Category: Items

The day you’ve been waiting for: Happy Birthday Mike Leslie, Worcester’s newest visionary junk shop, opens today. I stopped by the in the morning to drop off a copy of Stale Urine’s Bachelor Party! They weren’t open yet.

(I’m hoping to see the use of the Flickr tag happybirthdaymikeleslie explode.)

Update: Stopped by again this afternoon, and they were open. Dropped off the CD. The place is magnificent. Scored some good stuff (pictured) for $7.

Golden Pizza burns: Looks like a fire hit the Golden Pizza on Chandler near Mason this morning.

Animals: Erik Marcus has a podcast about anger and activism. He thinks that because there’s so much to be angry about, unless you can deal with these negative feelings you’ll get worn down. How does Erik deal with his anger over Adam Durand getting 6 months for documenting a cruel egg farm? By doing a literary analysis of the judge’s statement. That, and thinking about Mr Rogers.

Catholicism: Apparently, to win the “Left Behind” video game, you have to convert or kill Catholics and non-Christians. The Book of Revelation, like the rest of the Bible, has lots of irony, and I wouldn’t be surprised if during the end times a bunch of uniforms and guns dropped from the sky, and Christian gangs took them and began a slaughter. I can picture one guy stopping for a moment and noticing the patches on his friend’s blood-spattered uniform: “Hey, our unit number is six-six-six . . . .”

Anyhow, before exterminating Catholics, you might want to learn the real story from “Harsh Truths About Catholicism“:

CLAIM: The inverted cross on some papal decorations shows the Catholic Church’s devotion to Satan.

This is false. The inverted cross actually shows the pope’s dedication to Danish heavy metal band Mercyful Fate.

Totally topless: Buck Paxton points out that the Worcester city ordinances prohibit bar employees from displaying their aureolae (haloes) but not their areolae (nipples).

Adam Villani points out that Kern County regulates the sale of breast-shaped pillows on the highway.
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Class: May 15 I’m teaching a free class called “HTML for Activists.” This will be an hour-long introduction to HTML, focused on practical matters. If you’re interested, meet at 7pm at the statue of Freud on the main quad of Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Flickr: The new cool tag: happybirthdaymikeleslie.

Conference: As someone who doesn’t own a laptop, I’ll probably be the only person at tomorrow’s Beyond Broadcast conference doing less blogging than usual during the event.

Second Life and Darfur: The BB conference also has a presence in Second Life. Mr Paulukonis points out that there’s been some fighting in Second Life about Darfur, and that Ethan Zuckerman (who will be at BB) thinks the whole thing is irrelevant at best:

When I consider the issues I’m most interested in, collecting information – especially from people who are actually affected by these issues – is a much higher priority than presenting this data in a 3D format. Given that roughly 100,000 people log into Second Life in a given month – compared to roughly one billion using the Internet as a whole – I suspect people trying to call attention to global issues are better off making a website than a 3D space.

Nun: Nice article in Whispers about Sister Rose Thering, whose life work was “to promote greater understanding in the often-strained relationships between Christians and Jews.”

Dude: Through some Drupal site I found a microformats site, whereby I found this microformats podcast featuring Rohit. Dude, it is weird to stumble upon someone like that.

Happy Birthday Mike Leslie: is happening. See the homepage.

Stop the RIAA: A couple local college students are being sued for downloading music. The EFF says:

We oppose the recording industry’s decision to attack the public, bankrupt its customers and offer false amnesty to those who would impugn themselves. We call instead for a real amnesty: the development of a legal alternative that preserves file-sharing technology while ensuring that artists are fairly compensated.

Conference: I’ll be at Beyond Broadcast next weekend in Cambridge. Like physically there, not virtually there.

Animals: A guy who removed some dying chickens from an egg farm has been acquitted of felony charges. And Dan “Bizarro” Piraro has a movie (.mov) of a talking pig with a goatee explaining physiology.

Retail: A reader sends in this story of people dressing up like Best Buy clerks and infiltrating a store.

Iocane powder: Best stencil ever, via BrewLog.

Signs: An AP photo from McGovern’s arrest, featuring Worcester’s Scott Schaeffer-Duffy. Good job on the signs.

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Thomas Gumbleton Tuesday: The controversial retired bishop/peacenik will be Holy Week speaker at St. Rose of Lima parish, 244 West Main Street, Northborough, Massachusetts, April 11 at 7pm.

Holy cow, this is great: MIT steals Fleming’s cannon. I guess this was meant as a prank against Caltech, but it feels more like a prank against Fleming. Which makes me smile even wider.
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