Category: General

If there’s anything I hate more than cops, it’s phony police charities. I just received a fraudulent mailing from the American Federation of Police and Concerned Citizens, here is a quote from their mailing:

Across the country, the American Federation of Police and Concerned Citizens provides much-needed support to spouses, children, and other family members of police officers killed in the line of duty. We provide funding for grief counseling, scholarships, direct emergency financial assistance and other programs to loved ones left behind.

Except it’s all a lie. This organization isn’t a charity for the families of dead cops, it goes to the American Police Hall of Fame, a tiny “museum” in a shabby industrial building in Florida. The AFPCC’s main goal seems to be the promotion of the the Death Penalty and private ownership of handguns, they even claim to be a local militia

What We Stand for:

1. We are a strong, powerful and professional organization on the side of law enforcement.

2. We believe that all law-abiding citizens have the right (if they so select), to own firearms for self-defense and sport. We are also ready to serve as a standing “militia” during any disaster or national emergency, as part of civil defense preparedness.

3. We support swift punishment for career criminals.

4. We favor the death penalty and are determined to achieve drug-free schools and communities.

I have contacted the Iowa Attorney General to make sure they have filed the required financial disclosure forms. If they’ve filed, I expect that over 90% of the donations go to “administrative expenses” and less than 10% to actual charitable work. That’s how these frauds work, the charity’s officers keep all the money and give a tiny amount to the people they raised money for.

There is nothing more despicable in the post-9/11 world than scamming money in the name of dead cops. I may hate cops, but I hate fake cops raising money for fake charities even more.

Update: I located AFPCC’s records through the California Attorney General’s office. It is slightly worse than I suspected, they only give 9% to their charity, and keep 91% for themselves.

I was appalled to discover the most horriffic depiction of Sherlock Holmes ever to disgrace the screen, Sherlock Headroom. Matt Frewer, most widely known as Max Headroom, has starred in not one of these cinematic abominations, but three of them and is producing a fourth one. Someone stop him before he Holmes again!

Frewer is just not suited to this role. I know every male actor wants to play Holmes, but the people who deserve the role are limited to those people who can convincingly produce a realistic British accent. This effectively limits the role to native Britons, and definitely not Canadians like Frewer. Jeremy Brett is the definitive Holmes, after his performances, everyone should just give it a rest.

A letter arrived in the mail informing me that my checking account was overdrawn. The letter informed me that my monthly $30 ISP charge via electronic transfer was paid and there was no penalty fee for the overdraft. I don’t keep any money in this account, I just put money in to pay the monthly ISP bills, which I discovered are now deducted on the 5th instead of the 15th. I went to the bank to deposit some money and asked the teller to check the transaction. She said the bank had paid the charge, but now I was overdrawn 39 cents. I told her, “so the bank spent 37 cents postage to tell me I was overdrawn 39 cents?” She laughed.

I am trying to revive an old email shorthand notation, NRN. It is a common courtesy when dashing off a quick note, if you do not need a response to a trivial message. It shows that you do not expect the recipient to expend further time to write a response. But nowadays, nobody seems to know what it means.

I am a speed demon. I have a lead foot, and if I spend time behind the wheel, I want to spend it pedal to the metal. When I took Driver’s Ed, the speed limit was still 70, but it changed to 55 before I got my first car, a 1965 Mustang GT convertible. I think my record speed in the old GT was 140 mph. I’ve only been in one serious accident in my life, a spinout doing 95 in the GT, I did a double spin across some farm field, then drove away without a scratch on me or the car. But I was troubled when the car came to a rest only 2 feet from a telephone pole.

It is a rare person who will consent to ride in my car. Mostly that’s because of my cars, which are usually rustbuckets. But they’re fast, I prefer older muscle cars, like my 65 Barracuda, or my old 65 Dart GT. If you ride with me, you are taking your life in your hands. To ride with me, you must disclaim all liability from death and dismemberment, NO backseat driving, and most of all, keep your hands at your sides and do not distract the driver when he’s doing something insane. The #1 safety rule in my car is that passengers are never ever permitted to yell “Look OUT!”

Tonight on Turner Classic Movies I caught a short film, a highway safety film from Los Angeles, it must have been made in the 1920s. It had old B&W film of the early days of the freeways in LA, I was especially nostalgic to see the Sepulveda Pass back when it was only 2 lanes. I used to commute through the Sepulveda Pass and now it’s got at least 8 lanes of freeway and about 4 lanes off the freeway. But suddenly the tone of the film changed, it showed extremely graphic footage of dead children being carted away from horrible auto accidents. Burning cars with people still inside, dismembered and bleeding bodies tossed onto stretchers and taken away in ambulances. The narrator’s authoritative tone speaks, “they were all good drivers, they had a perfect driving record, right up until they DIED and now it doesn’t make any difference.”

So lately I’ve been thinking about mending my evil ways. Especially since I got that ticket doing 90 on the Interstate, in Illinois. The drive to Chicago from here is long and boring, and I’d do it at 120mph if I could get away with it. But now that I’ve been busted once, if it happens again I’ll be in serious trouble. So I have to get used to driving like a snail.

I recently read an article on the web, some car advice guy gave some suggestions on how to drive more civilly on the road. He suggested that you allow extra time in your trips, that you plan ahead to drive more slowly. Instead of trying to get from Point A to Point B in the least time possible, you must change your attitude and try to obey the speed limits as accurately as possible. I’ve found it actually works. If I make time to go slowly, I’m not burning up the road. It is tough for me to stick to the speed limits, but I have to pretend it’s a road rally or something, I try to stick as precisely to the limits as possible. But I still let er rip sometimes, I just can’t stay stuck in traffic with a bunch of people driving below the speed limit.

But I might already have lost my driving edge. I was back in LA a year ago, and I discovered I constantly had to push myself to keep up with traffic. I can’t believe that people honked at me, the speed demon, because I was driving too slow.

I have a Fairy Ring in my front yard. A Fairy Ring is a large ring of mushrooms, and the ones in my yard are unusually large, each one growing to almost a foot in diameter. I noticed mushrooms in my yard in previous years, but I never noticed them growing in a ring until this year. The mushrooms are usually one of about 7 species, the most common Fairy Ring mushrooms are edible but there are a couple of species that are intensely poisonous, and look almost the same as the edible ones.

I checked around the web and there aren’t any good ways to get rid of the mushrooms. They grow from a huge underground mycelium, the suggested treatment is to dig up and discard the soil from the ring and about 2 feet of dirt around it. But you’re probably going to spread around the mycelium to other parts of the lawn if you drop any dirt, you have to treat it like toxic waste. There is only one real solution: to bulldoze the yard, and start over with a fresh layer of fumigated, sterile topsoil.

Bill Gates is in the process of assimilating the pharmaceutical industry. Gates has made massive investments in Merck, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Abbott Labs, Bristol Myers Squibb, Pharmacia, Johnson & Johnson, and Schering-Plough. These investments exceed any other of Gates’ holdings, with the exception of Microsoft stock. Gates is shifting hundreds of millions of dollars of illegally-obtained wealth into other industries. Apparently selling drugs is even more profitable than a monopoly on operating systems.

The irony of this is that it makes the most vicious joke about Gates into the truth. Long ago, Craig Kilborn joked that Gates had announced his initiative to eradicate AIDS, by buying up all competing viruses and using his monopoly power to drive the AIDS virus to extinction.

Long ago, someone posted a question on Usenet about the history of pigments. It turned out they were searching the internet for a term paper to copy. So I whipped one together, the most preposterous mangled history I could think up. I posted it and actually got an offer out of the blue to publish the satire in some obscure art magazine, but I declined. I lost the text for years, it was written before the days of Deja.com and Google, I could never find it in Usenet archives, but I ran across it today, quite by surprise. So here it is.

The History of Pigment

The first pigments are commonly thought to have been used at the time of paleolithic man, in cave paintings, however, scientific evidence indicates that pigments first appeared during the early development of the planet. As the earth’s molten surface cooled, minerals condensed and formed colorful pools of pigment. As meteorites impacted the surface, these pools were flung across the surface of the earth in bright patterns remeniscent of modern splatter paintings. Unfortunately, due to the effects of rain and erosion, these bright paintings can no longer be seen, however, evidence of these pigments can still be seen today on the surface of the moon, in its pattern of cratering. Unfortunately, due to the lack of oxygen on the surface of the moon, only white and black pigments are visible. The colors found in such abundance on earth, such as chromium oxide (green), iron oxide (reds) and other oxygen compounds are notably missing. However, scientists have been unable to explain the appearance of titanium oxide (white) in such abundance on the lunar surface. Apollo astronauts returned with samples of this paint, however the analysis has been inconclusive due to the lunar pigments milleniums of bombardment with cosmic rays.

Let us move forward, past the dawn of life, when the protoplasmic life in the primordial ooze, rich with pigments, gave birth to the first paintbrushes–the cillia of these single-celled creatures (see my prior essay on the origin of the paintbrush). The final event in the paleolithic era was the cataclysmic impact of a meteor, causing widespread pollution due to the immense release of airborne particles of toxic pigments such as vanadium, cadmium, and chromium. This resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs, the surviving mammals, such as Man, showed his adaptability to working in toxic environments, such as painting studios. Thus, it could be said that Mankind ‘s development as a species was modified by the existence of pigments, and the ecological niche he now occupies was opened by his high tolerance for these toxic pigments.

Let us zoom past the ice age, when aqueous pigments were impossible to use, and move forward to later geological eras, when oil started bubbling from oozing tar pits. The discovery of these highly persistent pigments led to further experimentation, which, alas, led to the deaths of many of this race of budding artists, both through the exposure to the harmful vapors, and from falling into the tar pits. Once again, evolution of the human species is adapted to the use of these toxic chemicals. However, use of these oil based tars as pigments gradually ceased, as it only came in one color, black. It would take centuries of human history to invent oil refining, and chemical pigments. But more about that later.

As man became more adapted to the niche of artist and pigment-user, he multiplied and spread throughout the earth, mining and manufacturing pigments for local artists. Early trade routes between far-flung civilizations were common, and pigments became the currency of exchange for these traders. Unfortunately, it was difficult to transport these dry pigments through long travels, as they tended to blow away in the slightest winds. The quest for suitable packages for these pigments ensued. Early attempts at storing these pigments in pig bladders were only partially successful, due to the scarcity of domesticated livestock in these primitive civilizations, and also the pigs didn’t like to stand still long enough to have the pigments deposited. It would take several thousands of years, for the development of agricultural civilizations, for the discovery of the Gourd’s usefulness in pigment storage. For many years, development of primitive packaging ceased, it seemed that the invention of more useful storage devices like the tin tube would have to wait. However, trade flourished, with the new boom in the economy, traders discovered that by storing their pigments in gourds, they now arrived with almost 95% of their original pigments, rather than about 1% in prior eras. The wealth from the trade in pigments caused the rise in the early Nation-States, and political upheaval, war, and the evils of slavery wracked the continents. But let us not dwell on these evil events, as every schoolchild knows about the biblical accounts of Pharoh and the enslaved races working in his pigment factories, and their quest to escape from bondage with the secrets of pigment manufacturing, and their 10 secret formulas written on stone tablets (manufacturing ‘commandments’).

As civilization arose from its turbulent formative era, pigment development stalled completely. It seemed that all the chemical pigments had been discovered, and extensively mined. The sources of biological pigments (such as the rich purple that comes from certain species of beetles) caused the extinction of many plants and lower creatures. It is only a wonder that nobody discovered the human body is a rich source of red pigment! However, no serious breakthroughs would come about until early in the 19th century, when German chemists developed anniline dyes, and the color spectrum exploded! The voracious appetite for german pigments eventually lead to the expansionist Nazi policies of annexing nearby territories rich in coal and oil (for anniline dyes were made from these materials). However, these dyes went largely into the immediate production of textiles, as the secret of storing pigments in tin tubes had eluded these German scientists. It was only when german scientists visited the kitchens of the great pastry chefs in Paris, and noticed how they decorated pastry with squeeze tubes, that the Fuhrer decided upon his great gamble: France and its technologies must be captured! The Maginot Line (drawn with great pipes of white pigment, like cake decorations) must be crossed! And so, the greatest conflict in the history of man began, the quest to subjugate a continent, and to unite the largest producer of pigments with the only country that knew the secret of how to neatly package squishy goo.

Once France has been subjugated, the secret of tin tubes was at the disposal of the Nazis. Previously, it had been only known to chefs, and was a rather obscure invention, used only to hold foodstuffs like anchovy paste. But now, with its newly obtained technologies, Germany was unstoppable. Its manufacturing conglomerates employed millions of forced laborers, producing these tubes of pigments in uncountable numbers, but at what price? The holocaust killed millions of these forced laborers, including most of the artist and intellectuals who were most likely to use these chemical pigments. Most of the artists who had not been imprisoned in work camps had already fled germany, and moved to America.

In 1939, Albert Eisenstadt wrote the infamous letter to President Roosevelt, warning him of the strategic importance of Germany’s secret research in oil paints, and urged that the US begin an emergency program to develop a comparable technology. The Manhattan Project was begun. In lofts throughout Manhattan, expatriate artists from all over europe collaborated with American painters, establishing completely new methods of using paint, and completely new methods of fabrication. Most notably, the contribution from the New York “Ash Can” school of painters (named after their method of storing bulk pigments in large ‘ash cans’, lacking tin tubes for storage lead to the mass production of pigments in quantities the Nazis could not compete with. America’s soldiers flooded europe with their brightly camouflaged tanks and colorfully ribboned uniforms (it was not mere coincidence that the most precious pigments were reserved for ‘Purple Heart’ medals).. Eventually, faced with overwhelming superiority, the Nazi war engine ground to a halt. Throughout Germany, both Russian and American recovery teams scoured through the wreckage of the Nazi industrial empire for pigment chemists, and manufacturing equipment to be siezed as war reparations. These teams managed to recover the largest cache of paintings ever assembled (for the Nazis were voracious collectors of oil paintings), as well as teams of German scientists developing the secret ‘V-2″ Strategic Pigment Delivery systems. But let us not belabor the point, every schoolchild knows the history of these German pigment scientists, and their chief, Werner von Grumbacher.

When painters get together, we rarely talk about painting, we talk about paint and canvas. Painters tend to be unable to express in words what they express in their visual works, but we all have one thing in common, we all love to talk about the tools of the trade. We’ll talk your ear off about the trivialities of pigments and brushes, and the debates over the merits of different methods of preparing canvas and stretcher bars is a particularly hot topic. I even have a few favorite stretchers I use over and over. I’ve been known to take perfectly good paintings off of my stretchers because I like the stretchers better than the painting. Here’s an odd tale about my favorite stretcher bars.

One day I arrived early for painting class, and just inside the the door was a huge pile of bare stretcher bars, all set up but with no canvas. There was a note attached, it was a gift from the university’s grad student painting archives, they’d stripped some worthless damaged and destroyed paintings off the stretchers and donated them to the painting students. I thought it was a great idea, stretchers are expensive and I like recycling, especially when I get there first and get first pick. I looked through the pile and there was a huge stretcher, about 16×8 feet with massive crossbars, the most beautiful carpentry I’d ever seen, and it was made from solid California redwood. A storage sticker indicated it was made in the early 1950s. Today, a stretcher like that would cost hundreds of bucks, perhaps over a thousand. I grabbed it immediately. I felt like an environmental rapist, like I was cutting down the majestic redwood trees to paint on, but I figured, better my painting on such a beautiful stretcher than some other crappy art student.

My painting teacher helped me stretch the canvas, it was a lot of work even with expert help. I bought a higher grade of canvas than usual, this stretcher deserved nothing less. It took 2 weeks to prime the canvas, I wanted to make sure the surface was perfect. I laid it flat on the floor and brushed on the white gesso. About 5 minutes after I put the first coat on the canvas, the cloth became taut, and the crossbars bent and bowed out from behind, the whole assembly was shaped like a square canoe frame with a canvas cover. I didn’t see it happen, I was washing the gesso off my hands when one of the other students yelled, “hey Charles, get over here quick, you better see this!” I couldn’t believe it, I thought it would rip apart and explode into splinters at any moment. But in an hour or so, everything was settled down and flat again. The same thing happened on the second and third coats, but a little less each time. I was worried I’d stretched it too taught and bent the bars permanently, but I measured it and it was square. It was absolutely perfect, the finished canvas was as taut as a drumhead, something really hard to do with a canvas that size.

I painted on it for about a week, when suddenly one day in class, the teacher came up to me and said, “hey, the Dean wants to talk to you.” I looked up from my easel and he was pointing at the Dean, standing in the far corner of the studio near the door. I went over to talk to him, and before I could even say hello, his face got red, and he burst out in an accusatory tone, “where did you get that stretcher bar?” I briefly told him the story, and he said nothing until I was done, and then said, “oh,” and turned on his heel and walked right out of the studio without saying another word.

I went back to my teacher and asked him what that was all about. He said the Dean saw my stretcher, looked at the tag from the archives, and he thought broken in I’d stolen it. Good thing we got that cleared up, the Dean had to sign off on my degree the next semester.

I am presenting a small actual-size detail of my color tempera painting. You can see there’s a lot more detail than is visible on video, and the color work can be seen more clearly.