuff soon gave way to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, V, and the paperback cover of Whitley Strieber‘s Communion
that used to freak me out. Recently, it’s been more “realistic” interests such as cryptography, ciphers, The DaVinci Code or The Rule of Four. All of this stuff has always just been there — like some subcurrent.

Recently, Charlie at work piqued my interests in such things again, as he is also an observer of these mysterious, wonderful and fun conspiratorial ramblings and skeptical science. It would seem that all of our conversations, whether they involve Neal Stephenson‘s Cryptonomicon, or perhaps the Masons (which bring into light Alan Moore‘s From Hell and Gary Spencer Millidge’s Strangehaven), or perhaps the edges of science itself in the form of Nikola Tesla, are connected in one manner or another with some facet of our lives in very odd and conspiratorial subcurrenty sort of ways. Jack White, of The White Stripes (a favoured band of us both) has a bit of a thing for Nikola Tesla and his brand of high-voltage fruitcake science. We both in one manner or another have family or friend connections to the Masons or the Ordo Templi Orientis — both of which are real, actual, secretive organizations filled with tantalizing mythology and years of history. I could go on and on – and if I was a conspiratorial theorist worth my salt, I certainly would! But, alas, I am not — I’m just making a point that this stuff is terribly interesting.

So, just recently, on This American Life specifically Episode 265 titled “Fake Science”, they did a piece on Art Bell, the proprietor and host of Coast to Coast AM. I played a bit of it for Charlie and my surrounding office-mates (specifically the part where a man claiming to be “the Anti-Christ” calls into Art), and this morning, Charlie introduces me to Mel’s Hole. Mel is a man who discovered a hole in Ellensburg, Washington that he claims is at least 80,000 feet deep and might be a portal to another dimension. I cannot and will not attempt to explain further here, but suffice it to say you can listen to the saga by checking out the Mel’s Hole Audio site which has a number of Art Bell broadcasts with our man Mel Waters.

Art Bell and Mel’s Hole is just terribly entertaining to me, and I don’t claim to believe much of any of it. But, some unexplained mysteries of this world, some odd correlations or connections are just too interesting not to explore! I love it, and I can’t get enough of it. I’d suggest if you’ve got a little time, just poke around, you’ll find something.