Jesse Pilgrim on [dog]and[pony]

Enter [Dog]and[Pony].

This is probably the best Portland-centric website I’ve seen since Hillytown, with the exception of the old Potential, which this new incarnation has only time (and well, potential) to achieve. [Dog]and[Pony] has found an interesting blend between music and video and music video that works oh so well. They’ll go to a featured local band’s rehearsal space, record the practice, cut and edit and remaster it all very nicely and then give a nice write-up about the experience, promoting the band’s material, proper link-lovin’, and when they play around town. It’s founded by Krister Rollins and his friend Sam, I’ve known Krister since back in summer camp days and he’s living in Portland now and making waves of glory for the local music scene. He writes very eloquently on the artists and shows a true appreciation for their craft.

The most recent webisode is of a man, a myth, a legend. I refer to the one and only: Jesse Pilgrim. He was the first dude I met in college, he was my first RA, he’s the frickin’ man, and he’s musically the ultimate expression of Maine protest indie-folk-rock. Check the link. Eat it up. Like pudding.

Jesse Pilgrim from [dog]and[pony] on Vimeo.

A Your Effin R: Twitter Shirts

Thanks to my friend Dragos for this find:

Apparently the folks at Squidder are busy at work turning the world into Shadowrun 4. They’ve been playing with a number of augumented reality (the AR of the title) oriented devices like this one:

PaperTweet3d: Augmented Reality T-shirts from squidder on Vimeo.

Imagine being able to slap on a pair of AR sunglasses and walk down the street and read what everyone was doing, where they were going, etc. (Provided of course they were Tweeting or Facebooking their actions.) It’d certainly evolve the sport of people watching to a whole new level. Twitter would no longer be something you check in the dark solitude of your bedroom or while secretly craning your neck down to your iPhone during a buisness lunch, instead it would be a direct broadcast proudly worn by you for all the augumented world to see, a constantly changing novelty tee whose idiotic phrases are dictated solely by you.

(Side note: Perhaps if people are forced to face the visual reactions that their tweets then some standard of ettiquette will evolve.)

Now don’t get me wrong. I am enthusiastic about this. There are tons of other perks about this beyond Twitter:

• Looking at a box of food in the supermarket and having a screen pop up with a list of recipies that the item would be good with, or a wine pairing, or a comparative list of prices between brands.
• An AR museum experience with searchable databases of paintings and art histories. (Think of a museum plaque crossed with a Wikipedia article and you’re barely scratching the surface.)
• Chips on signposts telling you which way to turn for a certain address or what the next 3 intersections with a particular street are.

Of course this design is specifically for Twitter/Facebook feeds and the oppertunity to be presented with thousands of t-shirt encoded passive-aggressive internet messages about people being bored, depressed or pissed off at their ex is staggering. I crave the day when I can go out to the Old Port, see some dude who can barely stand tack away at his iPhone for a few seconds and then watch a tweet pop up on their shirt that says:

sherri!!!!!!! cum ot 2 4play!! I”MDRUNNNK!!!!!!!!

Cause that totally wont be obvious.

Two Guys, One Grenade

New short by Tasty Dude Films brings under the microscope such topical issues as working-class depression, suicide, the right to bear arms and comic timing.

World News Update

 

1. NASA defends it’s next-generation moon rocket plans.
2. Iran just can’t seem to help itself when it comes to toeing the oppressive police-state line as armed government forces descend on a public mourning for the victims of the post-election violence.
3. Recently discovered Mac flaw could leak scrambled data.
4. Saudi man forced into hiding after talking about using Bluetooth to pick up chicks in Jeddah on live TV.
5. Red Sox’s World Series victories could be tainted by Ortiz/Ramierez perfomance-enhancing drug use.
6. Nanotechnology succesfully kills ovarian cancer in mice. Human trials may be less than a year away.
7. Senators threaten to reduce federal highway funding to states that do not ban texting and driving. iPhone and Blackberry users in a spectacular show of solidarity rapidly tweet protests and complaints while driving with one knee down the interstate.
8. Hugo Chavez, everyone’s favorite demon-sniffing* South American socialist president, pulls his ambassador from neighboring Colombia over a weapons dispute.
9. A girl, from her mother’s wombe untimely ripp’d*, discovered alive by NH police. (PS: Holy shit.)
10. Pelosi accuses insurance companies of trying to kill a government run health plan, calls insurance companies “villains” and says they’ve been “immoral all along.”
11. Men at Work face plagarism case and no, it’s not for the phrase “and men chunder.”

World News Update

1. Pyongyang calls Hillary Clinton ‘a funny lady’ and says ‘sometimes she looks like a primary schoolgirl.’
2. Califonia’s senate decides to pull an all-nighter to figure out this whole $28,000,000,000.00 budget deficit thing.
3. China breeds live mice from skin cells.
4. Iran’s opposition leader unveils new broad-based political front that will give the opposition to the June elections legal status.
5. Khameneni, Iran’s Supreme Ayatollah, orders the dismissal of current vice presidential choice.
6. Three people escape Bruges jail in hijacked helicopter.
7. Britain’s Prince William spends entire day being cool with a bunch of homeless kids on a mountain.
8. N. Korea has stepped up the execution of Christians.
9. Ireland realizes it doesn’t have a law against blasphemy and quickly passes one.
10. Bill Gates criticises the U.S. for not adopting a national identity card.
11. Two lobstermen get into a turf-war shootout, ruin it for everyone else.

Toddy.

This is one for all the true Mainers out there.

This dialectic diamond was unearthed on Youtube, at the time no one the wiser to the author, or who even posted it, and like most sensations it snowballed over the ‘Net, making waves in the Portland music scene. After Toddy got so hot [pun totally intended] everybody was quite frustrated with the anonymity of this masterpiece set in Waterville, ME. The owner of Ruskie’s even offered $50 and free food and beer to whoever owned up to writing this.

Luckily, the songwriter’s sister still lived in Maine and heard the buzz about it in the Phoenix and phoned her brother, Billy Mayo, a Watervillian who had moved to New York to play in his band Black Taxi. Check the video here of him actually playing it in a super-swank NY apartment to his highbrow cityslicker friends. I jest. Anyways, Billy heard of the reward for his name and replied “It’s a Deal.” I’m going to keep my ear to the ground to see if perhaps when he comes to claim his prize, he’ll perform this incredible feat in vernacular discharge.

I, Icarus. [reflections on the crash]

I don’t like to proclaim I live life in the fast lane but as we approached 100 miles per hour it was brought into question. But I’m not in the car yet. I’m on the upper deck of a third story apartment building I’ve never been in down the street from my place, we’re listening to a wandering gypsy cover Paul Simon ["Sometimes life's like a G chord," he tells me with a grin and passes me the Evan Williams.] I’m sitting alone in the Whiteheart drinking Evan Williams waiting for my friends to finish smoking and mustering up the courage to shout to the single lady a seat away from me [she was with somebody else too.] I’m walking down the breakdown lane of I-95 just outside of Gray calculating if I could make it to Portland by daybreak, or at least noon [and maybe I still could have.] That was certainly not the fast lane. It was for breaking down. But nothing was stopping.

An antique store in Rye, New Hampshire is selling a metal tin plate, old and rusted but decorated, and pierced, hanging in the center from two wires attached to my worn edges hangs a metal tin heart, painted in the center in simple but delicate letters it reminds me to “Be.” The art cost eight dollars. “Life is short, but art is long,” Hippocrates instructs me [from beyond the grave in the program for Grease in Prescott Park.] Sitting on the wood stool, beside the last embers of a fireplace, in the ancient ruins of a house’s chimney, I gaze across a serene lake in Waterford, Maine cradling a Pabst Blue Ribbon, and ask myself what I’m doing with my life. I later answer my own question.

Later, but not that later, I’m telling a beautiful Russian woman she is beautiful in Russian. I’m drinking merrily as if I’m filling myself up to the brim with nectar, then I teeter and spill and laugh and laugh. A week after, I walk down the wet and incandescent streets of Portsmouth with a man almost just like me, and today he turned 62. I can barely recall even getting in the car [I do recall thanking the driver, a trusted friend.] The next day I gently glide down the wrong side of Congress Street, I can still hear the rain falling in Portsmouth, pitter-pattering me to sleep. On our rocky coast at Wolf’s Neck, sitting upon boulders that call to me to naturally to leap and bound upon them, I rest instead and stare at the island, up to the osprey’s nest where he stands a sentinel [I'm speechless.]

Hurdling down unpaved closed-country roads in the backwoods of Maine is quite dangerous and common, thus dangerously common, I spent many greener years recklessly testing myself with my equally adolescent peers. It seems so long ago now, but so does everything, the constant flux, the winds of life fill my wax sails and I let go of the sheet and rudder. These events I’ve been listing are out of place, falling like grains through God’s fingers at random, but still landing in the shape of pyramids. I can hardly even remember the crash, just the instant calm understanding, [the "I have to get out the car right now."] Once safe, I turned back to survey the incident, the silver shell lifted at a 45 degree angle over the devastated stone wall, the sails melted and leaking out underneath onto the pine needles. The trees on either side silently loomed over us, judging his poor, poor decision. I can still feel their power, and hear his heart slip under reality’s cold and unforgiving waves. Neither the undesignated driver, nor I, nor Aaron, nor the Russian were injured.

So, needless to say, I’ve been pretty fucked up the past few days.

World News Update (Local Edition)

1. Well executed police procedure drives the price of marijuana up.
2. The Oasis and 51 Wharf team up with two former Mayors to make the Old Port a louder place.
3. New York developer buys out Portland Press Herald Buildings and sets sights on 30 story tower next to City Hall. (As a side note to anyone who’s been out to Cliff Island in Casco Bay, this is the same guy who owns the huge mansion with on Hope Island with the peacocks that scream all night.)
4. In two weeks Portland’s cops are going to start carrying tasers, bro.
5. Plummeting beer bottles and handguns being brandished out of apartment windows, Congress Street is becoming an exciting place to be.
6. A look back at Franklin Street.
7. Though the ripening is taking a while Maine’s blueberry crop could reach a landmark 100 million pounds this year.

Twenty-Four Thousand Hits and Climbing

My dear friend, Charles Parker Newton, is the one with the beard.

Apparently this got on Fox last night. Twenty-four thousand hits in fifteen days.

C’mon guys this is totally camping…

The Advanced Design boys at General Motors have tackled that timeless bastion of the American Pioneer Spirit(tm) the mobile home/camper. This is what they came up with: 

The GMC PAD

Now my title is a bit misleading. GM didn’t design this sexy sleeper for the purposes of camping specifically. The phrase they use is “diesel-electric powered urban loft with mobility” and with a ridiculous amount of connectivity (Direct TV, OnStar, XM Satellite Wi-Fi and probably a goddamn bluetooth headset) it’s designed for the new urban professional, specifically someone who doesn’t have to physically be “at work” to be working (here’s looking at you tehflash) or someone who is interested in being able to take his idea of “home” anywhere he wants.

Other sexy phrases in the article include:

• “Electronically variable exterior glazing” — which I’m guessing turns the camper into some kind of sugary, bluetooth accesible donut.
• “LCD interior architecture” —that’s right, now you can watch RedTube on your stovetop.
• “Missiles” — which is a lie, but seems like the next logical step.

Plus the entire thing is modular which means if the design takes off GM could create versions of these for combat zones, as crisis response vehicles, Star Waggon’s for celebrities shooting on location and various other purposes.

Various other purposes.

The full run down is on Gizmag. Thanks to my roomate for the link.