Richard sends mad love to the laydeeez, 2007

Richard is like, “The honies can resist neither my large wooden kraft letters nor my tropical print shirt.”

From: uwalert@washington.edu
Subject: UW Alert
Date: July 2, 2009 5:01:58 PM PDT
To: [me]

Dear Jessie Hirsch,

Armed robbery on Brooklyn and 50th. Two armed suspects heading south to
Campus Parkway. Stay alert

I’m still on the mailing list for the University of Washington alert service. This is a recent innovation– I think it was implemented last year, but I can’t remember exactly. Sometimes I get e-mail/SMS messages that alert me to a hazmat spill in some chemistry building, and other times, I get one like the above.

What a great way to mobilize eyes! I could go on for hours mocking the UW about various things, having spent 5 years there as a disgruntled student, but I will not mock them about this. There is something terrifying and wonderful about the thought of 45k+ students all getting the same important information at once.

So, around 5pm, Brooklyn and 50th was probably packed as usual with UW students looking for dinner. I like to imagine the armed suspects making for Campus Parkway (?!) when all of a sudden cell phones ring all around, everyone pulls them out, and the armed suspects filled with sudden, violent terror.

Payphone on Brooklyn, 2008

You should probably buy this photograph! It is awesome!

I just got the 20×200 update in my inbox and saw this and thought… well, I don’t have the time to put what I actually thought into words, but this photo basically sums up Independence Day for me.

I would also like to know how Mike Sinclair shot this, because the depth of field is huge and it almost looks like an illustration…

It occurs to me that I could get this information from a Mechanical Turk. I guess it’s time to think about how much I’m willing to pay for the goods.

Oh also, if you haven’t watched this HARD TIMES episode about outsourcing joke writing, you had better do it immediately.

You know, I was actually going to write about a homework problem here, but by the time I finished typing the post’s title, I was already distracted. Who says bloggers are useless as cats? (I’ll give you a hint– it’s a friend of the family named Arch.)

Last week I made another bathroom sign, this one specifically for the men’s lavatory:

I mean, let’s be honest here. The photo above is probably one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. The experimentee even reminds me of Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (post Shock Shop, pre-lobotomy). Look through the whole set if you want to see some seriously weird shit. And as far as it being creepy to apply electrical stimulation to facial muscles… well yeah, it looks pretty bad, but I’ve had a TENS unit used on me during physical therapy sessions, and it doesn’t hurt– it’s actually pretty hilarious. Compared to other things people were doing to each other at that time for the sake of medical research, I think this is rather innocuous.

Now that I know something like a TENS unit can be used to stimulate facial muscles, I may have to buy one and do a whole series of photographs of my friends. That doesn’t count as human experimentation, does it? I mean… maybe I should have people sign a release first.

One of the cool things about Richard is that he doesn’t need a TENS unit to individually control his facial muscles.

But I am inviting you to enjoy a moment of Beauty by gazing at this lovely free background that my sharp-as-a-tack friend Ballookey created. Check it!

Prints are for sale at Imagekind. I BOUGHT ONE TODAY, and if you buy one today, your wall may ultimately look as awesome as mine, I will have received this poster BEFORE you did, and have all kinds of seniority.

“Suppose you tell me when you first began to hate the telephone.”

…”Uncle of mine called it the Ghost Machine. Voices without bodies. Scared the living hell out of me. Later in life I was never comfortable. Seemed to me a phone was an impersonal instrument. If it felt like it, it let your personality go through its wires. If it didn’t want to, it just drained your personality away until what slipped through at the other end was some cold fish of a voice all steel, copper, plastic, no warmth, no reality. It’s easy to say the wrong thing on telephones; the telephone changes your meaning on you. First thing you know, you’ve made an enemy. Then, of course, the telephone’s such a convenient thing; it just sits there and demands you call someone who doesn’t want to be called. Friends were always calling, calling, calling me. Hell, I hadn’t any time of my own. …my horror chamber of a radio wrist watch on which my friends and wife phoned every five minutes. What is there about such ‘conveniences’ that makes them so temptingly convenient? The average man thinks, Here I am, time on my hands, so why not just buzz old Joe up, eh? ‘Hello, hello!’ I love my friends, my wife, humanity, very much, but when one minute my wife calls to say, ‘Where are you now dear?’ and a friend calls and says, ‘Got the best off-color joke to tell you. Seems there was a guy—’ And a stranger calls and cries out, ‘This is the Find-Fax Poll. What gum are you chewing at this very instant!’ Well!”

I don’t imagine I’m the first person to read this story in the last few years and laugh her ass off, thinking of twitter, facebook, myspace, dodgeball… and well, what started off with the car phone, I guess. (Or the fully portable mobile phone, the “radio wrist watch”!)

“It’s easy to say the wrong thing on telephones; the telephone changes your meaning on you. First thing you know, you’ve made an enemy.” IRC, anyone? O prescient sci-fi writers!

That dates from 11/26/02! I don’t think the Internet even existed then! No wonder they’re using Scotch tape!