Let me tell you a little story. There was once a great website called TheSpark.com. It was really, really funny and was always popping with new hilarious projects like the “Stinky Meat Project” the “Fat Project” and the “Date My Sister Project”. Some seriously funny writing! Well, they also made a site called “SparkNotes” which had a boatload of handy notes for high school and college-level students. This appears to be the start of the end. TheSpark.com and SparkNotes.com were both bought up by iTurf.com (a teen-centric website with message boards, articles, etc, inexplicably headed by Delias.com, a clothing store). iTurf (and parent company Delias) was a little too heady with the Internet land-grab in 2000, and in November of 2000, Delias cut the cord, canned the staff of iTurf, and so affiliates like TheSpark and SparkNotes (among others) went into a little bit of a limbo. SparkNotes, however, had a relationship with Barnes & Noble to sell their SparkNotes study-guides (Cliff Notes, sorta). In March of 2001, TheSpark and SparkNotes is sold to Barnes & Noble for the paltry sum of $3,555 (according to this SEC filing).

So, from then on The Spark apparently becomes a bit of Bastard Child to Barnes & Noble. They focus more on SparkNotes, as that can produce revenue while, apparently, writing articles about decaying meat does not. I don’t know when Christian Rudder (the creator of TheSpark.com and SparkNotes.com) parted ways with TheB&NSpark, but it appears to be in early 2001 when Barnes & Noble bought TheSpark and SparkNotes from Delias. And now, as of June 2004, Barnes & Noble shut down TheSpark.com as we knew it, and put up a re-director from TheSpark to SparkNotes, which is minutely similar. I, among many, many others, were terribly dismayed to see this. Notsomuch the revival of SparkNotes.com (which I really didn’t visit that often), but for the complete and total scrapping of TheSpark.com and its content. It would have been one thing to shut down the site and swap it for something COMPLETLY different, but this is some sort of half-baked clownshoe attempt at melding SparkNotes with little tidbits of TheSpark.com. Why not just leave up an archive of TheSpark.com? Hard to say.

Now, for the bad news. According to the FAQ page on his latest web-venture, OKCupid.com, they sold all of their content to Barnes & Noble, and cannot get access to that old content (due to the deal I presume took place in 2001). I don’t pretend to know the particulars of that deal, but one must presume that Christian Rudder either A) got hosed/railroaded, B) took the money and ran or C) just washed his hands of what, on paper, seems like a great big implosion that TheSpark/SparkNotes was involved in. Also, hard to say.

If you want to read a cutesy history of SparkNotes, then read this. Perhaps I’ll dig a little further and flesh this out, but right now I’m just a little muddied with a feeling between fury and sadness.

With Ben’s recent passing, among other things, it has struck me that things have changed. Stepping out of the workaday I’m in and looking back down the hallway of my life (that’s how I visualize time past and time to come) has allowed me a bit of perspective. It feels to me as if I’ve just changed rooms — a door has shut behind me with a thud that surprised me. I remember a similar feeling in early 1997, the day another friend of mine committed suicide. I felt then as I do now that I’d changed rooms. The comfortable uncomfort of high school was a thing behind me — death and those it that it touched was and were real, and I better get my head on straight.

This last nearly 8 years were ones where I think I found myself — where we all found ourselves in one way or another. The fluid uncertainty that is growing up and out of high school and into college gels into what we are now. It is a time of serious stresses, new boundaries and slowly settling uncertainties. Morals and ideals begin to align themselves like iron filings in the presence of a magnet. Grief and resentment come with the realization that time has passed beneath your feet and behind your back, and it’s all a little bewildering. Eventually I found my feet. That me in that when is now looked back upon with amusement, wonder and occassional disappointment. I’m happy with what I’ve become, and I don’t regret as much as I used to. I am comfortable with who I am, partially because I know I’ve changed for the better. I made it through that time of uncertainty, fear and change, and I’m a better person for it.

However, as I sit here on what I assume to be solid ground, I look back through those doors and I see those who I left behind, those who stayed behind, or those who just didn’t make it. Ben didn’t make it, and as much as I’d like to drag him into that next room, I know I can’t. He’ll have to remain back there a constant reminder of closed doors. A piece of me stays behind in each room, too, and as much as I’d like the old me to come along, that me in that when and me here, we both know where we stand and where we need to be. And that is something I learned not too long ago. Perhaps that bit of knowledge allowed me passage on, I don’t know.

Like looking across flat land on a clear day, I think I can see far down the hallway now, but there have been times in my life — darker times — when it’s hard for me to imagine what will be coming, what is in my future. I can’t say how far away the next door is, or really what is across it’s threshold, but I have ideas. I wonder what I would see had I had been in Ben’s shoes. From what little I knew of his state of mind in the last couple of years, I understand that he felt under great pressures to succeed — academically and personally, and I think I can understand some of those pressures. Marriage and work and the loss of friends, the rest of your life now solely in your hands, all things that lay waste to even the strongest of people. The last few years of my life have certainly been challenging ones, ones where I certainly felt lost and in the woodwork. Each one of us, friends and family alike, have a separate path in life that may lead us further away from one another, but in the end we are never so far away that our bonds are not worth testing.

According to an article at Pitchfork, there is a book about Neutral Milk Hotel (a band) in the works. Oddly enough I just managed to get my hands on their first album On Avery Island just recently. A few months back the venerable Mr. Cooper implored me to listen to the positively riveting and mind-blowingly awesome second album In an Aeroplane Over the Sea after he himself was given a copy by a generous friend.

The circuitous route by which Neutral Milk Hotel caught my ear is really only a small facet of the strange story of Jeff Mangum’s short career with his Neutral Milk Hotel band. In an Aeroplane… was released in 1998 to critical acclaim and then he essentially fell off the face of the earth. Much like the sudden rise subsequent disappearance of the band, both albums are noisy, powerful and ultimately deep and terribly sad. There is part of me that wants to hear more and part of me that revels in the hope that music like that is never made again. That said, I’d love to read more about it all…

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…

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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.

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.

Speaking with a friend of mine via the venerable AIM internet teletype service, we got to speaking about the computer acronym SAN (Storage Area Network). As per usual, I throw that term into Google. I pull up various and sundry unrelated links, but do see a “Sponsored Link” on the side for Broadcom — a network microchip manufacturer. The text of said “Sponsored Link” is as follows:

SAN Solutions

Free e-Book download: “Architecting Next-Generation Networks.”

www.broadcom.com

Architect.
ArchitectING?
“What do architects do?” I wonder aloud. They clearly don’t fricking ARCHITECT. They DESIGN, but they sure aren’t ARCHITECTING all damn day long. Man. I swear. I know that our beloved English language has morphed into what it is by relatively similar idiot moves, but here is to hoping that this unfortunate mutation of turning nouns into verbs gets EVOLUTIONED into EXINCTIONING itself.

I’ve leafed through a couple of issues of AdBusters magazine a couple of times, and have always been intrigued by the layout and the complete deconstruction of branded® America&tm;. How should I best explain AdBusters? Well, I think they do it best:

Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Adbusters is a not-for-profit, reader-supported, 120,000-circulation magazine concerned about the erosion of our physical and cultural environments by commercial forces.

Yeah, pretty much. So are there ads in the magazine? Nope. The layout is fantastic and entertaining, but they somehow manage to stay away from having a “brand” themselves. I really don’t know how they do it, but they seem to stay on that razors-edge of having a good, gripping, competent design, but yet don’t fall into the trap of “no image as an image”. Also, culture jamming is a great idea (not to mention a great name), and I suspect that Warren Ellis knows well these busters of ad.

I do believe I will subscribe.

Well, the last vestige of a successful broad-range local bookstore, Hawley-Cooke has been bought by Borders Books and Music. They will close briefly in a couple of months and reopen as Borders. I don’t know how employment will be affected, but I suppose our closest Hawley-Cooke contact Holly will know. Or her legions of HC spies will know.

Holly (she’s no dumbass) sent me an op-ed piece at CNN entitled Believe It, or Not and it discusses the shift in American Christian faith (including Catholics, mind you) where more and more Christians believe in the idea of the Virgin birth and that God is the only key to morality (among other things).

As the author Kristof states: “The faith in the Virgin Birth reflects the way American Christianity is becoming less intellectual and more mystical over time. The faith in the Virgin Birth reflects the way American Christianity is becoming less intellectual and more mystical over time.“

Man, that worries me quite a bit. People that don’t know why they should believe what they believe. I know the word is “faith”, but damn! There are ridiculous numbers of pieces of evidence that state that the Bible isn’t “the word of god”, but a constantly edited piece of literature. Many things that are the bedrock pieces of the faith are later “add-ins” by the clergy. (The “why” of that is another argument all together).

I don’t intend to impugn religious beliefs here but faith is indeed turning away from the hard texts and more into an almost oral tradition of mysticism and mythology. Know your faith, and question it. Know more, assume less.

V to make a comeback on NBC

“reworked” GI JOE Public Service Announcements

Crazy ‘The DaVinci Code’ web-puzzle thing

Quicktime of Gollum’s acceptance speech at the MTV movie awards